XII

The dining room was large, bare, unattractive, with thin pillars upholding a sagging ceiling. It reminded him of some dim Sunday-­school room out of his childhood: he could see the pillars festooned with holly and tinsel, hear each tinny note of the flat pitch-­black piano. . . . Now through the room from the hall came the tinkling notes of Beautiful Dreamer which was being played on a harp in the parlor beyond the lobby. Down at one end of the long room were the Howards, chatting busily together; and a few tables away sat a yellow-­haired young man and his mother. Ethel appeared in the doorway, looked in uncertainly, and then found their table. As she came across the room he admired her walk: it was straight, confident, cool, the walk of a young woman.

“You look very nice,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“I like that dress.” He unfolded his napkin. “There seems to be some kind of recital going on, a harp.”

“Yes.”

“After dinner would you care to go in, for a while, and listen?”

“Not tonight.”

The wide still room continued to evoke its associations out of the past; he had only to close his eyes to feel himself back in the Boys’ Carving and Weaving Class that met on Friday nights. It was the second time in the past hour that he had had intimations of childhood. First there had been the memory of the childhood dream that had sprung unbidden to his mind as they were leaving the steamer; now, the sense of being in the old Sunday-school room. What brought these images up? he wondered. The pending showdown with Ethel—his feeling of being on trial, so to speak—which inevitably reduced him to something less than adult status? Or was it, possibly, the influence of the Marine captain still, in whose presence he had experienced stirrings of an old adolescence?

A middle-­aged woman with heavy black eyebrows and lavender hair, wearing beach pajamas, sandals, and long drop-­earrings, came forward and introduced herself as Miss Fly, the hostess. She launched at once into a long one-­sided conversation, with an incessant running fire of comment as if she had an anxiety that she would be interrupted—which, it turned out, was the case; for Miss Fly was deaf as a post and lived in fear of being found out.

“. . . I’m sorry but I guess you folks are going to get a more or less cold dinner tonight on account of it’s so late and we’re short of help anyway. We like to close the dining room at eight-­thirty but still we can’t very well do you good people out of your dinner just because the boat was late, now can we? In normal times we kept the dining room open till nine but then of course we had more help. Like old Mrs. Westermeier was saying only this noon—and I want you folks to meet her, she’s a real person—good servants don’t grow on trees any more or even any servants for that matter. We can’t get any help nowadays you know in any way shape or form except these high school kids. C’est la vie of course. Well let’s hope it won’t last forever . . .”

“I can’t believe it,” he said, as Miss Fly moved away.

“Amazing. . . .”

They dispensed with the soup out of consideration for the help and the lateness of the hour. While waiting for the high school girl to bring the meat course, Grandin looked at the young man near by with his mother. He wore a sky-­blue linen jacket with large white bone buttons, over a red-­and-­white striped basque shirt. His elbows were on the table and his long fingers interlaced on a level with his chin. Even from this distance the fingernails gleamed and glinted brightly in the reflected light, as if they had been enameled with some garish lacquer.

“I don’t hear the sea at all,” Grandin said.

“I guess it’s some distance away . . .”

“Besides, they’ve got the windows closed. I suppose because of the bugs.”

“Yes . . .”

“. . . Wasn’t it funny the way he blushed when I said ‘hell-­bent’?”

“Who? Oh. I didn’t notice . . .”

As they had done on similar occasions, they made conversation. He wondered why they bothered. Pride, perhaps; they would have felt silly indeed sitting in silence opposite one another in that vast quiet room, the more so because laughter and lively talk came continually from the Howards’ corner, Miss Fly slowly circled their table at a discreet distance but always with one eye on their progress with the meal, and the yellow-­haired young man bent upon them a fixed if abstracted gaze. To finish their dinner without speaking would have been to declare publicly: we’ve had, are having, or are about to have, a quarrel.

“I wonder how Hauman was wounded. He didn’t say.”

“I suppose he never does.”

“Oh, I don’t know. He was willing enough to talk about himself once he got started.” Then he added: “Odd how he seems to feel guilty for being out of the war. A real guilt. He of all people.”

“Imagine.”

“. . . You haven’t told me a thing about the boys.” She hadn’t said anything about his book, either, but for some reason he couldn’t speak of it now.

“I suppose they’re having a good time.”

“I miss them. Don’t you?”

“No, not really . . .”

“Oh, by the way! I had the damnedest experience the other day. I was on top of a bus, alone, there was no one else upstairs at all, when four young fliers came up and sat down several seats behind me. Their uniforms were a lightish blue, I think they were Canadians; anyhow they weren’t Americans. You can’t imagine how young they were—just kids—hardly looked as if they shaved. You could tell they were in a fine mood and were out to have a good time—really do the town. I sat there thinking about them, wondering where they’d be six months from now, or even three, or even if they’d still be alive, and I was hoping like anything that they’d have the best time in New York they’d ever had anywhere. Suddenly I heard one of them say, ‘How do you like that civilian uniform up there?’ I turned around, thinking someone else must have come up on top of the bus, and discovered they meant me. I was being baited. Me, forty-­four years old! But that’s not the point, of course. The point is—well, I felt awfully sorry about the whole thing; I kept wishing it hadn’t happened, or that I hadn’t heard them say it . . .”

“I know . . .”