Seventeenth Summer (13 page)

Before us the poles of the street lights laid thick shadows across the sidewalk and above us, above the houses and the trees, a high, lonesome moon was tilted against the sky like a half-slice of lemon. My mind was puttering with small thoughts as we walked, thoughts about the people rocking on the
porches and the funny way the wind in the trees made restless shifting shadows on the road, when Jack said, “Angie, we don’t have to meet Fitz and Margie at the movie till a quarter-past eight, and if we walk just a little faster we’ll be in time to stop in at church for Benediction on the way.” The first chapel bells for Sunday service had rung just as we left home about fifteen minutes ago and I remembered brushing the sound from my mind. It made me ashamed now that I hadn’t had the courage to suggest going myself.

But there is something so final, something so husband—and wifelike about going to church with a boy. Religion is too personal a thing to share promiscuously and the thought of being there with Jack filled me with a kind of awe; made me feel as though I should tiptoe up the aisle and genuflect in careful silence.

The very air of a church inspires reverence, and that night the lower stained-glass windows were tilted half open and the breeze stirred the warm air that was thick with the scent of flowers, incense, and the damp smell of leather from the prayer books and kneeling-benches. Kneeling beside him I felt so self-conscious and ill at ease I almost giggled, but Jack just knelt with his hands folded properly and his eyes ahead.

On the altar the tapers raised their flames in bright tiers and the squat candles of the votive lights filled the red glass holders with a warm glow like cups of wine. The ceiling of the church was vaulted into high shadowed arches and the organ music
rolled out in full, rich swells above us; while the candle glow, the music, and the fragrance of the altar flowers filled the church with a heady, moving perfection. Jack knelt twisting his class ring round and round on his finger in unconscious thought. It was the first night I had seen him wear it and I remember noticing then the quick, clean look of his hands.

A series of pictures flipped through my mind—the way the wind had ruffled his hair that night in the boat, Jane Rady dancing with him, her hair falling like silk, that night at Pete’s, out on the golf course at the dance when the moon was pale and high above the trees. The candle glow on the altar and the thoughts in my head blurred together into memories so pleasant I could almost taste them. With a jolt I realized Jack was staring at me. I had been smiling in church! He passed me a little black prayer book he pulled from his back pocket and I turned my face toward the altar with the same small, humiliated feelings as if I had been caught chewing gum in school.

I will show him, I thought, and knelt very straight, my hands folded with my eyes raised the way figures do in the stained-glass windows. I made my lips just barely move in dainty, inaudible prayers, feeling very good and maidenly but he never moved. With my eyes straight ahead I could still tell that he never turned to look at me. … And I never knew before that ordinary boys prayed.

Later, as we went down the broad stone steps of the church, Jack took my arm with a squeeze and said happily,
“Come on, Angie. We’ll have to step it up so we don’t keep Fitz and Margie waiting.”

I realized then with a half-proud, half-ashamed feeling, that Jack was a better boy than I was a girl.

Tony Becker called me the next morning just after I had cleared away the breakfast dishes. “Hi, there,” he said over the phone. “Guess who’s talking.” I knew it wasn’t Jack’s voice and I didn’t think Martin Keefe would call in the morning even if he did call at all. It might have been Swede but he was too good a friend of Jack’s to call me.

“I just drove over from Oshkosh to deliver some stuff for my dad,” he went on. “This is Tony talking.” Even though he had liked me a little I hadn’t expected him to call. It seemed too much luck to have two boys wanting to date me when just a few weeks ago there hadn’t been any. He asked me if I would like to do something with him on Wednesday night and I told him I certainly would. When he hung up I went out into the garden and could hardly keep the elation out of my voice as I said to my mother, “Tony Becker just called me.”

Later in the morning I phoned Margie and we talked about little things till I ventured casually, “Oh, by the way, Tony Becker asked for a date Wednesday night.” I thought she sounded queer when she asked me if I were going, but attributed it to jealousy—even if a girl is going steady I guess she doesn’t like other girls to be
too
popular.

At noon I made sandwiches and tea and we had lunch on the back lawn, my mother, Kitty, and I.The sky was dazzling blue, and white cabbage butterflies flitted here and there over the garden in an endless dance. We sipped our tea slowly, enjoying the brightness of the day, while Kitty plucked handfuls of the short grass and showered them down on Kinkee who was sleeping beside her. The grass tickled the dog’s black nose till she sneezed and then walked away in abused dejection. I kept waiting for the phone to ring till the one o’clock whistle blew at the factories on the edge of town. That was the first day in over two weeks that Jack hadn’t called at noon.

That evening Margaret and I put on slacks and played baseball in the side lot with Kitty till the sun went down, and after that we went inside and played three-handed bridge with Lorraine while my mother sat with her reading glasses on, letting down the hem of one of Kitty’s last summer’s dresses.

Later, when I opened my window before going to bed, last night’s moon was out again, just showing through the trees on our lawn. I tried to go to sleep very quickly. It seemed better not to think about Jack that night.

Lorraine told us when she came home from work the next day that she had a date with Martin that night. She met him having a Coke in the drugstore, she explained all smiling. He was just as nice as anything, asked how she’d been, and then suggested that they do something that night. “Honestly,” she said to
Margaret with enthusiasm, “you should have Art find out subtly where he gets his things … Martin has the most superb taste in clothes!”

She went upstairs and put her hair in curlers and came to the supper table with apologies and a film of cold cream on her face. No one mentioned Jack’s not having called. My mother had had a letter from my father who was working on a prospect down in southern Illinois and he had hopes of closing a big deal in the morning. Kitty had spent the afternoon catching bumblebees in a canning jar and was rushing through her supper so she could let them loose again before they suffocated. All day long one half of my mind had been thinking about Tony Becker and tomorrow evening, and the other half was cautiously waiting for Jack to call. He might be in Green Bay visiting his cousin again, of course. Either I would get a postcard tomorrow or he would be certain to call.

That night I tried to stay awake until Lorraine came home to ask if she had had a good time. It struck me that I had been so busy thinking about Jack for the past few weeks that I hadn’t taken the time to be nice to Lorraine or to talk with her the way we used to. I lay for a long time remembering how it used to be when we were all little girls and there was nothing to do on Saturday night but take baths and play pillow games in bed. I wondered if Lorraine thought about things like that anymore.

The old clock on the courthouse tower in the center of town rings out every hour, and late at night, when the town is
still, the chimes echo out even to the edge of town. Lying in bed, I heard the clock strike midnight and then one o’clock. Outside the night was quiet and only an occasional car went down the street. Even the wind in the trees was hushed. Before long I lost hold of my thoughts and they slipped into dreams. I didn’t hear Lorraine come in after all. I don’t even think I heard two o’clock ring.

We drove back to Oshkosh on Wednesday evening. It is a twenty-mile drive from Fond du Lac on a wide curve of highway that runs along the lake, almost touching the shore. My mother hadn’t liked Tony very well—I could tell that. He had been polite and friendly but there was something in the way he had talked to her—as if he had known her a long time, instead of being a little shy the way boys are supposed to be. It was almost seven-thirty when we left and the sun was going down, with stretches of cloud like graying cotton against the faint rose of the sky. A cool, moist wind blew in from the lake. Farther on, the highway goes through a stretch of sodden marshland, thick with slim, green rushes and stagnant with green-scummed pools. Here and there were the dark mounds of beaver hills, half hidden in the tall grass.

From the very beginning I liked Tony. There was something different about him. He drove faster and didn’t look straight ahead with his eyes on the road the way Jack did, but kept turning to look at me. In fact, he looked at me so much that I began to feel that I must be very nice to look at. He asked me what I’d
been doing with my summer and what college I was going to in the fall and the sort of things that make easy conversation. One stretch of highway runs directly along the lake shore and the water there was restless and choppy. There is a small island a short distance out with two heavy-headed trees on it. “Sometimes in stormy weather,” said Tony, pointing it out, “the waves wash right over that island so that the trees look as if they are growing out of the water. I tried to land on it from a motorboat one afternoon but you can’t do it. It’s too rocky and the island’s nothing but a piece of high marshland anyway.”

He smoked one cigarette after another and I had to open my window to clear out the smoke, and the night air was cool and smelled of rain. We passed a long straight row of ash trees, bending gently with the wind and restless as before a storm. There is something fascinatingly secure about riding in a car at that time of evening. Along the road the barns and silos were changing into dark silhouettes against the sky and fields were losing their fences in the dusk. The road to Oshkosh is dotted with taverns that thrust their bright neon beer signs out into the night. In a yard before one of them, an old white farmhouse converted into a roadhouse, early customers had already parked their cars, like a row of dark beetles. We passed an old billboard that sagged drunkenly on tired legs, its supports sunk into the marshy ground. The whole countryside seemed caught in the silence that comes over everything just as the sun goes down. First lights were
just beginning to wink on in the farmhouses and trees stirred uneasily, apprehensive of the coming night. The wind had twisted the dark clouds into weird shapes and in the whole gray-green pall of half-darkness I felt as if I would like to sit closer to Tony, safe inside the car with the bright headlights before us, pushing aside the dusk.

Just on the outskirts of Oshkosh was a line of new white frame houses with warm lights in their shiny windows, the young evergreens beside the doors still squat and green and the lawn still grassless and fresh with red clay. Tony slowed up as we went by and said, “Look at that, Angie. Look at that, will you? All those people sitting reading the evening paper in their nice, clean white boxes. Looks nice, doesn’t it? Just like playing house.” It was good to hear a boy talk that way and Tony had talked like that all the way from Fond du Lac.

He
liked
things. It was he who had pointed out to me that the corn in the fields was higher than usual for this time of year; he had showed me a tavern where he usually stopped on Friday night for crisp, hot little fish fried in deep fat; and he had told me with pleasure to listen how clear the music came through on the car radio since he had had the aerial adjusted. He seemed to be
glad
about everything. Each cigarette he smoked seemed to taste good and he watched the smoke, blue in the air. There was something about his mouth that seemed different from other boys. When I looked at him I felt so conscious of it. His lips were full and red and when he talked the words sounded
slow and warm, as if he enjoyed saying them. I had noticed, too, that when he came up our front sidewalk, though he came fast enough, he seemed to be doing it slowly, to the fullest, and when he looked at me I felt that my face must be warm and smooth. I didn’t get the same breathless feeling of expectation I felt when I was with Jack but rather a lazy, luxurious consciousness of being alive.

We stopped at a place called Chet’s just on the edge of town. Instead of going around to the other side of the car to open my door, Tony just leaned across from the driver’s seat and turned the handle. It struck me then what a big boy he was. Inside, Chet’s is divided into two parts, just like Pete’s—one half for the bar and the other half for the orthophonic, the dance floor, and a circle of little black-topped tables and chromium-and-leather chairs. As we walked in several people turned to say hello to Tony and the bartender hailed him from the other room. This wasn’t a tavern or a roadhouse or anything like that—in fact, it was the sort of place that every town has for the younger people to go—but I couldn’t quite reconcile myself to being with people who drank beer and to going to “bar places.”

The whole evening went quickly. Tony was fun, though he was the first boy I had ever been with who drank whiskey and soda and I kept unconsciously watching him, expecting him to act as men in the movies do when they drink too much. We sat at a table by ourselves but several of his friends came over. The
fellows seemed older and looked at me as if they were surprised about something, and the girls Tony talked to were the kind with very dark lipstick, short skirts, and low voices.

We danced together, Tony and I, and the music was slow and easy, and there was something in the way Tony moved that reminded me of how he had looked walking up our front sidewalk. I can’t explain to you the feeling it gave me. There was something slow and conscious about the way he moved his legs—as if he were thinking about them.

Of course I was wondering about Jack. Little thoughts nudged at my brain all evening but I tried to fluff them away. It was just the music from the jukebox and the familiar things like cigarette smoke and Cokes that made me remember him. After all, three days without a phone call is nothing, and I busied myself talking with Tony to keep other thoughts out of my mind.