The long Saturday night - By Charles Williams Page 0,1

seem to remember it,” I said, “you do, though it’s been some time since I’ve been able to check. Okay, sexy, but when you get it dressed, will you for God’s sake bring it home?”

She laughed. “I love it when you sound like Boyer.”

There was something in the background that sounded like a trumpet. “Don’t tell me you’ve bought an orchestra,” I said.

“It’s the radio,” she replied. “I’ll turn it off. But never mind, I’d better start dressing. I’ll see you Sunday, dear.”

After she’d hung up, I was still conscious of vague dissatisfaction. Maybe it was the day; it was still and oppressive, with that feeling of uneasiness that precedes a storm. We’d successfully skirted an argument, but I wondered if I’d backed down too easily. Some friends of hers in New Orleans had had an extra ticket to the Sugar Bowl game; I hadn’t been able to get away, even if another ticket had been obtainable, so she’d gone alone. The original three-day trip had stretched to a week, and now it was nine days. I didn’t like it, but there didn’t seem to be a great deal I could do about it. I thought wryly of the surprise this pussyfooting attitude would cause among a large part of Carthage’s population who considered me an outspoken hothead who was always charging headlong into something with at least one foot in his mouth.

We’d been married less than two years. Was it the town she was bored with, or me? She’d grown up in Florida, mostly in Miami. Carthage, God knows, is no hectic round of gaiety, but at the moment I wasn’t too sure it was the town. I tried to take an objective look at this fellow who called himself John Duquesne Warren, but I suppose it’s impossible; the picture is always clouded by the mood. Sometimes I was able to see myself as quite a lad—sharp, aggressive, successful, popular—but all that came through now was yesterday’s second-string tackle with a receding hairline, the small-town businessman with a fading and beat-up dream or two, a beautiful but sometimes puzzling wife, no children, and a few jokes his friends were probably heartily sick of hearing—a nonentity and a crashing bore. Nobody would ever name a bridge after me, or a disease, or a gazelle.

Except for eight years away at school and one in Korea, I’d lived here all my life. My mother, who died when I was eight, had left me three pieces of commercial property on Clebourne Street, one of which I’d sold, using the proceeds to speculate in Florida real estate. I’d made a fair minor-league fortune out of it. I still owned the other two properties, which brought in a comfortable income. Warren Realty was in one, and the other was the old Duquesne Building on the northeast corner of Clebourne and Montrose, which contained Lackner Optical, the Sport Shop, and Allen’s Stationery store, as well as the professional offices on the second floor. My father, who was in the Citizens National Bank, had died in 1952, while I was in Korea.

It was right here in the office that I’d first met Frances. She came in one morning, two years ago this week, and wanted to rent the vacant store space in the Duquesne Building—the one now occupied by the Sport Shop, with the living quarters in back—to open a dress shop. My first impression was that no woman that good-looking and that young—she was only 25—could know anything about running a business, but it developed she did. She and her husband had owned a very successful dress shop in Miami until they’d split up the year before. After the divorce she’d wanted to get away from Miami and had started for the Coast in her car, stopped overnight in Carthage, and became interested in its possibilities. In the end I rented her the space, and then in less than six months did myself out of a tenant by persuading her to marry me. . . .

I tried to shrug off this mood of futility, and attacked the accumulation of paper work on my desk. Evans, one of the salesmen, came in to discuss an offer he’d received on one of the listings. At three I went next door to Fuller’s for a cup of coffee. The cold front was going to be on us in less than an hour; angry masses of clouds, dark and swollen with turbulence, were beginning to pile up in the northwest.