🎧 284: “I want you . . .”

“I WANT YOU to tell me about the war,” said Alice. She was sitting beside Herb on the sofa in the living room of the Millses’ apartment, over Alice’s father’s saloon. The Millses’ place wasn’t much grander than the Pipers’, but Alice and her mother put a lot of effort into making it “cozy,” and Herb enjoyed the shabby clutter they had created.
     “I don’t have much to tell,” said Herb. He looked at Alice and shrugged.
     “I know it must be hard to talk about it,” said Alice. She brought her hand to Herb’s cheek and looked into his eyes with great compassion. She had often imagined this time, when her Herb would have come home at last, when they would be alone and he could confide in her all the terrible things he had experienced and describe for her how often he’d thought of her in the midst of the horror, how often he’d dreamed of sitting beside her like this.
     “It’s not that,” said Herb. “It’s just that I don’t have many stories to tell. I didn’t do much of anything.”
     Alice brushed a tear from her cheek. This was even better than she’d hoped. Sitting alone with her was, apparently, so intoxicating that Herb could hardly speak, couldn’t find the words to tell her how much it had meant to him to know that she was waiting for him. “I understand,” she said. She let her head rest on his shoulder.
     Prohibition might have deprived the Millses of their livelihood if Mr. Mills hadn’t been as resourceful a man as he was. He reasoned that many people came to his saloon for companionship rather than, or as much as, for liquor, and that, if he kept the saloon open as a gathering place, without liquor, he stood a good chance of hanging on to some of his old customers and even drawing some new ones. He might even get them to bring their families. If he sold food and soft drinks and charged a membership fee, the place should make a small profit, he decided, and it would be a dandy cover for a speakeasy in the cellar. The idea worked brilliantly. He called the place “Mills’s Family Club.” It was hailed as a model of what temperance might do for family and community. The Millses prospered.
     Herb put off visiting Chacallit, and put it off again, and thought less and less about it. He began spending time in the club, upstairs and down, not only because Alice often worked there, but because Herb enjoyed the people who gathered there. He’d never had much time to relax and talk before. He discovered how much he liked being with people, listening to their stories, laughing at their jokes. He noticed the way other young men looked at Alice, but he didn’t notice how little he cared.
   Before Alice had fallen in love with Herb, her mother had worried that Alice would flirt away the years when her beauty was most marketable. “Nothing’s sure, is it?” she said to Alice one day. “Who’s to say you’ll get prettier? You might be as pretty right now as you’ll ever be. You may even be on the way down.”
     “Oh, Ma,” said Alice.
     “ ‘Oh, Ma’ nothing,” said Mrs. Mills. “Look at your friend Annie. We all thought she’d grow up gorgeous. Now she’s a fright.”
     “Oh, Ma,” said Alice.
     “She is. She’s a fright. It could happen to you. Then you’d have to settle for whatever men’re left.”
     “Oh, Ma,” said Alice.
     “Worse yet,” said Mrs. Mills, “you might never marry. You might become a nuisance and a burden.”
     Mrs. Mills had another worry, one that she kept to herself. She worried that Alice’s beauty might go on improving forever, while her own declined. At those times, she could imagine herself spending the rest of her life in the shadow of her daughter. It was this worry that most made Mrs. Mills like Herb. She liked Herb’s prospects. He seemed ambitious to her. She liked the idea that if he married Alice, his ambition might lead to his taking Alice away somewhere, somewhere far enough away so that she wouldn’t visit too often, so that she wouldn’t be a burden or cast a shadow.

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