One Good Turn

by Judith Arnold

  “And I can put in a word for you with Henry Carlisle in New Haven,” his father was now saying. “If only you’d gone to Yale for your undergraduate schooling, you’d be a shoo-in for the law school.”

  Look at me, Dad! He was twenty-one years old, and he was still aching to be noticed. It was beginning to dawn on him that being the focus of his father’s dreams didn’t guarantee that his father would actually notice him. Being the number one son didn’t entitle him to enter the discussion. It wasn’t a discussion, anyway. It was a lecture.

  If his father was looking at Luke, the old man certainly wasn’t seeing him.

  James helped himself to a fresh piece of bread. Luke poked his chicken with the tines of his fork, trying to muster an appetite. The City Tavern served hearty fare, but he wasn’t hungry.

  He wanted astronaut ice-cream.

  He and Jenny had gone to the Air and Space Museum on Saturday. The place was jammed—it always was jammed—but they’d fought their way through the mobs. Everything seemed to thrill Jenny, from Lucky Lindy’s Spirit of St. Louis to the models of the space shuttle. She’d squealed with delight at the astronaut uniforms and gasped in astonishment at the realization that people had actually flown in the rickety old biplanes on display. Luke had been to the museum countless times before, but he’d never enjoyed it as much as he had viewing the exhibits through Jenny’s eyes.

  It was in the museum’s cafeteria, where they’d gone to have a snack, that they’d discovered astronaut ice-cream. He’d tried to convince Jenny that, whatever the stuff was, it was bound to be vile, but she had insisted on buying a a package for them to share.

  He’d been right. It was vile. “This is what I’d imagine styrofoam tastes like,” he’d said.

  “Only sweeter,” she’d added. “It has a styrofoam texture, but the flavor is kind of like sugary children’s cereal.”

  Vile though it was, they’d devoured the entire contents of the package, grimacing and laughing through their self-inflicted torture. And two days later, seated across a linen-draped table from his father in the dining room of an exclusive private club on the southern edge of Georgetown, all Luke could imagine eating right now was astronaut ice-cream.

  “You aren’t paying attention,” his father chided. “This is important, Luke. We’re talking about your future.”

  My future, Luke thought glumly. It didn’t sound much like his, though.

  “Have you called your mother lately?” his father asked.

  Luke eyed his wine glass, then reached for his ice water instead. “Yes, Dad,” he said. “I talk to her twice a week.”

  “She’s not in good shape,” his father said blandly. “She’s still eating too little and drinking too much. She misses Elliott.”

  Luke nodded. As passive as his mother had always been, she’d become even more withdrawn after Elliott had done his vanishing act a year ago. He had sent his parents a Christmas card postmarked Helena, Montana, but other than that they heard nothing from him. He emailed Luke at Princeton pretty often, but he insisted that Luke keep his whereabouts a secret from their parents, and Luke complied. “If Dad knows where I am,” Elliott wrote, “he’ll charter a jet and come after me. You know he will.”

  Luke knew he would. There were times when their father’s pressure tactics became so overwhelming, Luke was tempted to pass along Elliott’s address in Sitka, just so his father would let up on him and redirect his attention to his older son. But Luke would never betray Elliott. In spite of the years he’d spent envying him, he never blamed his brother for receiving the lion’s share of their father’s love. Indeed, now that Luke was receiving the lion’s share, he could empathize with Elliott’s need to run away.

  He made a more concerted effort to look interested as his father droned on about his mother’s drinking. But behind his cool amber eyes his mind drifted back to the Saturday he’d spent with Jenny. The museum had been so crowded he’d had to hold her hand in order not to lose her. Her hand was so tiny, it felt like a child’s. Yet her body was definitely a woman’s. He’d been aware of the small, firm swells of her breasts beneath her loose-fitting T-shirt, and the curves of her slim waist, her hips and her calves, visible below the knee-length hem of her denim skirt. He’d been aware of her lightly scented cologne, the feathery whisps of hair that had unraveled from her braid at her temples, the faint sprinkle of golden freckles over the narrow bridge of her nose.

  His father kept yammering about how Yale was superior to Harvard, and Luke thought about what it would be like to kiss those freckles, and her smiling lips, and her breasts, what it would be like to run his hands over those supple legs and compact hips, what it would be like...

  “So, are you making any friends down here?” his father asked.

  Luke coughed and forced his thoughts back to the dinner table. “Yes, a few,” he said evasively.

  “Isn’t your roommate’s sister in town?”

  “Holly,” Luke informed him. “She’s a summer intern at the Corcoran.”

  “Art galleries.” James Benning sniffed. “And her brother wants to go into the restaurant business, of all things. He seemed like a sensible boy, but I don’t know.”

  “He’ll be good at it,” Luke defended Taylor. “He’s learned a lot about the business from his uncle, and he loves what he’s doing.” Taylor’s uncle owned a three-star restaurant in Newport, and Taylor had spent his summers working there ever since he was a teenager.

  “To each his own,” his father muttered with another sniff. Loving what you were doing was all right for some people, apparently, but not for the second son of James Benning. “Well, you’d be wise to steer clear of Taylor’s sister,” he went on. “Another important rule of survival is: never fool around with your best friend’s sister.” He grinned slyly and winked.

  Luke returned his father’s grin. “I’ll remember that.”

  “And you’ve probably met plenty of other women down here, anyway.”

  Luke opened his mouth to tell his father about Jenny, then shut it. He could predict what his father would say if Luke described her. Smith College was acceptable, but the daughter of insurance salespeople was bad, and red hair, even if determined by genetics and not L’Oreal, was declassé. An English major was valid, but a school teacher was not. And someone who actually clapped her hands together and insisted on climbing inside a mock-up of the lunar module was sorely lacking in sophistication.

  And Luke hadn’t even gotten her into bed. Why was he wasting his time on a girl like her?

  Because, Luke would say if he had the nerve—because the time he’d spent with Jenny Perrin was time spent happily. Because when he thought about it, it seemed as if much of his life had been a waste of time until the moment she’d marched up to him at a party and said “Hi.”

  Because Jenny Perrin was a miracle worker. That was why.

  Chapter Four

  * * *

  “I’M SURPRISED YOU liked it,” he remarked as he and Jenny left the church building, the interior of which had been gutted and converted into a flexible performance space. He had asked her if she wanted to see one of the Broadway hits whose touring companies were currently playing in town, but she’d suggested instead that they attend a new play at an experimental theater near Dupont Circle. Her theater-major roommate Sybil knew somebody affiliated with the theater, and Sybil had attended an earlier performance of the play and told Jenny it was worth seeing.

  The play had been well-acted but depressing. The plot had revolved around the fleecing of an elderly widow by a cabal of selfish, money-mad young people. Yet Jenny liked the show—and Luke was coming to realize that he liked anything and everything he did in her company.

  Last night he’d taken her out for pizza, and afterward they’d returned to her apartment to watch TV. They’d caught a rerun of some show she’d already seen, but that didn’t bother her. She and Sibyl and her two other roommates had all laughed and groaned and guessed what the next scene was going to be before it u
nfolded on the screen. They’d devoured a ton of popcorn and enough diet soda to float a navy, and they’d voted —with Luke abstaining—on who was the best-looking actor in the show.

  It had been fun sitting on the lumpy old sofa in the living room, surrounded by four cute college girls yet feeling no compulsion to be cool or suave or seductive. Jenny’s apartment-mates had interrogated him on what it was like working for a senator—like Jenny, they were all summer-temp staff workers in assorted federal departments and agencies. Sybil had inquired as to whether during his three years at Princeton Luke might have come across one “Stephen Ray Fontiere, a renegade cousin of mine who chose to attend that Yankee school of yours,” and Fran had politely requested some assistance in changing the ceiling lightbulb in the kitchen, which none of the four girls was tall enough to change without balancing precariously on a chair placed on top of the kitchen table.

  They were a terrific group of women. Sybil was deliciously sultry, Kate was as perky as a cheerleader on speed, and Fran was quiet and scholarly, almost Talmudic as she analyzed the television show.

  In Luke’s eyes, though, Jenny outshined the others. Maybe Kate was prettier in a classic sort of way, and Sybil was more voluptuous, and Fran’s soft-spoken reflectiveness appealed to Luke’s intellect. But Jenny...Jenny glowed. She exuded affection and trust. To be with her was to get caught up in her optimism, to experience an incomprehensible sense of well-being.

  He felt comfortable with her in a way he rarely felt comfortable with anyone—let alone someone of the opposite sex. When he’d teased her about how she seemed to have the TV show memorized she’d poked him in the ribs, and when he’d extended his arm along the back of the sofa she’d promptly cuddled against him so there would be room for Sybil to squeeze onto the cushions next to her. There had been nothing overtly romantic in her nearness—what with three chaperons in the room, Luke wasn’t about to get hot and heavy with her. The fact was, he hadn’t wanted to. He’d been content simply to have her next to him, leaning into him, behaving as if this cozy evening of popcorn and TV was nothing out of the ordinary.

  That was the way it was with Jenny. Her closeness—both physical and emotional—seemed natural and right. When he walked with her down Church Street tonight, they held hands, and it meant nothing—and everything. He was still occasionally distracted by thoughts of making love to her, but more often his fantasies centered on simply being with her, talking to her, knowing he could tell her whatever was on his mind or in his heart and she would assure him that it was okay, that he was good, that he had nothing to fear.

  “Don’t you see?” she explained, ambling down the street with him, her program clutched in her free hand. “All those nasty characters—they didn’t really want to be the way they were. You could sense the moral struggle in them. They were searching for a way to let their goodness rise to the surface.”

  Luke grinned. How typical of her to put a positive spin on such a grim, cynical theater piece. He’d love to hear her dissect Macbeth someday: “Lady Macbeth wasn’t really an evil person. Women had so little power in those days. They had to funnel all their ambitions into their husbands. It’s no wonder she got frustrated and cracked up...”

  “The trouble with these people,” she declared, referring to the play they’d just seen, “was that they’d lost the ability to listen to their inner voices. They’d forgotten how to trust their instincts.”

  “What makes you think their instincts weren’t telling them to con the widow out of her life’s savings?”

  “Because they were miserable.” Jenny’s tone implied that she thought this was obvious. “Not just after they conned the widow but before. You could see their torment. They were doing something they didn’t want to do because they’d lost faith in themselves. But faith is something you can regain any time you want. Faith is always there. I don’t mean religious faith, but faith in yourself, in your ability to trust others and do good things.”

  “Cornball,” Luke teased.

  Jenny chuckled. “It’s really sickening, isn’t it. I wonder if there’s a cure for corniness.”

  “I hope not.”

  They’d reached Dupont Circle. Cars and bicycles cruised down the avenues that converged at the circle like the spokes of a wheel. Elegant new high-rise condominiums towered over the fashionable neighborhood. A third of the way around the circle from the corner on which Luke and Jenny stood was a cafe with a dining patio; several dozen small round tables were arranged behind a decorative wrought-iron fence, each table adorned with a flickering candle.

  “Should we have a drink or an ice-cream?” Luke asked, gesturing toward the patio.

  “An ice-cream,” Jenny decided enthusiastically. She’d had a glass of beer with dinner, but Luke had spent enough time with her in the past week and a half to understand that Jenny was not a heavy drinker.

  The light turned green and they started across the street. The next arc of the circle contained a small plot of greenery—flowering shrubs and grass, a dogwood tree and a couple of carved concrete benches. A young man in a tee shirt, tattered jeans and torn sneakers sat on one of the benches. His sunken cheeks were darkened by a several-day-old stubble of beard, his shoulder-length hair appeared not to have been brushed in ages, his fingers were grimy and his fingernails discolored. A bulging plastic garbage bag stood between his legs. He oozed the sour smell of unbathed flesh.

  Luke instinctively tightened his hold on Jenny’s hand. She wriggled free and stalked across the sidewalk to the man on the bench. For an instant, Luke was too stunned to chase after her. Then he did, panicked by the thought of what the vagrant might do to her.

  By the time he’d reached her she was addressing the man in a low, earnest voice: “Have you eaten anything today?”

  “I had sumpin,” the man mumbled.

  “Do you have a place to stay for the night?”

  “Ain’t gonna rain, lady. I’m all right here.”

  Luke wanted to scream at her to get away from the man. But he held his words, sensing that Jenny would be furious with him if he interfered. She rummaged in her purse, pulled out a couple of dollar bills and pressed them into the vagrant’s grubby hand. “If you’re not hungry tonight, you can save this for tomorrow,” she instructed him.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said the man. “Thank you. God bless.” He stuffed the money into a pocket of his jeans and then looked away bashfully.

  Jenny straightened up and turned to Luke. Relief rushed through him that the street person hadn’t mugged her. In fact, the guy had behaved with remarkable civility. Even so, she had taken a huge risk in approaching him, and as soon as they put some distance between themselves and the guy, Luke intended to give her a stern sermon on the limits of mercy in the real world.

  He took her hand and hiked with her around the circle to the sidewalk cafe. Except to request a table for two, he remained silent until the hostess had ushered them to one of the candle-lit tables, presented them with menus and departed.

  “Jenny,” he said, ignoring his menu, “that man could have hurt you.”

  She rolled her eyes at what she clearly considered an overreaction.

  “I’m not kidding, Jenny. He’s a bum. He could have done something awful to you.”

  “Why on earth would he have wanted to do anything to me?” she asked.

  Luke could think of no good reason—but that wasn’t the point. “If he’s deranged enough to be spending his nights on a park bench in Dupont Circle, he’s probably deranged enough to be capable of violence.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Jenny argued calmly. “There are plenty of reasons why he might be spending the night on a park bench. Maybe he got evicted from his apartment. Maybe his home was gentrified out of existence,” she said, waving at the luxurious new residential towers that bordered the circle. “Maybe he’s just down on his luck. He could be an alcoholic, or—”

  “Exactly. Or a drug addict, ready to knife a naïve lady for the contents of her purse.”<
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  “Just because he hasn’t bathed in a while doesn’t mean he’s a murderer,” Jenny said with a laugh.

  “How are you going to feel if he takes that money you gave him and uses it to buy drugs?”

  Jenny laughed again. Luke knew she wasn’t laughing at him, though; her laughter was gentle, underlined with sympathy. “I only gave him two dollars. That won’t go far if he’s in the market for drugs. But why assume he’s going to use that money to get high? Why assume the worst? Why not assume he’s going to do something good with that two dollars? There’s always a possibility he’ll spend it on a bagel or a piece of fruit. If I had walked past him without giving him any money, there would have been no chance of that good thing happening.”

  She was crazy, arguably as deranged as the street person on the bench. But when Luke gazed into her wide hazel eyes and acknowledged the depth of her compassion, when he opened himself to the power of her convictions, he lost the will to refute her. What a wonderful thing it must be to go through life expecting the best and giving everyone the benefit of the doubt.

  He permitted himself a slight smile. “Are you going to feel guilty eating a banana split knowing that a hungry person is spending the night on a park bench a block away?”

  “I wasn’t planning to order a banana split,” Jenny told him as she lifted her menu. “That would be much too filling. I was thinking of just a dish of ice-cream.”

  “Not even a hot fudge sundae?”

  She shook her head. “I’m still pretty stuffed from dinner.”

  Dinner had been sandwiches at a gourmet deli a few blocks south of the theater. Since they’d both been at work all day, Luke hadn’t gotten to her apartment until six-fifteen, and curtain time at the theater had been eight o’clock. He’d devoured a side order of fries along with his sandwich and he was feeling a little hungry now, but he supposed a pita-pocket of chicken salad was enough to fill someone of Jenny’s diminutive size.