The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis Read online

  “Waitress,” I cried, “bring me a pot of coffee. Make it two pots. Quickly!”

  The puzzled woman returned directly with two pots of coffee. She watched with awe as I poured the black, steaming fluid down my throat. “Two more,” I cried, belching. These I also consumed with dispatch. Full now to the top of my esophagus, I paid my check and, making sloshing noises, walked from the restaurant.

  The infirmary was across the campus, a distance of perhaps a half mile. I got down on one knee, my palms flat on the ground, sprinter fashion. “On your mark, get set, GO!” I shouted and streaked away.

  I raced pell-mell across the knoll, leaping like a hurdler over the students taking their ease on the turf. Past Burton Hall I ran, past Eddy Hall, past the music building, past the library, past the law school, scattering knots of pedestrians as a bowling ball scatters tenpins.

  As I passed the chemistry building, I thought I heard the sound of running feet behind me. I cast a quick glance over my shoulder. About twenty feet to the rear, a tall young man was running. His eyes were wild. His coat flapped in the breeze. In his hand he clutched an object that seemed to be a silver loving cup.

  Was he after me? I increased my speed. But his long legs soon closed the distance between us. For about three strides we ran side by side. Then he thrust the loving cup into my hand. Having deposited the cup with me, he swerved to his right, cut across the street, and disappeared behind the school of mining and metallurgy.

  I ran on, the cup swinging in my hand, utterly confused. Who was he? What was the cup? Why had he given it to me? But these questions would have to wait. The infirmary was just around the corner and a block down the street. I wasn’t going to stop now—not after having worked up such a heartbeat and respiration. First I would get my medical excuse, then solve the mystery of the loving cup. I pounded ahead.

  I reached the corner, rounded it, and ran smack into a group of about twenty young men all wearing Chi Psi fraternity pins. “There he is!” they shouted as one man.

  They then proceeded to hit me with remarkable ferocity. Some hit me on top of the head, some on the nose and eyes, some in the ribs, some in the stomach, some in the kidneys. “Poor loser!” they kept yelling as they clobbered me.

  “I am not!” I cried indignantly. It is bad enough to be thrashed for no apparent reason, but to be insulted on top of it is really too much. Poor loser, indeed! I happen to be one of the most sportsmanlike losers in Minnesota. “I happen to be one of the most sportsmanlike losers in Minnesota,” I shouted.

  Unheeding, they continued to belt me. I was beginning to fear for my life when a cop finally came running up and stopped the carnage. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  “He stole our cup,” replied a Chi Psi angrily.

  “I did not,” I said truthfully. “A guy gave it to me.”

  “Liar!” hollered one.

  “Thief!” hollered another.

  “Poor loser!” hollered a third.

  “Just a minute, just a minute,” said the cop. “Now let’s get to the bottom of this. He stole your cup, you say?”

  One of the Chi Psis stepped forward. “Yes, sir. We won the cup yesterday in the interfraternity softball tournament. We beat the Sigma Chis for the championship. It was a disputed game. The Sigma Chis claimed that our pitcher was throwing overhand.”

  “A dirty lie!” chorused the Chi Psis.

  “A dirty lie,” echoed their spokesman. “We won the cup fair and square. But the Sigma Chis said they were going to steal it. About an hour ago this dirty rat”—he pointed at me—“sneaked into our trophy room and ran off with it.”

  “This is too ridiculous,” I cried, stamping my foot. “In the first place, I am not a Sigma Chi. I don’t even belong to a fraternity.”

  “A barbarian!” they whispered, recoiling from me in horror.

  “So why,” I continued, “should I steal your cup?”

  “The answer to that is obvious,” replied the Chi Psi spokesman. “The Sigma Chis paid you to steal it. A barbarian will do anything for money.” He turned to the policeman. “Officer, arrest this man.”

  The cop hesitated. “You really want me to?”

  “Yes,” they shouted in unison.

  “And you’ll appear against him?” asked the cop.

  Again they thundered affirmation.

  The cop shrugged. “Looks like you’re pinched, kid,” he told me.

  “But this is insane,” I protested. “Look—they say their cup was stolen an hour ago. I wasn’t even on the campus an hour ago. I was on my way from St. Paul with a girl in a Cadillac convertible.”

  “What was the girl’s name?” asked the cop.

  He had me there. “I don’t rightly know,” I confessed.

  “Kid,” said the cop, “I think you better come downtown.”

  Panic started to well up within me. “Please,” I begged, “please let me go over to the student infirmary. I’ve got to get a medical excuse for a final I missed this morning.”

  “You’ve got an excuse,” sneered a Chi Psi. “You were busy stealing our loving cup.”

  “I didn’t steal it,” I screamed. My nerves were snapping like overstretched guitar strings. “I was driving from St. Paul with a girl.”

  “But you can’t think of her name,” said the cop skeptically. He turned to the Chi Psis. “Watch him while I phone the station.” He walked over to a call box on the corner. “This is Mulvaney on the campus,” he said. “Send a car to Washington and Fourteenth.”

  The Chi Psis stood around me in a hostile cordon—not that I needed to be guarded. I couldn’t possibly have run away. I was gelatinous with terror. All was lost now. I was a dead pigeon, a gone goose. No medical excuse; a flunk in Egyptology; a conviction for stealing the loving cup; but worst of all, my father was going to learn everything.

  I twitched in quick, eccentric spasms. My father: that was the most unkindest cut of all. He was never entirely calm in my presence, but now he would go absolutely berserk. When he heard about the car, the money that should have gone for oranges, the missed final, and the loving cup, he would be transformed into a veritable engine of wrath. Even if I escaped a jail sentence for stealing the loving cup—and that seemed hardly likely—I could not escape my father’s punishment. I knew what that would be: life imprisonment in his grocery store. After today’s events, my mother’s best efforts would not prevent him from yanking me out of college.

  A squad car drew up. Mulvaney shoved my twitching frame into the back seat and got in beside me. We started away. My panic mounted with each passing block. It was no small panic, you must understand. It was the large economy-size panic, complete with head noises, icy perspiration, dry mouth, burning eyeballs, knotted stomach, obsessive clutching, spasms in the extremities, and pinwheels around the ears. I had a physical sensation of sanity ebbing away. By the time we got to headquarters, I was ready for the laughing academy. As I saw the cops scattered around the station house, I was possessed by a wildly hysterical notion. Scenes from George Raft movies reeled through my mind—with me as George Raft. I saw myself cringing in the center of a circle of gigantic, bristly-faced cops. I saw bright lights stabbing into my eyes. I felt rubber hoses thudding against my kidneys. “You stole the loving cup,” chorused a group of accusing voices. “Didn’t you? Didn’t you? Didn’t you?” And each question was punctuated with a fresh slam in the kidneys. “Yes!” I heard myself screaming. “Yes, I stole it! Don’t hit me any more!”

  And then a new thought seized me, and my hysteria increased, though it seemed hardly possible. Would the cops be satisfied with only a confession to the loving-cup robbery? Of course not. Seeing what an easy mark they had on their hands, they would haul out every unsolved crime in their files. They would have me confessing to felonies that had baffled the Minneapolis police for years. But that wasn’t all. When they had cleaned up the local blotter, they would make me confess to celebrated unsolved crimes in other parts of the nation—the Brinks Express r
obbery, the Judge Crater disappearance, the Black Tom explosion, the Crédit Mobilier scandal.

  A wild, bitter laugh escaped my lips. Only a short time ago I had told myself that no more bad luck could befall me. And now I was facing electrocution in several states.

  Mulvaney had me in front of the desk sergeant. “Cossack!” I shrieked. “Beat me all you want. Haul out your rubber hose. Shine your bright lights. Do your utmost. You’ll get nothing out of me.”

  “Calm down,” said the sergeant softly. “The only time I handle a rubber hose is when I water my garden in the evening, and there isn’t a light in the station brighter than forty watts. You’ve been seeing too many George Raft movies.… What’s the charge, Mulvaney?”

  “University kid,” replied Mulvaney. “Some frat men say he stole their loving cup.”

  “What’s your name and address, son?” asked the sergeant.

  I looked up at him. He was a fat, elderly man with a ruddy face and a shock of white hair, but I was not deceived by his appearance. I saw cruelty lurking behind his twinkling blue eyes, savagery masked by his benign dewlaps. “Dobie Gillis, 2897 Cherokee Drive, St. Paul,” I muttered.

  He made an entry on the pad in front of him. “How old are you, son?”

  Son. The fatherly type. The most dangerous of all, according to Krafft-Ebing. “Nineteen,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “Do you live with your mother and father?”

  He wants to know where to ship the body, I thought, quaking. “Yes,” I said in a hoarse whisper.

  “Be in Municipal Court at ten o’clock Wednesday morning with your mother and father,” said the sergeant. “That’s all for now, son.”

  “You mean,” I asked incredulously, “that I can go?”

  He reached over the desk and rumpled my hair. “You can go,” he said, laughing.

  Relief flooded over me, washing away my panic—but not entirely. Although it was a comfort to know that the Minneapolis police force was composed of paternal men who watered their lawns in the cool of the evening, there was still the matter of my father to consider. “Listen,” I said hopefully, “how would it be if I came to court with just my mother?”

  He shook his head. “Mother and father,” he said with finality.

  “Yes, sir,” I said and shambled out of the station. So my father would have to know. Frankly, I would have preferred the rubber hoses. I saw the bleak vista ahead—day upon day in a grocery store, peas and tomatoes, soap flakes and tunafish, clothesline, Vienna sausage, ginger ale, catsup, Fig Newtons, and the pomp of the Pharaohs an ironical memory. And probably a jail sentence too; the Chi Psis had seemed implacable. “Woe,” I cried aloud. “Woe and woe.”

  I walked forlornly down the street. If only I knew the name of the girl in the Cadillac. She could square everything. She was my alibi both for the loving cup and the missed examination. I could bring her to Professor Harrison and get him to let me take a make-up test. I could bring her to the Chi Psis and get them to drop charges against me. The case would never come to court; my father would never know what happened. Everything would be fixed. But who was the girl? Where was she?

  I’ll tell you where she was. At this moment she was driving down the street about thirty yards in front of me. I leaped into the air with a full-throated cry. There she was! The car, the girl, both unmistakable!

  But I was walking and she was driving, and already she was disappearing from my sight. “Follow that car!” I shouted and jumped on the running board of a passing sedan, forgetting in my excitement that they don’t put running boards on cars any more.

  I picked myself up off the street, bruised but happy. For the impact of my fall had suddenly jarred loose the clue that I had forgotten. I knew now how to find this girl!

  I raced into a drug store. I dug in my pocket and pulled out the five dollars that remained of the money my father had given me in the morning. “Change this,” I said to the clerk. I took the handful of silver into a phone booth. I dialed long distance. “I want to talk to the registrar of Bryn Mawr College,” I told the operator. “That’s in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.”

  There was a short interval while the connection was made. I deposited the $2.80 the operator requested. “Hello,” I said. “Is this the registrar of Bryn Mawr College?”

  “Yes,” said a cultured voice, for at Bryn Mawr even the employees are cultured.

  “This is Lieutenant Mulvaney of the St. Paul police department,” I said. “We’re cracking a big case here, and you can help. I want a list of all Bryn Mawr students who live in St. Paul.”

  “You cahn’t mean,” said the registrar, “that a Bryn Mawr gull is involved in a crime?”

  “Not at all,” I assured her. “We just need her as a witness. Quickly, woman. Innocent lives hang in the balance.”

  “One moment, please.”

  I held the phone in my perspiring palm against my perspiring ear. The seconds ticked by.

  “Please deposit another two dollars and eighty cents,” said the operator.

  I looked in my hand. Only two dollars and twenty cents were left. “Just a minute,” I told the operator.

  I ran out of the phone booth. A little man stood browsing at the bandage counter. “Mister,” I cried, tearing off my necktie, “will you give me sixty cents for this necktie?”

  “No, thank you,” he said politely. “I only wear bow ties.”

  I seized his little shoulders and shook him violently. “Mister, don’t argue,” I shouted.

  Alarmed, he fished out sixty cents and thrust it at me. I ran back to the booth, flung the money into the slot. “Hello, hello?” I yelled frantically.

  “Lieutenant Mulvaney?” said the registrar, “I thought we were cut off.”

  “No, I had to step out for a minute and arrest a criminal. Have you got that information?”

  “We have only one gull from St. Paul,” she replied. “A Miss Bonnie Willet, 1734 Bohland Avenue.”

  “Thank you,” I cried exultantly. “There’ll be two tickets to the policeman’s ball in your morning mail.”

  I rushed out of the drugstore. I rushed right back in again. I had suddenly remembered that I didn’t have carfare to get to St. Paul. The little man still stood at the bandage counter, looking without joy at my necktie. He cowered as I approached him. “You’ll need a clasp for that necktie,” I said forcefully. I removed my clasp and handed it to him. “That’ll be fifty cents.”

  “Very well,” he said, thrusting out his little chin defiantly, “but this is the last of your wardrobe I shall purchase, do you understand?”

  “Thanks, pal.” I clapped his tiny back, took the money, and ran for a streetcar.

  Within an hour I was on Bohland Avenue, a street in Highland Park, St. Paul’s swankiest residential section. I walked up the street looking for Bonnie Willet’s house. A host of fears were swarming like bees through my mind. What if Bonnie refused to help me? What if she were not home? What if she had left the country? Had I come so far, suffered so much, only to meet defeat?

  Then I saw the Cadillac parked in the driveway beside a fine big house. I raced up the walk. I bounded up on the porch. I pointed my finger at the doorbell. “Hey,” said a voice.

  I turned to my right. There on the porch glider sat Bonnie Willet. There were tears in her eyes, a distraught expression on her face. I did not know what her trouble was, but I felt sure it could not even approximate mine. I ran to her and seized both of her hands in mine. “You’ve got to help me!” I cried, and the whole hapless story poured from my lips in an anguished torrent.

  A calculating look came into her eyes as she listened. “All right,” she said when I had finished my grisly recital, “I’ll help you if you’ll help me.”

  “Anything,” I exclaimed earnestly. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Who’s out there, dear?” called a voice from within the house.

  “It’s Bill Johnson, Mother,” Bonnie called back.

  “Bill Johnson?” I said in
bewilderment. “I’m Dobie Gillis.”

  “You’re Bill Johnson,” she whispered urgently. “Don’t forget it.”

  “Bring him in, dear,” called the voice.

  “Yes, Mother,” replied Bonnie. She took my arm. “Let me do the talking,” she whispered. “Just agree with whatever I say. And remember, you’re Bill Johnson.”

  What now? I thought helplessly, and accompanied her into the house.

  It was a house such as I had never been in before. It was rich but not garish, sumptuous yet simple. All the hangings and appointments were stamped with quiet good taste. I do not know of what period the furniture was—my knowledge of periods does not go beyond the Ptolemies; all I know is that the furnishings were uniformly graceful and elegant, that they had been chosen discriminately and arranged tastefully. It was a house where culture dwelt with wealth and breeding with comfort, and I, the grocer’s son, was impressed.

  “Mother, this is Bill Johnson,” said Bonnie.

  No casting director could have chosen a mistress for this house more perfectly. Mrs. Willet was the very model of a patrician. From her handsomely coifed gray hair to her custom-shod feet, she practically oozed breeding. Her carriage was erect, her eyes were level, her hands were beautifully kept, her dress was of pastel silk, expensive, severely cut, and adorned only with a small cameo brooch.

  “How do you do?” she said. She gave me her cool fingers to squeeze and withdrew them after a proper interval.

  “Bill is the boy I was telling you about, Mother,” said Bonnie. “He’s the one I had lunch with today. Didn’t I, Bill?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Oh yes.”

  “So you see, Mother,” Bonnie continued, “Mrs. Holloway was mistaken.”

  “Apparently she was,” agreed Bonnie’s mother.

  “Mrs. Holloway is a friend of Mother’s,” Bonnie explained to me. “She made the most ridiculous mistake this noon. She thought she saw me going into the stage door of the Jollity Theater.”

  I felt my eyebrows shooting up. The Jollity Theater is a crummy burlesque house on Minneapolis’s skid row. It is patronized largely by vagrants, winos, dehorns, grifters, and other such unsanitary persons. What, I wondered, was a high type girl like Bonnie doing in a low type place like that? For I was sure that she had, indeed, been there; otherwise why this fantastic alibi?