Five Smooth Stones

by Ann Fairbairn

  "I love you when you call me 'Smallest'—"

  "What—what're you saying?"

  "I mean—I meant—I love it when you call me 'Smallest' —that's what I meant to say."

  "It's not what you said, Sara; it's not what you said."

  Suddenly she dropped her arms to her sides and stood very still, her eyes, looking into his, enormous and dark over cheeks flushed from the warmth of the room.

  "David."

  "Sara, we have to go—we—"

  "David. We're in love."

  Now, tossing in bed on the last night he would ever spend at Pengard, it was easy to say that he should have run, have bundled her into her coat and cap and boots, and run, telling her not to be silly. And, after that, stayed away, stayed the hell away. His brain had come alive at the shock of that outright statement, but it hadn't sent the right message.

  "Sara—baby—"

  "David, we're in love. We have been. Always. I—I guess I've known since the very first night when you came to Aunt Eve's—"

  A man ought to be angry at a woman who took the initiative like that, ought to lose his interest in her. Interest, hell! When it wasn't interest but was your breath and your heartbeat and every hidden cell of your being, there couldn't be any losing of it just because she had been the one to put it into words, half frightened, half defiant, yet all love in the glow of a foul-smelling oil lamp in a dim boathouse with the black of a moonless night crowding in, the faint night sounds of a lake and a forest clear in the silence.

  He sat up in bed in his room at Quimby House and snapped on the lamp beside it, and the room sprang into light, but Sara did not go away. If he'd known then what he knew now, been able to see ahead to the heartache that was inevitable— Yet he had known, even then he'd damned well known there were storms ahead, known it, known it—he slammed a fist into a pillow—yet he had reached out and put his hands on her waist, almost spanning it with his fingers, and she had put her hands over his, holding them closer; then she had relaxed her pressure. "Not your hands, David. Your arms—"

  Their first kiss had been very gentle, like the kiss of two strangers taking part in some solemn ceremony. There had been more greeting than passion in that first kiss, more a drawing together of two people who had been separate for a long time and wanted first to savor slowly the joy of union. The next had been different. It had been David Champlin and Sara Kent, male and female since time began, wanting each other to the ultimate limits of wanting, very young and impatient and wanting what no man or woman ever had, utter possession, finding a storm, a tumult, and then a singing silence of love.

  "Sara—little love—"

  "David—"

  David supposed, in the self-conscious maturity of twenty-one years and a college degree, that if anyone asked him "When did you really grow up?" or if he had asked himself when Gramp's often repeated remark "You a man now, son," became truth he would have begged the question with an outsider, but to himself would have answered that it was on that night in the boathouse. Because if being a man meant feeling whole and complete and fulfilled, he had become one then.

  Until that time a girl had been just a girl; she was nice or she wasn't; you could have fun with her or you couldn't, and you could lay her or you couldn't—and he'd always been glad that most of the time he'd known the difference, that he hadn't been like a lot of guys who had the motto "no harm in trying." Maybe they liked being put down; he didn't, and he was always very cagey about testing the ice before he walked on it.

  He'd known, of course, for a long time that with Sara it was different. He was in love. He thought she was too, but he tried to make his thinking stop there. It didn't always. And the farther afield his thoughts traveled, the more scared he became that in spite of himself he'd make a wrong move and find out she wasn't in love with him at all. A rebuff from any other girl could be laughed off; from Sara Kent it would be a mortal hurt.

  Maybe if she had just said "I'm in love with you," he could have handled it somehow, but that wouldn't have been Sara. Instead, she had said "We're in love." As simply as that—and that had been Sara. Saying what she knew to be true, not letting him run away from it or from her without facing it.

  He remembered their quarrels, most of them no more than spats, and how she had grown to know the attitudes and things that made him flare up, although she had never learned them completely because every once in a while she'd forget and say something and they'd be off again. He remembered, too, the time she had insisted, in an excess of honesty, on telling him about a boy she'd known before.

  "David, you knew, didn't you—that night—"

  "All I knew was that I loved you, baby. I mean, that's all. It's all I wanted to—"

  "Don't put me off. The—the other time, David, I didn't like it—it wasn't—well, it wasn't what I know it really is now—"

  "So now do you feel better? Now will you forget about it? Because I know a lot of things about you I don't think you even know about yourself, and that's why I don't give a damn what happened before I ever saw you. You don't hear me making a big lot of confessions—"

  "You better not! David, don't you dare! I can't even stand thinking about it—"

  He had thrown his head back and laughed then so that a bird skimming the lake a long way off veered and took flight high and fast, and Sara laughed with him, and the echo thai lived in the lake near where they stood bounced their laughter back and forth. After that every time he walked there he thought that he could hear that laughter, still echoing.

  That summer Sara went to Europe with her father, and he came down to earth. He came home broker than he dared tell Gramp and headed for the laundry where they usually had a job for him driving a delivery truck, and was taken on immediately. The man who owned the laundry said: "What in hell you want to go way up there for? You're the best driver I ever had, and what's more I can tell you so and you won't get swellheaded. What they got up there you ain't got here? Those books teaching you how to earn a living?"

  "Not here," said David, and smiled, hating the man but needing the job. Hell, what an old story. Hating the man but needing the job. A hundred-year-old story.

  "Here's the key to the truck. Pick it up at the garage, seven thirty in the morning. You're just lucky. Next time you got time on your hands may not be a job open. Get smart, boy—"

  David stood very still, looking at the key case the man was holding, not touching it. His eyes rose to the man's eyes, looked into them directly, and he knew that what he felt must show in his face. He smiled and knew that when he smiled the blaze of anger in his eyes grew hotter, and he saw the man step back.

  "Keep the keys. I could tell you what to do with them, but you know already. I've changed my mind." He walked away slowly, deliberately, fighting back the rage, the almost uncontrollable desire to go back and feel white flesh spread under his fist, hear teeth crunch.

  Gramp said that night: "You a bad nigger now, son. That's what he'll be saying. Now you been up north you're a bad nigger." But Gramp was smiling. "Calls for a beer, son. You set 'em up for three. The Prof said he'd come by."

  That was when he came down to earth. Isaiah Watkins put him to work mornings collecting insurance premiums, and afternoons he drove a delivery truck for a grocery store in Beauregard. Evenings when he was home he sat on the porch with Gramp until the mosquitoes drove them inside, not talking much, thinking, traveling slowly to an inevitable conclusion, backing away from it, facing it again, growing nearer each time; finally, just before he returned to Pengard, accepting it.

  It hadn't even been too hard telling it to Sara. It was Sara's reaction that had been hard. She refused to take him seriously at first. She didn't exactly laugh at him because Sara wouldn't do that, would be afraid of hurting him, but she said: "David, you don't mean it, you know you don't. It's— oh, for gosh sake, David—it's not all that important."

  "Yes, it is, Sara. You don't understand. You don't know, Smallest. You can't. Sara, in my state the law—the law— wou
ldn't let you marry me. As though I was—was unclean—"

  "But who cares! Who in hell cares about your state? We don't have to live there."

  "I—I don't care about my state, Sara. I do about my people."

  "Of course you do! You should. So do I."

  "And I care about you. Sara, you don't know what the world does to your people when they're too—too friendly with my people. And if they marry them—Sara, it's hell. It's—it's —-Sara, you'd grow to hate me. You'd learn things you never even knew existed—up north, too. Things about living and— Sara, if I didn't know what would happen—"

  "You don't know any such damned thing, David Champlin! And I don't want to talk about any such damned nonsense anymore. You—you haven't any guts!"

  They hadn't talked about it much after that. In the summer she went to Brazil to visit her sister, and he worked as he had the year before. In Beauregard the Champlin house was one of the first on the mailman's route, so he usually got her letters out of the box on the way to work, and Gramp saw only a few of them—and said nothing. But David could tell he was troubled.

  Back at Pengard when he saw her for the first time it was the way it had always been—as though he'd just started to live all over again, not having really lived since the last time he saw her.

  And then, incredibly, graduation was only a few weeks away, and then only a few days, and she was standing before him just as she had in the boathouse, in the woods near Laurel, the spring sun bright on her face and hair, dappling them with shadow when the new green leaves of the tree above them stirred. "David. We're still in love."

  "I know."

  "We always will be. It won't make any difference if we make a project out of saying goodbye. It won't change anything. We'll still be in love. We'll still love. And that's even more important. We'll still love."

  "Sara—I know—I know—"

  "You won't give me a chance, David. And it wouldn't be 'chance.' It would be good and right, no matter what happened, no matter how rough it might be. You're wrong, David. You're so wrong, wrong, wrong—"

  "How can a guy know that? Know it, I mean. Your family wouldn't think so—"

  "My family! David, it's my family. I'd have to worry about that, not you. And I know my father knows. He's—he's great, David. I'd have to live with whatever my family think—"

  "I'd be living with it too, Sara, with you, or it wouldn't be a marriage. And your father's not so great it isn't breaking him up. I met him, remember. He tried, he sure tried, but— well—a guy knows these things somehow. You don't understand—"

  "David, look. We couldn't afford to get married anyhow, could we? Not with you sure to be all stiff-necked about my having any money—"

  "No. Gosh, no—"

  "So lots and lots of couples have to wait until they can afford to get married. So let's make it that way, David. That we have to wait. I won't say goodbye. I won't. Not for any such crazy reasons."

  "It's better—"

  "Don't I have anything to say about it? Not anything? Someday you'll have pots of money—"

  He had laughed then. "How you talk—"

  She moved closer, and as it had been that night in the boathouse her hands touched his cheeks, crept along them— "That's what I'm waiting for, David." She grinned up at him, gamin now. "For you to make those pots of money and be famous. Marrying you for your money and fame, that's what I'm doing—"

  "Sara—you birdbrain—"

  Her hands drew his head forward, and he put his own over them. "Sara—"

  "A week from now we'll be gone from here, from the boathouse and this place in the woods and the lake and—and everywhere. You can say goodbye if you want to. I won't. Not now or ever. And I won't see you again like this, just David and Sara. Only on campus and at the auditorium—and I'll never really mean goodbye because, David, it would be some kind of a—dreadful sin. David, come closer—kiss me —because I know it will be a while—it may be a long while—"

  "Sara—please—Smallest—" He picked her up bodily, fiercely, held her so tightly she cried out, "David—David! You're squashing me to pieces—"

  "Sara—little love—you always win, don't you, baby—"

  She had won that afternoon, and she would win again and again if he let himself see her. It might take him all summer and most of next year to strengthen his will to the point where she couldn't win a final time.

  He turned the bedside lamp off and slept, on his last night in Quimby House. But Sara was still there.

  CHAPTER 38

  As he walked up Third Street in East Cambridge, David tried to tell himself that he was too old to feel like a kid going to the circus for the first time. It was no way to approach his first day in a courtroom, just as a spectator. He wouldn't be doing this at all, would be doing what was more sensible—looking for a room—if he had not read the feature article in the Boston paper on the train the day before, an article about an attorney named Bradford Willis. There had been a familiar sound to the name; then he remembered hearing it mentioned by Sudsy's family and, after reading the article, he felt what he knew was a childish pride that he had rubbed shoulders, even remotely, with this man. The article had led off with: "Opposing counsel call him the green-eyed monster; his clients for the most part regard him as one of the best defense attorneys of our time. Last week he did it again—saved another man from a little room in State's prison, the last room many men have ever seen in their lifetime." The article had not been a long one, had detailed a few of the trials in which he had appeared for the defense, most of them trials for murder, most of them apparently hopeless. He had not won acquittals in all of them, but not one of his clients had received the death penalty.

  David had three days in which to find a place to live; he would cut it to two, and if this man was appearing in any court nearby would try to hear him. That morning, feeling like an idiot as he did so, he had called the office of Bradford Willis and asked the girl who answered the telephone if Mr. Willis was going to be in court that day. She not only replied that he was, but furnished the name of the court—Middlesex County Superior Court. And did he want Mr. Willis to return his call, because she expected him to call in? "No, ma'am," said David hastily. "It's all right. Thank you." He hung up hurriedly, feeling uncomfortable even about having troubled the switchboard operator in the offices of the great Bradford Willis. Perhaps all Willis would be doing would be filing a demurrer or something, but David was under the impression such routine tasks were performed by underlings and juniors, and he might strike it rich and find Willis was trying a case; he'd been too flustered to ask the switchboard operator. "You'd be a hell of a trial lawyer," he told himself. "Getting butterflies just from the idea of watching a trial."

  The conductor on the streetcar had told him how to recognize the courthouse. Now he saw it, a red brick building with a central entrance flanked by two wings, the main doorway overlooking an open, paved clearing centered by a flower bed and flagpole. It was obviously very old, and gave an impression of being none too clean, of hiding mustiness behind its doors and windows. When he entered he smelled, along with cigar, cigarette, and pipe smoke, the blue, thick smell of politics; a smell, he supposed, that permeated every courthouse in the country. He waited while a deputy sheriff carrying a long white staff and followed by a column of people passed. That had to be a jury, he thought. The deputy sheriff looked weighed down with a half-century of boredom, and the members of the jury looked self-conscious. He noted three Negroes on the jury, a woman and two men. No one paid any attention to him, and he felt shy about asking someone to tell him where Bradford Willis could be found. He decided to follow the jury.

  He was behind them as they went up a flight of stairs beside the entrance but was not quick enough to arrive at the top before they had disappeared. Standing outside a pair of double doors was an old man, not much bigger, David thought, than Gramp. Brass buttons on a dark blue coat indicated he had something to do with some court proceeding, and David walked up to him d
iffidently. He said, "Excuse me," politely, and then, "Is there a trial going on in there?"

  The old man looked at him with rheumy eyes. "Parsons versus Bay Indemnity. You a witness?"

  "No, sir."

  Something stirred in the faded eyes. The old man evidently appreciated politeness. "Interested party?" David shook his head. "Just a spectator. A—a student."

  The "party" had become "pahty" and "Parsons" was "Pah-sons" in the old man's mouth. It wasn't the soft dropping of an "r," to which David's ears were accustomed, not the "mo'nin" and "fo"' of his people; there was a metallic clang to this speech up here, and there was no inflection in the tones. His own voice, he thought, must sound affectedly soft.

  "I'm just a student," he said again.

  "You picked the right place," said the old man. "This one's a pretty good one. Good enough to bring Brad Willis on it himself. If it wan't good to start with, he'd make it good. Brad Willis—you ever hear of him?"

  "Yes, sir. I read all about him on the train coming over from New York. He's the one I came to hear."

  "You watch Brad Willis, you'll learn more about how to try a case in court than ten years in a law school. Sharp as a tack, Brad Willis."

  Did people still say "sharp as a tack"? Evidently they did up here.

  "Go on in." The old man opened one of the swinging doors. "Get yourself a good seat down front, over on this side." Then, instead of letting him go in alone, the old man followed him, picking out the most advantageous seat, not in the center but on the side of the front row of seats. "See everything better here," he said. "That weazened-up old geezer pawing through his briefcase—looks like a squirrel—he's the attorney for the defendant. He's a big shot. Probably be a judge someday. Willis ain't come in yet. Young blond feller in glasses, that's his assistant"

  The old man rambled on, and David thought of the people who had told him he would find cold unfriendliness in New England. One of the people who had warned him had been a white man in New Orleans, for whom he had done some work the previous summer. He thought of a white-haired, middle-aged woman of whom he had hesitantly inquired directions when he had been lost in midtown Boston on the first day of his arrival, remembered how she had walked with him to the corner so that she could make her directions clearer by pointing out the way. And he remembered, even as the old man was talking, the old lady in the French Quarter he had heard Gramp and his friends talk about; he heard Gramp saying: 'That old lady must have been nigh ninety year old. Blind as a bat. Used to stand on the curb, and when she heard someone walking close she'd say, 'Walk me across, please,' and when they got to the other side she'd say, 'White or colored?' and if they said 'Colored,' she'd shake 'em away and say Turn me loose, nigger.' I helped her across a coupla times, but after that I didn't do it no more; I didn't want no more insults even from a blind old lady." Maybe things were as bad in the North as they were anywhere else, but the ratio of insults to people met was a whole hell of a lot lower.