Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
After they had straightened out the muddle of books in Ed Sheehan's
gritty, dusty little office Terry turned her piano-playing talent to
practical account. At twenty-one she was still playing at the Bijou, and
into her face was creeping the first hint of that look of sophistication
which comes from daily contact with the artificial world of the
footlights. It is the look of those who must make believe as a business,
and are a-weary. You see it developed into its highest degree in the
face of a veteran comedian. It is the thing that gives the look of utter
pathos and tragedy to the relaxed expression of a circus clown.
There are, in a small, Mid-West town like Wetona, just two kinds of
girls. Those who go down town Saturday nights, and those who don't.
Terry, if she had not been busy with her job at the Bijou, would have
come in the first group. She craved excitement. There was little chance
to satisfy such craving in Wetona, but she managed to find certain
means. The travelling men from the Burke House just across the street
used to drop in at the Bijou for an evening's entertainment. They
usually sat well toward the front, and Terry's expert playing, and the
gloss of her black hair, and her piquant profile as she sometimes looked
up toward the stage for a signal from one of the performers, caught
their fancy, and held it.
Terry did not accept their attentions promiscuously. She was too decent
a girl for that. But she found herself, at the end of a year or two,
with a rather large acquaintance among these peripatetic gentlemen. You
occasionally saw one of them strolling home with her. Sometimes she went
driving with one of them of a Sunday afternoon. And she rather enjoyed
taking Sunday dinner at the Burke Hotel with a favoured friend. She
thought those small-town hotel Sunday dinners the last word in elegance.
The roast course was always accompanied by an aqueous, semi-frozen
concoction which the bill of fare revealed as Roman punch. It added a
royal touch to the repast, even when served with roast pork. I don't say
that any of these Lotharios snatched a kiss during a Sunday afternoon
drive. Or that Terry slapped him promptly. But either seems extremely
likely.
Terry was twenty-two when Orville Platt, making his initial Wisconsin
trip for the wholesale grocery house he represented, first beheld
Terry's piquant Irish profile, and heard her deft manipulation of the
keys. Orville had the fat man's sense of rhythm and love of music. He
had a buttery tenor voice, too, of which he was rather proud.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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