"We'll be back in a half-hour or so, Daughter," Mr Plowman said.
Noah winced a little at the "Daughter". It was like a bad play about life on the farm in 1900, and he had an unreal sense of melodrama and heavy contrivance as he held the door open and he and Mr Plowman went out into the snowy street. He caught a glimpse of Hope sitting behind the window, staring anxiously at them, and then they were walking slowly and deliberately past the closed shop-fronts on the cleared sidewalks, in the harsh, windy cold.
They walked without speaking for almost two minutes, their shoes making a dry crunching on the scraps of snow that the shovels had left on the pavements. Then Mr Plowman spoke.
"How much," he asked, "do they charge you in the hotel?"
"Two-fifty," Noah said.
"For one day?" Mr Plowman asked.
"Yes."
"Highway robbers," Mr Plowman said. "All hotel-keepers."
Then he fell back into silence and they walked quietly once more. They walked past Marshall's feed and grain store, past the drug-store of F. Kinne, past J. Gifford's men's clothing shop, past the law offices of Virgil Swift, past John Harding's butcher shop and Mrs Walton's bakery, past the furniture and undertaking establishment of Oliver Robinson, and N. West's grocery store.
Mr Plowman's face was set and rigid, and as Noah looked from his sharp, quiet features, non-committally arranged under the old-fashioned Sunday hat, to the store-fronts, the names went into his brain like so many spikes driven into a plank by a methodical, impartial carpenter. Each name was an attack. Each name was a wall, an announcement, an arrow, a reproof. Subtly, Noah felt, in an ingenious quiet way, the old man was showing Noah the close-knit homogeneous world of plain English names from which his daughter sprang. Deviously, Noah felt, the old man was demanding, how will an Ackerman fit here, a name imported from the broil of Europe, a name lonely, careless, un-owned and dispossessed, a name without a father or a home, a name rootless and accidental.
It would have been better to have the brother here, Noah thought, talking, fulminating, with all the old, familiar, ugly, spoken arguments, rather than this shrewd, silent Yankee attack.
They passed the business section, still in silence. A weathered, red-brick school building reared up across a lawn, covered with dead ivy.
"Went to school there," Mr Plowman said, with a stiff gesture of his head. "Hope."
A new enemy, Noah thought, looking at the plain old building, crouched behind its oak trees, another antagonist lying in wait for twenty-five years. There was some motto carved into the weathered stone above the portal and Noah squinted to read it. "YE SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH", the faded letters proclaimed to the generations of Plowmans who had walked under it to learn how to read and write and how their forefathers had set foot on the rock of Plymouth in the blustery weather of the seventeenth century, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Noah could almost hear his own father reading the words, the dead voice ringing out of the tomb with rhetorical, flaring relish.
"Cost twenty-three thousand dollars," Mr Plowman said, "back in 1904. WPA wanted to tear it down and put up a new one in 1935. We stopped that. Waste of the taxpayers' money. Perfectly good school."
They continued walking. There was a church a hundred yards down the road, its steeple rising slender and austere into the morning sky. That's where it's going to happen, Noah thought despairingly. This is the shrewdest weapon coming up. There are probably six dozen Plowmans buried in that yard, and I'm going to be told in their presence.
The church was built of white wood and lay delicately and solidly on its sloping, snowy lawns. It was balanced and reserved and did not cry out wildly to God, like the soaring cathedrals of the French and the Italians, but rather addressed Him in measured, plain terms, brief, dryly musical and to the point.
"Well," said Mr Plowman while the church was still fifty yards away, "we've probably gone far enough." He turned.
"Like to go back?"
"Yes," Noah said. He was dazed and puzzled, and walked automatically, almost unseeingly, as they started back towards the hotel. The blow had not fallen yet, and there was no indication when it would fall. He glanced at the old man's face. There was a look of concentration and puzzlement there, among the granite lines, and Noah felt that he was searching painfully in his mind for the proper cold, thoughtful words with which to dismiss his daughter's lover, words that would be fair but decisive, reasonable but final.
"You're doing an awful thing, young fellow," Mr Plowman said, and Noah felt his jaw grow rigid as he prepared to fight.
"You're putting an old man to the test of his principles. I won't deny it. I wish to God you would turn around and get on the train and go back to New York and never see Hope again. You won't do that, will you?" He peered shrewdly at Noah.
"No," said Noah. "I won't."
"Didn't think you would. Wouldn't've been up here in the first place if you would." The old man took a deep breath, stared at the cleared pavements before his feet, as he walked slowly at Noah's side. "Excuse me if I've given you a pretty glum walk through town," he said. "A man goes a good deal of his life living more or less automatically. But every once in a while, he has to make a real decision. He has to say to himself, now, what do I really believe, and is it good or is it bad? The last forty-five minutes you've had me doing that, and I'm not fond of you for it. Don't know any Jews, never had any dealings with them. I had to look at you and try to decide whether I thought Jews were wild, howling heathen, or congenital felons, or whatever.
… Hope thinks you're not too bad, but young girls've made plenty of mistakes before. All my life I thought I believed one man was born as good as another, but thank God I never had to act on it till this day. Anybody else show up in town asking to marry Hope, I'd say, 'Come out to the house. Virginia's got turkey for dinner…'"
They were in front of the hotel now. Noah hadn't noticed it, listening to the old man's earnest voice, but the door of the hotel opened and Hope came quickly out. The old man stopped and wiped his mouth reflectively as his daughter stood there staring at him, her face worried and set-looking.
Noah felt as though he had been confined to a sick bed for weeks, and the list of names on the store-fronts, the Kinnes and Wests and Swifts marshalled behind him, and the names on the tombstones in the churchyard, and the cold, unrelenting church itself, and the deliberate voice of the old man, suddenly, all together, with the pale, harrowed sight of Hope herself, became intolerable. He had a vision of his warm, untidy room near the river, with the books and the old piano, and he longed for it with an aching intensity.
"Well?" Hope said.
"Well," her father said slowly. "I've just been telling Mr Ackerman, there's turkey for dinner."
Slowly, Hope's face broke into a smile. She leaned over and kissed her father. "What in Heaven took so long?" she asked, and, dazedly, Noah knew it was going to be all right, although at the moment he was too spent and weary to feel anything about it.
"Might as well take your things, young man," Mr Plowman said. "No sense giving those robbers all your money."
"Yes," Noah said. "Yes, of course." He moved slowly and dreamily up the steps into the hotel. He opened the door and looked back. Hope was holding her father's arm. The old man was grinning. It was a little forced and a little painful, but it was a grin.
"Oh," said Noah, "I forgot. Merry Christmas."
Then he went in to get his bag.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE draft board was in a large, bare loft over a Greek restaurant. The smell of frying oil and misused fish swept up in waves. The floor was dirty. There were only two bare lights glaring down on the rickety wooden camp chairs and the cluttered desks with the two plain secretaries boredly typing forms. A composition wall divided the waiting-room from the section where the board was meeting, and a hum of voices filtered through. There were about a dozen people sitting on camp chairs, grave, almost middle-aged men in good business suits, an Italian boy, in a leather jacket, with his mother, several young couples, holding hands defensively. They all look, Michael thought, as though they are at bay, resentful, bitter, staring at the frayed paper American flag and the mimeographed and printed announcements on the walls.