by Jane Rule
Carl wondered if he should ask Cole to join them, but the boy was obviously embarrassed to be found eating out in the first place. Better let him alone. Carl and Harriet had just settled at a table of their own when Dina Pyros came in. She stopped at Cole’s table, and for a moment it looked as if she might join him. Then she went to sit by herself at a table for four, where almost at once she was joined by the two women who ran the corset shop.
“Do you know what Dina said to me the other day?” Harriet asked, her voice pitched so carefully low that Carl had to strain to hear her. “She said that a woman should marry, any woman.”
“Do you think she’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. It just surprised me, when she said it.”
“Knowing what should be isn’t hard,” Carl said with some dryness. “Accepting what can be seems to me the problem.”
“I owe you an apology about this morning. It’s hard to explain. …”
“There’s no need to…”
It’s just that Peter was so angry the other night, and I was upset by it. I’ve thought of phoning him, but somehow I can’t. I don’t phone Peter. That’s one of the things I think he wouldn’t like. So I sent him a note. He must have had it this morning. He often does call me at the library or at home right after work. He didn’t call. There’s not much else I can do, is there?”
“Are you in love with Peter, Harriet?” Carl asked.
“I didn’t think so,” Harriet said, bleakly honest. “Months ago, we had a talk, and we agreed we weren’t really interested in each other, but, as Peter put it, we could be convenient for each other—friends.”
“Maybe that wasn’t a very good agreement.”
“I couldn’t really think of any reason to refuse,” Harriet said.
“But maybe now there is one.”
“For Peter, you mean?”
The kitchen door swung open, and six fast bars of Greek song canceled Carl’s reply.
“I beg your pardon?” Harriet said.
“For either of you,” Carl repeated.
“I guess, when I forgot, I stopped being a convenience,” Harriet said. “Once when I was just a girl, my mother asked me to take my little brother and sister shopping with me. I did it, cheerfully enough, but then I forgot them. I mean, I simply left them in the store and got all the way home before I remembered. They were tiny—about three and five at the time.”
At that moment, the street door opened, and Peter Fallidon walked in.
“Oh dear,” Harriet said.
Peter caught sight of Cole just before he noticed, with acute embarrassment, Harriet and Carl. He spoke to Cole, and then he deliberately moved to greet the others.
“Won’t you join us?” Carl suggested.
“I’d like to,” Peter said. “But I’ve just told Cole I’d keep him company. I got your note, Harriet. Thank you.”
“I just wanted you to know how sorry I was…”
“Have you heard about Miss Larson?”
“Yes,” Harriet said.
“The new girl called to tell me there won’t be dinner on Wednesday.”
“No, I thought there wouldn’t.”
“Doesn’t even seem to be dinner for Cole,” Peter said, glancing back at the boy. Then he caught sight of Dina, nodded and smiled. “Everybody seems to be here tonight Well … enjoy your dinner.”
“That’s good advice, you know,” Carl said gently to Harriet “Why not enjoy it?”
“I don’t know why I involve you in all this nonsense,” Harriet said. “I don’t see how you can enjoy yours.”
“The older you get, Harriet, the gladder you are of lively problems, and you’re very charming not to realize how flattering it is for me to be confided in.”
Peter had stopped at Dina’s table, his smile a little strained at the bad jokes Dolly and Sal were sharing with him. He waited for a pause and then said, “If you’re in the bank any time this week, Dina, I wish you’d stop in to see me.”
“All right,” Dina said, her clear gray eyes alert with questions she would not ask.
“Just some business that might interest you.”
Then Peter returned to Cole, who had nearly finished his meal.
“Are you planning to stay awhile?” Peter asked. “I don’t want to hold you up.”
“I was planning to stay.”
“You look tired.”
“First day at the mill, I guess,” Cole said. “Takes a while to get used to it.”
“Hard not to be able to go home for dinner.”
“Oh, I could have gone home. It’s just that… I didn’t really know where I should eat.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, with Cousin A having her dinner in bed, I didn’t know whether I should sit in the dining room or suggest that I eat in the kitchen.”
Peter grinned at him. “You’d better solve that problem or you may have to eat out every night for a week.”
“I know, and I wouldn’t mind that, but I guess Cousin A would think it was funny.”
“What’s Agate like?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Cole said.
“Bad cook?”
“Oh no. She cooks all right.” Cole waited for Peter to order. “She’s different from Kathy. Kathy would have just gone ahead and set my place. But I don’t think Agate’s used to being a… a servant. She doesn’t act like it anyway.”
“How does she act?”
“Sort of like a… well, just like a girl. She jokes a lot. Tonight when I got in, she was sitting in Cousin A’s chair in the study reading the paper. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t. Cousin A’s in bed, after all. She said something like, “The master’s home from touring the cotton, is he?” in a cornball southern accent. So I told her I’d be going out for supper, and she just shrugged, but maybe I hurt her feelings.”
“Well, she was bugging you. Just tell her what you want.”
“Sure,” Cole said, with a wry grin. “All I have to do is figure out what that is. There have to be more choices than master or slave.”
“She’s paid.”
“So am I. I still don’t like taking orders, but I’d rather take them than give them. Ever meet a sadder combination? An army mentality in a conscientious objector.”
“Are you going to take that route?”
“Can’t,” Cole said, “not legally anyway; so it’s jail or Canada.”
“I was in the navy. It wasn’t all that bad.”
“So was my dad. Maybe he was a bastard before, just a one-armed bastard after. But I still think maybe he wouldn’t have slugged so hard with two arms.”
“What happened to him?”
“Don’t know. He took off.”
What should Peter say: that he was sorry? that he hadn’t even had the benefit of a bad father himself? That letting women run you and the world was no solution? Nobody had shown Peter that alternative of domestic kindness and unworldly idealism which Cole was trying to struggle into. Could Peter say it wouldn’t work?
“You don’t approve,” Cole said.
“Of what?”
“Me.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you think the army would make a man of me.”
“Don’t hang that cliché on me, Cole. I don’t know what I’d do now in your shoes. It was a different scene for me, for all of us.”
“You’d go.”
“All right. I’d go. Maybe you will, too, when the time comes, for the same reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“Bad alternatives. Not being enough of a romantic to be that kind of rebel. Inertia.”
“No good reasons at all?”
“Sure, but I thought you were asking about the real ones.”
“I wasn’t,” Cole said. “I don’t want to know things like that.”
“Well, Mr. Fallidon!”
At the sight of Grace Hill, both Peter and Cole got to their feet, Peter quickly bracing the table between them.
“Hello, Mrs. Hill,” Cole said against Peter’s silent nod.
“I didn’t know you were interested in this sort of thing,” Grace Hill said to Peter, the malice in her eyes amused. “And Miss Jameson at another table … with a minister. Pre-wedding plans? Or is this… ah… a new arrangement?”
Peter looked beyond her and asked, “Isn’t Feller with you tonight?”
“He doesn’t come to places like this. He thinks it’s slumming. I didn’t know you were old enough to drink, Cole. Is Mr. Fallidon trying to persuade you to open an account?”
“He… I…” Cole began.
“Ah, there’s Dina.” Grace Hill waved.
Dina stood up and came to Grace. “Why don’t you let them sit down?”
“Do,” Grace said to the men.
“There’s an extra chair at our table. There isn’t at this one.”
“Nobody suggested that I was welcome,” Grace said, “but that’s why people sit at tables for two, isn’t it?”
“Often,” Dina said. “Come on.”
Cole sat down and said, without looking at Peter, “I suppose you have to be polite to her.”
“Marginally,” Peter said.
“I’m not old enough to drink… not for another five months,” Cole said, staring at his beer in moral gloom.
Peter was not free to get up and walk out before he had finished his dinner. The price of the resulting embarrassment and gossip was higher than he could afford, Since it was futile to regret his ever having come to Nick’s tonight—as futile as to regret he had ever taken the job of bank manager in this town eighteen months ago—he defended himself against such temptations by concentrating on the astringent clarity of the wine, the sudden assaults of music, withdrawing into his senses.
Cole, aware that he had been temporarily deserted, looked around the room over the heads of the other diners with the casual indifference of someone ignoring an epileptic fit. Harriet, seeing him so stranded, wished she could send him some comfort. How often she had found herself without the ease of actually being alone, isolated in Peter’s presence. Sometimes he had turned his attention to something else, but more often he simply withdrew without warning or explanation.
“Do you understand people, Mr. Hollinger?” she asked. “I suppose you do.”
And she saw, as she spoke, that she had brought Carl Hollinger back from some retreat of his own. Maybe Peter wasn’t peculiar. Maybe all men went into themselves like that from time to time. A nervous defense, as women were likely to chatter. Grace Hill chattering now. If Dina had been a man, the listening light in her face would have gone out by now. But Harriet didn’t talk a great deal. She didn’t make demands. She forgot.
“I was thinking about Ida Setworth,” Carl said, realizing that Harriet was uncertain of his attention. “And loneliness.”
“Does she seem to you lonely?”
“No, but I don’t really understand why she isn’t.”
“I don’t think loneliness has to do with whether you’re with people or not,” Harriet said. “Look: Dina’s lonely right now, and so is Cole, do you see?”
“Are you?”
“No, but I can talk with you,” Harriet said, an easy frankness she regretted at once for the shadow it cast across the old man’s face, because, of course, he was lonely, and what attention had she paid to that, involved in her own more interesting pain?
Suddenly the lights went up; the speakers on the kitchen wall crackled into the wild center of a fast dance; and through the kitchen door came a line of sailors with several trapped girls, feet stuttering in uncertain effort, saved from falling by strong hands on their hips, from real humiliation by encouraging laughter. They swung round the long, narrow center of the room, the leaders disappearing back into the kitchen just as the music stopped. People clapped for those left behind, who grinned as they untangled themselves from the dance. One sailor leaned on Cole’s shoulder, picked up his beer, and drank to Peter. Two stood by Dina, asking her why she was sitting down in here, why not in there with them, with the dancing. Well, they would dance for her here. The music began again, slowly this time. With the sharp snap of a handkerchief, which invited a partnership, with the formal stamping reply, the two boys danced, the handkerchief held high between them, while across the room the sailor who had drunk Cole’s beer did a solo, insolent and sexual, for Peter. Cole, who had practiced this dance for nights in his own room, felt a sharp envy for the strutting confidence before him, and he could see by Peter’s face that he was both impressed and entertained.
Others of the dancers were finding extra chairs and drawing up to tables which they had been encouraged to join. Waiters hurried to clear away the last of the dinner dishes so that there would be room for the beer and wine being ordered.
“Do you want to stay?” Carl asked, for, at the sight of the insolent sailor, he had felt an alarm for Peter or for Harriet, as if one or the other should be protected.
“I love the dancing, but if it’s late…”
“Not at all,” Carl said.
And why should he be alarmed? If the boy’s dance was the social equivalent of a long, bragging, dirty story, it was no aesthetic equivalent, and Carl admired Peter’s candid appreciation of it. Carl needn’t feel a shocked missionary at a native feast when even dear, prim Harriet took innocent pleasure in it.
“They always dance for Peter,” Harriet said. “Someone told me they want the praise of the handsomest man in the room.”
“In order to impress the ladies?”
“I guess so, but I don’t think we have much to do with it really. It’s more like sport, like the Olympic Games. Greece must be a wonderful country.”
And, as if to prove Harriet’s point, the most accomplished of the dancers leaped high, doubling his knees to clear an invisible barrier, and the table-pounding and shouts of approval began.
Peter was ordering more beer. Dina was firmly refusing to join the men on the dance floor. Grace Hill was silent, watching Dina, the sailors, Peter, and Cole with intense interest that shifted only occasionally to Harriet and Carl, those refugees from a Sunday school picnic, unless she had been very much mistaken, which was comically possible. Grace Hill liked the sailors, their sycophantic sexuality such a contrast to her own heavy-muscled, sluggish sons, who would breed, she supposed, like beached fish on waterlogged girls.
“Dance, Dina,” she called over the music. “Go ahead and dance.”
“She doesn’t want to,” Sal explained, already slurred, blurred by beer and sound, her hand on Dolly’s immovable thigh.
“Go ahead and dance, Cole,” Peter was saying as the sailor who had chosen them snapped his handkerchief in mocking invitation.
“I don’t really know how,” Cole said.
“Go on. Do what you want to do.”
The sailor, laughing, put away the handkerchief and pulled Cole to his feet. Then, facing into the center of the room, arms on each other’s shoulders, they did the fine, nearly military folk dance, the basic steps of which almost everyone who came to Nick’s had learned. Cole, shy and too light on his feet, was nevertheless confident. As he kept pace, the sailor shouted amused approval and called for more difficult variations. Cole knew them all. And as the watchers cheered and pounded, he gave in to his ambitions, challenging the speed of the music. At the frantic end of the dance, he and the arrogant Greek stamped and posed in front of Harriet and Carl’s table.
“Marvelous, Cole,” Harriet said, clapping and laughing. “You’re just marvelous!”
The sailor, younger than Cole by a couple of years, held out his hands to Harriet, but she shook her head firmly. He shrugged and turned away to Peter, who offered him a drink.
Now Grace Hill’s chant had been picked up by other people who had crowded around their table. “Dance, Dina, dance, Dina, dance.”
But tonight she would not. There was no one here to please. She would please herself and sit. Or she would get up and leave, go back to the shop and work and wai
t. She could not; Grace Hill would go with her. But she could ignore the chanting. Across the room, she watched young Panayotis taunting Peter with the same invitation. Dance. Dance. Dance. He sat, in the same refusal. Panayotis, Peter: the same name. So Cole and Panayotis were dancing again, a competitive dance for the attention of their father, who had refused to father anyone. Still, he was chosen. Panayotis, growing proud of the grace of this tall, fair, foreign boy, became teasingly, lewdly seductive. As Cole turned free into a step of his own, Panayotis leapt suddenly and caught himself with knees clenched around Cole’s rib cage, the shouts of the crowd covering Cole’s own cry of surprise, but he held his balance until Panayotis dropped back. Peter was laughing at them both, proud, indulgent of them. As he looked round to signal the waiter for more beer, the easy love aroused in his eyes turned on Harriet. Caught by it, she couldn’t look away quickly. Nor could he.
“I think maybe I’d better go,” Harriet said to Carl. “I’ve got some work to do at home before tomorrow.”
As they found their way carefully around the dancers, Peter stood up.
“Perhaps,” he said, “since we’re not going to Miss Larson’s on Wednesday, we could go out for dinner.”
“Oh, I…”
“Could I pick you up at around seven?”
“Well… thank you.”
“Good night, Peter,” Carl said. “I think they’re going to have you on the dance floor if you stay much longer.”
“A good reason for me to leave soon myself. Good night.”
“Those youngsters get pretty wild, don’t they?” Carl said as they walked to his car. “I thought Cole was going to be knocked down.”
“He’s steadier on his feet than he looks, or than he knows.”
Cole, carefully feeling his rib cage with his elbows, was not sure he was not in some way broken. He did not want to dance again, either alone or with Panayotis, who, discouraged, drifted over to Dina’s table.
“Knock the wind out of you a bit?” Peter asked.
“Yeah,” Cole said. “I didn’t expect it. I’ve seen them do it lots of times, but I didn’t expect it.”
“It looked all right,” Peter said. “You didn’t look surprised.”