There were booths of dark wood along one side. My father sat down in one of them, and I slid in across from him. He asked me what kind of soda I would like, but I wasn't used to being alone with him in a public place and it made me shy. Also I didn't know what kinds there were. So he ordered a strawberry soda for me and a cup of coffee for himself.
The waitress had a black dress and a white cap and eyebrows plucked to thin curves, and a red mouth shiny as jam. She called my father Captain Chase and he called her Agnes. By this, and by the way he leaned his elbows on the table, I realised he must already be familiar with this place.
Agnes said was this his little girl, and how sweet; she threw me a glance of dislike. She brought him his coffee almost immediately, wobbling a little on her high heels, and when she set it down she touched his hand briefly. (I took note of this touch, though I could not yet interpret it.) Then she brought the soda for me, in a cone-shaped glass like a dunce cap upside down; it came with two straws. The bubbles went up my nose and made my eyes water.
My father put a sugar cube into his coffee and stirred it, and tapped the spoon on the side of the cup. I studied him over the rim of my soda glass. All of a sudden he looked different; he looked like someone I had never seen before-more tenuous, less solid somehow, but more detailed. I rarely saw him this close up. His hair was combed straight back and cut short at the sides, and was receding from his temples; his good eye was a flat blue, like blue paper. His wrecked, still-handsome face had the same abstracted air it often had in the mornings, at the breakfast table, as if he were listening to a song, or a distant explosion. His moustache was greyer than I'd noticed before, and it seemed odd, now that I considered it, that men had such bristles growing on their faces and women did not. Even his ordinary clothes had turned mysterious in the dim vanilla-scented light, as if they belonged to someone else and he had only borrowed them. They were too big for him, that was it. He had shrunk. But at the same time he was taller.
He smiled at me, and asked if I was enjoying my soda. After that he was silent and thoughtful. Then he took a cigarette out of the silver case he always carried, and lit it, and blew out smoke. "If anything happens," he said finally, "you must promise to look after Laura."
I nodded solemnly. What wasanything? What could happen? I dreaded some piece of bad news, though I couldn't have put a name to it. Maybe he might be going away-going overseas. Stories of the war had not been lost on me. However he did not explain further.
"Shake hands on it?" he said. We reached our hands across the table; his was hard and dry, like a leather suitcase handle. His one blue eye assessed me, as if speculating about whether I could be depended on. I lifted my chin, straightened my shoulders. I wanted desperately to deserve his good opinion.
"What can you buy for a nickel?" he said then. I was caught off-guard by this question, tongue-tied: I didn't know. Laura and I were not given any money of our own to spend, because Reenie said we needed to learn the value of a dollar.
From the inside pocket of his dark suit he took out his memorandum book in its pigskin cover and tore out a sheet of paper. Then he began talking about buttons. It was never too early, he said, for me to learn the simple principles of economics, which I would need to know in order to act responsibly, when I was older.
"Suppose you begin with two buttons," he said. He said your expenses would be what it cost you to make the buttons, and your gross revenues would be how much you could sell the buttons for, and your net profit would be that figure minus your expenses, over a given time. You could then keep some of the net profit for yourself and use the rest of it to make four buttons, and then you would sell those and be able to make eight. He drew a little chart with his silver penciclass="underline" two buttons, then four buttons, then eight buttons. Buttons multiplied bewilderingly on the page; in the column next to them, the money piled up. It was like shelling peas-peas in this bowl, pods in that. He asked me if I understood.
I scanned his face to see if he was serious. I'd heard him denounce the button factory often enough as a trap, a quicksand, a jinx, an albatross, but that was when he'd been drinking. Right now he was sober enough. He didn't look as if he was explaining, he looked as if he was apologising. He wanted something from me, apart from an answer to his question. It was as if he wanted me to forgive him, to absolve him from some crime; but what had he done to me? Nothing I could think of.
I felt confused, and also inadequate: whatever it was he was asking or demanding, it was beyond me. This was the first time a man would expect more from me than I was capable of giving, but it would not be the last.
"Yes," I said.
In the week before she died-one of those dreadful mornings-my mother said a strange thing, though I didn't consider it strange at the time. She said, "Underneath it all, your father loves you."
She wasn't in the habit of speaking to us about feelings, and especially not about love-her own love or anyone else's, except God's. But parents were supposed to love their children, so I must have taken this thing she said as a reassurance: despite appearances, my father was as other fathers were, or were considered to be.
Now I think it was more complicated than that. It may have been a warning. It may also have been a burden. Even if love wasunderneath it all, there was a great deal piled on top, and what would you find when you dug down? Not a simple gift, pure gold and shining; instead, something ancient and possibly baneful, like an iron charm rusting among old bones. A talisman of sorts, this love, but a heavy one; a heavy thing for me to carry around with me, slung on its iron chain around my neck.
Four
The cafe
The rain is light, but steady since noon. Mist rises from the trees, from the roadways. She comes past the front window with its painted coffee cup, white with a green stripe around it and three steam trails coming up out of it in wavering lines, as if three clutching fingers have slid down the wet glass. The door is marked CAFE in peeling gold letters; she opens it and steps inside, shaking her umbrella. It's cream-coloured, as is her poplin raincoat. She throws back the hood.
He's in the last booth, beside the swing door to the kitchen, as he said he'd be. The walls are yellowed by smoke, the heavy booths are painted a dull brown, each with a metal hen's-claw hook for coats. Men sit in the booths, only men, in baggy jackets like worn blankets, no ties, jagged haircuts, their legs apart and feet in boots planted flat to the floorboards. Hands like stumps: those hands could rescue you or beat you to a pulp and they would look the same while doing either thing. Blunt instruments, and their eyes as well. There's a smell in the room, of rotting planks and spilled vinegar and sour wool trousers and old meat and one shower a week, of scrimping and cheating and resentment. She knows it's important to act as if she doesn't notice the smell.
He lifts a hand, and the other men look at her with suspicion and contempt as she hurries towards him, her heels clacking on the wood. She sits down across from him, smiles with relief: he's here. He's still here.
Judas Priest, he says, you might as well have worn mink.
What did I do? What's wrong?
Your coat.
It's just a coat. An ordinary raincoat, she says, faltering. What's wrong with it?
Christ, he says, look at yourself. Look around you. It's too clean.
I can't get it right for you, can I? she says. I won't ever get it right.
You do, he says. You know what you get right. But you don't think anything through.
You didn't tell me. I've never been down here before-to a place like this. And I can hardly rush out the door looking like a cleaning woman-have you thought of that?