“Nothing,” Tom Carlin said dryly.
Joe winced.
Walking home, Tom Carlin said: “That hurt, Joe, didn’t it? I was working at your age in a country store for two dollars a week. There was another merchant in town with a more imposing store, and I expected to go to work for him the next month for two-fifty a week. In those days a great many persons bought bean coffee and ground it at home. A customer came in for a coffee-mill. I took a heavy mill down from the shelf and dropped it. It smashed, and the handle flew up and knocked off the customer’s hat. He left in a rage. My employer fired me. The other merchant decided he didn’t want a clumsy lout for a clerk. I was out of the job I was holding and out of the job I had expected to hold. I thought it might help if I told you.”
It seemed incredible that the man who owned one of the brightest stores in the city should have lost two jobs in one day. Two jobs—two parts.
“It does help,” Joe said.
Suddenly he knew that to-morrow he’d go downtown. Downtown was his world with or without a voice, with or without a part. But he wouldn’t go downtown with a swaggering, theatrical front. Front was a fake.
Moving through the mid-morning traffic of narrow Royal Street, Joe heard the familiar blare of FKIP’s speaker, broadcasting a tune that, having leaped into the Hit Parade, would be murdered by radio bands before the week was out. FKIP piled on the program in its usual pattern of gaudy layers. One brassy layer that went out into the street, a tinny, metallic layer for the hall, a softer layer for the elevator. Joe sighed. It was raucous and overdone, but he’d missed it. The operator started to close the door, craned his neck to look out into the hall, and held the door open. Stella Joyce stepped into the car.
“Joe!” Her hands went out to him impulsively. “Say something.”
Joe spoke a few words from an old Sue Davis script: “Mother, you must listen—”
“Your voice is stronger.”