Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  Then past the trees and wall and up on top of the world. A great spread of field atop Beacon Hill. Hayed twice each summer by the Farnsworths who came over from West Hill to do the work worth the trip. Standing there he could see the village below as if a model rendered. The valley extending north and south. The dark swath of the river. Up and outward the far distant ridges to the south, east, and north, extending into five other townships. West obscured by the clump of West Hill. And there beside him, the spotting tower of raw hemlock planks and uprights, the ladder nailed to the side, little more than a platform raised some thirty feet into the air. Enough to gain an even greater vantage. He had a pair of decent Feldglas 08 binoculars someone had brought home from the First War that his father had bought or taken in trade for goods or services during the Depression and while daylight held he’d do his homework, pausing when he thought of it, or the rare times he heard the drone of an airborne engine and scan the skies. After dark he’d study the stars and watch, almost hopefully, for the lights of aircraft. So far he hadn’t seen much.

  One afternoon in mid-August of 1942 he wasn’t there an hour when he looked down and watched her come out from the woods, crossing through the goldenrod and blooming purple heads of milkweed and work her way toward him. Some of the old maples held single branches that were red and orange, the green of the leaves slightly weakened, paling toward autumn.

  Here she came in a cream-colored skirt and a short-sleeved peach blouse and saddle shoes, her book bag over one arm and looking up at him as she made the top of the hill and climbed the tower. He stood, leaving the book he was reading facedown on the platform flooring. She paused at the top, looking him frankly up and down before she stepped within. Later he’d wonder if she’d been waiting to be invited in and decided not, that she’d only been catching her breath. The lower hem of her skirt was dotted with the green triangles of beggar lice.

  “Hello, Ruth. I thought I’d found a place where I could be alone but count on you to flush me out.” His face was hot.

  “Stop that.” She bent and picked up the library book and looked at it, then closed it properly and set it back down. “Sister Carrie. The library had this?”

  His face was hotter. “You have to ask for it.”

  “Tell me when you return it. I’ll wait a week or so if that matters to you.” She threw up her shoulders in a shrug and then said, “Have you seen anything interesting?”

  She was flip and it didn’t square with her coming here and he understood she was nervous. Yet here she was. He said, “I’ve seen more falling stars than I ever thought possible. And one time last summer I saw bands of green light wavering against the sky, the Northern Lights. And I could swear I heard them, also.”

  “You can’t hear them,” she said with a scowl. “So you haven’t shot down any planes?”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “I was making a joke.”

  Both quiet a long moment then. Abruptly she bent and lifted up the Feldglas 08s and walked to the southern edge of the platform and he watched her go. She lifted the binoculars and steadied herself and then gasped. He stepped behind her as she turned and said, “It all jumps so close. What am I seeing? Is that the Royalton Methodist steeple? Can’t be.”

  He leaned forward so his chin was just above her shoulder and took the glasses and peered out and said, “No. That’s the Barnard Congregational. Up high like that.”

  He reached his left hand around her and brought the glasses back before her face, holding them with both hands and let her lean in. Her back was against his chest and his arms were around her head and he could smell her hair. He was breathing against the back of her ear, a pink whorl of flesh at once delicate and crushingly strange.

  “Yes, oh my goodness it is. It’s so close.”

  “How the whole world seems, these days.”

  “I know.” Then, still looking through the glasses, she said, “First week of school in Biology old Phillips is going to break us into pairs to dissect. I know he’s going to stick me with Gladys, maybe Annie Gilman which would be the worst. I thought I’d ask you and maybe we could go together to him and say we’d like to team up.”

  “Why me?”

  She turned then and he pulled his arms away, a cautious awkward moment where he almost grazed her shoulder lifting the binoculars away from her, keeping his grip tight on them. She leaned back against the rail and he stepped back but just only. Her face was serious, eyes measured, lips parted as she breathed through them. She said, “Because if I have to do it I want to learn as much as I can from it. Not waste time calming down a girl all worked up over nothing.”

  He surprised himself by mildly responding. “Okay. Sounds good to me.”

  Both then quiet a moment. He said, “You walked all the way up here to ask me that?”

  She went pink but held his eyes and said, “Friday night of Labor Day weekend there’s a dance out to Corinth at the Dreamland Ballroom. They say all the boys who turn eighteen this year will be out there, before school starts. I thought maybe you and I might go. There’s a orchestra from Boston and everything.”

  Now he went pink, hot in the face anyway. He looked off and said, “I’ve heard about it. Trouble is, I can’t drive. I mean, I can drive but I keep missing getting my license. My dad needs his ration tickets for deliveries, getting about.”

  “I can drive. And my father has plenty of gas rations—his job, you know?”

  “Well.” He briefly considered just leaping over the railing and dropping to the earth, let it damage him as it would. Sweat pooled under his arms and ran down smarting into his eyes. He said it: “Ruth, truth is I can’t dance. All I’d do is bruise your feet and most likely drop you on the floor I tried any of those moves. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh goodness,” she said. “I can’t either. It looks so smooth and easy but I just know I’d cross my knees and trip you up. But also. Well. If you were willing…”

  “What?”

  She looked off and back at him and said in a sudden rush, “Last time I was up to Barre and went into Evan’s Music I picked up a book on how to swing dance. Some others too. The Lindy Hop, Jitterbug. It’s diagrams step-by-step of the moves. His and her feet. It’s kind of funny but I was thinking, maybe if we spent a few afternoons working through it…”

  She paused and stopped.

  It was a cool evening with the last of the rain clouds rolling off to the east, bands of high deep blue sky coming from the west, shot through with swathes of angled sunlight. She drove her father’s Buick but only until they were up past the hill leading out of the village when she pulled to the shoulder and stepped out, walked around to where he sat and said, “I thought you might want to drive.”

  He looked at her and then slid partway across the seat and leaned to open the door for her. He then settled behind the wheel and powered up the big car and took them down the road. Windows open and the last of summer blowing across them.

  The Dreamland was the last extant building from the Corinth Fair which in the last century had been one of the great fairs in central Vermont but had died off after a fire swept the grandstand during the sulky races in 1898, killing five people, three of them children. It had been a dry summer anyway and the bare wood was old and a pile of sawdust under the seats, kept there to cover wet patches of the track in the event of rain had caught fire, it was never known how although both boys with matches and a dropped cigar were cited as possible causes. After the fire someone had planted a homemade cross as a memorial on the site of the grandstand and others has planted flowers and the following year the fair officials had held off building anew and while the fair sputtered on for a few more years that was mostly the end of it. People went south to Tunbridge and the September fair held there. A fellow from Vershire bought the land on which the Corinth Fair had been held and tore down all the remaining sheds but kept the one large hall, used in its day for everything from vegetable and floral displays and contests to line and square dances at nig
ht, and the Dreamland was born. Rose from the ashes. That man’s son took it over in the late twenties and strung his own electric line in from Bradford, tacking the line to trees where he had to and erecting his own poles roadside when he could and before the war the Dreamland was a great string of twinkle in the vast bowl of dark valley on summer weekend nights. Lit up also on New Year’s Eve and people made the trip if the snow allowed despite the smoking cold of the ballroom, hauling with them old buffalo sleigh-robes pulled from attics, quilts off beds, men and women both in long underwear and woolen trousers, sweaters and scarves and mufflers. Crazy to dance the frigid night to a thaw. Coal braziers set up among the musicians of the orchestra and this night only any and all form of libation were allowed and encouraged. At midnight there was a great show of fireworks up into the night sky, again as if to taunt the winter before the long rides home.

  Summer weekend nights were more sedate, at least in the decades before the war. Though it was said by some, with bitterness or fond memories, that to get into the Dreamland a man had to have a bottle of whiskey in one hand and another man’s wife in the other. People like to talk and people give each other plenty to talk about. Perhaps the Dreamland Ballroom existed for that purpose, which in the end is reason and purpose enough.

  Ruth and Oliver danced. Very badly at first, even worse than their initial attempts to her Victrola and the frequent pauses to study the diagrams. His heart stammered so loudly it overrode the music and her own throat was constricted and her lungs wouldn’t draw air. She was certain she could smell her armpits and he was aware of the tumescence that threatened his trousers. Then the music took hold. The orchestra was from Boston, composed of nine white men and four black men, the first Negroes either of them had ever seen save for their own townsfolk done up in burnt-cork blackface for the annual minstrel show put on in the doldrums of February. The music rose and fell in coils and spirals that twisted and turned back upon themselves, sliding along a heaving thick underbelly of bass and horns and drums, the clear tinkle chime of a brush against a snare drum, the slap of traps and cymbals, sounds explosive and contained, controlled at once even as nothing could be anticipated except their bodies had fallen into sway and syncopation and they moved through the steps now forgotten except in central core recesses of their bodies, brought to leaping joyful life as they meshed with the music.

  Idiot smiles pasted to their faces. Or a corner of a lip tugged between teeth as one or the other, both, were caught in an eddy of deepest concentration as if nothing ever before in their lives and nothing ever after that moment would be as important as hitting the next step together. And then they did. She slipped her head back and her hair was damp and he felt the moisture on his face and grinned at her as her face turned to a mask of ferocity, the music thrusting her back twirling and bending for his outstretched arms to capture, trusting, knowing that she wouldn’t crash to the floor. That he would save her. And he did. Each time.

  During the intermission they drank lemonade from pint Mason jars rattled with ice. They stood out in the parking lot under the stars of heaven and she drew out of her handbag a package of Old Gold cigarettes and a Zippo that gleamed in the night and tapped the tight new pack so three cigarettes extended forth and offered it to him.

  “I don’t smoke,” he said.

  “I don’t either.”

  They stood in the warm late-summer night and smoked cigarettes each in their own hesitant delicate way and both coughed but faintly and with the other deliberately not noticing, but watching about them in the parking lot as people moved and fell apart, some odd skeleton or shadow of the dancing now paused as flasks were passed, cans of beer were offered. They stood silent watching as a couple walked among the outer ring of parked cars, searching for an empty backseat, both pretending they weren’t watching.

  He said, “I could use another lemonade. You?”

  They danced again and he felt her most acutely when she was gone, twirling out and away or in her pause or when she was returning to him, as if she was a magnetic field that he yearned toward. Once back in his arms she was both strangely foreign and ever-known. The swell of her forearms in his hands, the jut of her hips just below her waist as he lifted and spun her. Her laughter as she turned neatly under his outstretched arm and came in again, her back against his chest, laughter heard over the full throttle of the orchestra as if it drilled through for his ears alone. A message, a semaphore of sound cutting through the swelter of music, a vital sound meant for him to hear. And the orchestra was closing down the night in a turbulent full cascade. “Sing Sing Sing.” “String of Pearls.” Then, “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,” the last chorus suddenly pitched down low and slow, a dirge pinked up by the clarinet to stop it from being fully mournful and the dancers, all of them, collapsed against each other and held on as they staggered together until the final notes tickled away and it was a huge room of exhausted couples clinging tight to the night, to each other; each their own story and many with those stories held tight and close as a folded secret. The drummer crashed the big cymbal one final time and they all stumbled awake from the dream just ended.

  Ruth and Oliver emerged into a world lit by fireflies, a thunderous vacuum of silence, the lovely giddiness of knowing it was mere hours until sunrise and a new day. That belonged to them. The smell of crushed sweet fern all about them. Flowing through the open car windows with the heater on. They each smoked another cigarette and he watched the spark trail behind as they threw the exhausted butts out the windows. Upon the crest of Brocklebank Hill he slowed the car and pulled to the shoulder, the dashboard dials throwing a faint pool of thin yellow light upon his lap. Ruth looked straight ahead through the windshield but did not question the stop. Her face was reflected in the curve of the glass, a ghost of her face, large eyes and a smudge of cheekbones and nose, her hair a frame that dissolved into the dark of night, her mouth most clear, lips parted as she breathed.

  He turned toward her and slung his right arm out across the top of the bench seat and said, “Ruth?” but she also had turned and came across under his arm and her face lifted to his as he lifted his other arm from the wheel and met her coming embrace.

  At some point she pulled back a moment and reached to kill the headlights and also punched a button on the Buick’s radio and again, as from a great distance but also as if played only for them, music filled the car. When he finally cupped a breast through her rayon blouse she sagged and came up, biting his tongue. She ran her hands through his hair, holding his head, pulling his face tight against hers. He placed his hand on her knee and she lifted it off and said, “I turned in my last silk stockings,” and he understood all she was truly saying. After a time he reached and turned the key and killed the engine and went back to her although she’d not left—it was only his moment away.

  In the village they stopped again and came to argument. He wanted to drive her home and talk with her father and she knew better. Behind them was a faint pink edge to the hillside, out beyond the village some few stars still burned. Her whole body was sore and ached and was restless, exhausted. She offered to drive him home. The village milk wagon went past in the new fog rising from the river, the clopping of the horse’s hooves coming through the pinking air, a reminder if they needed one of the coming day. He stepped from the car, surprising both of them.

  “I’ll walk. It’s just across the Common and up a bit. Save you the trouble.”

  She stepped out also and spoke to him across the roof. “Oliver. It’s no trouble.”

  The morning deputy sheriff went by on the main road, slowed and Bob Martin peered at them, the cruiser’s headlights cones in the fog. Then went on.

  She said, “Don’t do this. Please. It was such a nice night.”

  He looked down, back. He said, “I’m not doing anything, Ruth. Not really. But right now I need to go.” And turned and walked across the North Common until he was a film in the fog. She watched and waited and as if he could gauge it, just before he was swallo
wed altogether by the fog he turned and lifted a hand. He stood a solid moment. Then turned again and was gone.

  Ruth’s mother was a woman who looked as if she could be fifty or sixty-eight. Stout of bosom and sturdy of frame, she kept her hair in a tight bun, wore skirts and dresses, blouses and sweater sets so elegant they appeared plain, much like the handkerchief she kept up her left sleeve, as if from another time, which in most ways she was. As a young woman, the portrait in the hall between dining room and library attested, she possessed a fine slightly arched nose that with age had grown bulbous, almost tuberous. Yet her nose became her still. Her hair was silver and her eyes dark—not black but a density of brown as a deep pool of water glanced by sunlight. She was a Putnam from all the way over at Shelburne near Lake Champlain and in some ways remained so all of her life. She hadn’t married beneath her but very nearly so and despite the awkward arrival of her third daughter so late in life, she loved her husband deeply, was aware that he slept with certain women as the fancy took him and forgave him outwardly by never mentioning it but he made himself smaller within her by doing so. Nevertheless she loved to sit by the fire of an evening and have a whiskey with Nate, not merely listening to him but waiting and then with the acerbic wit and insight he so loved, would speak her mind. He listened to her; aware she knew of his ramblings and so even more trusted her judgment as well as her silence. Her given name was Georgette but she went by Jo for those few who did not address her as Mrs. Hale. She did her own cooking but had a woman to clean and launder once a week and now employed the first woman’s adult daughter, who was grown and married but was referred to by her maiden name, as if it was her mother who still worked in the house. With the exception of holidays, large gatherings, other rare events, Jo Hale cleaned the house before the cleaning woman arrived. She tended her own flower garden and did so in wide-wale corduroy pants in shades of deep green or brown, with tucked-in blue chambray work shirts above, also a wide straw hat upon her head. Her garden shears and spades always sharp and well-oiled. Throughout the summer and into the fall she kept the house filled with cut flowers. Certain places such as the dining room table, the library, the flowers were arranged in lead-crystal vases but in the kitchen, even the bathroom, she was happy to use old green-glass Mason jars and those old jars, sprouting arrays so carefully chosen they seemed to be simply clumps torn free and tucked in, gained majesty and a purity of form. Light fell through the glass and water, the twined stems.