Read Online House Party by Patrick Dennis - Free Book Online Page A

arrive at Pruitt's Landing at seven sharp and sometimes it even did. In any case, it rarely got there later than eight. Once past Hicksville, where the bulk of the commuters disbarked, it was possible to get a seat. Another drove of commuters got off at Old Westbury and the train became markedly cooler just as the road bed became markedly rougher. But, while it could never be described as a pleasant ride, it was at least endurable.
    John Burgess wandered into a car where smoking was permissible and sat squarely in the middle of it, where he hoped there would be no wheels beneath him. He had brought his briefcase, as well as his weekend bag, telling himself that he might do some work on the way out, or there might be some legal question that Felicia would want answered over the weekend. But even back in the office when he packed the dossier labelled Choate vs. Choate, he had known that he would never so much as open the briefcase. He always found train rides too much fun; the other passengers interested him. He liked to eavesdrop slightly on their conversations, to make guesses as to where they were going and why, to invent little stories about them.
    Now he found himself sitting just opposite the pretty, dark-eyed girl with the wicker basket who'd bumped into him in the station. She was a cute little thing—typically Yankee and not at all like the belles down home. She had no feminine affectations and he expected her conversation to be peppery and probably funny.
    But he was disappointed. The girl was sitting next to a square, rawboned blond boy who looked as though he still had hayseeds in his ears. They had a lot of typewritten papers spread out on their laps but they weren't looking at them. They weren't even talking. They just sat there holding hands and looking straight ahead.
     
    I wonder just who I think I am, Elly said to herself, staring vaguely at the Chesterfield sign at the end of the car. Here I get a job as a secretary to a managing editor when I can't even take shorthand or type with all my fingers. There are a thousand other girls who are really literary who could do the job ten times better and not lose any manuscripts, either. I come in late. I never looked at a book until I got paid to.
    The job bores me and I don't know anything about denouements or the mise en scene or the tour de force or the deus ex machine or any of those other nine-dollar words, and now, just because some first novelist comes in—without even an agent —I play the big lady editor and have lunch with him to discuss his plot construction, whatever that is, and go to dinner with him and let him kiss me in a taxi—the subway, even—and ask him out here. And he's not really so special. It's just that he isn't like any of the other boys I ever met. He's mid-western. And it is a good book.
    Elly pressed Joe Sullivan's hand. "Here's King's Park. Now we only have to do the S's—Smithtown, St. James, Stony Brook and Setauket—before we get to Pruitt's Landing. My brother, Bryan, or my cousin Felicia, or somebody like that will meet us, I guess."
    Joe lifted Elly's hand to his lips. It was different from most of the New York hands he'd seen so far. It was a country hand. It was short and square and smelled of soap. Boy, New York sure is a funny place, Joe said to himself, a hell of a funny place. You come here fresh out of the Army and get shoved around and treated like a hick. You get a job as a correspondent in a sweat shop where they insist upon brains and a college degree and then don't let you use either. Correspondent! That must sound great back in Indiana, but it all boils down to "Dear Madam, Pay your bill or we'll come and take your plush furniture." Then you move into a cell at the Y.M.C.A. and beat the bejesus out of your typewriter every night while the weight-lifter next door pounds on the wall.
    Pretty soon you have a novel and you peddle it around town getting the fish-eye from every publisher's receptionist who was ever