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John Stevenson looked with disgust at four poker dice that had somehow appeared from a drawer he had pulled out and overturned while hunting for a collar stud. He had one magnificent Hathaway shirt, and it had two button holes instead of a hole and a button. He often thought it would last forever because he could never locate his one gold collar stud on the rare occasions when he wanted to wear the shirt. He now searched through the debris on the floor for his collar stud and for the other poker die. He could find neither of them.
But had had an inspiration. Sometimes the laundry put a wood stud in the collar, and upon opening the cellophane, he found they had done so this time. Now in a thoroughly good humor, he did not reply directly when his wife entered the room and expressed dismay at finding the drawer’s contents all over the floor. Instead he said, “Do you know that if poker dice came in sets of four instead of five that I would now be the biggest Ford dealer in the state and you would be married to that obnoxious, little creep you were engaged to when we met?”
“Pooh,” she said. “Did I ever tell you what my Uncle Rawlison used to say about if?”
“I doubt if I want to know.”
“He used to say if frogs had wings they wouldn’t bump their asses along the ground.” She made a quick exit.
“You and your Uncle Rawlison are crude pragmatists,” he yelled as she went down the stairs.
But it was true he thought, as he tossed the dice from one hand to the other, that the direct cause of the argument that had led to the final break with Sharon Amundsen had been these poker dice. Doubtless, if it hadn’t been the dice, it would have been something else. But there are points in life that turn on such insignificant fulcrums that one can never for sure what would have happened if. “If frogs had wings,” he said.
The dice had definitely been very unlucky for him on one occasion. When his troopship went out through the Golden Gate, he had a little over $200 in his pocket, and he was looking forward to playing poker for days on end as the ship made its slow way across the Pacific. But on the first day out someone showed him how to play poker dice.
It was a simple game. The first player could, at his option, roll one to three times, holding back from the second and third times previously rolled values that he thought might improve his hand. For example, he could on his first toss have a pair of kings; he could hold out this pair and roll the other three dice. If he got an additional king, he might roll a third time for more kings. Or if he rolled three aces on the second roll, he could, if he wished, roll the other two dice trying for four or five aces. The next player to roll could not, however, roll more times than the preceding one, so some judgment was required.
The one skill you could depend upon being present to a marked degree in any conglomeration of soldiers was gambling skill. It almost seemed that if there were two soldiers together, one would be a shark and the other a sucker. John with his own poker dice was the sucker; his $200 was gone before dark on the day the ship passed under the fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge.
For the next thirty-one days, while the ship wallowed its way to New Guinea, he could play no poker but was restricted to chess at which he was not very good. A cocky little sergeant, game after game, kept trying to catch him in fool’s mate and leaving himself in a poor position when John did not fall for the trap. Finally John had become so bored with the opening that he had told the sergeant to cut it out. The sergeant had agreed that if John knew about fool’s mate there was no point in trying it and had then, in the very next game, guffawingly caught him in it.
John could not help feeling, fairly or not, that much of the responsibility for all this rested with Sharon, and he felt indignant and put upon.
He had known Sharon for about two years altogether. They had sat side by side in a class, “Introduction to Anthropology.” At first sight Sharon was not very attractive. She was thin and rather shapeless. She had shoulder length brown wavy hair that was perhaps her most attractive feature. Her face was a bit sharp, with good bones, but marred by a slightly pop-eyed look. She had an engaging grin, a direct open manner, an alert mind, a propensity for amusing remarks, and a quick appreciation for apt remarks in return.
John soon found himself looking forward to the class where he would see her. Somehow he was sure she was as poor and lonely as he was, and actually, for once, believed he might be doing a girl a favor when he asked her for a date for the following Saturday evening. She accepted in her usual straightforward manner and gave him an address that was in town rather than a girls’ dorm in which, for some reason, he had been sure she lived.
John was not well acquainted with the town so it was with some surprise that he found she lived in a very nice neighborhood in a house so expensive looking that he felt intimidated and actually had to force himself to approach the house and ring the doorbell.
The door was immediately opened by a short fat man who waved John to enter as soon as he had stated the purpose of his visit. As they passed the stairway on the way to the parlor, Mr. Amundsen removed his pipe form his mouth and yelled, “Sharon, a gentleman is here to see you.” Turning to John after they were seated, he blew a dense cloud of blue-white smoke and said, “The reason I called you a gentleman is that you came to the door. Most of the idiots who come for her sit out front and honk their horns. No manners at all.”
John felt that he should tell Mr. Amundsen that he had come on a city bus to the house, but before he could do so, Mr. Amundsen went quickly to quizzing him about his college courses. They were having a spirited discussion when Mrs. Amundsen came into the room only minutes before Sharon appeared. John saw her quick, cold appraisal and understood that she was displeased and wary of him. This pattern prevailed from then on.
For reasons never clear to John, Mr. Amundsen became his strong partisan and Mrs. Amundsen his enemy. Since she was clearly the more intelligent of the two, he might have suffered from this split except that Sharon’s conflict with her mother was so great that both Mrs. Amundsen’s disparagements and Mr. Amundsen’s championing redounded to his credit.
Mrs. Amundsen was a worthy opponent, however, and could make John feel like an ignorant peasant by showing him her “morning sitting room” or by asking him to carve the roast, knowing somehow that he had never seen such a roast. Her instincts were sound, and according to Sharon she called John, in his absence, “that long-haired lawyer with wild ideas.” Though John was neither long-haired nor a lawyer, he could not keep from feeling the aptness of her categorization.
When John and Sharon, that first evening, went out the front door, Sharon looked at the empty curb and asked, “Where did you park?”
When John told her he didn’t have a car, she seemed a little shocked but quickly said, “Oh well, we can take mine.” She led the way to the garage where there were three apparently brand new Fords in the driveway. Then, most families had no car, very few had two, and, so far as John knew, none had more than two. When she saw his astonishment, she said, “Listen, didn’t you know that my father owns Amundsen Ford? He sells the damn things.”
Thus began a peculiar romance between John and Sharon. It was impossible for him to join the crowd that she ran around with; he simply did not have the money to do it. So she continued to date boys from her group but went out with John almost anytime he asked.
At first John was apprehensive about dating a girl who was used to such a flow of money, but he soon discovered that her attitude about money was so at variance with his that it became a source of annoyance to him. She treated a lack of money as an inconvenient temporary state. The only lack she’d ever felt had been when she’d spent her allowance early and had to wait a few days for more money. She could not seem to understand the difference in her situation to his – the difference in being temporarily broke and habitually broke, the difference in being out of spending money and in having no money.
Thus she didn’t seem to mind at all when he could not buy her a cup of coffee, but on the other hand, she had no appreciation of the sacrifice he was making when he did without lunches for three days to take her to a movie.
He often thought of the different attitudes that seemed to be held by her parents. Mr. Amundsen had made his money himself and apparently saw no reason why anyone else couldn’t do the same. Quite reasonably, he seemed to assume if one started as a partner in a thriving Ford agency, his future financial position was secure. Mrs. Amundsen seemed more cautious. To John it appeared that she could be confident only of suitors whose families already had the necessary money. She certainly did not want Sharon to take the chance that a penniless young man, and one in which she detected something off beat, would accumulate money with sufficient speed and in adequate quantity.
Sharon was not only a very intelligent girl but she had always been a thinker and an analyzer. In her own crowd, activity took the place of thought and conversation, but with John there was plenty of opportunity to talk since he could seldom afford anything else. There developed between them an intellectual companionship that neither of them had experienced with anyone, much less with anyone of the other sex. They kept trying to make something more of it. Although John found Sharon physically attractive, the chemistry, or whatever, was missing, and as far as he could judge, it seemed to be more or less the same on her part.
In time Mrs. Amundsen, seeming to have concluded that John was not a real threat, became less abrasive. Then, her last remaining trick was to tell John what an unsuitable place for a lady the beer joint to which he had last taken Sharon was. ‘How does she know where we go?” John asked Sharon. She seemed to have spies who reported their every act. John swore that the next time she did this, he was going to say, “My mother is the barmaid there; if it’s good enough for my mother, it’s good enough for Sharon.” But he could never quite get up nerve to do it. Mr. Amundsen, less sensitive to the poor progress of the courtship, seemed ever more taken with John, and he did not fail to hint that he could use some help in his business, and that he was hoping for a son-in-law who would eventually be capable of taking it over.
But the relationship became ever more platonic, and after a year, John and Sharon were very close friends who no longer pretended to be anything more.
With the U.S. entry in World War II, John had left school and joined the army. After some months of separation and much writing back and forth, John convinced himself that, indeed, he and Sharon were in love. Curiously enough, she seemed to feel the same way, and their letters became ever warmer.
Finally John got a furlough and came to town to stay a few days, and found that in spite of all the anticipation on both sides, the reality was that they clearly were not in love. Their common expectation had, indeed, gotten in the way of their former friendship so that now they tended to drift into arguments about nothing but which served to vent on each other the bitterness of their disappointment. Now they could not even remain friends, much less be lovers.
After a few months apart, however, the whole idea of being in love was resurrected and again seemed believable. Again the letters flew back and forth with expressions of increasing warmth and longing.
During this year, Sharon had left home and had taken a job in the office of an aircraft plant in Xenia, Ohio. So when John’s last furlough before going overseas was granted, he called Sharon and after a few days at home managed to squeeze into enough trains to get to Xenia.
He arrived in Xenia early on Friday afternoon, found a hotel room, and was asleep in the swing on the porch of the old house in which Sharon shared an apartment, when she got home from work. Sharon and her roommate had somehow obtained a large steak, and the dinner was a success with much laughing and talking. At parting, after some unusually, for them, passionate goodnight kisses, she whispered that the roommate was going home for the weekend. There was no mistaking her message.
John went happily back to his hotel with as much a feeling of surprise as anticipation. The truth was that he was somewhat nervous about the next day.
John was back at her apartment by ten the next morning. After a cup of coffee, Sharon suggested that they go to Dayton as she had some errand to do there. They rode a city bus (Sharon had given up her car when gasoline had become so scarce) and thus began a purely beautiful day. There are days when it just feels good to be alive, when one feels in tune with the world. They cannot be planned or forced, and they can come in times when everything seems to be falling into ruins. Such a day was this for John. They talked, laughed, held hands on the street, and once stopped in the middle of a crosswalk and kissed.
After lunch in Dayton, they went to a large department store where Sharon bought a wedding gift for her cousin. John saw a set of poker dice at the stationery counter and, having never seen poker dice, liked them and bought them.
It was six o’clock or so by the time they caught a bus for Xenia. All day together they had continued to enjoy each other without restraint or tension. On the bus, they could, as they were both slender, move far enough apart to leave a space between them to roll the dice on the seat. There were no instructions with the dice so they were taking one roll each and the high hand was the winner. On one roll John got four aces; Sharon’s roll produced five aces, and she immediately claimed victory. “Obviously five aces beats four aces,” she said.
“I doubt it,” John said. “Five aces or five of anything is not a poker hand.”
“How about a flush, a straight, or a full house?”
“That’s different,” John said.
From this small beginning, and on a matter that neither cared one whit about, a tension developed between them. Finally after dinner at her apartment, John asked, “What the hell’s going on? Can you tell me? What is it?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not going to work. I see that clear and simple. I’m sorry. It’s probably all my fault. I’m not just scared. It’s just no good. I’m sorry.”
They continued the discussion for some time, but John, in spite of his dismay and disappointment, felt that she was right. Finally he said, “OK, let’s quit fooling ourselves. This time let’s break completely. No more letter writing, no more nothing.”
“Yes, I agree. I am sorry, John.”
John went back to his hotel and after a restless night, succeeded on Sunday morning to get the manager to open a laundry and return the dirty clothes he had handed in the day before. He caught an afternoon train to Cincinnati where he was lucky enough to find a hotel room. Sunday night he walked hour after hour through the streets until he was so tired he slept until nearly noon Monday. Two days remained of his furlough; he had to start back to Arkansas on Wednesday morning.
Although soldiers were everywhere in Cincinnati, it was not overrun with them as most cities were at that time. John often felt overwhelmed by the mass of soldiers in the bars, in the movies, in everything. He did not blame the civilians who often seemed to hate them.
In a bar on Monday night, John was drinking quietly, lost in his thoughts of the puzzle of his broken relationship with Sharon, when the woman on the stool to his right said, “This guy I’m with is an awful jerk.”
“What guy?” asked John.
“Oh, he’s in the men’s room.” She waved at the empty seat on her right. On the bar at that place were a mixed drink and a half-empty package of cigarettes.
John examined her with care: about twenty, a trifle heavy, heavy breasts, pleasant round face, slightly intoxicated – one of the multitude of barflies spawned by the war. “Let’s leave, then, before he comes back,” he said.
John rolled the poker dice on the dresser top. “Ace, king, queen, ten. Busted straight. But what can you expect with four dice?”
“Hey,” he thought, “was the guy in the seat by her really with her? Not that it matters, then or now. But in all these years, that thought never crossed my mind.”
With that beginning, one could have predicted all kinds of dire results. But life is not that simple. It takes our prudent actions and makes them look foolish, and, now and then, an obviously stupid move turns out to look like the plan of a genius. This feature is prevalent enough to make us sometimes wonder if we are being mocked.
Anyway, as it turned, the girl was just what John needed at the time – simple lust with no complications, no aftermath. She never left his side until she saw him off at the train on Wednesday morning. He always though of her, on the rare occasions when he did, with gratitude.
“Hey, John,” his wife called from the foot of the stairs, “are you ever going to finish dressing? We’re going to be late, if you don’t come on.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he said. He threw the four poker dice into the empty metal wastebasket where they clattered around before finally coming to rest, “Four aces,” he said, without looking, “a sure winner.”
Colophon
Hand set in Deepdene. Display type is P. T. Barnum. Paper is Warren’s Olde Style, Subs. 60. Inks are Van Son PMS green and 40904 black. Published by Jake Warner and 460 copies printed by him on a 10×15 C&P at the Boxwood Press, Greenbelt, Maryland 20770.