“I’m drinking Gimlets and listening to Death and Transfiguration.”
“Still drinking Gimlets?”
“Not still. Again. I took time out to drink a bottle of white Burgundy.”
“Aren’t you afraid of becoming drunk?”
“Not at all. In fact, I’m cultivating it.”
“Darling, are you unhappy?”
“I am. I’m full of gin and sorrow.”
“Is Sid there?”
“No, Sid is not here. Sid’s gone. Sid is off discussing something with Rose Pogue.”
“Really? A thing like that can go on forever with Rose.”
“True. Rose is an exceptionally gregarious intellectual type. Windy is what she is.”
“Couldn’t we get together?”
“We could, indeed, but I don’t think it would be wise.”
“Oh, come on, darling. Don’t be such a coward.”
“Come where?”
“Well, I’m staying at the hotel, of course, but I don’t think you had better come here. Do you remember Dreamer’s Park?”
“How can you ask? We stopped there now and again in the past to do a little necking in the old bandstand.”
“That’s exactly the place, darling. Wouldn’t it be exciting to be in the old bandstand again? Like old times. I’ll meet you there if you’ll come. Will you?”
“Yes, I will.”
“In half an hour?”
“I’ll have to walk. It may take a little longer.”
“As soon as possible, darling. Please hurry.”
She hung up, and I did, too, and if you are thinking that I was a damn fool. I won’t argue the point, but I would like to say at least that circumstances were extenuating, and everything, as you can see, was working just right to come out all wrong in an afternoon and an evening and a night that were filled with the nostalgia and idiocy of going and gone.
Death and Transfiguration was out of the Largo and into the Allegro. I went over to the player and turned the reject dial, and the arm lifted, and the music stopped. I closed and locked the back door and went out of the house the front way, and all this time I was trying to think of Beth only and not at all of Sid, instead of Sid only and not at all of Beth, hut this did not work perfectly, or even very well, for Sid is not the kind of person you can just quit thinking of in an instant, even for someone like Beth.
“What the hell!” I said to myself in my mind. “I am only innocently going to see an old girl for old time’s sake.”
Like hell you are! Sid said in my mind. You are going to see an old girl for tonight’s sake, and not so damn innocently, either, if you ask me.
I hadn’t asked her, but she kept telling me, and I kept trying not to listen and to think only of Beth as I walked along. Dreamer’s Park was quite a long walk away, on the other side of town, and as an aid to the exclusion of Sid, who refused to be mute or invisible. I began to remember how it used to be with Beth and me in the pre-Thatcher days, and this is the way it was.
Beth had been a girl around town, born there and growing up there, and I had known her since way back. She had always been the kind of girl that boys notice, even when she was a very small girl being noticed by very small boys, but later, sometime in high school, she was suddenly the loveliest girl in the world. I was lucky then, in high school, for Beth took a fancy to me that was somewhat greater than, if not exclusive of the fancies she had in varying degrees for others.
This was the early period of our ancient era. The middle period lasted for nine years and was characterized mainly by my absence from town. I spent most of seven of the nine at the state university in pre-law and law, and then I worked two more for The Adjutant General. I was released, as they say, under honorable conditions, and came home. End of middle period.
I had seen Beth now and then during this time, of course, but not often and never for long, and in the final eighteen months of it, not at all. Now I was home to stay, honorable but undistinguished, and there was Beth still. If she was not exactly waiting for me, still she was there. She was more or less engaged, in fact, to Sherman Pike, who was about my age and who had become editor of the Record, the local daily, during my absence. Sherm had a good brain and considerable talent, a fine and sensitive fellow, and it was generally conceded that he had a fair prospect of becoming important. I had been anticipating more of Beth, but I was prepared, after I discovered how matters had developed with her and Sherm, to withdraw all claims and look elsewhere for diversion.
But Beth wouldn’t have it that way. Her fancy for Gideon Jones was still strong, although not exclusive, and pretty soon we had taken up what we had never quite put down. It was too bad about Sherm, but as things turned out, it didn’t make much difference to him, anyhow, for it wasn’t long after my return when he went home one evening and died. He’d had rheumatic fever as a boy, and the doctor said that it was an impaired heart that caused it. He was buried on a Wednesday afternoon, having had no time to become important after all, in the cemetery on the east edge of town.
Everything was satisfactory with Beth and me. Even intense and exciting. She went out a Couple of times with Wilson Thatcher, and I raised a mild sort of hell about it, but she said it was only for a little variety and to help him spend some money, of which I was short constantly and he never. Then, to get it over with, there was the night when they got married, and that was the end of it. For seven years at least.
I won’t go into those seven years, except to say that they were rather distressing in the beginning, and I wished that it had been I who died of an impaired heart instead of Sherman Pike. My own was impaired, I felt, but I didn’t die of it, and when Sid came along I was glad I hadn’t. We were married after a while, and it was a good marriage, and I thought of Beth only now and then.
Until tonight, that is, when I tried to think of her exclusively in the evasion of my conscience. This sad summer night of gin and cicadas at the end of seven years. Walking through the night across the town in spite of what my common sense told me was wrong, and despite Sid.
In your own town, if it is a town of a certain size and character, you probably have a Dreamer’s Park. It is not large, occupying a square block, and it is thickly planted with indigenous trees, possibly oaks and maples and elms and sycamores. Gravel paths, bordered with red bricks set edgewise in the earth, cross the park diagonally from corner to corner, and various gravel tributaries branch off less geometrically from these. In the center of the park, so that the two diagonal paths must coincide briefly to make their ways around it in a circle, is a wooden bandstand badly needing a new paint job and repair.
The park is old, as age is reckoned in your town, and not so much use is made of it now as used to be. A few children play there on warm, dry days. The green benches under the frees are mostly occupied by old men who have nothing much to do, and who walk there slowly to sit and rest and dream before walking slowly home again. At night, sometimes, lovers stop by.
This was Dreamer’s Park, to which I was going, and after a while I got there. Arriving at the bandstand. I went a quarter of a turn around the circle and up the rickety steps. The stand was also circular, with a shingled peaked roof, and all around the perimeter was a built-in bench that was no more than a hard seat braced at intervals with two-by-fours, open space between the seat and the floor. I sat down on the bench and began to wait, looking out into the park and listening for the sound of Beth’s feet on the gravel walk, but the only sounds I heard came from the four bounding streets, where cars and pedestrians passed sparsely in four directions.
Time passed. So, on the four streets, did the sparse cars, the even sparser pedestrians. And so, in the bandstand, did the expectations of Gideon Jones, who had been tricked and traduced in the tradition of the past.