The Silence on the Shore. Hugh Garner
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hurried to the telephone and called the Parklawn Hotel. When she asked for Mr. Clark Cronin the operator rang his room. When she came back on the line she said, “Mr. Cronin appears to be out. Is there any message please?” “No, no message,” Grace answered, hanging up.
But she still bet he didn’t have a car.
Clark hurried down the street after noting the number of the house. Adford Road wasn’t a bad address. It was a good old residential neighbourhood that wasn’t quite given over yet to rooming-houses. The address could mean a private house, if he wanted somebody to think so. The room he’d rented was pretty small and crummy, but clean enough. Anyhow, it was all he could afford right then.
The landlady was a dandy. What was her accent, German? Maybe he should have tried to sprechen Sie Deutsch a little with her — not that he’d learned much of it during his two years in Germany. He’d met her kind before, not very appetizing but ready to put it out if given any encouragement at all. She was too old for him. Why didn’t she get some decent false teeth?
He wondered who else lived in the joint. She’d mentioned one of them, Martin or something, who lived in the basement. There wouldn’t be any young women in the house. A landlady like that would make sure all her women tenants were as old as she was and even uglier if that was possible. Mrs. Hill . . . what was German for hill? Berg. Yeah, that was it. No, her name wouldn’t be Berg; that was strictly yid, and she wasn’t Jewish.
When he picked up his room key and smiled at the girl on the desk she looked right through him. She’d smiled at him the evening before, when he was dressed up, but now he was just a nothing. As he rode up to his room on the elevator he looked ahead a few weeks when he’d have a few bucks in his pocket and a new front. If he hadn’t lost so much in the crown-and-anchor and crap games on his way home from Europe, he’d be able to operate right now. Well, it wouldn’t be too long.
There was one thing they taught you in the army, and that was patience. Hurry up and wait. Get you up at five in the morning to wait all afternoon for the visiting brass. Still, his three years in the service had done him a lot of good. He’d filled out with twenty-five more pounds on him than he’d joined up with. And a guy couldn’t serve two years in Germany without learning a few angles about people, or about women. Certainly not without learning about women.
When he approached the desk this time, carrying his gladstone bag and with his army issue raincoat over his arm, the girl at the counter noticed his good clothes.
“Yes, sir?” she asked. She was not smiling, but there was more respect in her.
He tossed his key to her. “I’m checking out.”
“Will you come to the cashier’s wicket, please?”
She picked up his rate card, totalled it, and gave him the amount of his bill. He pulled a chequebook from an inside pocket and wrote out a cheque.
“Have you a forwarding address, sir?”
“No. I’m leaving for New York on the eight-twenty plane.”
“I see. Could I have your permanent address, please?”
“I have none.”
The girl hesitated, looked behind her at the empty office, then said, “I suppose it’s all right.”
“If you mean the cheque, why don’t you phone the bank?”
“I’m sure it’s all right,” she said, smiling now.
“Could I have a receipt?”
When she made one out and handed it to him he turned without thanking her, picked up his bag and walked across the lobby to the door. When he reached the sidewalk he turned west in the direction of the rooming-house.
Clark Cronin had learned a lot during his twenty-seven years, but a lot of what he had learned was wrong. He fancied himself to be a smart guy, a guy who quickly learned the angles, who cut corners instead of having to make it the hard way. He had a superficial ease with women, and an easy contempt for them which they found attractive If he had an ambition at all at the moment it was to become the lover of a woman who could support him.
He knew that he stood little chance of becoming the husband or lover of a wealthy woman, and so he had sensibly set his sights a little lower on the economic and social scale. He had enough intelligence to know that his chances were better if he concentrated on those women who were not rich but were successful in everything except marriage or ability to attract the right kind of man. These women held down good positions in business, the minor professions, and the arts, and even if they were salaried their income was usually greater than that of most men in his economic stratum. A great number of these women had gravitated to the city from small towns, where their inability to get or hold a husband was looked upon as a personal gaffe. Clark had made up his mind to find such a woman and shack up with her. He had dreamed about this during his hitch in the army.
As he swung into Adford from Bloor, Clark was thinking not of the well-heeled woman he would eventually court and conquer, but of the weeks to come before she presented herself. He would have to support himself by working, he was afraid. When he had left Germany he had more than six hundred dollars in cash to finance his contemplated campaign, three hundred of it “borrowed” from the wife of a battalion Protestant padre. All of it had slipped through his fingers on the Empress of Scotland between Hamburg and Montreal.
A week before, a man he met in the beer parlour of the hotel told him of the job selling gas heaters. It was a lousy job, door-to-door, speculative, all commission, but he had taken it. On the Monday, he had presented himself to the company’s office, which looked as transient as its employees, had been hired, given a territory in which to sell (and which had already been gone over every season for the past three by earlier employees), handed a company brochure and some sales forms, listened to two hours of instructions and sent on his way. Without a car it had been grim slugging, but necessity had forced him to see it through.
On Tuesday evening he had sold a hot-water heater, and on Wednesday had signed up two householders for the conversion of their furnaces from oil to gas. His paper commissions were tremendous for one who had been living on the pay of an army private, and he celebrated his salesmanship and business acumen that evening by spending it with a fifty-dollar call-girl in his hotel room. On Thursday he had failed to make a sale, but on Friday he sold another furnace unit and a heater to a couple in the suburbs. On Saturday he picked up his commission from the heater he had sold Tuesday. On Monday he learned to his disgust and dismay that both Wednesday furnaces had been cancelled, along with the double sale in the suburbs, all three clients having impossible credit ratings.
That morning he had gone to the house where the heater was being installed, made sure there was no slip-up by the installation crew, and had then looked through the papers for a less expensive room.
As he turned up the walk to the rooming-house he noticed a man and a girl standing at the door. The girl was pretty in a washed-out blonde sort of way, and the man, who was carrying her bags, was thin and middle-aged, balding in front and with a thin aquiline nose.
The door was opened by the landlady, who motioned the couple inside, before noticing him coming up the walk. She stood and held the door open.
“Well, I made it, Mrs. Hill,” he said. “I left my car in the hotel garage.”
The landlady closed the door behind him without a word, and led the couple down the hall to a door at the rear. As he climbed the stairs Clark heard her say, “I wasn’t expecting you back today, Miss Garfield.”
“I’m earlier than I expected,” the girl answered. “This is Mr. Sloman, my foreman from the plant. He was kind enough to give me a lift from the station.”
From upstairs Clark heard the three of them enter the girl’s room, then their voices were cut off by the doorway and the floor of the upper hall. When he entered his own room, which looked more bare and shabby than ever as he switched on the light, he saw that the landlady had put his keys on the top of the chest of drawers. Beneath them was a piece of paper with a printed sentence