The Tight White Collar by Grace Metalious Page B

and a priest and three organ selections because Mrs. McGovern, the organist, always played three selections at all weddings for which she was paid five dollars. Irene stayed on after the ceremony just long enough to wish the newlyweds luck and then she headed for the Happy Hour Café. People at the Happy Hour knew Irene for the lady she was. At the Happy Hour, no one ever said a mean word to her. They listened to her stories by the hour and they never questioned a word.
    The Pappases did not put in an appearance at the wedding at all, and Cooper’s Mills wondered and whispered.
    â€œWonder where Irene kept the shotgun hid all during Mass?”
    â€œIt won’t last a year. Marriages like that never do.”
    â€œWell, it’s too late now. Imagine, a priest and everything. They can never get a divorce now. It’s too late.”
    â€œI never thought Lisa was that kind of girl.”
    â€œWell, it don’t surprise me none.”
    â€œA regular little hot pants bitch.”
    â€œAnd Chris Pappas. What a sonofabitch he turned out to be. And him so smart in school and all.”
    â€œIt’s a wise child knows its own father. I wonder if Lisa’s kid’ll know.”
    â€œShe’s beginning to show already.”
    â€œI noticed.”
    Chris and Lisa rented a two-room apartment on River Street in Cooper’s Mills. The apartment was in a building that had the subtly decayed quality peculiar to buildings in the manufacturing towns of northern New England. There was no real reason why the board of health should have condemned the place, for the building had the required number of exits and the proper number of fire extinguishers in the halls, but there was a feeling of age about the place, a feeling of rottenness that came from the sagging of hidden sills and mildewed clapboards, and over everything, there was the smell of aged wallpaper and faulty drains.
    Lisa and Chris had an apartment in the back of the building so that they had a view of the river, and sometimes Lisa sat in front of her kitchen window and pretended that she was in a palace and that the river was the Rhine and that Chris was not going to come home from the job he’d taken at the factories after his folks put him out, but that he would be returning from an afternoon of hunting on his own private game preserve.
    When it was time for the baby to be born they had to put the new crib against a wall in the kitchen and then there didn’t seem to be room to turn around anywhere, but Lisa and Chris didn’t mind. Living together, being married, was just like playing house except that the game never ended and neither one of them ever had to leave to go somewhere else. Jess Cameron delivered the baby, a girl, three days after Thanksgiving 1941, and Chris took Lisa home from the hospital on the same Sunday morning that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
    â€œI’ll have to go,” he told Lisa. “I guess everybody will before it’s over.”
    â€œYes,” said Lisa, not caring, really, about anything that was happening some place as far off as Hawaii. “But not today, darling, not today.”
    â€œBut soon,” replied Chris, unsmiling, “very soon.”
    â€œFor heaven’s sake, Chris,” said Lisa, “can’t you think of anything besides a silly old war some place? We’ve got a brand-new baby to think about. You don’t plan to rush off to Pearl Harbor this minute, do you?”
    Chris looked down at the little face inside the pink bunting.
    â€œNo,” he said at last. “Not this very minute.”

Chapter V
    Years later at the state university, a professor in the education department had asked Chris why he wanted to be a schoolteacher at all.
    â€œThere has to be a reason, Chris,” the professor had said. “All of us have to have a reason and a good one, too. One that will stand up when the going gets rough as it always does sooner or