The Progress of Love (20 page)

They were the only farm boys at business college, and their clothes set them apart. They had no light-blue or light-brown V-neck sweaters, no grownup-looking gray trousers, only these stiff woollen breeches, thick home-knit sweaters, old suit jackets worn as sports coats. They wore shirts and ties because it was required, but they had only one tie each and a couple of shirts. Miss Kernaghan allowed only one shirt a week in the washing, so Sam and Edgar often had dirty collars and cuffs, and even stains—probably from jam tarts—that they had unsuccessfully tried to sponge away.

And there was another problem, related partly to clothes and partly to the bodies inside. There was never much hot water at the boarding house, and Alice Peel used up more than her share. In the sleepy mornings, the boys splashed their hands and faces as they had done at home. They carried around and were used to the settled
smell of their bodies and daily-worn clothes, a record of their efforts and exertions. Perhaps this was a lucky thing. Otherwise, girls might have paid more attention to Edgar, whose looks they liked, and not to Sam, with his floppy sandy hair and freckles and his habit of keeping his head down, as if he were thinking of rooting for something. There would have been a wedge between them. Or, to put it another way, the wedge would have been there sooner.

Winter came and put an end to the acrobatic stunts in the vacant lot. Now Sam and Edgar longed to go skating. The rink was only a couple of blocks away, on Orange Street, and on skating nights, which were Mondays and Thursdays, they could hear the music. They had brought their skates with them to Gallagher. They had skated almost as long as they could remember, on the swamp pond or the outdoor rink in the village. Here skating cost fifteen cents, and the only way for them to afford that was to give up the extra food. But the cold weather was making their appetites fiercer than ever.

They walked over to the rink on a Sunday night when there was nobody around and again on a Monday night when the evening’s skating was over and there was nobody to keep them from going inside. They went in and mingled with the people leaving the ice and taking off their skates. They had a good look around before the lights were turned off. On their way home, and in their room, they talked quietly. Sam enjoyed figuring out a way that they could get in for nothing, but he did not picture them actually doing it. Edgar took for granted that they would go from plan to action.

“We can’t,” said Sam. “Neither of us are small enough.”

Edgar didn’t answer, and Sam thought that was the end of it. He should have known better.

The Orange Street Skating Rink, in Sam’s memory, is a long, dark ramshackle shed. A dim, moving light shows through the cracks between the boards. The music comes from gramophone records that are hoarse and scratchy—to listen to them is like reaching for the music through a wavering wall of thorns. “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” “The Merry Widow,” “The Gold and Silver
Waltz,” “The Sleeping Beauty.” The moving light seen through the cracks comes from a fixture called “the moon.” The moon, which shines from the roof of the rink, is a yellow bulb inside a large tin can, a syrup tin, from which one end has been cut away. The other lights are turned off when the moon is turned on. A system of wires and ropes makes it possible to pull the tin can this way and that, creating an impression of shifting light—the source, the strong yellow bulb, being deeply hidden.

The rinkie-dinks controlled the moon. Rinkie-dinks were boys from ten or eleven to fifteen or sixteen years old. They cleaned the ice and shovelled the snow out the snow door, which was a snugly fitted flap low in the wall, hooked on the inside. Besides the ropes that controlled the moon, they worked the shutters that covered the openings in the roof—opened for air, closed against driving snow. The rinkie-dinks collected the money and would sometimes shortchange girls who were afraid of them, but they didn’t cheat Blinker. He had somehow fooled them into thinking he had every skater counted. Blinker was the rink manager, a sallow, skinny, and unfriendly man. He and his friends sat in his room, beyond the men’s toilet and changing room. In there was a wood stove, with a tall, blackened conical coffeepot sitting on top, and some straight-backed chairs with rungs missing, and a few old, filthy armchairs. The plank floor, like all the floors and benches and wallboards in the rink, was cut and scarred by fresh and old skate marks and darkened with smoke and dirt. The room where the men sat was hot and smoky and it was assumed they drank liquor in there, though perhaps it was only coffee out of the stained enamel mugs. Of course, there was a story that boys had once got in before the men arrived, and had peed in the coffeepot. Another story was that one of his friends had done that when Blinker went to scoop up the admission money.

The rinkie-dinks could be busy or idle around parts of the rink, climbing the wall ladders, walking along the benches, even running along the platform, which had no guardrail, under the roof openings. Sometimes they would wiggle through these openings onto the roof, and get back in the same way. Some of the time, of course, they skated. They got in for nothing.

So did Sam and Edgar and Callie, soon enough. They came along when the skating was well under way and the rink full and noisy. Close to one corner of the building were some cherry trees, and a very light person could climb one of these trees and drop onto the roof. Then this very light, bold, and agile person could scramble along the roof and crawl through one of the openings and jump to the platform underneath, risking a fall to the ice below and broken bones or even death. But boys risked that all the time. From the platform you could climb down a wall ladder, then work your way around the benches and slip over the wall of the passage made for shovelling out snow. Then it was a matter of crouching in the shadow, watching for the right moment, unhooking the snow door, and letting in the two who were waiting outside: Sam and Edgar, who lost no time putting on their skates and taking to the ice.

Why did others not manage the same trick, Sam might be asked on those occasions, years and years later, when he chose to tell the story, and he always said maybe they did, he wouldn’t know about it. The rinkie-dinks of course could have opened the door to any number of friends, but they were not disposed to do so, being quite jealous of their own privileges. And few of the night skaters were small enough and light and quick and brave enough to get in through the roof. Children might have tried it, but they skated on Saturday afternoons and didn’t have the advantage of darkness. And why was Callie not noticed? Well, she was very quick, and she was never careless; she waited her time. She wore a ragged, ill-fitting set of clothes—breeches, windbreaker, cloth cap. There were always boys around who were dressed in cast-off raggedy clothes. And the town was just big enough that not every face could be placed instantly. There were two public schools, and a boy from one, noticing her, would just think she went to the other.

Sam’s wife once asked, “How did you persuade her?” Callie—what was in it for Callie, who never owned a pair of skates?

“Callie’s life was work,” Sam said. “So anything that wasn’t work—that was a thrill for her.” But he wondered—how
did
they persuade her? It must have been a dare. Making friends with Callie at first had been something like making friends with a testy and suspicious little dog, and later on it had been like making friends
with the twelve-year-old she looked to be. At first she wouldn’t stop work to look at them. They admired the needlework picture she was making, of green hills and a round blue pond and a large sailboat, and she pulled it to her chest as if they were making fun of her. “Do you make the pictures up yourself?” said Sam, meaning it as a compliment, but she was incensed.

“You send away for them,” she said. “You send to Cincinnati.”

They persisted. Why? Because she was a little slavey, forever out of things, queer-looking, undersized, and compared to her they were in the mainstream, they were fortunate. They could be mean or kind to her as they pleased, and it pleased them to be kind. Also, it was a challenge. Jokes and dares were what finally disarmed her. They brought her tiny lumps of coal wrapped in chocolate papers. She put dried thistles under their sheets. She told them she had never refused a dare. That was the secret of Callie—she would never say that anything was too much for her. Far from being oppressed by all the work she had to do, she gloried in it. One night, when Sam was doing his accounting at the dining-room table, she thrust a school notebook under his nose.

“What’s this, Callie?”

“I don’t know!”

It was her scrapbook, and pasted in it were newspaper items about herself. The newspaper had invited people to enter into competitions. Who could do the most bound buttonholes in eight hours? Who could can the most raspberries in a single day? Who had crocheted the most amazing number of bedspreads, tablecloths, runners, and doilies? Callie, Callie, Callie, Callie Kernaghan, again and again. In her own estimation, she was no slavey but a prodigy pitying the slothful lives of others.

It was only on Monday nights that they could go skating, because that was the night Miss Kernaghan played bingo at the Legion Hall. Callie kept her boy’s clothes in the woodshed. They came from a ragbag of things belonging to Mrs. Cruze, who had brought it with her from her old home, intending to make quilts, but never got around to it. All except the cap. That had belonged to Adam Delahunt, who put it in a bundle of things he gave to
Callie to save for the Missionary Society, but Miss Kernaghan told Callie just to put those things down in the cellar, in case.

Callie could have slipped off from the skating rink as soon as her job was done—she could have walked out by the main entrance and nobody would have bothered her. But she never did. She climbed over the top of the benches, walked along testing the boards for springiness, climbed partway up one of the ladders, and swung out on one hand, one foot, hanging over the partition and watching the skaters. Edgar and Sam never stopped skating till the moon was turned off and the music stopped and the other lights came on. Sometimes they raced each other, darting in and out among the sedate couples and rows of unsteady girls. Sometimes they showed off, gliding down the ice with their arms spread. (Edgar was the more gifted skater, though not so ruthless a racer—he could have done fancy skating, if boys did it then.) They never skated with girls, but that wasn’t so much because they were scared to ask as that they didn’t want to be kept to anybody else’s measure. Callie waited for them outside when the skating was over, and they walked home together, three boys. Callie didn’t do any ostentatious whistling or snowballing to show she was a boy. She had a scuffling boy’s walk, thoughtful but independent, alert for possibilities—a fight or an adventure. Her heavy, rough black hair was stuffed up under the cloth cap, and kept it from being too big for her head. Without the hair around it, her face looked less pale and scrunched up—that spitting, mocking, fierce look she sometimes had was gone and she looked sober and self-respecting. They called her Cal.

They came into the house the back way. The boys went upstairs and Callie changed her clothes in the icy woodshed. She had ten minutes or so to get the evening lunch on the table.

When Sam and Edgar lay in bed in the dark on Monday nights after skating, they talked more than was usual. Edgar was apt to bring up the name of Chrissie Young, his girlfriend last year, at home. Edgar claimed to be sexually experienced. He said he had done it to Chrissie last winter, when they went tobogganing after dark and ran into a snowdrift. Sam didn’t think this was possible,
given the cold, their clothing, the brief time before other tobogganers caught up with them. But he wasn’t sure, and, listening, he grew restless and perhaps jealous. He mentioned other girls, girls who had been at the skating rink wearing short flared skirts and little fur-trimmed jackets. Sam and Edgar compared what they had seen when these girls twirled around or when one of them fell on the ice. What would you do to Shirley, or Doris, Sam asked Edgar, and quickly passed on, in a spirit of strangely mixed ridicule and excitement, to ask him what he would do to other girls and women, more and more unlikely, caught where they couldn’t defend themselves. Teachers at the business college—mannish-looking Miss Lewisohn, who taught accounting, and brittle Miss Parkinson, who taught typing. The fat woman in the post office, the anemic blonde in Eaton’s Order Office. Housewives who showed off their behinds in the back yard, bending over clothes baskets. The grotesque nature of certain choices excited them more than the grace and prettiness of girls who were officially admired. Alice Peel was dismissed almost perfunctorily—they tied her to her bed and ravished her on their way down to supper. Miss Verne was spread quite publicly on the stairs, having been caught exciting herself with her legs around the newel post. They spared old Mrs. Cruze—they had some limits, after all. What about Miss Kernaghan, with her rheumatism, her layers of rusty clothes, her queer painted mouth? They had heard stories, everybody had. Callie was supposed to be the child of a Bible salesman, a boarder. They imagined the Bible salesman doing it in place of themselves, plugging old Miss Kernaghan. Over and over, the Bible salesman rams her, tears her ancient bloomers, smears her hungry mouth, drives her to croaks and groans of the most extreme need and gratification.

“Callie, too,” said Edgar.

What about Callie? The joys of the game stopped for Sam when she was mentioned. The fact that she, too, was female came to him as an embarrassment. You would think he had discovered something disgusting and pitiable about himself.

Edgar didn’t mean that they should just imagine what could be done to Callie.

“We could get her to. I bet we could.”

Sam said, “She’s too small.”

“No, she’s not.”

That persuading Sam does remember, and it was accomplished by dares, which makes him think the skating-rink adventure must have been managed the same way. A Saturday morning when the winter was nearly over, when the farmers’ sleighs, driven over the packed snow, grated on patches of bare ground as they passed Kernaghan’s house. Callie coming up the attic stairs with the wet mop, scrub pail, dust rags. She kicked the rag rug down the stairs so that she could shake it out the door. She stripped the beds of the flannelette sheets, with their intimate, cozy smell. No fresh air enters the Kernaghan house. Outside the windows are the storm windows. This is the time and place for Callie’s seduction.