"Free, is it?" he shouted, his veins purple on his forehead. "Free for you to stand here and choose who you'll rape tonight?" He raised an open hand to slap the boy across the face.
The boy cringed, the insolence gone from his face.
"What yuh pickin' on us for, Mr. Denton?
We aren't the ones fucked Jennie."
The words seemed to freeze the blood in Tom's veins.
He stood there, his hand still upraised, staring down at the boy.
Fucked Jennie.
They could say that about his own daughter and there was nothing he could do that could change the fact of it.
Slowly he let his hand fall to his side, then with a violent gesture, he flung the boy away from him.
Tom glared at them, looking from one to another.
They were only boys, he told himself. He couldn't hate all boys because of what two had done.
The boy was right. They weren't the guilty ones.
A sense of failure came over him.
If anyone was guilty, he was the guiltiest of all.
If he'd been a man and kept his job, all this might never have happened.
"Get off this corner," he said. "If any of you ever see me coming this way again, you'd better be on the other side of the street."
They looked at him and then at each other and it almost seemed now as if they were pitying him.
Suddenly, as if a secret message had been passed mysteriously between them, they began to disperse in ones and twos.
A moment later, he was alone on the corner.
He stood there for a moment to quiet the sudden trembling that came over him, then he, too, turned and walked around the corner to where his wife and daughter were waiting for him.
"It's over now," he said for the second time that morning, as he took Jennie's arm and started for the house again.
But this time, he knew, even as he said it, that it wasn't over – that it would never be over as long as he was alive to remember.
The cool September breeze held the first hint of autumn.
Jennie looked out the cable-car window toward her stop.
Her father was standing there under the street lamp, waiting for her as he did each night now.
The car stopped and she stepped down.
"Hello, Daddy."
"Hi, Jennie Bear."
She fell into step beside him as they turned the corner toward home.
"Any luck today?"
He shook his head.
"I don't understand it. There just are no jobs."
"Maybe there'll be one tomorrow."
"I hope so," he said. "Maybe after the election, things will look up.
Roosevelt says the government has to take the lead in providing work, that big business has fallen down on its responsibilities.
He makes more sense for the working man than Hoover and the Republicans." He looked at her. "How did it go today?"
"All right," she said.
But there still was an uncomfortable feeling in the office.
Many of the company agents had taken to stopping at her desk on their way in and out of the office.
Sometimes they just chatted, but some of them had tried to date her.
Maybe if things had been different, she'd have gone out with them.
But when she looked up from her desk into their eyes, she knew what they were thinking.
She'd refuse politely and some of them would stammer or even blush, for they knew somehow that she knew.
"You don't have to meet me every night, Daddy," she said suddenly. "I'm not afraid to come home alone."
"I know you're not. I've known it from that first day I came to meet you.
But I want to do it.
It's the one time of the whole day that I feel I've really got something to do."
Jennie didn't answer and they walked along silently for a moment.
"Do you want me to stop?"
"Not if you want to meet me, Daddy."