3

BETH DROVE DOWN WITH me to Nick’s place over near Red Bank, about forty-five minutes from New York, not very far from Mike Jacobs’ own little Versailles. In fact, if I remember right, he heard of Green Acres through Mike when he was down there for a week-end five or six years ago. It had belonged to a millionaire Wall Street broker whose marriage went on the rocks and who decided to unload it in a hurry. Nick had got it for around fifty thousand. But there must have been an easy hundred thousand sunk in it, with the twenty-three-room house, hundred and twenty acres, swimming pool, tennis court, hot-house, screened-in barbecue, four-car garage and twenty-horse stable.

It was hard to understand what the broker was thinking about when he built the house. It was neo-Gothic, if you could call it anything, an architectural Texas-leaguer that fell somewhere between medieval and modern design, a formal, urban dwelling that looked out of place in the country and yet would have looked equally incongruous in town. It was beautifully landscaped, with smartly trimmed hedges bordering the well-kept lawns dressed up with circular flower beds. We drove around the house to the garage, where Nick’s chauffeur was washing the big black Cadillac four-door convertible. He was bare from the waist up, and although there was a bicycle tire of fat around his middle, the chest, back, shoulders and over-developed biceps were impressive. He looked up when he saw me and his frank, flattened face opened in a gummy smile.

“Whaddya say, Mr. Lewis?”

“Hello, Jock. How’s everything?”

“Ain’t so bad. You know the wife’s home with the new kid.”

“Yeah? Swell. How many’s that make it?”

“Eight. Five boys and three goils.”

“Take it easy now, Jock,” I said. “You never did know your own strength.”

The chauffeur grinned proudly until his eyes, puffy with scar-tissue, pressed together in the grimace of a cheerful gargoyle.

“The boss around?”

“He’s out horse-back ridin’ with Whitey.”

Whitey Williams was the little ex-jockey who won a nice chunk of change for Nick at Tropical Park one season when he booted home forty-five winners. Now he took care of Nick’s horses for him and taught him how to ride. They were out on the bridle path together almost every Sunday.

“How about the Duchess?”

That was Ruby. Anybody who had been around the place very long knew whom you meant.

“I just took her over to ten-o’clock mass. She’n this big fella from the Argentine.”

“Oh, he went, too? What does he look like?”

“Well, if anyone tags him he’s got a long way to fall.”

“See you later, Jock.”

“You bet, Mr. Lewis.”

“That’s Jock Mahoney,” I told Beth as we walked up toward the large lawn that stretched between the main house and the garage, over which Jock, the missus and the seven kids lived in five small rooms. “A good second-rate light-heavyweight in the days when Delaney, Slattery, Berlenbach, Loughran and Greb were first rate. Very tough. Could take a hell of a punch.”

“He doesn’t talk as if he has a brain full of scrambled eggs,” Beth said.

“They don’t all come out of it talking to themselves,” I said. “Take McLarnin, fought the toughest—Barney Ross, Petrolle, Canzoneri—and his head’s as clear as mine.”

“This morning probably clearer,” Beth said.

I was still thinking about Mahoney. Old fighters will always get me. There is nothing duller than an old ball player or an old tennis star, but an old fighter who’s been punched around, spilled his blood freely for the fans’ amusement only to wind up broke, battered and forgotten has got the stuff of tragedy for me.

“The only thing soft about Mahoney is the way he laughs,” I said. “All you have to do is look at him and he laughs. That’s usually a sign you’re a little punchy. The time Berlenbach tagged him with the first punch he threw in the third round, Jock was out so completely he went over to Berlenbach’s corner and flopped down. But the way he was grinning and laughing, you’d’ve thought he was home in an easy chair reading the funny papers.”

“That’s what I don’t like about it,” Beth said. “The way they laugh.”

“When they laugh, Beth, it usually means they’re hurt,” I said. “They just want to show the other guy that they aren’t hurt, that everything’s okay.”

“I read something about laughter once,” Beth said. “The idea was that laughter is just a display of superiority. Laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel, for instance, or gets a face full of pie. Or take the whole line of Scotch-Jewish-Darky jokes. The thing about them that makes people laugh is the warm feeling that they aren’t as tight as the Scotchman, as beaten down as the Negroes and so on.”

“But if we follow that theory,” I said, “shouldn’t the fellow who does the laughing be the one who throws the punch, not the one who catches it?”

“It’s not that simple,” Beth insisted. “Maybe the guy who gets hurt laughs to hang on to his superiority—or is that what you said in the first place?”

“That’s the trouble with you psychologists,” I said. “You can take either side and sound just as scientific.”

We had reached the lawn nearest the house, where a row of round metal tables had been set out with brightly colored beach umbrellas rising through the centers. Lying on the grass in the shade of one of these umbrellas was a slight, middle-aged man with gray hair and a sickly white face, eyes closed in the heavy stupefaction of alcoholic sleep. A folded Racing Form he had used as an eye-shade had slipped off his forehead. He was snoring strenuously through a badly broken nose, the only punished feature in an otherwise unmarked face.

“There’s Danny McKeogh,” I said. Around Stillman’s they call it “McCuff.”

“Is he alive?” Beth asked.

“Slightly,” I said.

“He’s got a sad face,” Beth said.

“He’s one of the right guys in this business,” I said. “He’d give you his shirt if you needed it, even if he didn’t have a shirt and had to go borrow one off somebody else. Which has happened.”

“A generous member of this profession? I didn’t know there was such an animal.”

As we walked along the volcanic career of Danny McKeogh registered its peaks and valleys in my mind.

He never took a drink until the night he fought Leonard. Danny was a beautiful gymnasium fighter, a real cutie from way back. He never made a wrong move in a gym. He wasn’t a cocky kid ordinarily, but he was sure he could take Leonard. Nobody had done it yet, not even Lew Tendler, but Danny felt sure. He studied Leonard in all his fights and even went to see movies of him. Kind of a nut on the subject, like Tunney with Dempsey, only with a different ending. After all the build-up, Leonard knocked him cold in one minute and twenty-three seconds of the first round. Got his nose busted in the bargain. That was curtains for Danny as a fighter. Almost curtains in other ways too. For the next couple of years he gave a convincing imitation of a man who was trying to drink up all the liquor there was in New York.

Then, one day, hanging around the gym with a bad breath and a three-day growth—it was up on 59th Street at the time—he happened to see a skinny little East Side Jewish boy working out with another kid. Right away Danny decided to get a shave and sober up. It was love at first sight. The boy was Izzy Greenberg, just a punk skinny sixteen-year-old kid then, training for a newsboy tournament. Danny must have seen himself all over again in that kid. Anyway he stayed on the wagon. He worked with Izzy every day for a year or more, boxing with him, showing him, very patient, showing him again—and there’s no better teacher in the world than Danny when he’s sober. Even drunk he still makes more sense than almost anybody around.

Danny brought Izzy right to the top. He looked like another Leonard, one of those classy Jewish lightweights that keep coming up out of the East Side. Three years of consistent wins and they’ve got the championship. They travel around the world, picking up easy dough, meeting the Australian champion, the Champion of England, the Champion of Europe, which is not as much trouble for Izzy as slicing Matzoth balls with a hot knife. Then they come back to the big town, and Izzy defends his title in the old Garden against Art Hudson, a slugger from out West. Danny, who always backed his fighters heavily—old-fashioned that way—had his friends cover all the Hudson money they could find. They only found ten thousand dollars. Sixty thousand if Danny lost. But Danny liked the bet, called it easy money.

The first round looked like curtains for Hudson. Izzy left-handed him to death, and that jab of his wasn’t just scoring points; it could carve you up like a steak knife. Thirty seconds before the end of the round Hudson went down. Izzy danced back to his corner, winking at Danny, nodding to friends around the ring, waving a glove at the large Jewish following that was letting itself go. He’s all ready to go in and get dressed. And Danny’s already thinking of how to parlay the ten grand. But somehow or other Hudson was on his feet at nine and rushing across the ring. He was really a throw-back to Ketchell and Papke. All he knew about boxing was to keep getting up and keep banging away. Izzy turned toward him coolly, did a little fancy footwork and snapped out that fast left to keep Hudson away. But Hudson just brushed it aside and banged a wild left to the body and a hard roundhouse right to the jaw.

Izzy was out for twenty minutes. His jaw had been broken in two places. A reporter who was there in the dressing room told me Danny was crying like a baby. He rode with Izzy up to the hospital and then he went out and had a drink. That time he stayed drunk for almost three years.

Then one day at the Main Street gym out in L.A., where Danny looks like any other flea-bitten bum, he spots another little kid, Speedy Sencio. Same thing all over again. On the wagon. Fills the little Filipino full of everything he knows. Cops the bantamweight crown and everything’s copasetic until Speedy goes over the hump and starts going downhill. Danny goes back on the flit again.

By this time Danny has made a couple of hundred thousand, gone mostly to the horses. He is also a great little check-grabber and highly vulnerable to the touch, especially when it comes from one of the fighters who used to win for him. Like Izzy Greenberg. Danny put fifteen thousand in a haberdashery business Izzy was starting, and six months later the business went the way of all Greenberg enterprises. He is not nearly the flash in business he was in the ring. But Danny gave him ten thousand more and he went into ladies’ wear on Fourteenth Street.

The crash put the finisher on Danny’s chips. The only chance he saw of getting it back fast was the horses, and the only way of getting enough for the horses was finding a friend to put it on the cuff. Nick Latka turned out to be the friend, and he seemed to be all cuff where Danny was concerned. Danny didn’t know there was a catch to it until he was into Nick for around twenty G’s. “Who’s worried about it?” Nick had said every time Danny mentioned something about hoping to clean up enough soon to pay some of it back. Then one day Nick sends for Danny and all of a sudden wants his dough. Danny is just back from Belmont, where his tips have been worse than his hunches. So Nick says, “Tell you what I’ll do with you, baby. You come to work for me for two fifty a week, building up a stable and handling the boys. You keep a C for yourself and one and a half cuts back to me until we’re even. And just to show you how I feel about you, I’ll put you down for a bonus of ten percent on everything we make over fifty G’s a year.”

So that’s where Danny’s been ever since. Even if he developed another Greenberg or a Sencio it wouldn’t be his any more. So the incentive to say no to the bottle is practically nil. Now it’s reflex action for him to reach for one in the morning, and he tosses them off in quick nervous motions until somebody puts him to bed. He has never been known to come in loaded on fight night when he is working a corner. But when he is sober everybody wishes he would take one to relax. He’s so sober he gets the shakes. It’s really a heroic and terrible effort for Danny to be sober, but he does it, because, for all the disappointments, he’s still got his heart in the game. There’s nobody hops into a ring at the end of a round faster than Danny and there is something wonderful about the loving way he leans over his fighters, rhythmically rubbing the neck, the small of the back, with his thin, nervous lips close to his boy’s ear, keeping up a quiet running patter as he improvises new tactics for the boy’s defense and spots holes in the opponent’s.

A great manager, Danny McKeogh, in the big tradition of great managers. Johnston, Kearns, Mead. Or at least he was a great manager before Nick Latka brought him into bondage.

As I stood there looking down at him, thinking about him, a fly lit on his nose, was brushed away, only to return to his forehead. Danny shook his head, let a crack of light into his eyes and saw me standing there. He sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes.

“Hello, laddie.”

Everybody he liked he called laddie. For people he didn’t like, it was mister.

“Hello, Danny. How’s the boy?”

Danny shook his head. “Pretty tough,” he said, “pretty tough.”

“By the way, Miss Reynolds, Mr. McKeogh.”

Danny began to tuck one foot under him as if he were going to rise. Beth put her hand out to stop him. “You look much too comfortable,” she said. “I’m not used to such gallantry.”

That kind of courtesy was part of Danny, drunk or sober. He had that big Irish thing about women, reverent when he mentioned his mother, sore at guys who profaned in the presence of ladies, which was the entire opposite sex in Danny’s book, regardless of rep or appearance. But Danny didn’t have that other Irish thing, the three-drink belligerence. When he drank himself into a stupor he did so quietly and gradually like the death of Galsworthy’s patriarch in The Indian Summer of a Forsyte. No fuss and never any fights, even when goaded by a champion like Vince Vanneman. He was one of the few men I’ve ever known who could pass out and not lose either his cookies or his dignity.

“Seen your new heavyweight yet?” I said.

“No,” he said. “I been pounding my ear. You see him?”

I shook my head. “He’s gone to mass with the Duchess.”

“Well, we’ll take a look at him in the gym tomorrow.”

“Nick’s all excited,” I said.

“Yeah,” Danny said.

A loud yawn escaped him. “Scuse me, ma’m.”

“Who’s the biggest guy you ever handled before, Danny?”

Danny thought a moment. “Big Boy Lemson, I guess. Scaled around two-thirty. Looked tough, but he was muscle-bound, had a glass jaw. I tell ya, Eddie, I don’t get excited about these jumbo heavyweights. Hundred ’n eighty, eighty-five, that’s all you need to knock out anything, if you know how to punch. Dempsey was only one-ninety at Toledo. Corbett’s best weight was around one-eighty.”

“Nick sees a sensational draw in this Molina,” I said.

“Yeah,” Danny said.

That’s about the most combative Danny ever got, that “yeah.” It would be harder to find two guys further apart in the boxing business than Danny and Nick. Nick was all business. For him the fix was second nature. To Danny it wasn’t a sport any more either. It was a trade. He happened to be an honest craftsman. His way was to start from scratch, pitting his brain and his kid’s natural talent and ability against all comers. That was too hap-hazard for Nick. Whether it was horses or fighters, he liked to play sure things.

“You could use a little more shut-eye, Danny,” I said. “We’ll catch you later.”

“Right, laddie,” Danny said. There was still the echo of a brogue. He stretched out on the grass again. Beth took my arm and we walked on.

Under the next umbrella sat a couple of gamblers. It sounds like easy generalization to look at a couple of guys you have never seen before and flip your mind down to G like a card-file, right away, “Gamblers.” But I would have laid five-to-one that’s what they were, if I hadn’t learned my lesson a long time ago never to stake my judgment against the professional players’. One of the gamblers had done too well for a long time and it was all in his face and his belly. The other had started out with a very good physique and still kept a little pride in it. Once in a while, when he got into a bathing suit, he probably felt a twinge of self-consciousness about the surplus fat on him and subjected it to the hard mechanical hands of the steam-bath rubber. They were both dressed in easy, comfortable clothes that added up to the kind of country ensemble that looks expensively cheap. The fatter one was wearing a yellow flannel sports-shirt that must have cost sixteen bucks at Abercrombie & Fitch. But there was nothing Abercrombie & Fitch about the short hairy arms, the fat neck and the sweat staining the shirt-front even in the shade. You would think the Scotch or the British or whoever knitted his socks would have known better than to waste pure wool on such corny patterns.

“Gin,” the leaner one said, pushing back an expensive Panama hat from a low forehead tanned from bending over racing programs in the sun near the railing.

The fat man threw his cards down in disgust. “Gin,” he said, nodding his head in weary resignation and turning to us as if we had been there all the time, appealing to us as sympathetic onlookers witnessing a catastrophe. “Gin. Every five minutes gin. All the way up from Miami it’s all I hear—gin, gin, gin! Three hundred and two dollars he’s into me before we hit Balteemore. The cards he gives me, I shoulda got off at Jacksonville.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” the man with the Panama said. “How many you got?”

“Twenty-eight,” the fat man complained, and began to turn the cards over sorrowfully.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, let me count,” the other man said. His eyes did a quick recap of the fat man’s cards. “Twenty-nine,” he announced triumphantly, “twenty-nine, jerk.”

“So twenty-nine,” the fat man shrugged. “He’s cutting my throat by inches and he’s worried about a little pinch in the behind.”

This fat one, Barney Winch, made gambling his business; but it was also his recreation. His success was due to the fact that he never allowed the business and the recreation to overlap. Strictly speaking, Barney was in the gambling business the way a saloon keeper is in the drinking business, although he never has one himself until the chairs are on the tables and the door is bolted for the night. If Barney were betting on a football game, he would figure out a way to bet on both teams so there was no chance of losing and yet a better-than-even chance of winning on both. That is how he was supposed to have cleaned up on a Southern Cal-Notre Dame game a few years back. First he had laid two and a half to four on the Irish, to win. Then he had turned around and taken Southern Cal and seven points. Notre Dame won by a single point, and Barney collected on both bets. Barney hedged his fight bets the same way, and he never faded in a crap game unless the percentage was with him. If you ever caught Barney betting only one side of a fight or putting a big wad down on the nose of a horse, you would be safe, in assuming that these contests had lost their element of chance.

What Barney did for recreation was another story. His hands felt empty when they weren’t holding cards. But he wasn’t a particularly expert poker player nor invincible at gin. He never cheated at cards because cards was something he did with his friends, and a man like Barney Winch would never give the business to a friend. If the business was slang, it was highly literal slang, for it meant to Barney exactly what it had to Webster, that which busies or engages one’s time, attention or labor, as a principal serious employment. When something went wrong with Barney’s “principal serious employment” there was never so much as a sigh out of him. There was the time Barney had dropped forty thousand because a certain middleweight of Nick’s who was supposed to fall down for a price double-crossed his managers and the smart money by staying on his feet and winning the decision. Barney took it philosophically. He shrugged and paid off. The double-cross was one of the risks of the business, like unseasonable rain for the farmer. Only as a little ethical reminder to the disobedient pugilist, a couple of goons were waiting for him outside his Washington Heights apartment when he got home after the fight, anxious to convince him of his mistake. They left him lying unconscious in the hallway with a convincing two-inch blackjack wound in his head.

If it was business, Barney never bellyached. The day he won enough to shoot up into the highest income brackets (if such profits were declared), he could be weeping because he was a sixty-one-dollar loser in a rummy game.

Barney rearranged his new hand, looked it over and shook his head with the clucking sound of self-pity. “Jacksonville,” he said, “I shoulda got off at Jacksonville.”

Just a hot, quiet Sunday morning at Green Acres, Nick off on the bridle path, Ruby at church and none of the usual Sunday-dinner crowd out of bed this early. We walked out toward the tennis court, where Junior Latka, slender and full of grace and conceit in his white ducks and white jersey with the school crest over the heart, was in the middle of a long and well-played rally with another young man almost his equal. Junior hit a hard deep forehand drive which his opponent had to return as a lob that Junior put away with an overhead smash. The other boy ran back and made a futile pass at it as it bounced high over his head.

Behind the tennis court was a carefully cultivated flower garden where a weather-beaten, runty old man was working quietly on his knees. He looked up when we passed and waited for us to admire his flowers. He had the face of a kid, with big ears and small, grinning eyes.

“The flowers look good this year, Petey,” I said.

“T’anks, Mr. Lewis,” he said. “I started dem earlier dis year. Dese white bride roses is comin’ out better’n I expected.”

He went back to his weeding as we walked on. “How old do you think he is?” I said.

“Oh, forty-eight, fifty,” Beth guessed.

“He stayed twenty rounds with Terry McGovern before we were born,” I said. “He must be crowding seventy. Petey Odell, a great old-time featherweight.”

“I suppose he wound up better than most of them,” Beth said. “At least he’s here in Nick’s old fighters’ home.”

“They come up to Nick’s all the time to put the bite on him. I guess it makes Nick feel good to take care of some of them. And of course it pays off. Nick’s charities always pay off. They’re grateful slobs, these old fighters. Good-hearted, loyal as hell and work like fools. Especially if you show an interest in what they’re doing. That Jock Mahoney. I think he loves that Caddy more than he does his wife. All you have to do to make him happy is ask him how he manages to get such a high polish on those fenders. Old Petey’s the same way about his garden. If he saw us go by and we didn’t say anything about that garden he’d sulk all day. Just a little punchy.”

“What a business!” Beth said. The more she saw of it, the less “fascinating” it seemed.

“Mahoney or Odell, they aren’t so bad. They know what day it is. Give them a definite job to do and they’ll throw themselves into it. But just the same when you talk to them about anything but the job or maybe their families, you hit something fuzzy, as if they’ve got a layer of cotton around their brains.”

“It’s a filthy business,” Beth said suddenly. “In your heart you know it’s a filthy business.”

“Last Friday night you were yelling your head off,” I reminded her.

“That’s true,” she admitted. “I was rooting for the colored boy. He looked so thin and weak compared to the other one. When he started to rally, when he actually had that big Italian boy groggy, well”—she had to smile—“I guess I got excited.”

“It’s been exciting people a hell of a long time. Look at Greek mythology—full of boxers. Wasn’t it Hercules who fought that very tough boy who grew stronger each time he was knocked down because the earth was his mother? What was his name?”

“Antaeus,” Beth said.

“That’s why it pays to court a Life researcher,” I said. “Antaeus. Homer wrote a hell of a piece about that fight. And Virgil covered one of the first great comebacks of a retired champ. Remember how the old champ doesn’t want to accept the challenge of the young contender from Troy because he complains he is way out of condition and all washed up, a sort of ancient Greek Tony Galento? But when he’s finally goaded into fighting he puts up a hell of a battle, has his man on the verge of a kayo when the King steps between them like Arthur Donovan and gives it to the old champ on a TKO. Of course, Virgil made it sound a little more poetic, but that was the guts of it.”

Beth smiled. “You shouldn’t be a tub-thumper for a stable of fighters. You should write essays for The Yale Review.”

“Nick pays me for the tub-thumping,” I said. “This kind of talk I have to do for free.”

We had almost reached the house. Nick and Whitey Williams were just coming up the driveway, at a slow trot. In contrast to Whitey, who sat his horse as if it were an overstuffed easy chair, and looked as much at home, Nick’s seat was very erect, a little ill at ease, and when he posted you felt he was conscious of doing so with perfect form, which always results in something less than perfect in sport technique.

He swung off his horse, a big, deep-chested bay, and handed the reins to Whitey, who led both horses back to the stable. Nick was wearing Irish boots, chamois breeches and a brown polo shirt.

“How long you two been here?” he said pleasantly.

“About half an hour, Nick,” I said. “Wonderful day.”

“It must be a sweat-box in town,” Nick said, gloatingly. “We useta knock the head off the fire plug an’ take a shower bath in the street.” He gave a little laugh, thinking how far he had come. “Eddie been showing you around the joint?”

“It’s perfectly beautiful,” Beth said.

“Didja show her the vegetable garden?” Nick said. “We got a thousand tomato plants. Raise all our own stuff. You like corn, miss? I’ll betcha never tasted corn like this. Corn like this, you’ll never get it in the stores. When you go home take some with you, all you want.”

“Thanks very much,” Beth said.

“Aah, it’s nothing,” Nick waved it aside. “This place is lousy with stuff. If you don’t take it, my bums will eat me out of it anyway. That Jock Mahoney, he sits down to corn, he doesn’t get up till he’s finished thirteen-fourteen ears. He’d rather eat ’n…” He looked at Beth and stopped. “Even when he was supposed to be trainin’, he ate like a pig.”

We were back on the terrace. Danny McKeogh was still sleeping, his legs spread apart and his arms out-stretched, like a man who had been run over. The gamblers were still hunched over their cards.

“How’s it going, Barney?” Nick said.

The fat man’s body rose and fell in an exaggerated sigh. “Don’t ask. He’s murdering me. There oughta be a law against what he’s doing to me.”

Nick laughed. “No wonder Runyon called him the Town Crier,” he said. “Even when he wins, he cries, because it wasn’t bigger.”

He dropped his hand on my shoulder. “This fella Acosta is inside on the screen porch. This oughta be a good time to talk. Come on in.” Then he remembered Beth. “Sorry to grab the boy-friend away,” he said with what was for Nick a very courtly gesture. “Ruby oughta be back in a couple of minutes. There’s plenty of papers on the terrace if you feel like readin’. And if you wanna drink, just call the butler, the guy with the little black bow-tie.”

“Who is he, Gene Tunney?” Beth asked.

“Tooney,” Nick said, “Tooney gives me a pain in the…excuse me, miss, but I’d throw Tooney the hell off the place.”

He maneuvered me toward the door. “Just do anything you feel like, take anything you want like it was your own home.”

“You boys go ahead,” Beth said. “I’ll amuse myself.”

I watched her for a moment as she started back across the terrace. She was wearing a yellow-brown linen skirt, only a shade darker than her tanned legs and arms. Even in the city, where the only exercise most people get is running for a bus or hailing a cab, she always got down to the courts at Park and Thirty-ninth at least twice a week when the weather was right. She looked very sharp from where we stood, not the dream figure, a little too athletic maybe, a little too thin in the legs and not quite enough in front. But there was something attractively capable about the way she walked. I made a mental note to mention this to her later.

She puzzled me. She was the kind of girl to whom I was always going to say something nice a little later. What kept me back, perhaps, was that she would only half believe what I told her, always holding something in reserve. Maybe it was her upbringing, the kind that demands a strict balance all the time. Maybe it was the old Puritan strain in her. Maybe it was a bad inheritance of fierce convictions. Whatever it was, a nice girl like Beth, good respectable family, good schooling, good brain, was still a question mark to me. Passion and restraint, in equal portions, end up in a no-decision fight.

“She’s all right,” Nick said. “You got yourself something there. Plenty of class.”