Early the next morning a spare person trousered in denim and stoled in duffel slid out of the Hasken house. On the porch stood three solemn but uncrushed figures. Eyeglasses glinting, Nancy walked steadily. At the bus depot she leaned against the storage boxes. Istanbul? Too thievish. And Zurich was too square. In Amsterdam one could be run down by a bike. She crossed to the counter, bought her ticket, and gazed for a while at the coffee machine. She would make up her mind at Cook’s. Briefly Nan wished she’d enjoyed a more bracing adolescence, wished she’d put to sea before. Then, supporting her duffel bag, she climbed onto the southbound bus.
UNRAVISHED BRIDE
“TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF,” Marlene chattered to this Rafferty fellow. The wedding was going to her head, as all weddings did. There was nothing majestic about the suburban parish church, but the late September day was beautiful, and the bride, Marlene’s cousin’s daughter, was certainly pretty — she resembled Marlene’s grandmother. The groom was a salesman for the Raffertys. He was handsome in an untrustworthy way: hair too abundant, eyes too calculating, smile erupting with teeth. He might have passed for a young Kennedy. His name, however, was O’Riordan.
Somehow during the reception Marlene had become separated from her husband and their children. At these family affairs Paul and the kids always looked so interesting, or just so Jewish, that they got snapped up like savories. So she had begun to move alone through the receiving line, like a widow — no: like a maiden. Then this Hugh Rafferty materialized at her side. Marlene kissed the bride, Peggy Ann, and told the groom she hoped he’d be very happy. Hugh did the same. They drifted together into the swirl, and Hugh grabbed two champagnes from a passing tray.
“Tell me about yourself.” Not the most sophisticated of openings. But sophistication would leave this man cold — she knew that just by looking at him. She knew, too, that he had been gently bred and properly educated (Harvard, it turned out); he was respectful and observant; his wife was the sort who gets things done (she was director of publicity at a local college, he told Marlene with pride); he loved his many kids. He sailed and skied and played tennis, but a paunch was rising anyway.
His eyes were bright blue and his smile was the turned-up kind that children put on cookies. She meant to slip away as she often did at parties, fearful that she was restraining people ambitious to be elsewhere. But Hugh pleasantly stood fast, telling Marlene about himself. He managed the family lumber business and lived on the South Shore. He was the third generation to do both; love of work and pleasure in home were strong in him. His smile must once have haunted the dreams of virgins …
“You were at Wellesley?” he said. “You’d think we’d have met.”
“I was a fireman’s daughter, on scholarship, from Detroit. It’s my mother’s relatives at this wedding, though she’s gone, so’s my father. My sisters are scattered,” she babbled.
Paul came up. Marlene introduced the men, then said to her husband, “You’ve been a trooper with Aunt Tess. I was watching you. Is it her gout this time?”
“It’s her gums.”
“Are you a dentist?” Hugh asked.
“I’m a radiologist.”
“It’s all the same to Aunt Tess,” Marlene said, and they laughed, and then Hugh excused himself, shaking hands first.
That should have been that. Meeting again seemed unlikely — Hugh halfway to the Cape, Marlene near to town; his crowd rich, hers high-minded. If O’Riordan were to take an ax to Peggy Ann, they might see each other at the funeral, or the trial. Otherwise, no.
They saw each other five days later. Marlene’s avocation — she was an amateur biographer — sometimes took her to the Boston Public Library. Hugh’s work demanded his presence at the company’s Prudential Center office twice a week. He was headed there at quarter past twelve that Thursday; she was about to enter the library.
“Hello!” he called.
The usual flurries. And then — he so easily might not have said it—“Have you had lunch yet?”
“I … don’t have lunch, usually.”
“Then you can’t have had it yet. Have it with me.”
Once in a while at a college party some tall handsome boy, caught by her alert face, had danced with her … She walked next to Hugh, along Boylston Street, along Clarendon. She wished her friends could see her.
They talked easily. Neither liked to worry a subject to death. They passed up wine and shared a dessert. Afterward they retraced their steps. At the entrance to the library she turned and shook hands.
“Thank you very much,” she said, looking up at him. “You’ve reminded me of the pleasures of having lunch.”
“Let me do it again,” he said relinquishing her hand and putting his own in his pocket. Don’t make too much of this, his attitude said.
“I’m here every Thursday,” she lied.
“Next Thursday, then? Tell me where you usually work.”
“I drift from section to section,” she said. “I could arrange to be in bound periodicals. Near Fortune, say.”
“Fine. At about one?”
So it began — Thursday lunches. They feasted at taverns and went hungry at salad bars. They ate raw fish wrapped in seaweed. One Thursday when Hugh was in a hurry they sat at a doughnut counter. The next week he insisted on several courses at the Ritz.
At Christmastime they took an enforced break while Hugh and his family went south. In February, Marlene had a week-long flu; that Thursday morning, trembling, she called his office.
“Mr. Rafferty, please,” she said to the secretary, who sounded gorgeous. “Ms. Winokaur calling.”
“Marlene?” he said when he picked up. She had never before heard his voice on the telephone. Her bowels turned to water; but that was probably the flu. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, when she told him she was too ill to come out. “Feel better.” His voice was frank and unashamed. Anyone hearing the conversation would have assumed that they were merely two friends canceling a luncheon appointment.
And were they anything else? Their weekly meetings couldn’t be more blameless if some Sister made them a threesome. They were as public as statues. They talked about politics, basketball, first communions they had lived through, the lives she investigated, the trees he loved. They talked about the few people they knew in common (the young O’Riordans were expecting a baby already). They were like college boy and college girl on that outmoded, rule-bound thing: a date. But dates were only the beginning, weren’t they — the slow beginning of a series that became hurried, became precipitous, came to a head, and ended in either a broken heart or a ceremony in a stone church. “How did I get here?” more than one panicky bride had said to Marlene. How did we get here? Marlene wondered now. Where are we going?
On the first warm Thursday in May, they bought a bag of pretzels and ate them on the bank of the Charles. They sat on Hugh’s raincoat. He loosened his tie. Hundreds of men all over the city were loosening their ties in the spring warmth. Yet she had to look away until she felt her flush recede.
They spent most summer Thursdays picnicking on the river or watching swan boats in the public garden. If it rained they sat at a sidewalk café under an umbrella. Their vacations happened to coincide — temporally, not geographically; the Raffertys went camping in Wyoming, the Winokaurs exchanged houses with a family in Hampstead. September found them both back in town. It was almost a year since they’d first met.