Against the Season (14 page)

“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 wait. 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.”

Which is the point, son, the difference. Was that all? You simply learned to express no surprise at bodies hurling themselves at you in fury or lust, stood your ground until they dropped or fell away? An ugly image. Still, it suited people like Grace Hill, studying him now from across the room. Not Harriet. But he felt as if he had been trapped tonight by Harriet just the same. By the circumstances, honestly. But if she hadn’t been at Nick’s, he would have seen her some place else. You couldn’t live in a town like this and simply ignore or forget anyone for long. She had apologized. But he still smarted from the fear he had felt. Dependence. If you walked away from that, the dependence on the family you were born to, did you always choose its equivalents wherever you found yourself? Grace Hill could be Peter Fallidon’s blood kin easily enough. As Harriet Jameson was the girl who had never been “good” enough for him, another way of putting that she was too “nice” for him, too far above the vicious, empty restlessness of his inheritance. Her simple kindness called “prissy” and “old maidish”; so the Harriet Jamesons could always be made to feel grateful for whatever attentions he offered, resigned to his basic rejection of them. All right, and the punishment he took came not from Harriet but from Grace Hill, who was not really dangerous, because she would never accuse him of anything he felt guilty about. People like her, like his sisters and mother, were more inventive than imaginative and nearly ignorant of real guilts because they had no knowledge of real virtues. And that was probably why Feller Hill could stand his wife. But why would he choose to?

“Dina’s going to dance after all,” Cole was saying.

“I must go,” Peter said.

He was glad that he had been sitting near the door because, now that Dina was on her feet, the crowd would move in, taking everyone with it into the dance. He stood and put a hand on Cole’s shoulder to keep him from standing, too.

“Tell Agate what you want,” he said.

A
MELIA LARSON COULD NOT
get up at the end of the week. She had phlebitis.

“I must get a nurse then,” she said to the doctor.

Agate wouldn’t hear of it. And because she argued that it was easier for her to wait on Amelia than to cook for another person, Amelia agreed to getting along without a nurse for a while.

“But this isn’t the job you were hired to do,” Amelia said. “I must pay you at least another hundred and fifty dollars a month.”

“That works out to five dollars a bed bath.”

“You don’t get any time off.”

“Sure I do,” Agate said. “Cole and I have great evenings of gin rummy, and since I’m already winning most of his mill money, you’d better save the extra hundred and fifty for his fees this fall.”

“You’re not gambling.”

“Nobody’d play gin rummy just for fun.”

Amelia was not used to being physically tended. Though she worried about the extra burden it put on Agate, she was frankly grateful not to have a brisk and professionally cheerful woman constantly about. Agate, random and inventive about her duties, kept the days from turning into boring routine. Amelia got her breakfast within an hour of the usual time—never late, almost always early because Agate liked the morning. Lunch and dinner were less predictable. Sometimes Agate brought the evening meal before Cole got home from the mill. Sometimes she not only waited for him but enlisted his help. He would arrive in Amelia’s room with a card table, then rescue precariously balanced trays sent up on their own by chair lift, Agate bawling out comic instructions from the bottom of the stairs like a short-order cook or a cockney kitchen maid. Finally she herself would arrive, usually with beer she was drinking from the bottle, and they would all eat together. Amelia supposed, once she was up again, Agate would always eat with them. She knew that Cole helped Agate now with the cleaning up. Nice of him. And why not have an extra and helpful youngster about the house rather than a servant? Fine, but Amelia was aware that, while she lay helpless, Agate was reversing the pattern of authority, which made it difficult for Amelia to correct Agate ever.