And he knew that elusive look—the look of dawning adulthood staring out of childish faces.
They grew them up too fast!
“No,” said Dean to himself. “No, it couldn’t be!”
And yet there was corroborative evidence: The high averages, the unusual number of scholarships, the disdain for athletics. And, as well, the general attitude. And the lack of juvenile delinquency—for years, Millville had been proud that its juvenile delinquency had been a minor problem. He remembered that several years ago he had been asked to write an article about it for a parent-teacher magazine.
He tried to remember what he had written in that article and slowly bits of it came back to him—the realization of parents that their children were a part of the family and not mere appendages; the role played by the churches of the town; the emphasis placed on the social sciences by the schools.
“And was I wrong?” he asked himself. “Was it none of these, but something else entirely—someone else entirely?”
He tried to work and couldn’t. He was too upset. He could not erase the smiling little faces that were staring up at him.
Finally he shoved the papers in a drawer and got up from the desk. He put on his worn topcoat and sat the battered old black felt hat atop his silver head.
On the ground floor, he found Stuffy herding the last of the servo-mechanisms into their cubby for the night. Stuffy was infuriated.
“It got itself caught in a heating grill,” he raged. “If I hadn’t gotten there in the nick of time, it would have wrecked the works.” He shook his head dolefully. “Them machines are fine when everything goes well. But just let something happen and they panic. It was best the old way, John.”
Stuffy slammed the door on the last of the waddling machines and locked it savagely.
“Stuffy, how well did you know Lamont Stiles?” asked Dean.
Stuffy rubbed his mustaches in fine deliberation. “Knew him well. Lamont and me, we were kids together. You were a little older. You were in the crowd ahead.”
Dean nodded his head slowly. “Yes, I remember, Stuffy. Odd that you and I stayed on in the old home town. So many of the others left.”
“Lamont ran away when he was seventeen. There wasn’t much to stay for. His old lady was dead and his old man was drinking himself to death and Lamont had been in a scrape or two. Everyone was agreed Lamont never would amount to nothing.”
“It’s hard for a boy when a whole town turns against him.”
“That’s a fact,” said the janitor. “There was no one on his side. He told me when he left that someday he’d come back and show them. But I just thought he was talking big. Like a kid will do, you know, to bolster up himself.”
“You were wrong,” said Dean.
“Never wronger, John.”
For Lamont Stiles had come back, more than thirty years after he had run away, back to the old weather-beaten house on Maple Street that had waited empty for him all the lonely years; had come back, an old man when he still was scarcely fifty, big and tough despite the snow-white hair and the skin turned cordovan with the burn of many alien suns; back from far wandering among the distant stars.
But he was a stranger. The town remembered him; he had forgotten it. Years in alien lands had taken the town and twisted it in his brain, and what he remembered of it was more fantasy than truth—the fantasy spawned by years of thinking back and of yearning and of hate.
“I must go,” Dean said. “Carrie will have supper ready. She doesn’t like to have it getting cold.”
“Good night, John,” said the janitor.
The sun was almost down when Dean came out the door and started down the walk. It was later than he’d thought. Carrie would be sore at him and she would bawl him out.
Dean chuckled to himself. There was no one quite like Carrie.
Not wife, for he’d never had a wife. Not mother or sister, for both of those were dead. But housekeeper, faithful all the years—and a bit of wife and sister, and sometimes even mother.
A man’s loyalties are queer, he thought. They blind him and they bind him and they shape the man he is. And, through them, he serves and achieves a kind of greatness, although at times the greatness may be gray and pallid and very, very quiet.
Not like the swaggering and the bitter greatness of Lamont Stiles, who came striding from the stars, bringing with him those three queer creatures who became the Sitters. Bringing them and installing them in his house on Maple Street and then, in a year or two, going off to the stars again and leaving them in Millville.
Queer, Dean thought, that so provincial a town as this should accept so quietly these exotic beings. Queerer still that the mothers of the town, in time, should entrust their children to the aliens’ care.
As Dean turned the corner into Lincoln Street, he met a woman walking with a knee-high boy.
It was Mildred Anderson, he saw—or had been Mildred Anderson, but she was married now and for the life of him he could not recall the name. Funny, he thought, how fast the young ones grew up. Not more than a couple of years ago, it seemed, that Mildred was in school—although he knew he must be wrong on that; it would be more like ten.
He tipped his hat, “Good evening, Mildred. My, how the boy is growing.”
“I doe to cool,” the child lisped.
His mother interpreted. “He means he goes to school. He is so proud of it.”
“Nursery school, of course.”
“Yes, Mr. Dean. The Sitters. They are such lovely things. And so good with children. And there’s the cost. Or, rather, the lack of it. You just give them a bouquet of flowers or a little bottle of perfume or a pretty picture and they are satisfied. They positively refuse to take any money. I can’t understand that. Can you, Mr. Dean?”
“No,” said Dean. “I can’t.”
He’d forgotten what a talker Mildred was. There had been a period in school, he recalled, when she had been appropriately nicknamed Gabby.
“I sometimes think,” she said, hurrying on so she’d miss no time for talk, “that we people here on Earth attach too much importance to money. The Sitters don’t seem to know what money is, or if they do, they pay no attention to it. As if it were something that was not important. But I understand there are other races like that. It makes one think, doesn’t it, Mr. Dean?”
And he remembered now another infuriating trait of Mildred’s—how she inevitably ended any string of sentences with a dangling question.
He didn’t try to answer. He knew an answer was not expected of him.
“I must be getting on,” he said. “I am late already.”
“It was nice to see you, Mr. Dean,” said Mildred. “I so often think of my days in school and sometimes it seems like just positively ages and there are other times when it seems no more than just yesterday and …”
“Very nice, indeed,” said Dean, lifting his hat to her, then almost scurrying off.
It was undignified, he grumbled to himself, being routed in broad daylight on a public street by a talkative woman.
As he went up the walk to the house, he heard Carrie bustling angrily about.
“Johnson Dean,” she cried the instant he came in the door, “you sit right down and eat. Your food’s already cold. And it’s my circle night. Don’t you even stop to wash.”
Dean calmly hung up his hat and coat.
“For that matter,” he said, “I guess I don’t need to wash. My kind of job, a man doesn’t get too dirty.”
She was bustling about in the dining area, pouring his cup of coffee and straightening up the bouquet of mums that served for the centerpiece.
“Since it’s my circle night,” she said, laying deliberate stress upon the words to shame him for being late, “I won’t stay to wash the dishes. You just leave them on the table. I will do them later.”