More often, Bess imagined, a cocked eyebrow or a referentially lifted shoulder was the slim, self-conscious noting of something amiss but private. One did not confront. To be drunk and abusive to one’s wife was a man’s private business. Out of self-protection people paid respect to the notion of privacy, even if it was imaginary. If one were to begin preaching and prying, where would it end? Mightn’t someone else be preaching and prying into one’s own life?
Recoiling from the past, Bess was flustered to find that she was clutching Doyle Hanlon’s hand.
“Sorry,” she said, releasing him and wiping her palm on her skirt.
“I won’t run away,” he told her and smiled.
How philanthropically he gave his smiles away. They made her feel attractive and clever and like someone else’s daughter, not Archer’s. And they held Celia at a distance.
Celia had been at Bess’s elbow all day, insistent, forcing her way into Bess’s thoughts, as if to say, “Pay attention.” Giving an impatient shrug to her mother, Bess tried to fix her mind elsewhere. But where? On Doyle’s mother, maybe? What was she like?
Rebecca Hanlon was wheelchair-bound, Bess knew, though she did not know why. Maybe Doyle would tell her. Mrs. Hanlon was pretty, for a middle-aged woman. Bess had seen her at the Episcopal church bazaars when she’d gone with Aunt Kate and Harriet. The Episcopalians knew how to throw a proper bazaar, Aunt Kate always said. Everything was first-rate and the women still did fine needlework. A little expensive, but worth it.
Despite being an invalid, Mrs. Hanlon was in the thick of things at the bazaars. “Rebecca Hanlon is true royalty,” Kate had observed with warm admiration. She’d said nothing about Mr. Hanlon.
About Doyle Hanlon’s wife or his twin boys, Bess knew almost nothing, except that his wife’s name was Jean and she was tiny and trim and athletic-looking. Her name and picture appeared in the Standard Ledger at the end of summer when the paper covered the community tennis tournament. Jean Hanlon was a leading light of that event. Bess had heard that she was from Chicago and that she’d been married to Doyle since both were at Northwestern University, before he’d enlisted in the army.
Bess supposed that Jean, too, was remarkable. Doubtless her father was a surgeon and her mother a symphony cellist. That was the sort of marriage Doyle Hanlon would make.
But it was odd that he’d gone off to Korea, leaving a young wife and children behind. He had enlisted, he said, to get the shit kicked out of him and become a man. Why had he imagined that he wasn’t one?
Donna had squeezed out of the booth and crossed the room. “Bess, Jim and Bob are driving over to the Dakota. They said they’d give us a ride over and back if we wanted to go. What d’ya think? It’s only ten-thirty. The band plays till one.”
Bess had no reason to want to go to the Dakota and no good excuse not to go. She glanced at the Arliss boys, tipping up their bottles and finishing the Millers. They were perfectly fine boys, but she didn’t want to be the date of either. If she and Donna were truly just hitching a ride, that was one thing, but …
“Let’s all drive over and see what’s happening,” Doyle Hanlon suggested as though reading Bess’s thoughts. That would make it a party, and no one would be paired with anybody. “Bess, you can ride with Earl and me. Donna can ride with Jim and Bob. Is that all right with you?” he asked Donna.
Bess knew that it was fine with Donna, who, like herself, saw this as having the flavor of a party now. Donna wouldn’t feel constrained to kiss either of the Arlisses good night. Although if it came to that, she probably wouldn’t mind so much. They were both decent Catholic boys. And Bess and Donna had had nothing but good experiences with Catholic boys.
Chapter 9
HARRIET
Harriet and Rose had arrived at the Dakota early enough to find a booth near the kitchen. Since this end of the ballroom only smelled of old grease, people dashed to nab one of these booths.
DeVore and his sons Lyle and Delwin had taken a booth two rows over, within hailing distance but not so close as to make Harriet self-conscious. She didn’t want to feel herself studied by the two boys. Not that they were in the booth much, except to order beer. They were crazy for dancing, and they cut a daring and athletic path around the floor, cheeks scarlet, eyes fixed, perspiration streaming down their faces.
“God, I’ve got a thirst,” she’d heard Lyle exclaim as he returned to the booth after a wild and wide-ranging polka. The young girl whom he’d honored had looked like someone clinging for life to the back of a runaway horse. “Them polkas take it outta ya.”
Harriet had danced four polkas with DeVore. She was very good at the polka, and she was tall so that her steps were well matched to his. She thought it must be difficult for a short woman, like the one he was presently waltzing with, to keep step with a tall man. This woman, a dark-haired, not unattractive divorcée from Ula, by the name of Shirley, barely came to DeVore’s shoulder. Shirley’s bosom was pressed against him just above his belt buckle.
Men danced with divorcées, but a man with children at home wasn’t likely to marry one. Not that there was necessarily anything wrong with a divorcée. She might have been absolutely blameless, married to a brute. That might be the very fact that she was explaining to DeVore now, smiling her injured smile and looking up into his long, bony, believing face.
Here came a fellow from St. Bridget whose name Harriet could never remember. At every dance he asked her several times for waltzes. She didn’t think he knew how to polka, and it was just as well because he was a couple of inches shorter than Harriet and it probably wouldn’t have worked.
“Harriet, would you care to dance?”
With his hand on her elbow, the St. Bridget fellow—Ernie—led her to the floor, asking after her and what she’d been doing with herself since Sunday, which was when she’d last been to the Dakota.
He wasn’t fat. A little stocky. He wore a suit, dress shirt and tie, wingtip shoes and dark socks. He had a good, thick head of hair and a pleasant round face, brown as a nut. He worked for the Highway Department, he’d told her.
He liked his work, especially in winter when the weather was bad, winds blowing hard and snow piling up, and people depending on the Highway Department to keep things moving. It made him feel good that, because of him, someone sick could get to the hospital or someone alone could visit a friend or someone with a broken furnace could get help.
Harriet had to admit that she’d never looked at it that way and, yes, it was perhaps a noble calling if you thought about it. That pleased him. “A noble calling,” he repeated. “You’re very good with words, Harriet.” If he were good with words, he told her, he would write about his work. He thought people would be amazed to know what it was like out there on the plow with the wind tossing bales of snow at you and the headlights of distant vehicles, like animal eyes, staring out of the whiteness at you.
When he returned Harriet to her booth and thanked her, Rose said of his retreating figure, “Ernie’s stuck on you.”
“Well, I’m not stuck on him. He’s nice, but that’s all.”
“Sure wish he’d look my way,” Rose complained.
“Why don’t you ask him for ladies’ choice?”
“I always think I’m going to, but I always chicken out. I’m not shy with the others. I could ask Cary Grant to dance. But at the last minute I never can get myself to ask Ernie.”
“I never knew you were interested.”
“At my age it embarrasses me to talk about a man that way when he shows no interest. Do you understand?”
Harriet did. It wasn’t just embarrassment, though. It was superstition, too. If you talked too freely about your hopes, you seemed to invite disaster, to bring it down on yourself. After Bill Hahn had left for that good-paying job in Greenland, Harriet had all but quit talking aloud about romantic possibilities.
“Do you think it’s silly for women our age to flirt and be … infatuated and, well, whatever?” Rose asked.
Harri
et was tired of Rose talking about them as though they were old ladies with gnarled blue veins and smelly corsets. “We’re not that old, Rose! We’re still warm-blooded animals, if you understand my meaning. We keep ourselves up and we wear nice clothes. Any man should be proud to be seen with us. I don’t feel the least silly.”
Now and then she did shiver with doubt. Was it time to stop coming to the dances and join the Ladies’ Aid Circle at the Methodist Church? But when that crossed her mind, the blood drained out of her face and hands and she felt stone dead for a minute.
“I was afraid you might take a shine to Ernie,” Rose said, “since he’s shown so much interest in you.”
“He’s not my type. He’s very nice, but I’m not romantically inclined toward him.”
“He talks beautifully, don’t you think? Like poetry.”
Yes, he did. He seemed intelligent and not at all common. Why wasn’t she attracted to Ernie? Wouldn’t it be lovely and simple if she were? He was someone Kate and Bess would like. He could be like a father to Bess. But you couldn’t talk yourself into love any more than you could talk yourself out of it.
The next number was the “Beer Barrel Polka,” and Billy and the Six Fat Goats played a particularly frenzied arrangement of it. DeVore, all angles and loping limbs, was headed toward her. Her heart beat so hard, she wished she could scream and release some of its fury.
Off they galloped, his wiry arms with their knotty, workman’s muscles holding her lightly, confidently. Harriet glimpsed Bess standing in the entrance. Bess and several others, Donna Olson among them, were crowded into the doorway surveying the dancers. One of the fellows, a soldier, detached himself and went to search for an empty booth.
Harriet was swept away to the opposite end of the floor, where she couldn’t see Bess, and when she and DeVore whirled back around, Bess and the others had disappeared.
DeVore walked Harriet to her booth, something he didn’t always do. Sometimes he left her at the edge of the dance floor, saying, “Well, I’ll see you before long, I guess.” Harriet was surprised and flustered when he sat down. Had he noticed her dancing with Ernie and been suddenly visited by the green-eyed monster? Or was he perhaps interested in Rose, who, at that moment, returned, flushed and laughing, from the dance floor? That could certainly be the case since Billy, the bandleader, announced the butterfly, and DeVore, turning to Rose, who looked quite pretty with her cheeks pink and her nose shiny, asked, “Are you ladies up to a butterfly?”
As they danced, DeVore holding first one and then the other of them, Harriet felt a knee-weakening fear. The floor seemed to fall away from under her. What if DeVore was really attracted to Rose and he’d struck up an acquaintance with her, Harriet, in order to meet her friend? Oh, wouldn’t it be an awful irony if Ernie was stuck on her and DeVore was stuck on Rose?
Suddenly she saw Bess again—dancing the butterfly with Doyle Hanlon and Earl Ingbretson. Married men. What on earth was she doing with them? Were their wives along? She caught Bess’s eye and nodded. A nod was all she could manage, so great were her fears and jealousy over DeVore.
Later, Harriet saw the booth, or, rather, two booths where Bess and Donna were sitting. They were back where the light was dim, far from the dance floor, but at the kitchen end of the room so that Harriet could glimpse the girls now and again. My, didn’t they look pretty in their pale summer cottons. Their bare arms were so firm, their faces so fresh. To be young and pretty and without care. It seemed almost unfair. Harriet chided herself. Envy was common, and it gave your face a hardened look.
Bess and Donna were in a party that included the soldier, another lad who looked to be his brother, Doyle Hanlon, and Earl Ingbretson. Bess was sitting with Doyle and Earl, Donna with the others. Harriet could not imagine how such a party came to be made up. That the girls should be with the soldier and his brother seemed reasonable enough. The two boys were young and looked not quite finished around the edges. But Doyle Hanlon must be twenty-five and Earl Ingbretson was closer to thirty. It was obviously an innocent arrangement, but it piqued Harriet’s curiosity.
As Harriet watched, Doyle Hanlon got to his feet. He held his hand out to Bess and she took it. They walked toward the dance floor, his hand at Bess’s back proprietarily. Now he was saying something clever and Bess, as they passed beneath a flyspecked yellow bulb, was gazing up at him with an expression on her face that Harriet had never seen there.
“Oh, dear me, no,” Harriet whispered.
“Anything wrong?” Rose inquired.
“No. Nothing.” Instantly the maternal and protective part of Harriet began poring over the slim data she possessed regarding Doyle Hanlon. Son of Rebecca and Herbert Hanlon. Husband of Jean Hanlon. Father of … well, a father, at any rate. Twenty-four years old? Twenty-five? Most likely twenty-five at least, since he’d been in college and Korea, though hadn’t she heard that he’d shot himself in the foot to get out of Korea early? She didn’t know whether to believe that. It was assumed in Harvester that if you had money, there was crookedness somewhere in your family and probably insanity as well. Only tainted blood could produce wealth.
Neither of the senior Hanlons was from these parts. St. Louis or New Orleans, Harriet thought. They both had a lingering tinge of accent. Rebecca Hanlon, who was only about five years older than Harriet, was as gracious and kind a woman as any in town, but not one to talk about herself. That was because of the way her husband had made his money when he’d come here during hard times, Harriet had decided. After all, the very clothes Rebecca Hanlon wore and the food she ate came to her through the tragedy of others. Little wonder she was always generous and ready to help.
Little wonder, too, that Herbert Hanlon was one who kept to himself. Not many men around in the thirties had been ready to pal with him. A few bankers, maybe. What kind of man had the stomach to pick other men’s bones? Harriet shuddered. She had some knowledge of Herbert Hanlon’s vulturing. Thank God DeVore’s family hadn’t lost their land to Hanlon.
But Harriet was a slave to fairness. Had she a family crest, Bess had once told her, the motto would read, “On the Other Hand …” She could not, therefore, dismiss from her mind the image of Herbert Hanlon carrying his wife in his arms—in and out of St. John’s Episcopal Church, in and out of Rebecca’s friends’ homes—wherever Rebecca’s interests took her. Hanlon himself did not attend these functions, but he did not deny his wife. He lifted her from her wheelchair as gladly and easily as if she were a child. And twining her arms around his neck, Rebecca cast her husband a very private glance, a look of gay intimacy that caught one unprepared and twisted one’s heart with envy.
What sort of offspring did a couple like that produce? A coldhearted skirt chaser who pursued young girls? Or was Doyle Hanlon something else entirely? Whatever he was, he was not for Bess. The look Harriet had seen on Bess’s face, she tried to put down to her own imagination. She was borrowing trouble. She was good at that. But a worry headache was tightening around her head, squeezing it like a lemon.
Massaging her temple, she turned her thoughts toward DeVore. That did not relieve the headache. Half an hour passed, during which he did not request a dance of her. When he wasn’t schottisching with the divorcée from Ula, he was laughing with his sons. Several times Harriet thought he was looking toward her booth, but not at her, at Rose, or at the empty place where Rose would be if she weren’t dancing. The bandleader announced ladies’ choice, a set of slow waltzes.
“If you’re interested in Ernie, go ask him to dance,” Harriet told her friend. “Tonight’s the night. If you don’t ask him, I’ll ask him for you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Then you do it.”
“I’m scared.”
“Of course you are, but you can be scared and still be brave. Get going or I’ll tell him you wanted to but were too shy.”
Rose pulled herself out of the booth but still hung back. Harriet started to get up.
“All right. All right. I’m going,�
�� Rose said, her voice shrill with nerves. “I wish I’d never told you about Ernie.”
Untrue, thought Harriet, who was feeling staunch and maternal. She realized, however, that her own motives were questionable. Wasn’t she pushing Rose at Ernie to keep her out of DeVore’s way? On the other hand, she did honestly hope that Rose would find true and lasting happiness with Ernie.
She sipped warm beer. Sipping beer passed the time. It made you look occupied when no one asked you to dance. And she certainly wasn’t going to ask DeVore for ladies’ choice. What was the point of chasing after a man who was backing away? You’d end up falling on your face.
The dark-haired divorcée was leading DeVore to the floor. Well, thought Harriet, she’ll soon find out that he’s quicksilver.
Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d be the one he chose for his wife. After all, she was broken in.
In the light of cruel but honest appraisal, Harriet saw that her dreams about DeVore had been built on nothing but desperate hope. She was deeply humiliated by her silliness and wished that she were not here in this grimy, sordid-looking place where you snagged your stockings on the booths and no one ever wiped off the tables, and the sound of empty laughter and shouted obscenities was deafening.
In DeVore’s booth Lyle elbowed Delwin and pointed in Harriet’s direction, laughing. Because she was staring straight ahead, they thought she couldn’t see them, but her peripheral vision was excellent. They were laughing at her. What were they saying? “There’s the old maid who’s sweet on Pa. No way in hell he’d take up with her.”
Rising slowly, she started toward the door, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. The floor wobbled a little, and the walls, papered with lurid posters of coming attractions, tilted.
What a Woman Must Do Page 7