Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain [2]
"Bring her—? What do you mean?"
"Well, there was some batter left over, and I made up some little cakes I was saving for the children. But fat as she is, she must like sweets, and—here, I'll wrap them up for her."
"How'd you like to go to hell?"
She laid aside the bird sketch and faced him. She started to talk. She had little to say about love, fidelity, or morals. She talked about money, and his failure to find work; and when she mentioned the lady of his choice, it was not as a siren who had stolen his love, but as the cause of the shiftlessness that had lately come over him. He broke in frequently, making excuses for himself, and repeating that there war no work, and insisting bitterly that if Mrs. Biederhof had come into his life, a guy was entitled to some peace, instead of a constant nagging over things that lay beyond his control. They spoke quickly, as though they were saying things that scalded their mouths, and had to be cooled with spit. Indeed, the whole scene had an ancient, almost classical ugliness to it, for they uttered the same recriminations that have been uttered since the beginning of marriage, and added little of originality to them, and nothing of beauty. Presently they stopped, and he started out of the kitchen again, but she stopped him. "Where are you going?"
"Would I be teffing you?"
"Are you going to Maggie Biederhof's?"
"Suppose I am?"
"Then you might as well pack right now, and leave for good, because if you go out of that door I'm not going to let you come back. If I have to take this cleaver to you, you're not coming back in this house."
She lifted the cleaver out of a drawer, held it up, put it back, while he watched contemptuously. "Keep on, Mildred, keep right on. If you don't watch out, I may call you one of these days. I wouldn't ask mich to take a powder on you, right now."
"You're not calling me. I'm calling you. You go to her this afternoon, and that's the last you've seen of this house."
"I go where I goddam please to go."
"Then pack up, Bert."
His face went white, and their eyes met for a long stare. "O.K., then. I will."
"You better do it now. The sooner the better."
"O.K. . . . O.K."
He stalked out of the kitchen. She filled a paper cornucopia with icing, snipped the end off with a pair of scissors, and started to ice the bird on the cake.
By then he was in the bedroom, pitching traveling bags from the closet to the middle of the floor. He was pretty noisy about it, perhaps hoping she would hear him and come in there, begging him to change his mind. If so, he was disappointed, and there was nothing for him to do but pack. His first care was for an outfit of evening regalia, consisting of shirts, collars, studs, ties, and shoes, as well as the black suit he called his "tuxedo." All these he wrapped tenderly in tissue paper, and placed in the bottom of the biggest bag. He had, in truth, seen better days. In his teens he had been a stunt rider for the movies, and was still vain of his horsemanship. Then an uncle had died and left him a ranch on the outskirts of Glendale. Glendale is now an endless suburb, bearing the same relation to Los Angeles as Queens bears to New York. But at that time it was a village, and a pretty scrubby village at that, with a freight yards at one end, open country at the other, and a car track down the middle.
So he bought a ten-gallon hat, took possession of the ranch, and tried to operate it, but without much success. His oranges didn't grade, and when he tried grapes, the vines had just started when Prohibition came along and he dug them out, in favor of walnuts. But he had just selected his trees when the grape market zoomed on the bootleg demand, and this depressed him so much that f or a time his land lay idle, while he tried to get his bearings in a dizzilyspinning world. But one day he was visited by three men who made him a proposition. He didn't know it, but southern California, and particularly Glendale, was on the verge of the real-estate boom of the 1920's, such a boom as has