“Excuse things,” Tweany murmured. He left her standing in the kitchen as he prowled, tomcat-wise, from room to room. His possessions seemed to be safe: nobody had stolen his shirts; nobody had ruffled his drapes; nobody had drunk his whiskey.
In the kitchen a slight pool of water shone; the linoleum was damp with evidence of the catastrophe. But the heater had been repaired and the mess mopped up.
“Fine,” Tweany said. “They did a good job.”
Subdued, aware now that her alarm had been wasted, Mary Anne padded here and there, examining bookcases, peering out of windows. The apartment was very high up; she could see across town. Along the horizon ran a series of clear yellow lights.
“What’s those lights?” she asked Tweany.
He was indifferent. “A road, maybe.”
Mary Anne breathed in the faintly musty scent of the apartment. “You have an interesting place. I’ve never seen a place like this. I’m still living at home with my parents. This gives me a lot of ideas for my own pad . . . you know?”
Lighting a cigarette, Tweany said: “Well, I was right.”
“I guess the plumber came.”
“Nothing was the matter after all.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, feeling uncertain of herself. “I was thinking about the people downstairs. I read an ad, once. An insurance company ad about a hot water heater that exploded.”
“Might as well take off your coat, now that you’re here.”
She did so, pushing it over the arm of a chair. “I guess I got you away from the Wren for nothing.” Hands in the back pockets of her jeans, she returned to the window.
“Beer?”
“Okay.” She nodded. “Thanks.”
“Eastern beer.” Tweany filled a glass for her. “Sit down.”
She sat, holding the glass awkwardly. It was cold and damp with drops of collected moisture.
“You don’t even know if there are any people downstairs,” Tweany said. He had made a point and he intended to develop it. “What makes you think there’s somebody downstairs?”
Staring at the floor Mary Anne murmured: “I don’t know. I just thought about it.”
Tweany settled himself on the edge of a heaped table; he was now located well above her, in a position of authority. The girl seemed quite small in comparison to him, and quite young. In her jeans and cotton shirt she might have been a teenager.
“How old are you?” Tweany demanded.
Her lips barely moved. “Twenty.”
“You’re just a little girl.”
It was so. She felt like a little girl, too; she could sense his eyes fastened mockingly on her. She was, she realized, about to undergo the ordeal of a lecture. She was going to be reprimanded.
“You got to grow up,” Tweany said. “You got a lot of things to learn.”
Mary Anne roused herself. “For cripe’s sake, don’t I know it? I want to learn things.”
“You live here in town?”
“Naturally,” she said, with bitterness. “You go to school?”
“No. I work in a lousy broken-down chrome furniture factory.”
“Doing what?”
“Stenographer.”
“Do you like it?”
“No.”
Tweany contemplated her. “Do you have talent?”
“What do you mean?”
“You should do something creative.”
“I just want to go somewhere where I can be with people and they won’t let me down.”
Tweany went over and turned on the radio. The sound of Sarah Vaughan drifted out and into the living room. “You’ve been dealt some hard knocks,” he said, returning to his vantage point.
“I don’t know. I haven’t had it so bad.” She sipped her beer. “Why does eastern beer cost more than western?”
“Because it’s finer.”
“I thought maybe it was the freight cost.”
“Did you?” His great contemptuous grin reappeared.
“See, I’ve never had a chance to find things out. Where do you find out things like that?”
“A lifetime of broad experience. A cultivated taste is acquired gradually over the years. To some people eastern beer and western beer taste exactly alike.”
Mary Anne didn’t like beer of any kind. Dutifully she sipped at her glass, wishing, in a wan sort of way, that she was older, that she had seen more and done more. She was aware of her ordinariness in comparison with Carleton Tweany.
“How does it feel to be a singer?” she asked.
“In art,” Tweany told her, “there’s a spiritual satisfaction that goes beyond material success. The American society is only interested in money. It’s shallow.”
“Sing something for me,” Mary Anne said suddenly. “I mean,” she murmured, “I like to hear you.”
“Such as?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Sing ‘Water Boy.’ ” She smiled at him. “I like that . . . you sang it at the Wren, one night.”
“It’s a favorite of yours, then?”
“We sang it once in grammar school assembly, years ago.” Her thoughts eddied back to her earlier life, when she, in scotch-plaid skirt and middy blouse, had trooped as part of an obedient line from one classroom to another. Crayon drawings, current events, air raid drills during the war . . .
“That was better,” she decided. “During the war. Why isn’t it like that now?”
“What war?”
“With the Nazis and the Japs. Were you in that?”
“I served in the Pacific.”
“Doing what?” She was instantly curious. “Hospital attendant.”
“Is it fun to work in a hospital? How’d you get to do it?”
“I signed up.” His activity in the war had never ranked high in his own estimation; he had come out as he had gone in: a private earning twenty-one dollars a month.
“How do you get to be a nurse?” she asked. “You take courses, like anything else.”
Mary Anne’s face glowed. “It must be wonderful to be able to devote your life to something real and important. A cause—like nursing.”
Distastefully, Tweany said: “Bathing old, dried-up men. There’s no fun in that.”
Mary Anne’s interest waned. “No,” she agreed, sharing his aversion. “I wouldn’t like that. But it wouldn’t be that all the time, would it? Mostly it would be healing people.”
“What was so fine about the war?” Tweany said. “You never seen a war, young lady. You never seen a man get killed. I’ve seen that. War’s an awful business.”
She didn’t mean that, of course. She meant the unanimity that had arisen during the war, the evaporation of internal hostility. “My grandfather died in 1940,” she said aloud. “He used to keep a map of the war, a big wall map. He stuck pins in it.”
“Yes,” Tweany agreed, unmoved.
But she was greatly moved, because Grandfather Reynolds had been a vast and important person to her; he had taken care of her. “He used to explain to me about Munich and the Czechs,” she said. “He loved the Czechs. Then he died. I was—” She computed—“I was seven years old.”
“Very young,” Tweany murmured.
Grandfather Reynolds had loved the Czechs, and she had loved him; and, perhaps, he was the only human being she had ever had real affection for. Her father was a danger, not a person. Since one certain night when she had come home late, and he, in the living room, had caught her, had really caught her: not in a game. Since that night she had been afraid. And he, the grinning little man, knew it. And enjoyed it.
“Ed was working in a defense plant in San Jose,” she said. “But my grandfather was home; he was old. He used to own a ranch in the Sacramento Valley. And he was tall.” She felt herself drifting, falling away into her own thoughts. “I remember that . . . he used to lift me up and swing me around a long way off the ground. He was too old to drive; when he was a boy he rode on a horse.” Her eyes shone. “And he wore a vest, and a big silver ring he bought from an Indian.”