Cold Spring Harbor (14 page)

As they moved away toward the bright steps of Costello’s the girls would hold their escorts by the waist or the arm or not at all—Phil decided there was no real significance in those three styles—and they didn’t seem to walk across the lot so much as drift across it, their pale dresses floating and swaying in and out of shadows as if time were the last thing on their minds. Keeping a careful distance, he would sometimes follow a couple and try to overhear what the girl was saying: whole personalities of girls might be deduced from that kind of eavesdropping, but for the most part he heard only tantalizing fragments.

“… Well, but we’ll only have one drink here, okay? And then let’s go right on home.”

“… Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that I might be a little tired of hearing about what Linda likes and doesn’t like? And how Linda feels? And what Linda has to say about this and that and everything else …?”

Late one night he led a soldier and a lovely girl from the bar into the darkness, and the girl’s voice was as sweet as a song. She was trying to reassure the soldier about something, though the words were indistinct at first until she
said “But you’re not insensitive, Marvin. You’re
won
derfully sensitive.”

And Phil knew he wouldn’t hear anything prettier than that all summer. It stayed with him for hours as he needlessly patrolled the parking lot or stood looking through a chain link fence at the slick pilings and the black, gentle water.

“You’re
won
derfully sensitive.” It was exactly the kind of thing a girl might say to Phil Drake when he was old enough to deserve it—and it could even happen in two more years, when he’d be in the army and when all other elements of his life would be under control.

He often wished he could follow people into Costello’s and find out what it was like at the peak of business hours—all he was ever allowed to see was the way it looked in the late afternoons, when guys in shirtsleeves were still taking upside-down chairs off the tops of tables, and the way it looked at the end of the night when they’d be putting the chairs back up again. He knew, though, that there were deep leatherette booths along three walls of the room, and he guessed that those were where most of the girls would probably choose to settle. Toying with their gin rickeys or their rum-and-Cokes in the throb and moan of the jukebox, they might let their free hands fall delicately onto the thighs of their men. And he knew he wouldn’t forget certain popular songs of that summer of 1942 as they were wafted dimly out to him among the parked cars.

This was one:

And this was another:

When closing time came around he would stuff the flashlight in his pocket and walk through the service entrance into the kitchen—this was his only privilege on the job—and ask for a cup of black coffee.

“How come you always want black coffee?” a haggard dishwasher asked him after the first few nights.

“I like it black, is all,” Phil explained, but the explanation didn’t ring true: he knew he drank coffee black because that was how his mother drank it (“It’s wonderful, Philly; it’s very stimulating; it really perks up your spirits; this is the way the French drink it all the time”).

“Want any ice cream?” the dishwasher asked him. “We got five flavors.”

“No thanks.”

“Piece a pie?”

“No, that’s okay. Thanks anyway.”

“Know something, kid? You’re gonna rot your guts out, taking in all that caffeine without any nourishment.” And the man shook his head in mild exasperation. “You’re a sad case.”

Sipping and wincing at his hot cup, Phil knew the old guy was probably right but didn’t know what to say or do about it, and that made him feel even skinnier than usual.

Then Aaron the busboy burst through the swinging doors from the restaurant, whipping off his apron and dropping it into a laundry hamper. He made straight for a tub of maple walnut, mashed three scoops of it into an ice-cream dish and wolfed it down in what looked like no more than six or seven motions of his spoon. Then he lobbed the spoon and the empty dish into a sinkful of hot water and suds and turned away to take off for home.

“Goodnight, Aaron,” one of the girls called, and then others took it up: “Goodnight, Aaron” … “Goodnight, Aaron” …

“So long, girls,” he called back. “See you tomorrow.”

And Phil Drake felt like a very sad case indeed as he pedaled slowly home along Route Nine.

But in the shrunken daylight hours, with money in his pocket and his firm tires whirring over asphalt and concrete, it never took him long to feel much better. He could go shopping now, even for things he didn’t need. In the well-fanned depths of an old-fashioned hardware store one day he bought a jackknife for no better reason than that he liked the weighted feel of it in his hand; then later, closer to home, he made another stop and picked up a cellophane package of six Milky Way bars because Rachel had often said it was her favorite kind of candy.

“Well, how sweet, Phil,” she said. “And how thoughtful. You remembered.” But she said she’d rather not eat one of them now, if he didn’t mind; she’d rather put them all in the refrigerator until they were nice and cold. “And I bet you didn’t even buy anything for yourself, did you.”

“I sure did,” he told her. “I made a major purchase. Look.”

“Oh, nice,” she said. “That looks like a beauty. I’m afraid I can’t open the blades, though, with these long fingernails. Will you do the honors, dear?”

And when he’d thumbed open both blades of the thing, a
long one and a short one, she said “Wonderful. Those two are all you’ll ever want with this kind of knife. If there were any other things in it, like all the stuff in a scout knife, they’d only get in the way and spoil the balance of it, right? This kind of knife is exactly what you want for mumblety-peg and things like that—looks better and feels better too.”

“Well, I guess so, yeah,” he said, taking it back from her. “Hadn’t really thought of that, though.”

“You were the best mumblety-peg player in the neighborhood when you were about eleven. I could hardly ever beat you at that, or at any other target kind of game.”

“Well, it’s okay with me if you want to remember it that way,” he told her. “What I mostly remember is that we never really played mumblety-peg at all, beyond learning a few of the hand positions. What we did was
play
at playing it. That’s what we did with all the games, and with sports too; or at least I did.”

“You did not, Phil,” she said. “You really played. You certainly played touch football, when we lived in Morristown, and I’d come out and watch you almost every afternoon.”

“Rachel, will you cut this out? Touch football is about the worst example you could’ve thought of. I
played
at playing it, that’s all, and all the other kids were on to me.”

But she was so serious now, insisting on her own spunky memories, that in the end he let her have whatever she seemed to need. Rachel had never been much of a companion in certain kinds of reminiscence.

When Evan got home that afternoon it was almost time for Phil to go upstairs and wash up for the parking lot, though not quite; he hadn’t yet made his escape when his sister said “Phil? Have you shown Evan your knife?”

And so, like a bashful little boy, he had no choice but to offer up the jackknife for his brother-in-law’s inspection and approval.

“Mm,” Evan said. “Yes, that’s a nice one.”

All Phil had to do now was get out of this room, but he hadn’t made the first two or three of the stairs when he was stopped by overhearing a little snort of disbelief or amusement as Evan said “Is he really sixteen?”

“Well, of course he is,” Rachel said impatiently.

“I’ll be God damned,” Evan told her. “When I was that age I was out getting laid.”

“
Ev
an!” she said.

Phil went through his washing-up as calmly as if he’d already decided not to give Evan’s remark a moment’s thought, not to let it get him down at all; but he had to hesitate a long time over whether to wear the chauffeur’s cap on his way down and back through the living room again. He settled on the compromise of stuffing the cloth part of it into one hip pocket, with only the patent-leather crescent of the visor hanging free for ridicule—or for showing how little he cared about ridicule of any kind. That was how he left the house and covered the distance to the driveway, where his bike stood propped on its kickstand; and it wasn’t until an hour later, speaking aloud to the chain link fence over the Sound, that he heard himself say “Yeah, well, fuck you Shepard. Just wait and see, you son of a bitch. You won’t be laughing at me a hell of a lot longer.”

“Darling?” Rachel Shepard inquired. “Will you be having breakfast here today? Or would you rather have it out?”

“Have it out, I think,” Evan said. “That’s simpler.”

It was another of the Saturdays when he would go to visit his daughter, and Rachel never quite knew how to behave on these mornings. If she tried being bright and cheerful she was afraid of seeming
too
bright,
too
cheerful; still, giving any hint of the loneliness and jealousy she would feel all day might only be a worse mistake. She was as shy of meeting her husband’s eyes as if he were a man she had just met; and later, along with the helplessness she felt when the front door closed behind him, there was always an unexpected sense of relief.

Mary Donovan’s parents had moved down toward the south shore four years ago, so that Mr. Donovan could be closer to his job at Grumman Aircraft, and it couldn’t be denied that they’d grown a little less cordial in their dealings with Evan Shepard. This new house of theirs was dominated by a heavily screened front porch, and lately—it happened again this morning—they managed to avoid any real greeting of Evan at all. At the moment he took a step or two up the concrete path from the sidewalk, the screen door opened just enough to let Kathleen out, all dressed up and all eagerness, all arms and legs and flying hair as she came running to meet him—“Daddy!”—and he dropped to his haunches and gathered her up in a hug. Then, when he looked up at the house again, there was a slow wave of a white-sleeved arm in the shadows behind the screen, like the curve of a fish near the surface of murky water. He couldn’t even tell whether it was Mr. or Mrs. Donovan who waved, but the meaning of the signal was clear: a simple acknowledgment of shared responsibility.

“Well, don’t you look pretty,” Evan said. “Is that a new dress?”

“Yes. Mom bought it in New York.”

“Good.”

He had heard other fathers say that seven was “a nice age for a girl,” and now he could easily see what they meant. From a distance Kathleen might look frail and disorganized, but up close, in his arms, there was a reassuring strength in her that suggested a healthy young heart. And girls of seven did seem to like their fathers with an unqualified enthusiasm; that was another nice thing.

“So what would you like to do today?” he asked as he set her carefully down on the pavement and took her hand for walking. “We can do whatever you want.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Let’s decide later, okay?”

When they were settled in the car he reviewed several possibilities. “Well, we could drive along the south shore a little ways and see the big ocean waves breaking on the beaches there,” he told her. “Or, if you’d rather, I
think
I’ve got enough gas to take us all the way out to Montauk Point, where the lighthouse is, and where there’ll be absolutely nothing between us and Europe but about a hundred sea gulls making a terrible racket in the sky.”

“Good,” she said, rubbing her hands together between her skinny legs. “That’ll be neat, Dad.”

At one or two o’clock that afternoon, over the remains of a seafood lunch at an outdoor, paper-plate restaurant, Evan felt calm enough to ask a few direct questions about her mother.

“Oh, she’s fine,” the child said, her buttery fingers still at work on a near-empty crab shell. “She’s got a new job now and she really likes it a lot.”

“What kind of job is that, dear?”

Asking these questions was pleasurable in itself, but Evan knew it would be a mistake to ask very many more; he would have to sense when it was time to stop.

“She’s the assistant night manager at Bill Bailey’s, out on Route Twelve,” Kathleen told him.

“The old ice-cream parlor, you mean?”

“Yes, except it’s all different now and a whole lot bigger. They’ve remodeled everything, and they’re branching out. You can get almost anything there now, like hamburgers and french fries and stuff. Oh, and fried chicken, too, and Mom says the people there are really, really nice.”