NOTES ON A CHARACTER
Barney Conal
W
HEN I CAME
upon Tommy again he had just married. She read
books a little, they said she "came from a good family," and evidently
Tommy was not what she had been looking fer. Tommy didn't think she
was an angel. He wasn't that kind. But he thought she had "class."
I knew Tommy as a kid. He was one of your square-shooting tough
guys, sporty and hardboiled around the gang and quiet away from it, in
school and at home. Even the teachers liked him, though he wasn't a
g;ood student. They could always rely on his sense of loyalty.
When they married, Tommy had a steady job as a bookkeeper and
she was working too. She was a stenographer. They went in tor furnish–
ing an apartment, but no babies. She, coming from the "good family,"
set out to make a home of the apartment, she was wanting to create the
family aura immediately. She had evidently become wise to something in
Tommy that we as kids had naturally missed. She was out to ·surround
him with the mystery of herself, perhaps because he was so damn matter–
of-fact and unemotional a person for a woman to handle. Tommy could
be kind, even gentle, but he was self-righteous in a way and stubborn.
This righteous stubborness of his probably used to be the force behind
his old through-thick-or-thin loyalties; it had a moral , almost a spiritual,
·quality to it.
It
was what had bullied us secretly when we were kids.
If
Tommy didn't like a thing, he didn't like it.
If
he got to like
a thing once, he was bent on liking it forever-on principle. He had
never liked the taste of butter, he had never liked raisins, anything in
the shape of custards or jellies, anything he had not tasted or heard of
before; and he didn't now. He read a certain newspaper and certain
story magazines and he read no others, no matter how superior she said
other reading was and even though he respected her statement that she
had taste. He didn't have that taste.
!
What she didn't quite understand was how much Tommy belonged
to the American sport's-world culture, along with legions of the lower
middle classes. It is more than a mere interest in sports, it is a way of
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