Up in Honey's Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

flicked once to light the cigarette.
    â€œThat’s what happened,” Honey said, “I fell in love with Walter because he’s such a swell guy, kind and considerate, fun to be with.” She handed the cigarette to Kevin, a trace of lipstick on the tip.
    Now she was lighting another, Kevin glancing at Honey in her trench coat and black beret, pulled low on her blond hair and slightly to one side, the way girls in spy movies wore their berets. Honey was a new experience for him.
    She said, “The whole time we talked, you know you didn’t once call me by my name? Which one do you have a problem with, Honey or Miss Deal?”
    He was aware of it and said, “Well, if I called you ‘Honey’ it would sound like, you know, we’re going together.”
    â€œMy friends at work call me Honey. I’m not going with any of them. The day I was born my dad picked me up and said, ‘Here’s my little honey,’ and loved me so much I was christened Honey. The priest said, ‘You can’t call her that. There’s no St. Honey in the Catholic Church.’ My dad said, ‘There is now. Christen her Honey or we’re turning Baptist.’” She said, “You want to know something? Walter never asked where I got the name.”
    â€œDid you tell him?”
    â€œWe’re coming to Blessed Sacrament,” Honey said, “where Walter and I met. It was after eleven o’clock Mass. Yeah, I told him but he didn’t make anything of it. He called me Honig, if he called me anything.”
    â€œYou took that as a good sign, meeting at church?”
    â€œI think it was the only reason Walter went to Mass, to meet a girl with golden hair. He stopped going once he had me, and I stopped since we were living in sin, not married in the Church.”
    â€œYou believe that, you were living in sin?”
    â€œNot really. It was more like living a life of penance. I’ll tell you though, I did like his looks, the way he dressed, his little glasses pinched on his nose, he was so different. I’d never met anyone in my life like Walter Schoen. I think I might’ve felt sorry for him too, he seemed so lonely. He was serious about everything and when we argued—we argued all the time—I’d keep at him, whatever we were talking about, and it drove him nuts.”
    â€œDetermined to change him,” Kevin said.
    Honey sat up to look past Kevin. She said, “There’s his market,” and sat back again. “With a sign in the window, but I couldn’t read it.”
    â€œAnnouncing no meat today,” Kevin said. “I passed it on the way to your place. So, you thought you could change him?”
    â€œI wanted to get him to quit being so serious and have some fun. Maybe even get him to laugh at Adolf Hitler, the way Charlie Chaplin played him in The Great Dictator . Chaplin has the little smudge of a mustache, the uniform, he’s Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania. But the movie came out after I left.”
    â€œYou think he saw it?”
    â€œI couldn’t get Walter to listen to Jack Benny. He called him a pompous Jew. I said, ‘That’s the part he plays, a cheapskate. You don’t think he’s funny?’ No, or even Fred Allen. We were at some German place having drinks, I said, ‘Walter, have you ever told a joke? Not a political cartoon, a funny story?’ He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. I said, ‘I’ll tell you a joke and then you tell it to me. We’ll see how you do.’”
    Kevin Dean was looking straight ahead grinning. “You were married then?”
    â€œ Ja, I’m Frau Schoen. I tell him the one, three guys arrive at heaven at the same time. It’s been a very busy day, during the war, and Saint Peter says, ‘I only have time to admit one of you today. How about whoever has experienced the most unusual death.’ Have you heard