“Sunflower?” and Lawyer says,
“Helianthe.” Then he says, “No, that’s wrong. Tournesol. Sonnenblume,” and she says Wait and was already gone, and now I says Wait myself.
“Even a five-dollar necktie couldn’t support all them gold chairs.”
“It’s too late now,” Lawyer says. “Take it off.” Except that when she come back, it not only never had no sunflower, it wasn’t even red. It was jest dusty. No, that was wrong; you had looked at it by that time. It looked like the outside of a peach, that you know that in a minute, providing you can keep from blinking, you will see the first beginning of when it starts to turn peach. Except that it dont do that. It’s still jest dusted over with gold, like the back of a sunburned gal. “Yes,” Lawyer says, “send out and get him a white shirt. He never wore a white shirt before either.”
“No, never,” she says. “Always blue, not? And this blue, always? The same blue as your eyes?”
“That’s right,” I says.
“But how?” she says. “By fading them? By just washing them?”
“That’s right,” I says. “I jest washes them.”
“You mean, you wash them? Yourself?”
“He makes them himself too,” Lawyer says.
“That’s right,” I says. “I sells sewing machines. First thing I knowed I could run one too.”
“Of course,” she says. “This one for now. Tomorrow, the other one, red with Sonnenblume.” Then we was outside again. I was still trying to say Wait.
“Now I got to buy two of them,” I says. “I’m trying to be serious. I mean, please try to believe I am as serious right now as ere a man in your experience. Jest exactly how much you reckon was the price on that one in that window?”
And Lawyer not even stopping, saying over his shoulder in the middle of folks pushing past and around us in both directions: “I dont know. Her ties run up to a hundred and fifty. Say, seventy-five dollars—” It was exactly like somebody had hit me a quick light lick with the edge of his hand across the back of the neck until next I knowed I was leaning against the wall back out of the rush of folks in a fit of weak trembles with Lawyer more or less holdng me up. “You all right now?” he says.
“No I aint,” I says. “Seventy-five dollars for a necktie? I cant! I wont!”
“You’re forty years old,” he says. “You should a been buying at the minimum one tie a year ever since you fell in love the first time. When was it? eleven? twelve? thirteen? Or maybe it was eight or nine, when you first went to school—provided the first-grade teacher was female of course. But even call it twenty. That’s twenty years, at one dollar a tie a year. That’s twenty dollars. Since you are not married and never will be and dont have any kin close enough to exhaust and wear you out by taking care of you or hoping to get anything out of you, you may live another forty-five. That’s sixty-five dollars. That means you will have an Allanovna tie for only ten dollars. Nobody else in the world ever got an Allanovna tie for ten dollars.”
“I wont!” I says. “I wont!”
“All right. I’ll make you a present of it then.”
“I cant do that,” I says.
“All right. You want to go back there and tell her you dont want the tie?”
“Dont you see I cant do that?”
“All right,” he says. “Come on. We’re already a little late.” So when we got to this hotel we went straight to the saloon.
“We’re almost there,” I says. “Cant you tell me yet who it’s going to be?”
“No,” he says. “This is New York. I want to have a little fun and pleasure too.” And a moment later, when I realised that Lawyer hadn’t never laid eyes on him before, I should a figgered why he had insisted so hard on me coming on this trip. Except that I remembered how in this case Lawyer wouldn’t need no help since you are bound to have some kind of affinity of outragement anyhow for the man that for twenty-five years has been as much a part and as big a part of your simple natural normal anguish of jest having to wake up again tomorrow, as this one had. So I says,
“I’ll be durned. Howdy, Hoake.” Because there he was, a little gray at the temples, with not jest a sunburned outdoors look but a rich sunburned outdoors look that never needed thatere dark expensive-looking city suit, let alone two waiters jumping around the table where he was at, to prove it, already setting there where Lawyer had drawed him from wherever it was out west he had located him, the same as he had drawed me for this special day. No, it wasn’t Lawyer that had drawed McCarron and me from a thousand miles away and two thousand more miles apart, the three of us to meet at this moment in a New York saloon: it was that gal that done it—that gal that never had seen one of us and fur as I actively heard it to take a oath, never had said much more than good morning to the other two—that gal that likely not even knowed but didn’t even care that she had inherited her maw’s fatality to draw four men anyhow to that web, that one strangling hair; drawed all four of us without even lifting her hand— her husband, her father, the man that was still tryg to lay down his life for her maw if he could jest find somebody that wanted it, and what you might call a bystanding family friend—to be the supporting cast while she said “I do” outen the middle of a matrimonial production line at the City Hall before getting on a ship to go to Europe to do whatever it was she figgered she was going to do in that war. So I was the one that said, “This is Lawyer Stevens, Hoake,” with three waiters now (he was evidently that rich) bustling around helping us set down.
“What’s yours?” he says to Lawyer. “I know what V.K. wants.— Bushmill’s,” he says to the waiter. “Bring the bottle.—You’ll think you’re back home,” he says to me. “It tastes jest like that stuff Calvin Bookwright used to make—do you remember?” Now he was looking at it too. “That’s an Allanovna, isn’t it?” he says. “You’ve branched out a little since Frenchman’s Bend too, haven’t you?” Now he was looking at Lawyer. He taken his whole drink at one swallow though the waiter was already there with the bottle before he could a signalled. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You’ve got my word. I’m going to keep it.”
“You stop worrying too,” I says. “Lawyer’s already got Linda. She’s going to believe him first, no matter what anybody else might forget and try to tell her.” And we could have et dinner there too, but Lawyer says,
“This is New York. We can eat dinner in Uncle Cal Bookwright’s springhouse back home.” So we went to that
