Meanwhile, she was putting away the napkins that Rebecca had set out and bringing forth others — neither better nor worse, just different. Rebecca smiled to herself.
After they had finished their meal (which was, as always, bland and pallid-tasting, so underseasoned that no amount of salt seemed able to set things right), they watched the news on the huge old black-and-white TV in the living room. “Oh, honestly,” her mother kept telling the announcer. “Oh, for gracious sake.” She plucked irritably at the crease in her slacks. “Look at that,” she said when a group of congressmen appeared on the screen. “Children are running the country now. Every one of those men is younger than I am.”
“Well, but…” Rebecca said. She hesitated. She said, “Everyone just about everywhere’s younger than you are, by now.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that, thank you,” her mother said. “But it’s more noticeable, somehow, when they’re the government. You know? If I thought about it long enough — the whole U.S. in these people’s hands — I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”
“For me,” Rebecca said, “it’s just the opposite. Those men are younger than I am, too; at least a lot of them are. But I look at their gray hair and I think, ‘Old guys,’ as if I didn’t realize that I’m getting old myself.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” her mother said. “Fifty-three! A mere child.”
The congressmen faded away and a throng of soldiers appeared, wearing antique uniforms but sauntering across a field in a distinctly modern, offhand manner. They were reenacting one of the major battles of the Civil War, a reporter explained. Every attempt had been made to ensure that their equipment was authentic, although of course they were not using live ammunition.
“Men,” Rebecca’s mother said. “If they can’t find any good reason to fight, they have to make one up.”
The clock on the mantel struck the quarter hour, playing part of a hymn in golden-throated notes. One of the men fell down on a hillock of grass.
“Do you remember your paper on Robert E. Lee?” her mother asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“You invented this whole new theory about why he chose to side with the South. Remember? Your professor was thrilled.”
“Professor Lundgren,” Rebecca recalled. She hadn’t thought of him in years — his high, veined forehead and translucent hair.
“Come see him in his office, he said. He had such big plans for you! That’s when you decided to change your major to history.”
Rebecca said, “Oh, well.” She was afraid they might be working around to how she’d dropped out of college. “No great loss, really,” she said. “I don’t think it was history that interested me so much as… tracking down the clues, you know? Like a kind of detective story. Coming across that book no one else had bothered to read; it was the first time I’d seen the fun of independent research.”
“He wanted you to expand your paper into an honors project. But before you even got started, bang! Joe Davitch hove into view.”
“Oh, well.”
“And poor Will Allenby; poor Will,” her mother said, making a sudden right-angle turn. “He never even knew what hit him! One day you two were as good as engaged, and the next day you’d married a man nobody knew from Adam.”
“It wasn’t the next day,” Rebecca said. “It wasn’t quite as sudden as that.”
“It was as far as anybody hereabouts could tell.”
Fair enough, Rebecca supposed. It was true that she had kept Joe a secret. But at the start it had seemed so innocent — just a casual visit when he happened to be passing through Macadam. (Though if it had really been that casual, why had she not mentioned it to Will?) He had taken her for a sandwich at a diner just off campus, entertained her with a couple of funny stories about his work. The party the evening before, he said, had been a wedding reception where the bridal couple’s mothers had nearly come to blows. “We all know perfectly well,” the groom’s mother had shouted, “why your daughter is getting married in a dress with an umpire waistline!” Rebecca had laughed, and Joe had sat back and watched her with a fond, considering smile that made her wonder, suddenly, whether they already knew each other from some earlier time in her life that she had simply forgotten. But no, she surely would have remembered this larger-than-life man with the complicated upper lip that reminded her of a cursive letter M. “You were laughing the first night I saw you, too,” he told her. “You were enjoying the party more than anyone else in the room.”
She didn’t contradict him.
Everything might have turned out differently if she had.
He said he had started the Open Arms in 1951, when he’d left college for financial reasons after his father — an ironically uninsured insurance agent — had died without warning. “So is that… what you do?” Rebecca asked him. “I mean, is that your whole profession?”
“Yes, there you have it,” he said. “Nothing in my life but parties, parties, parties.”
She glanced at him, thinking she had detected a certain edge in his voice. But then he went on to give a very amusing account of a christening celebration where a child had dropped the baby into the punch bowl, and she decided she’d been imagining things.
She did tell him about Will Allenby. Or she alluded to him, at least: she said, “my date and I,” when discussing a movie she’d seen. Granted, she didn’t use the term boyfriend. But that would have been sort of tactless, wouldn’t it? Sort of bragging and inconsiderate.
Will Allenby was long-boned and slender and self-contained, with a cloud of yellow curls and an expression of luminous sweetness. He attended Macadam too — certainly not by coincidence — and they were planning to marry as soon as they graduated. This was in the 1960s, when half their classmates seemed to be sleeping with the other half, but they themselves were waiting till after their wedding. At the end of every evening, they kissed and kissed and kissed, clinging to each other, trembling, but then they parted company — Will to go off to his dorm, Rebecca to hers. “Au revoir,” Will always said, because using the word goodbye, he claimed, would make him too sad. Rebecca found this incredibly romantic, especially when he remembered to gargle that first r the way the French did.
None of this came up in her conversation with Joe at the diner, however, or in any of their other conversations. For there were other conversations. He telephoned two days later to solicit her advice about a Sweet Sixteen party. Rebecca had never been Sweet Sixteen herself (she’d been sixteen-going-on-forty, she felt), but nobody would have guessed it from her flood of helpful suggestions. And when he dropped by the following week on his way to a linen outlet, although Macadam wasn’t really on his way at all, wouldn’t her friends have been surprised to see how readily she slid into his car to accompany him, and how authoritatively she coached him on his selection of cocktail napkins, embroidered guest towels, and stenciled table runners!
“I find myself in Macadam” became his regular excuse, although Macadam was nearly an hour’s drive from Baltimore, over near D.C. “I find myself in Macadam and I wondered if you’d like to…” Grab a cup of coffee. Hunt a book in the college bookstore. Help select new stemware. In the course of three weeks he visited seven times, and after every visit, her first act was to return to her room and check her own face in the mirror. Her pink cheeks and her shining eyes, still a bit damp from laughter, and her heavy crown of braids. Was this how Joe Davitch saw her?