Deadline (12 page)

A
HEAVY RAIN HAD STARTED
by the time Diana arrived. She wore a simple overcoat, hooded and belted at the waist. Rubber boots, no umbrella. She took off her coat in the hall and shook out her hair, then hung the coat in the bathroom, over the bathtub. She had brought a bag of groceries, her offering of celebration. Walker took it as something more, a sign that he had passed muster with her. She had accepted his friendship, nothing more, and he had to be careful with her, and with himself, so he wouldn’t upset that.

She ran on a delicate balance of thought and instinct, just as he did. She followed her hunches, but could reverse herself in a minute if events proved her wrong. Walker was determined not to do that, not to disappoint whatever expectations she had of him. He found himself playing a role that didn’t quite feel right, and as a result, was tense all the time, like a silly teenager. He found himself thinking about her religious background, wondering where she stood on that now, and how, and if, he could possibly fit in. He wanted her, but he was afraid. She was the only woman in years who had frightened him.

And the crazy thing about that was, she was so natural. She didn’t talk religion, didn’t seem to disapprove of anything he did. She had found the bourbon where he had hidden it in the kitchen cupboard, and had fixed him a drink. She didn’t have any with him, waiting instead for her tea to boil, but he noticed that she had really laced in the booze. She made a hell of a good drink, as if she had been tending bar downtown for years.

When her tea was ready, she brought in the steaming cup and sat facing him, holding it between her hands. For a while they sat in silence. He thanked her for the drink.

“You know,” she said, “I’m not even sure what I should call you. Somehow Dalton doesn’t seem to fit. Do you go by anything else?”

“Only very occasionally, my very best friends call me Mike. My middle name.”

She looked at him, her head tilted slightly. “Hmmm.”

“Mostly, though, people call me Walker,” he said simply. “I’m comfortable with that. People have been calling me that for so long now that I hardly ever answer to anything else.”

“Yes,” she said after a while. “You do look like a Walker. Somehow that fits just fine.”

Again they had run out of words.

“Look,” she said suddenly. “I like you, Walker, but you’re driving me crazy. You’re letting yourself be inhibited by all kinds of things I can’t even guess at. You’re putting me on a pedestal, don’t you see that?”

He nodded slowly and sipped his drink.

“You hide your whiskey because you’re afraid I won’t like it. You watch your language to an embarrassing extent. How many times have you chopped off something just as the talk is getting interesting? Why do you do that?”

“You’re right, I’m probably afraid you won’t like it.”

“If I don’t like it I’ll tell you so. Then we’ll either stay friends or we won’t. But I can’t imagine anything you’d say that would offend me that much.”

“I guess I’m still feeling my way along. I didn’t want to turn you off even before I get to know you.”

“And you’re afraid the world you inhabit will turn me off.”

“Something like that.”

She shook her head. “You are all wrong, Walker. It’s the pretense that turns me off, not the words. It’s true, I come from a background of Puritanical values, but I’ve been in the city a long time. Ten years now. Do you think anybody could live in this city for ten years without hearing all the words there are to hear? Dozens, hundreds of times? What do you think this is, Victorian-era New York, when men protected women like that? Could I even pick up a novel today without seeing all the things my father once said were so unspeakably evil? Damn it, Walker, don’t put me in a shell like that.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged again, and laughed at herself. Her cheeks reddened. “Suppose we fall in love and get married.” She laughed again. “What then, Walker? Are you going to go through life hiding your whiskey and watching your language? Or are you going to change that character you spent thirty-five years building, just for me? Would you be able to do that? Would you want to?”

“You’ve made your point,” he said. “I apologize for treating you like a kid.”

“Fine. Now that we’ve got that settled, I’ll fix you some dinner.”

“It’s a simple Amish dinner,” she said, setting the dishes on the table. “Nothing special.”

They ate quietly. Over coffee, she said, “I’ll tell you about myself. Maybe that’ll help. I have three brothers. My parents are both living. I haven’t spoken to my mother or father in ten years. I see my youngest brother, Michael, once or twice a year, and he brings me news from home.

“My parents are very traditional, very much of the Old World. If I went back now, even though we haven’t seen each other for ten years, they’d shun me. It’s got nothing to do with love, it’s what they believe, what they were raised to believe, from their parents and grandparents, on back as far as anybody can remember. Outside people don’t understand it, but it’s their way. It doesn’t mean they don’t love me, but they wouldn’t speak to me until I’d confessed my sins and been admitted back into the Church. Then all would be forgiven. I’d be expected to take up the traditional woman’s role and become a farmer’s wife. That’s what they are, farmers. I’d be expected to marry a good Amish boy and settle down in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.”

He didn’t comment, and she was silent for a long time. When she spoke again, she had shifted slightly into a new train of thought.

“I’m not a Puritan, Walker. I wasn’t born to be one, not a good one, anyway. There are some things they ingrain into you, and you never really work them out of your system. Good things. Belief in God. Brotherly love. Sharing work and enjoying what fellowship you have with your brothers and sisters. Some of the things that happen there are fantastic. The things people do for each other. Back there, you’re truly your brother’s keeper. Not like here. There’s a sense of belonging, if you do belong, that you won’t find anywhere else. But if you don’t belong, your life there can be hell. Sometime I’ll tell you all about it. About them and me.”

She took a deep breath. “Look, I don’t drink myself, but I don’t mind those who do. I don’t like drunks, though, so if you’re one of those, I guess we won’t get along. Otherwise, everything’s fine. So far, I think we’re doing all right, don’t you?”

“I think we’re doing fine, Diana.”

“I like your company,” she said.

And suddenly Diana blushed, filled with the self-consciousness of an introvert caught talking too much. “Mercy, I haven’t made a speech like that since Lincoln freed the slaves.” She gave a dry little laugh.

Walker drained his drink, leaned over and squeezed her shoulder.

She covered his hand with hers.

They sat for hours, listening to the rain and talking in spurts. They drank black coffee and talked about prisons. Walker told her about his personal prisons, his years of sporadic self-exile from the business he loved and hated. She found strong similarities between that and her own background.

“Sometimes you have no choice,” she said. She had moved over next to him and now sat nestled under his arm. “I started learning that very early in my school years. Second or third grade. In the early Fifties, the Amish farmers were starting to catch a lot of heat for not schooling their kids. Did you know that the Amish don’t send their kids past the eighth grade? They feel threatened by the school system. They’re afraid the kids will see too many earthly pleasures and will want to break away from the Church. That’s what happened to me.

“I’d always been a restless child. I’d never been really comfortable with the life they mapped out for me, but it wasn’t until I got into school that I started to see some alternatives. Michael tells me things are different now. The Amish have built their own schools, so their kids won’t have to truck with outsiders. But when I was growing up, there were no Amish schools. There was a big confrontation between the farmers and the school board. We lost, the kids were made to go through eighth grade at least. In second or third grade, I met a girl named Billie Morris, and Billie wanted like crazy to be a dancer. She had books on dance, on ballet and modern dance, filled with the most gorgeous pictures you ever saw. Her parents had money; by our standards they were rich. They bought her everything she wanted. I couldn’t get over it, how
much
she had of everything. The books thrilled me. She used to lend them to me and I’d take them home and hide them in the barn. I’d read them at night by lanternlight. Until my father found them and burned them.

“You might say that was the beginning of my rebellion. You can imagine how I dreaded telling Billie Morris. For a week I avoided her. Finally I couldn’t put it off any longer. And you know what? She didn’t care at all. She said they were old books and she was getting tired of them anyway. She’d make her dad buy her some more. Over the next few months, the rift grew between the family and me. I became the black sheep. My older brother Daniel, who’s always followed the teachings of the Church to the letter, thought I was a terrible heretic. He stopped speaking to me long before I broke with the Church. Michael tells me he’s married and has his own farm now. Children. Two boys and a girl. And I’m sure he makes them tow the mark.”

“Making that final break must have been hard.”

“Not as hard as you’d think. It had been coming on by degrees for years. I’d been getting regular thrashings and one day, about two months before my seventeenth birthday, I decided I’d had enough. I packed my bag and walked out, in the middle of a workday, when Father and the boys were still in the fields. I told my mother I was going to New York, and I’d write.

“No, the hard part was staying away. No one who hasn’t been raised in the Amish faith could understand what a huge, wonderful, terrifying place the outside world is, when you come into it all of a sudden like that. You have no skills. You don’t know how to behave around people. How do you survive? The only thing you know is your housework and your Church, and now there’s no house to work in. There’s no family to put food on your table and give you a bed at night. You have no money and little more than the clothes on your back. Where would you go?”

“I don’t know.”

“I did what every Amish girl who’s ever run away from home has done. You either give up and go home or you find refuge where you can, in God, which is the only thing you know. In my case, the Mennonite Church, which is fairly close to the Amish, but somewhat looser in its rules. The Mennonites, for example, can have electricity in their homes. They don’t have to do without all the modern wonders, like Old World Amish. They don’t have to ride in buggies, or use horses for plowing. Their bathrooms are inside the house. Things you take for granted, the Amish child has never known for himself. So you might say I came up like a diver who’s been under water too long. Slowly, by degrees. I found a Mennonite family who took me in. I worked for them a year, until even their standards became too much to bear, then I broke away from them too. In the city I took simple jobs. I studied dancing, went to night school, got my high school diploma. And I found a Protestant Church that was close enough to the old teachings to give me the comfort I wanted, but loose enough to give me some breathing room.

“I got secretarial jobs, worked nights as a waitress. One day there came the chance I’d been waiting for, a dancing job in a roadhouse revue. Up in Connecticut. It meant casting off the last of those old chains, rejecting my home and Church and everything they stood for. It was something I’d always wanted, but I was afraid. I was certain it would lead to disaster.”

But it hadn’t led to disaster. Yes, her nervousness had cost her that first job in Connecticut, but there were other jobs, other parts. She played in a theater-in-the-round production
of Little Mary Sunshine,
and after that went on the road, to Colorado, where the wave of dinner-theaters offered jobs and new vistas. Her courage had seen her through lean times. And one night a girl from Radio City had seen her dancing in a Village play, and had met her backstage. They became friends, and the girl talked her into auditioning at Radio City.

“Here I am,” she said, with a sweeping motion meant to simplify the complicated. “Now you know the story of my life.”

Diana said she had never wanted to be a star, so the anonymity of the Rockettes suited her fine. She had never wanted anything but to dance. To dance and get paid for it was the ideal. She had read an article describing the sensations of free-fall parachuting, and she thought dancing was like that. Her brother Michael understood her. The others didn’t. Her parents didn’t know that she worked at Radio City. The last time he was in New York, Michael had come to see her perform. He had been thrilled by the wonder of it, and afterward he had gone home to his pregnant wife Trudy, and the patch of land he was leasing from brother Daniel until he could save enough money to buy his own. And he had written to her, and they had thought about each other. But Michael had never told anybody.

It was two o’clock in the morning. They had talked for eight hours, and had come to know each other well. Diana worked for the Democratic Party, licking stamps in election years. She did volunteer work with the handicapped, and she liked baseball. She went to Yankee Stadium when she could, always alone.

“Would you ever go home?” Walker said.

She thought for a long time. “Sometimes I want to go back so much, it really hurts me. It brings tears to my eyes. I’d give anything to be able to go home for a visit and be on good terms with everyone. Just like other people. How I’d love that.”

“Would you ever go back for good?”

“Once I actually had my bags packed. I was ready to go, but somehow I just couldn’t get on that bus. Somehow I couldn’t make that final step. Because I was afraid of just that. It would be final. I got away once. I couldn’t do it again. I don’t think I’d ever have the strength to walk away a second time.”

“You would,” Walker said.

“You think so?”

“People like you always find the strength, if it’s the right thing to do. God, listen to me. As if I’m any great authority on what that is.”