But there had been fog. Verna said so. And Mae Dell saw the moon. “So there!” she said aloud and turned, startled, to find Frankenstein’s monster at her door.
Caught between fright and laughter, she stopped with a tea towel in her hand and stared. The Frankenstein face, but no bright green sweater.
“I thought if it’s not too late—”
He stood outside the screen door, and for a moment there wasn’t another word out of either of them. Then he took the mask off. It was Toby’s face, all right, but this was not the same boy who, moments ago, had sat at her table. He was not quite the same, but she recognized him. She knew him at once. She had been looking for him all spring, in the night, through the alleys and into the park, all over town, drawing closer and closer, never knowing that this was the one—not the other, but this one—nor that he would stand at her door with his heart in his mouth and a crooked green face in his hand. It hit her like a ton of bricks. “Come in!” she said.
Twelve
She drifted through the following day, twice removed. Somehow or other she got through her classes, but with only the faintest idea of what she had taught, and no idea what she had said to the Ladies at lunch at the Show-Me Cafe. Voices seemed to come from a great distance. And the only face she saw was Toby’s. The rest were asterisks.
Somewhere along in the afternoon the dean summoned her to his office. His pink-and-white head shone like a peony bud, and he conveyed welcome news. Her contract had been renewed. All the teachers were reelected for the coming year. The formal documents would be ready for signing within a week or two.
“I’m greatly pleased,” he said, “that we’ll have you on our staff again. I feel you’re making a real contribution.”
She believed that she had thanked him.
She muddled blissfully through the rest of the afternoon and hurried home.
There had been others before him to whom she had been wildly attracted, though the attraction hadn’t often taken her very close. She had imagined love (almost, but hadn’t, made it once), but she had never loved, in the active voice—of that she was certain. That she did so now could be questioned. But that she was In Love, head over heels in some glorious concept, there could be no doubt. Nothing like this had appeared before on her landscape, and she advanced toward it unswervingly, like a confident walker in the night who, sure of his ground, walks into a pond and promptly, without so much as a flap of the arms, sinks like a stone. It was a strange, astonishing element, as new to Toby as to her, which they explored with curiosity and delight.
There was a ritual closely followed: the screen door left unlatched after dinner, the lights off except for the reading lamp, a record playing, and books open on the couch. Then the quiet sound of Toby letting himself in, coming through the dark kitchen, and with a grin of satisfaction settling into the thread-bare refuge of the big armchair. First they would go through the secular day, what each of them had done or said that might entertain the other. Then she would read to him, poetry, most often. He listened, leaning back, watching her, and then, settling deeper, “Talk to me,” he would say.
And she would begin, like Scheherazade spinning her lovely lies. She told him stories of what he would do some day, work as a reporter, or write the definitive book on Joyce. She would write books too, fiction, and poetry, and live in New York and come to visit sometimes, cross-country. And she would read poetry while Toby sat in the big chair and ate fresh strawberries dipped in sugar.
By that time they’d have gone through “Clair de Lune” and “La Mer.” And with scarcely a break in the words she would have wandered over and changed the music. Toby would rise from the depths of the chair and they would begin to dance, in this way daring to touch at last, then sink to the couch, still with the light on, holding on for dear life. They never had enough of marveling at each other, nor that each had chosen the other.
She knew that he was too young and she too old. She was a teacher, he was a student, and this was perilous business. She could be fired for this and land in her mother’s lap like a cannonball. But not one part of this got through to her better judgment. “For love,” as Burton could have warned her, “is fire, ice, hot, cold, itch, fever, frenzy, pleurisy, what not?” It is also bats in the belfry and hot fudge in the veins.
She went forth by day in a perfect dither, carrying with her the night before. She overflowed with good will toward everything in sight. She quite astonished Maxine one day, coming at her with a flying tackle meant as a girlish hug. (How could she ever have been envious of Maxine?) As for the Ladies, she found them paragons. The very power of her ravished gaze was enough to rejuvenate them. And such was the measure of her bliss that she could pour it out to all takers and never miss a drop. She was a fountain of indulgence, handing out pardons and benisons on all sides, so full of benevolence and indiscriminate praise and giggles that Verna was moved to inquire one day if she was running a fever.
“You look flushed. You feelin’ all right?”
“Never felt better in my life.”
“You better slow down. School’s not over yet.”
She knew her behavior was less than seemly. She knew she was walking on her hands. But for the life of her, she could do nothing about it and wouldn’t have if she could. It was incredible, this affair. She had come down in the orchards of Tantalus and she could eat.
She gorged herself. Her rooms were stocked like a pantry with the viands of romance—flowers, poetry, music, lucent syrups and spiced dainties. Scarcely Porphyro for his Madeline set such a heap as she, nor lavished them on a lover with so prodigal a hand.
She talked (all those glittering prophesies!). They listened to “Nights in the Gardens of Spain.” They played Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman and they danced. She no longer read poetry of her own; she was writing none. Possessed by the experience, she had no time to explore and interpret. In the thick of it, she could not see but only revel in it. And so they read other poetry, and they kissed and danced and ate fresh strawberries, thoroughly bedazzled by themselves.
“Toby?”
“Hm?”
“It’s late.”
“I know.”
They had fallen asleep, propped up against the velvet cushions.
“It’s after eleven.”
“Kee-rist,” he said, “why is it always after eleven!” He tightened his hold on her and within a moment was asleep again.
Down the street the steeple clock chimed the half hour. The elm branches stretching across the sidewalk scratched discreetly at the window. She leaned against him, feeling the rhythm of his breathing. He was clean-smelling and smooth and firm like soap fresh out of the wrapper. She loved him.
Why was it Toby, she wondered, why him and not George? She loved George too. But that was in another way. There was something about this one.... George had a purpose, he had somewhere he was going. But Toby was lost somewhere between a past he hadn’t loved and a future he did not trust. Neither country was his. He was homeless. This narrow present was all his refuge. And so he had turned to her because she made it for him, and so it was that she loved him best, because of his homelessness and his need. She reached up and smoothed the dark stubble-cut head. “Toby?”
“Hm? Did I go to sleep again?”
“Only for a minute. Go home now, it’s eleven-thirty.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“I don’t want you to go, but you’ve got to.”
He yawned and slowly untangled himself. “Always got to go blattin’ off.”
In the dark kitchen they clung to each other, dead for sleep. The steeple clock chimed another quarter hour. Abruptly Toby pulled himself loose. “Nothin’ for it,” he said and went home to climb through the window again.
They didn’t see very much of George; he was hard at work, practicing for the spring concert. He had been called back to Kansas City for a second audition, which meant he was among the finalists for the scholarship. On nights when the orchestra and chorus rehea
rsed together, Toby would come to her afterward. But George went straight home to work on his audition piece.
It wasn’t until the night of the college concert that the three of them went out again together—across town to Sutt’s Corner. They were out to celebrate. The orchestra and chorus, under the guidance of Mr. Delanier and Miss Boatwright, had outdone themselves. George played a Chopin prelude, and after much applause, came back with a short piece by Satie.
“You were wonderful,” Allen said. “They loved you.”
“It was easy,” he said, “homegrown audience, predisposed.” A grin spread across his face. “It’s not going to be this easy next week.”
That’s when he would go to Kansas City; they had requested he play Mozart’s Sonata Pathetique.
But they rejoiced anyway. The scholarship now seemed in hand.
It was fun being together again, keyed up and celebrating. But she and Toby could not keep their eyes from meeting, nor control the secretive smiles. And she was glad when, after a couple of beers, George said he’d better get home; tomorrow was Saturday and he had to work at the store.
“But I’m only going to work half a day. I’ve got to practice at least six hours. And more on Sunday.”
They bid him good-bye at the bus stop and went on together to her dim-lit room to settle into their usual places and turn on the phonograph and talk until it was time to dance.
In an affair of “love” (not the long Victorian engagement but a mutual obsession of some intensity), it is usually understood by both parties that this is no lasting condition. It will run its course. And the length is neither spoken of nor considered. Such an affair can last for a number of months, rarely as long as a year, before it becomes something else. But rapture of the most irrational sort, when the world and all its atoms compact into a single form, so that nothing exists that is not contained within that form, that face, that voice, can scarcely sustain itself for long. The affair you remember is the one that lasted three days. Or a week, perhaps even a month. The fine, lovely flash in the pan; the compressed affair, all the astonishment, the delight, and the anguish fused by a sudden explosion, with no time for thinning out or diminishing before it goes almost as it came, in a burst.
Hers lasted for nearly three weeks.
Somewhere along, she became aware, mostly when Toby was not around, of some vague lack. It was not sex she wanted. Brought up as they were to restraint, respectability, and fear, the game was to flirt all around it but carefully hold back. It was the romance of the thing that mattered. But something was missing. She felt the need of something beyond the circumscribed pattern of their meetings. The ritual had been enough at first. But there was a restlessness in her now, the vaguest murmur of something that said move: the need to stretch after a long time in one position. She wanted to bust loose, out of this room, this apartment—but with him. She imagined them driving together in an open car on a sunny afternoon, as the Maxes did, and dancing on terraces at the country club.
What touched it off, no doubt, was Maxine’s announcement party. The account of it appeared in the paper, written up in detail. It had, in fact, taken up the entire society column that day. According to the writer, no more lavish affair had graced the country club since the Chrysanthemum Balls before the crash. The decor, the floral arrangements, the lovely gowns, the elegance of the gentlemen, and the joyful spirits, the orchestra that played until two in the morning. Lovely, all of it, lovely, lovely. Allen read it a number of times.
She was not envious of Maxine, but envious of what Maxine could do—wear evening clothes and go to dinner, have lunch with her lover, dance until two and drink champagne (she supposed, though the paper didn’t come right out and say so). Maxine lived in a world where such things were sanctioned. Besides, in a few weeks she would no longer be part of the school. The rest of them would be. And in their world, one did not ride around with a lover in the middle of the day. Even if one had a car.
Restrictions notwithstanding, the wistful visions danced in her head, the glitter and glamour of a world where affairs of the heart were conducted with style and éclat. They were beyond her reach. She knew this well enough and never for a moment persuaded herself that they weren’t. But neither did she concede that some approximation of such pleasures was not available to her. Casting about for some way to extend, to vary the pattern, keep it fresh and diverting, she came up with the notion of an intimate dinner party.
Just the two of them. A real dinner, not potato chips and cheese, but an elegant dinner for two, with candlelight and background music (that part was easy) and hors d’oeuvres, and wine. And just for the hell of it they could dress up.
The idea struck her all of a heap on a Sunday afternoon, when Toby was home and writing a paper and George was practicing and Monday was eons away. Letting no grass grow, she got herself dressed, sashayed off to the Bonne Terre Hotel, and after leafing through the women’s magazines at the newsstand, bought two of them and hurried home. She studied them thoroughly and spent the rest of the afternoon agonizing over a menu and how to get the kitchen table through the door into the living room.
The dinner party occupied her for the next three days. But at last, guided by the magazines and memories of intimate dinners in the movies (with William Powell or Charles Boyer), she had it planned to the last detail. And on Wednesday night, before Toby was about to leave, she issued her invitation.
“Saturday night,” she said, “about seven.”
“Oh nuts! Murdstone has invited somebody for dinner that night and I have to be there.”
“Can’t you get out of it?”
“Not without a row. I’ll come over later, soon as I can get away.”
“But I have it all planned. Isn’t there some way you could weasel out?”
“There must be.”
“I wish you could.”
“Let me work on it.”
It was Friday noon before she saw him again. The halls were clearing for the lunch hour. She had started toward the lounge when George hailed her from down the hall. “Hiya, Teach, want to go eat? I didn’t eat lunch at home, so I could come early.”
“Sorry, I—”
“Hey, Tobe!” Toby was coming up the stairs from the lockers. “Want to go eat with us?”
“Sure,” Toby said.
“I can’t,” Allen said. “Wish I could, but we’re taking Maxine to lunch.”
“Do you have to go? Let the rest of ’em take her.”
“No, I have to go. I’m one of the bunch.”
“We’re a bunch too. Come with us, you’ll have more fun.”
“I know that. But not this time. I’ve got to go now.”
“Hey, wait, Teach.”
“I’m already late.”
“Look, I’ve practiced till I’m blue in the face. Want to go to the movies tomorrow night? I’ll be done with my audition and need to blow off some steam”
“Well, I—”
“They’re showing Rebecca at the Osage.”
“Oh boy! I’d love to see it, but—” She glanced at Toby—there was a look in his eyes that gave him dead away—and hastily back to George. “But I can’t. I’m tied up tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” George said. “You don’t have to go out with the biddies on Saturday night!”
“It’s not the biddies,” she protested, laughing. “And keep your voice down.”
Slowly George took off his glasses. “Hear that, Tobe? There’s another man in her life.”
“Sure there is,” she said. “Cary Grant.”
“All right, abandon us. See if we care. We’ll get over it, won’t we, Tobe?”
“Oh, go on away! You are not abandoned. I just happen to have something else cooking for a change.”
“Cooking! You hear that, Tobe? For who or whom?”
“Cary Grant.”
Again the quick glance at Toby, who had said nothing. “George dear, I can’t and that’s that. Really.”
“Oh
. Okay. Well, better luck next time. You want to go, Tobe?”
Toby hesitated only a second. “Jeez,” he said, “I can’t go either. My folks got something planned.”
“You mean I’ve got to spend Saturday night by myself? And after my audition, you don’t want to help me celebrate?”
“They’d be mad as hell if I don’t stay home.”
“Poor George,” said Allen. “Why can’t we all go Sunday night?”
“I got a paper to do.”
“Do it tomorrow night.”
“I don’t want to write a paper after I’ve been to Kansas City.”
“I’m really sorry, George.”
“Oh well, what the hell. I’ll find somebody else to go to the movies. You guys have fun with your folks—and Cary Grant.” He grinned and socked Toby on the arm. “Let’s go eat.”
She lingered a moment, watching them lope off up the hall. He would come to her dinner party! Covering her excitement, she put on a sober face and went in to join the Ladies. They were waiting for her. Verna was in a swivet.
Thirteen
She had said about seven. She was ready by six, the salad in the refrigerator, slices of baked ham covered with brown sugar and waiting in the oven, and she, bathed and sneezing in a cloud of Houbigant, was all dressed up in her brand-new dress, a red checkered affair with a long skirt and straps that crossed over her bare back. She looked nice, she thought. Maybe a bit skinny for a low-cut dress. But fetching. The straps helped.
In the living room the kitchen table, maneuvered through the door earlier in the day, was covered with a white cloth, with candles in clear glass holders (bought at the dime store along with two wineglasses), and two gardenias afloat in a cereal bowl. She surveyed it happily, breathing in the heavy, distinctive perfume of the flowers.
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