‘Sixteen,’ Oliver croaked.
‘Seventeen,’ the girl responded quickly, her voice carrying over the din.
‘It’s a damned pair,’ Oliver shouted, shaking his head. He opened his palm and unrolled the bills, checking the denominations. Seventeen. That was it. Not even small change.
He turned again and looked at the girl. She was calm, almost serene. But there was no mistaking her determination.
‘I have seventeen,’ the auctioneer said, staring at Oliver, his glare offensive, intimidating.
‘Eighteen,’ Oliver shouted, his voice crackling. The room seemed to grow quieter. The sound of pounding rain faded. Knowing he hadn’t the money, he felt sinister, manipulative. His breath came in short gasps.
‘Nineteen,’ the girl responded. ‘Twenty,’ he shot back.
The girl hesitated and a lump rose in his throat. He looked at the girl again. Their eyes met. There was no mistaking the fierceness of her determination.
‘Twenty-one,’ she snapped.
All right, he decided, nodding, thankful for the reprieve. Tough little bitch, he thought.
‘I have twenty-one once.’ The auctioneer paused, watching him. Oliver felt his blood rise. So I’m a coward, he told himself, wallowing in his humiliation.
‘Twice…’ The auctioneer shrugged. Down went the gavel. ‘Sold.’
Oliver sat through the rest of the auction in a funk. Hell, he could have borrowed the money. But why? What was the point? By the end of the auction he had calmed down, and when he went to pay for and collect his figure he confronted her.
‘It’s a pair,’ he said. He must have been eyeing the figure acquisitively because she seemed to draw it closer to her. ‘They go together.’
‘That’s not the way they were sold,’ she said, flashing green eyes, widely set, in rebuke.
‘He didn’t know what he was doing.’
‘I liked it,’ she said as they walked out of the parlor, huddling in the crowded hall as the group opened umbrellas and prepared to walk into the gusty rain.
‘All I had was seventeen bucks. I deliberately bid it up.’ He felt foolish and vindictive, telling her that.
‘I got carried away,’ he added, hoping to blunt his pettiness.
‘So did I,’ she admitted. ‘That’s me.’
‘Too damned stubborn.’
‘My father says tenacious.’
She smiled, showing white, even teeth. The smile warmed him and his antagonism faded. ‘Suppose I’d bid it up to a hundred?’
‘I was worried you would.’
‘You would have gone along?’
‘I hate to think about it.’
He returned her smile and moved with her to the doorway.
‘Why did you want it?’ he asked.
She hesitated, coy now. He sensed the give and take of flirtation.
‘It’s for one of the girls at the Chatham Arms. I’m a baking assistant for the summer. Her brother’s in Golden Gloves. She’s one of the maids. Takes a lot of crap. I thought it would be nice. Instead of a tip.’
He was touched, feeling guilty suddenly.
‘A shame to break up a pair. Even for a good cause.’
She opened her umbrella and stepped into the rain. He ducked under it, although it didn’t do either of them much good.
‘Hope you don’t mind.’
‘I’m a sportsmanlike winner.’
‘I’m a lousy loser.’
The Chatham Arms was on the other side of town and they walked through the main street. His hand covered hers as they jointly clutched the umbrella against the wind. The rain came at them horizontally and they finally took refuge in the doorway of a closed toy store.
By then they had traded vital statistics. Her name was Barbara Knowles. She was a student at Boston University. She had wanted to spend the summer as a volunteer for Jack Kennedy to help him win against Nixon, she told him. But she couldn’t afford that.
‘Anyway, I like baking. It’s fun. And the pay’s good.’
‘Unless you spend it all.’ He pointed to the figure wrapped in soggy newspapers.
‘You, too.’ She laughed and he noticed that her eyes were really hazel and had turned from green to brown in the late-afternoon light.
‘I guess I just like old things. They’ll be worth more than money someday. Like these figures.’
‘You can’t eat them.’
‘Unfortunately not. Anyway, I’ll have to avoid temptation. Better stay away from auctions,’ he told her. ‘Harvard Law is damned expensive. I start in the fall. My deal with my folks is that they pay tuition and I pay living expenses.’
They were huddled together in the tiny storefront entrance. When she spoke, he felt her warm breath against his cheek. A current, he knew, was passing between them. Something wonderful and mysterious. He felt her response.
‘Don’t give him away,’ he said, sensing his note of pleading. It was, after all, a symbol of their meeting. ‘Not yet.’
‘It’s mine,’ She pouted with mock sarcasm, holding it over his head like a club.
‘One isn’t much good without the other,’ he said. ‘It’s a twosome.’
‘I beat you fair and square,’ she said.
‘Well, the battle isn’t over yet,’ Oliver whispered, wondering if she had heard his voice above the beat of the rain.
‘Not yet,’ she agreed, smiling. She had heard him.
2
Through the dormer window of her third-floor room, Ann saw him open the side door of the garage. Holding his toolbox, he moved over the flagstone walk toward the house. A reddish spear of light from the slipping September sun bounced off the metal tools laid neatly in the box. Starded by the sudden glinting beam, she moved back out of the dormer’s niche, her heart pounding.
Hoping that she was out of his field of vision, she watched him pause and reattach a string of English ivy that had fallen from the high cedar fence. The fence formed a backdrop for a line of still-maturing arborvitaes that separated the back garden from the neighbor’s.
Seldom could she study him so minutely, free of her self-consciousness and clumsy shyness. Besides, she was certain that Oliver Rose viewed her as a country bumpkin from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that is, if he ever took the time to assess her seriously.
In his beige corduroys and blue plaid shirt, he looked oddly miscast as a man who worked with his hands most of his spare time. Even in his basement workroom – surrounded by his neatly hung power tools; his nuts, bolts, nails, and screws in little glass containers; his circular saw, lathe, and myriad mechanical gewgaws -he could not shed the image of his regular calling, a Washington lawyer. Or, as he characterized himself: ‘Just a plodding barrister.’
The deepening orange light set off his wavy, prematurely salty gray hair, which he still wore long, despite the new convention. His lightly speckled thick mustache and jet-black eyebrows gave him the look of an anglicized Omar Sharif, a resemblance quickly dissipated when his wide smile flashed and his blue eyes caught the right light, giving away his Irish antecedents.
If Oliver could have surmised the extent of her interest, he would have been flattered, of course, but appalled. Ann herself was appalled. The sensation had crept up on her, like the muggers who, she had been warned, prowled the Washington streets. Not here in the Kalorama section, of course, where there were almost as many embassies and legations as private residences and, therefore, fully protected by a vast army of special police. Her newly acquired neighborhood snobbery amused her as she recalled her sense of logic. She was afflicted, she decided, tearing her eyes from the dormer window, with an adolescent crush, an emotional aberration hardly worthy of a twenty-two-year-old woman. She was, after all, despite the warmth of her acceptance in the Roses’ household, merely a glorified au pair girl. The label, she knew, was unfair to them. They tried so hard to make her part of the family, and the free room and board, traded for vaguely defined ‘services’, gave her the wherewithal to pursue her history master’s at Georgetown University.