NOTES ON A CH.ARACTER
47
life, with its own heroes and ideals and literature and sense of right and
wrong and good and bad. Tommy still wanted to play basketball in the
schoolyard, he loved handball passionately, more than football, and big–
league baseball was important. She had found out he didn't care much
about meeting new people. All he wanted now was to live with her, in
a nice apartment, be married now, that is, while he went on working at
his job, meeting the fellows sometimes, going to a show, reading the
Daily Sun
daily and an exciting story now and again.
Their problem at first was not one of making ends meet· They
were both working. She injected a problem by trying to keep him alive
to her superiority, her "class." But Tommy had a way of his own-and
when he got used to being with her he applied it to her, too-<>f not accept–
ing anything in or about a person that wasn't explicit, that he hadn't re–
cognised before. When she hinted that she wanted to stop working for a
while, Tommy balked: he didn't see why. He was working and she had been
working when they had met and until now. Tommy couldn't see at all
that the fact she was married now and still working subtracted some–
thing from her "class" for her. But then Tommy couldn't see that she
considered this thing "class" a progressive thing; that you always kept
moving up into it, becoming better "class."
She vaguely won her g;:me in the end by allowing herself to become
pregnant. He got frightened at the thing, at the whole new aura it threw
about their lives, and finally even let her persuade him it had happened
through his own fault. Of course, she quit work. The meals were better,
she had time to do odd little things that pleased him. But it was then
that she learned, ruefully albeit, for she hadn't intended to have a baby,
really, that he would accept anything if it . was there in front of him,
if it had the authority of seeming actuality. That was quite a blow to
her. She could have pretended to be pregnant. But more than that–
perhaps she did want a baby, she wasn't very certain that she didn't–
she was hurt. She only believed in the desirable things she couldn't reach.
He, it turned out, believed only in what was, no matter what.
It
wasn't
that he attributed any particular sanctity to the factual. He simply had
respect for the "facts," whereas she despised them. What is, is-his whole
attitude said that. But he could be shrewd, even cynical about certain
facts. He was a big-city boy, a city street-boy, a wise guy in a way. As
he put it to me, "I don't swallow
everything- but
facts are facts."
I found out from him, he didn't mind telling these things, that he
was earning only twenty-five a week. "Business is gettin bad," he said,
as though he were giving me a weather report. She was at home all the
