Chapter Forty-three

Keller chalks up that spontaneous hug to the emotion of the moment. She was upset, and he just wanted her to feel better. He tells himself that it wasn’t any more significant than had Francesca been his sister. Or cousin. Except that he’s never had a sister, or had any desire to touch either of his female cousins, who lodge in his memory as tormentors, not pals.

If it meant only a quick dash of human kindness, why are they assiduously avoiding physical contact now? If her hand bumps his in passing the salt, she apologizes. If he accidently grazes her with his arm as he is reaching for a screwdriver out of the utensil drawer, he backs away like he’s been scalded. If it meant nothing, why does he think about it all the time? The feel of her cheek against his chest, the way she sank into him, as if climbing into a life raft. How good it felt to have his arms around another human being. It wakes him up at night.

After a warm early fall, the weather has turned more seasonable, and even with two extra army blankets over him and the dog’s warmth, it’s getting pretty hard to imagine staying in the garage bedroom much longer. At the very least, they’ll have to start closing the connecting doors to keep the cold out of the house, and that will make it difficult to hear Rick if he needs Keller in the night, and Pax will have to chose one place or the other to sleep. They haven’t talked about it yet, but they’ll have to. Not counting the den, which has been made over into Rick’s sickroom, the house has only two bedrooms, both on the second floor.

The thing is, Keller hates giving up the privacy, or the illusion of privacy, that the garage apartment offers. If he moves into the spare bedroom, there will be no separating himself from the Stantons. Even retreating to an upstairs bedroom to read or do homework won’t give him the psychological break that going into his “apartment” lends.

But it’s not just a loss of privacy that makes moving into the house an uncomfortable idea. After all, he’s said good night to her any number of times and watched her mount the stairs to bed. Greeted her as she comes down in the morning, housecoat tied neatly around her waist but her curls tousled and her cheeks rosy like a child’s. If she’s slept well, he can see it in her clear eyes; equally, a restless night and he can read in the shadows beneath her eyes the thoughts that have kept her awake. Once, she greeted him exactly as she does Rick: “Good morning, sunshine.” She blushed at her mistake, but throughout the day he kept smiling at having been so greeted.

Keller just can’t imagine being across the landing from her all night long. It’s just too intimate. It just doesn’t seem—what’s the word?—proper for him, as a single man, to be sleeping across the hall from his landlady. Sleeping, or not sleeping, a mere two yards apart.

Landlady. Keller laughs at his choice of word. What is she really? His boss? No. Rick’s wife. He would be sleeping in close proximity to Rick’s wife. What would the neighbors think? “What do you say, Pax? Will the neighbors talk if they think I’m sleeping on the same floor as a married woman? Will you chaperone us?” Pax just shakes from nose to tail, stretches fore and aft, and utters nothing useful.

Maybe he’ll go to the hardware store down on Hancock Street tomorrow and see if they have any space heaters he’d feel safe using. During the worst of the winter months, when the woodstove in the parlor was inadequate to the task, Clayton would haul out a cylindrical kerosene heater and fire it up. Keller remembers sleeping with one eye open on those nights, the noxious fumes of the burning kerosene leaving a bad taste on his tongue, and the fear of burning to death in the night.

It’s easier to think of tomorrow’s errands than it is his task of tonight. It’s decidedly the oddest request that Rick has made of him, and he’s still not certain how to handle it. Francesca kicked about it, too, but in the end Rick, as always, made a good case. It’s their anniversary, the Stantons. And Rick wants Keller to take Francesca out to dinner and to the Totem Pole Ballroom out in Auburndale. “Be my surrogate.”

Keller had to look the word up. Surrogate, meaning “replacement.” A willing replacement.

“It’s what I would be doing, and why should Francesca be denied a little fun just because I can’t do it?”

“I don’t dance.” That seemed the most reasonable way to refuse. “I mean, not since they forced us to learn the box step in gym class.”

“Francesca is a wonderful dancer; she’ll help you out.”

“Rick, don’t do this.” Francesca twisted a tea towel in her hands, and the smile on her face failed to suggest that she thought he was teasing, that Rick was having them on.

“Honey, come on. It’ll be fun.”

Keller put his oar in. “Rick, you take her. I’ll drive you there. We can go early, get a good seat for you close to the floor.”

“And do the jitterbug with her? No. I want her to dance and I want you to take her.”

Rick keeps doing this, throwing them together, as if their eating at the Clam Shack or taking a walk or going to a picture show somehow entertains him.

“But, Rick, it’s our anniversary. I want to spend it with you.” Francesca had that tension in her voice again. The tension of not saying what she wants to.

Keller left the room; this was just too marital for him. Later, she came to him, smiling, shaking her head, as if Rick were a naughty little boy getting his way. “Have you ever been to the Totem Pole? We used to love to go. Good music. And, Kel, we don’t have to dance if it makes you uncomfortable.”

Keller wondered if she meant dancing in general, or just dancing with her might make him uncomfortable.

“Francesca, we can do whatever you’d like to do.”

“I think I’d like to go.” At once, Francesca looks young, girlish.

“Then we’ll go.” He points at her, smiles. “As long as you don’t ask me to tango.”

*   *   *

“You kids look beautiful.” Rick shifts in his wheelchair. “Where’s the corsage?” Keller hands him the box with the flower in it, ordered, exactly as Rick wanted—pink and blue chrysanthemums with a white ribbon. Rick gets the box open, but they all realize at the same time that there is no way he can pin it on his wife. Keller awkwardly fashions the arrangement to Francesca’s dress. It flops and she unpins it, walks to the hallway mirror, and fixes it for herself. “They’re beautiful. Thank you.” She doesn’t look at either of them, so it’s hard to tell whom she is thanking.

In order to make this less like a date and more like a night of bowling, they’ve had dinner already. Before he took his plate into his room, Keller got Rick out of his and to the dining room table, where he had put two place settings, a little bouquet of fall flowers in the center to mark the special occasion of their anniversary and Rick’s grudging willingness to sit at the table. Rick insisted that he not be put to bed, that he’d be up waiting for them with Pax. He and Pax would listen to the live broadcast from the Totem Pole on the radio. He’d be fine, he insisted.

By the time Keller and Francesca arrive at Norumbega Park, the Totem Pole Ballroom is crowded and the dance floor swarming with people dancing to a small combo warming the crowd up for the next act. Black tuxedos and gowns in jewel-like colors blur and spin below them. Keller is dressed in his only pair of good trousers, black merino wool, his only dress shirt, and a tie borrowed from Rick. His jacket is borrowed, too. He’s never owned a suit, never before felt the need, but here he stands with Francesca, in the dress that she made herself. She’d chosen the material well, with an eye toward what’s fashionable, and she looks every bit as sophisticated as anyone else on that dance floor in the bell-shaped skirt and narrow belted waist of her blue-and-white dress. He offers his arm and they descend to find an empty seat.

“Can I get you something? A martini, maybe?” A martini sounds as sophisticated as she looks, he thinks.

Francesca tilts her head, nibbles her lower lip. He can see the thought process behind her eyes. Should she relax enough to say yes? Should they keep this as simply fulfilling a bizarre whim of Rick’s? “Sure. Why not.”

It takes nearly fifteen minutes to get through the pack lined up at the bar, and then he loses some of the expensive drink as he maneuvers his way through the crowd back to where Francesca waits, her gaze on the dancing couples, a smile on her face, as if she knows she needs to look like she’s having a good time. But Keller recognizes that wan smile as one she so often wears when Rick has been difficult. “Here you go. What’s the expression? Mud in your eye?” He wants to get that wan smile off her face and replace it with a genuine one.

“Something like that. I’m afraid I’ve never been one of the toast-giving crowd.”

“Me, either. Seems like something they only do in the movies.” Keller sips the martini, fishes out the olive, is uncertain if he’s supposed to eat it, puts it back in, leaning the tiny sword that skewers it against the rim of the glass.

They watch the crowd in silence for a bit. It seems obvious to Keller that he should ask her to dance. They can’t keep sitting here all evening drinking expensive drinks, ignoring the intent of being in such a place; it’s not the sort of place where you go simply to sit and drink martinis. Rick is listening to the WNBC broadcast and will grill them later, want to know what music they danced to. “I have to live vicariously now. Do it for me.” That’s what he said as they went out the door.

Keller starts to speak, when Francesca sets her drink down and says. “So, tell me, how do you know so much about carpentry? You were a fisherman, right? Before the war?”

Maybe it’s the unaccustomed martini, or maybe it’s the music surrounding this conversation; maybe it’s the fact that, in asking him about himself, Francesca has laid a hand on his arm, just above his wrist. Whatever it is, he is drawn into telling her the truth. “I went to reform school when I was nine. I learned carpentry there.” He sits back, pulls his arm away, and waits for her reaction.

“Nine. Oh my, what could you have possibly done to get sent to reform school at that age?” She doesn’t look at him with distaste, but curiosity, maybe even a skeptical amusement, as if she doesn’t believe him.

“Truancy. Well, I decked a truant officer and the state took that as a sign of my delinquent nature.”

“That seems very harsh.”

“In a lot of ways, it was better than getting passed around from relative to relative who didn’t want me. I got three squares a day and clothing that mostly fit. And a trade.”

“But you were smart. I saw the inscription on your book that your teacher wrote. She thought a lot of you.”

“Miss Jacobs? Yeah, she did. But that was when I was living with Clayton. He claimed me when I was sixteen. Put me to work.”

They sit quietly, letting the old war tunes work a little nostalgia on them. Keller tosses back the rest of his martini. “Hey, we’re here to dance, not reminisce.”