She hung fire an instant longer, and then gave a decisive nod. “All right,” she said.
v
It was a strange setting for autobiography. Evelyn had wanted to avoid stopping anywhere in Eustace, where she would be recognized, so they’d driven on up to Metal and turned left on 75, and midway between Metal and Richmond Furnace they’d found this place, a low square building with white aluminum siding and skimpy windows framing neon beer signs. There were a pickup truck and an elderly Dodge parked on the gravel beside the building, and behind it they could catch a glimpse of water. “Conococheague Creek,” Evelyn said, and when he asked her if that wasn’t the same one she’d showed him on Lockridge’s property back in May she said, “No, that’s the Conodoguinet.” At his expression she laughed, the first crack in her wall of tension.
Inside, there was a three-sided bar forming a square in the center of the room, with an interior wall on the fourth side. On the left and right walls were booths, while to the front were games; shuffleboard bowling machine to the left, pinball machine to the right. The rest rooms, with canine identifications, were at the rear, Pointers at the extreme left and Setters at the extreme right. Four men in work clothing, three of them wearing hats, sat at the bar around on the left side, discussing with the bartender a local bowling league.
Robert led her to a booth midway down on the right, and remained standing after she was seated. “What would you like?”
She considered. “A vodka sour, I think.”
He bent forward and lowered his voice to say, “I don’t think this is the place for mixed drinks.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, I should have thought of that. Do you think he’ll have tonic?”
“We can try.”
“Vodka and tonic.”
“Done.”
An island behind the bar served the function of a back-bar, lined with bottles and glasses, dominated in front by the cash register, and causing the bartender a long walk from the bowling league around to where Robert stood with one hand on the bar, waiting to give his order. Yes, he did have tonic — no, not Schweppes, a local brand, that’s all right — and he also had vodka. He seemed unsure what to charge once he’d made the drinks, and after some hesitation asked for a dollar thirty. The number was so patently arbitrary that Robert determined then and there to have a second round in this place, just to see if the bartender would remember it. He paid, and brought the drinks to the booth while the bartender strolled around the cash register and back to his conversation.
“I needed that,” Evelyn said, and a minute later, “Sometimes I’m sorry I quit smoking,” and after another minute, “Isn’t it amazing how you can live in a neighborhood and not know half the places in it.”
Robert reached out and put his hand over hers on the table top. He could feel it vibrating, like a tuning fork struck a long time before. “The vodka is supposed to calm you down,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have the feeling there’s more to come, and I don’t want it to be in front of you.”
Neither did Robert. He said something that was supposed to be funny, but wasn’t, and then something that was supposed to be a casual conversation starter, but it wasn’t, and then all at once he was telling her about Kit. Which meant he was telling her about football, which meant he was telling her the story of his life.
He liked to think afterward that he’d done it on purpose, told her his own troubles as a way of making her more comfortable about having revealed hers to him, and perhaps at a level below conscious thought that was true, but on the conscious level he was doing nothing more than take his turn. She had unburdened herself, or at least she’d started to, so now he was unpacking his own troubles.
But whether he’d had a therapeutic intent or not, his true confession turned out to have been good therapy. She listened, she became interested, she asked questions and took his side and consoled with him, and when he was finished she told her own story, about her dead husband and her daughter and having never lived on her own in her life and having no one left now but her grandfather, and how she knew it was past time for her to leave the nest and fly on her own, but how every year it became not more easy but more difficult. “I’m twenty-seven now,” she said, and he said, “I’m thirty-one.” Then they began to compare feelings and reactions and attitudes, and discovered that being widowed was essentially no different from being divorced, if the person who divorced you is now married to a Delta Air Lines executive, and that living alone in a five-room house was essentially no lonelier than living with relatives and servants in a thirty-room house, if the person you really wanted to live with was in none of the thirty rooms, and that having an occupation you didn’t care a rap about was essentially no emptier than having no occupation at all, and that the worst thing of all was not having anybody that you could really talk to.
They were on their third round of drinks — the bartender had remembered, and Robert now suspected he’d written it down somewhere after the first round, in case the question would come up again — when Evelyn said, “It’s after six! I’d better call home.”
He watched her walk to the phone booth — up front, in the corner beside the pinball machine — and once again he was aware of her as a woman. But he didn’t pursue the idea; there was no future in it.
When she came back she said, “Everything’s all right. But I really have to get back soon.”
“Do you ever eat dinner out? Not here, I know a place that isn’t quite so fancy.”
She smiled, but shook her head. “Not tonight. Thank you. But Dinah expects me, I always read to her before she goes to bed.”
“Ah.”
“That makes me child-ridden, doesn’t it? But I don’t like to disappoint her, I’m the only one she has.”
“You must go out sometime.”
“If I do, I tell her ahead of time. She doesn’t even know I’m away from the house.” She looked at her watch again, but he knew the actual time was irrelevant. “I do have to get back,” she said.
“I tell you what,” he said. “Today’s Monday. Your grandfather invited me back Friday to talk with him about this Congress idea again, and I said I’d come. That’s four days. Is that enough time to prepare Dinah for an evening without Mommy?”
“Of course,” she said, smiling.
“Then we’ll have dinner.”
“Fine.”
vi
“In Germany between 1918 and 1922,” Robert wrote, “assassinations by leftists numbered twenty-two, and by rightists three hundred fifty-four. (Peter Gay, Weimar Culture [1968], 20.) America’s experiences with political assassination have reflected the same rightward bias. Is it not a biologically sound evolutionary concept that a breed of left-wing radicals will sometime emerge for whom assassination is as valid a political methodology as it now is on the extreme right?”
It was raining today. The slanted portion of the study ceiling was actually roof, on which raindrops were rapping funereally. This was Thursday, three days since his visit to the Lockridge estate, one day before his scheduled return, and the article was moving slowly, too slowly. Because it was Lockridge he was thinking of, not the speculative might-have-been future of this essay.
What was he going to say to Lockridge tomorrow? What did he want to say?
He wanted to say, “Go ahead.” Despite all, that’s what he wanted to say.
There was just something exciting about the whole idea of Bradford Lockridge running for Congress, the thought stirred him and he had to admit it. And of course he’d be expected to play a part in the campaign, that was clear enough, and possibly afterward, when Lockridge was in the House. He would be a member of Bradford Lockridge’s “team,” he would be one of the men working with the man who would have to be the most prestigious Congressman in the United States. That idea impressed him, to be on a winning team again, and he found himself very resistant to all argument against Lockridge making the race, though in his more dispassionate moments he had to admit those arguments were compelling.