Hearts In Atlantis (47 page)

Nate raised his head and we saw he was crying himself. Just a little; wet lids and lashes, no more than that. For him that was a big deal, though.

“I found out one thing,” he said. “What that is on the back of Stoke Jones's jacket.”

“What?” Skip asked.

“A combination of two British Navy semaphore letters. Look.” Nate stood up with his bare heels together. He lifted his left arm straight up toward the ceiling and dropped his right down to the floor, making a straight line. “That's N.” Next he held his arms out at forty-five-degree angles to his body. I could see how the two shapes, when superimposed, would make the shape Stoke had inked on the back of his old duffle coat. “This one's D.”

“N-D,” Skip said. “So?”

“The letters stand for nuclear disarmament. Bertrand Russell invented the symbol in the fifties.” He drew it on the back of his notebook:
“He called it a peace sign.”

“Cool,” Skip said.

Nate smiled and wiped under his eyes with his fingers.
“That's what I thought,” he agreed. “It's a groove thing.”

I dropped the needle on the record and we listened to Phil Ochs sing. Grooved to it, as we Atlanteans used to say.

The lounge in the middle of Chamberlain Three had become my Jupiter—a scary planet with a huge gravitational pull. Still, I resisted it that night, slipping back into the phone-booth instead and calling Franklin again. This time I got Carol.

“I'm all right,” she said, laughing a little. “I'm fine. One of the cops even called me little lady. Sheesh, Pete, such concern.”

How much concern did this guy Gilman show you?
I felt like asking, but even at eighteen I knew that wasn't the way to go.

“You should have given me a call,” I said. “Maybe I would have gone with you. We could have taken my car.”

Carol began to giggle, a sweet sound but puzzling.

“What?”

“I was thinking about riding to an antiwar demonstration in a station wagon with a Goldwater sticker on the bumper.”

I guessed that
was
sort of funny.

“Besides,” she said, “I imagine you had other things to do.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” As if I didn't
know. Through the glass of the phone-booth and that of the lounge, I could see most of my floor-mates playing cards in a fume of cigarette smoke. And even in here with the door closed I could hear Ronnie Malenfant's high-pitched cackle. We're chasing The Bitch, boys, we are
cherchez
-ing
la
cunt
noire
, and we're going to have her out of the bushes.

“Studying or Hearts,” she said. “Studying, I hope. One of the girls on my floor goes out with Lennie Doria—or did, when he still had the time to go out. She calls it the card-game from hell. Am I being a nag yet?”

“No,” I said, not knowing if she was or not. Maybe I needed to be nagged. “Carol, are you okay?”

There was a long pause. “Yeah,” she said at last. “Sure I am.”

“The construction workers who showed up—”

“Mostly mouth,” she said. “Don't worry. Really.”

But she didn't sound right to me, not quite right . . . and there was George Gilman to worry about. I worried about him in a way I didn't about Sully, the boyfriend back home.

“Are you on this Committee Nate told me about?” I asked her. “This Committee of Resistance whatsit?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet, at least. George has asked me to join. He's this guy from my Polysci course. George Gilman. Do you know him?”

“Heard of him,” I said. I was clutching the phone too tightly and couldn't seem to loosen up.

“He was the one who told me about the demonstration. I rode up with him and some others. I  . . .” She broke off for a moment, then said with honest curiosity: “You're not jealous of him, are you?”

“Well,” I said carefully, “he got to spend an afternoon with you. I'm jealous of
that
, I guess.”

“Don't be. He's got brains, plenty of them, but he's also got a wiffle haircut and great big shifty eyes. He shaves, but it seems like he always misses a big patch.
He's
not the attraction, believe me.”

“Then what is?”

“Can I see you? I want to show you something. It won't take long. But it might help if I could just
explain
 . . .” Her voice wavered on the word and I realized she was close to tears.

“What's wrong?”

“You mean other than that my father probably won't let me back into his house once he's seen me in the
News
? He'll have the locks changed by this weekend, I bet. That's if he hasn't changed them already.”

I thought of Nate saying he was afraid his mother would see a picture of him getting arrested. Mommy's good little pre-dent pinched down in Derry for parading in front of the Federal Building without a permit. Ah, the shame, the shame. And Carol's dad? Not quite the same deal, but close. Carol's dad was a steady boy who said ship ahoy and joined the Nay-yay-vee, after all.

“He may not see the story,” I said. “Even if he does, the paper didn't use any names.”

“The
picture
.” She spoke patiently, as if to someone who can't help being dense. “Didn't you see the picture?”

I started to say that her face was mostly turned away from the camera and what you could see was in shadow. Then I remembered her high-school jacket with
HARWICH HIGH SCHOOL
blaring across the back.
Also, he was her
father
, for Christ's sake. Even half-turned away from the camera, her father would know her.

“He may not see the picture, either,” I said lamely. “Damariscotta's at the far edge of the
News
's area.”

“Is that how you want to live your life, Pete?” She still sounded patient, but now it was patience with an edge. “Doing stuff and then hoping people won't find out?”

“No,” I said. And could I get mad at her for saying that, considering that Annmarie Soucie still didn't have the slightest idea that Carol Gerber was alive? I didn't think so. Carol and I weren't married or anything, but marriage wasn't the issue. “No, I don't. But Carol . . . you don't have to shove the damned newspaper under his nose for him, do you?”

She laughed. The sound had none of the brightness I had heard in her earlier giggle, but I thought even a rueful laugh was better than none at all. “I won't have to. He'll find it. That's just the way he is. But I had to go, Pete. And I'll probably join the Committee of Resistance even though George Gilman always looks like a little kid who just got caught eating boogers and Harry Swidrowski has the world's worst breath. Because it's . . . the thing of it is . . . you see  . . .” She blew a frustrated I-can't-explain sigh into my ear. “Listen, you know where we go out for smoke-breaks?”

“At Holyoke? By the Dumpsters, sure.”

“Meet me there,” Carol said. “In fifteen minutes. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“I have a lot more studying to do so I can't stay long, but I . . . I just  . . .”

“I'll be there.”

I hung up the phone and stepped out of the booth. Ashley Rice was standing in the doorway of the lounge, smoking and doing a little shuffle-step. I deduced that he was between games. His face was too pale, the black stubble on his cheeks standing out like pencil-marks, and his shirt had gone beyond simply soiled; it looked lived-in. He had a wide-eyed Danger High Voltage look that I later came to associate with heavy cocaine users. And that's what the game really was; a kind of drug. Not the kind that mellowed you out, either.

“What do you say, Pete?” he asked. “Want to play a few hands?”

“Maybe later,” I said, and started down the hall. Stoke Jones was thumping back from the bathroom in a frayed old robe. His crutches left round wet tracks on the dark red linoleum. His long, crazy hair was wet. I wondered how he did in the shower; certainly there were none of the railings and grab-handles that later became standard in public washing facilities. He didn't look as though he would much enjoy discussing the subject, however. That or any other subject.

“How you doing, Stoke?” I asked.

He went by without answering, head down, dripping hair plastered to his cheeks, soap and towel clamped under one arm, muttering “Rip-
rip
, rip-
rip
” under his breath. He never even looked up at me. Say whatever you wanted about Stoke Jones, you could depend on him to put a little fuck-you into your day.

Carol was already at Holyoke when I got there. She had brought a couple of milk-boxes from the area where the Dumpsters were lined up and was sitting on one of them, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. I sat down on the other one, put my arm around her, and kissed her. She put her head on my shoulder for a moment, not saying anything. This wasn't much like her, but it was nice. I kept my arm around her and looked up at the stars. The night was mild for so late in the season, and lots of people—couples, mostly—were out walking, taking advantage of the weather. I could hear their murmured conversations. From above us, in the Commons dining room, a radio was playing “Hang On, Sloopy.” One of the janitors, I suppose.

Carol raised her head at last and moved away from me a little—just enough to let me know I could take my arm back. That was more like her, actually. “Thanks,” she said. “I needed a hug.”

“My pleasure.”

“I'm a little scared about facing my dad. Not real scared, but a little.”

“It'll be all right.” Not saying it because I really thought it would be—I couldn't know a thing like that—but because it's what you say, isn't it? Just what you say.

“My dad's not the reason I went with Harry and George and the rest. It's no big Freudian rebellion, or anything like that.”

She flicked her cigarette away and we watched it
fountain sparks when it struck the bricks of Bennett's Walk. Then she took her little clutch purse out of her lap, opened it, found her wallet, opened
that
, and thumbed through a selection of snapshots stuck in those small celluloid windows. She stopped, slipped one out, and handed it to me. I leaned forward so I could see it by the light falling through the dining-hall windows, where the janitors were probably doing the floors.

The picture showed three kids of eleven or twelve, a girl and two boys. They were all wearing blue tee-shirts with the words
STERLING HOUSE
on them in red block letters. They were standing in a parking lot somewhere and had their arms around each other—an easy pals-forever pose that was sort of beautiful. The girl was in the middle. The girl was Carol, of course.

“Which one is Sully-John?” I asked. She looked at me, a little surprised . . . but with the smile. In any case, I thought I already knew. Sully-John would be the one with the broad shoulders, the wide grin, and the tumbled black hair. It reminded me of Stoke's hair, although the boy had obviously run a comb through his thatch. I tapped him. “This one, right?”

“That's Sully,” she agreed, then touched the face of the other boy with her fingernail. He had a sunburn rather than a tan. His face was narrower, the eyes a little closer together, the hair a carroty red and mowed in a crewcut that made him look like a kid on a Norman Rockwell
Saturday Evening Post
cover. There was a faint frown-line on his brow. Sully's arms were already muscular for a kid's; this other boy had thin arms, thin stick arms. They were probably still
thin stick arms. On the hand not slung around Carol's shoulders he was wearing a big brown baseball glove.

“This one's Bobby,” she said. Her voice had changed, somehow. There was something in it I'd never heard before. Sorrow? But she was still smiling. If it was sorrow she felt, why was she smiling? “Bobby Garfield. He was my first boyfriend. My first love, I guess you could say. He and Sully and I were best friends back then. Not so long ago, 1960, but it
seems
long ago.”

“What happened to him?” I was somehow sure she was going to tell me he had died, this boy with the narrow face and the crewcut carrot-top.

“He and his mom moved away. We wrote back and forth for awhile, and then we lost touch. You know how kids are.”

“Nice baseball glove.”

Carol still with the smile. I could see the tears that had come into her eyes as we sat looking down at the snapshot, but still with the smile. In the white light of the fluorescents from the dining hall, her tears looked silver—the tears of a princess in a fairy-tale.

“That was Bobby's favorite thing. There's a baseball player named Alvin Dark, right?”

“There was.”

“That's what kind of a glove Bobby had. An Alvin Dark model.”

“Mine was a Ted Williams. I think my mom rummage-saled it a couple of years ago.”