Wayne Buchanan was a tall man with heavy shoulders, handsome in a rather florid fashion. Later, when Donna was studying history in school, she thought that he actually resembled the Buchanan who had been fifteenth President of the United States, and this was ironic, besides being a coincidence of names and appearance, because the other Buchanan had been weak and a failure too. He had been, however, a failure on a high level, which was one thing, while Wayne Buchanan was a failure on a low level, which was quite another. He had somehow decided that selling was the thing he did best, and he was always leaving one job for another which promised to be better. But the promise was never kept, and he accomplished so many minor failures in such rapid succession that they seemed to combine in retrospect into one big indivisible failure together, which was really what they amounted to. Not that he looked or acted like the failure he was. His appearance remained impressive, and he supported his natural weakness with a rigidity of attitude that obscured the weakness as it supported it, and it was this rigidity that prevented him from disintegrating entirely.
He was known as a religious man. He said grace at the table and took his wife and daughter every Sunday to church, and because he had no confidence in his own moral stamina, he was particularly critical of the morals of others, and wished to impose upon them dogmas of belief and behavior that they did not wish to adopt for themselves. Donna did not object to grace or church, the truth being that she rather enjoyed these things for the comfortable feeling that they gave her for a short time afterward, nor did she object strenuously to continual admonitions to be a good girl, for she had no active intention of being anything else. What she objected to and despised was her father’s propensity for making formulistic goodness a substitute for genuine devotion and for the capacity to do anything whatever that amounted to a damn. She understood with a kind of childish insight that a person who does not feel himself successful has much to gain from believing himself good, and she might have tolerated this in a more casual relationship. But she could not tolerate it in a relationship which was supposed to invoke respect, if not love, and she never did.
Besides being basically a fraud, Wayne Buchanan was something of a sadist. In a petty way, of course, as was appropriate for a weak man. He enjoyed denying Donna the things she could have had, and he enjoyed prohibiting her things she could have done. Many things were denied her, it was true, because Buchanan never had very much money and simply could not afford to supply them, and this was a valid reason for denial that Donna would have accepted if it had ever been offered, but it wasn’t. Buchanan was constitutionally incapable of making such a simple admission, for it would have seemed to him a confession of impotence. His denials were always accompanied by some pompous hocus-pocus intended to make Donna believe that they were for her own benefit, as if not having whatever she wanted was necessarily good for her character, while having it would necessarily be bad. His phoniness in this respect was clearly evident, even to a child, and as she grew older — Donna the girl becoming Donna the woman — she learned to avoid the revolting routine by asking him at first for nothing she wanted and, a little later, by honestly not wanting anything he had to give.
Although she did not have as much as many children have when they are growing up, she always had, because of her mother’s talent and trade, all the pretty dresses that she could wear, and this was very important to a pretty girl. Her mother bought fabric at a remnant shop for a fraction of its regular cost, but it was good material that was only marked down because it was the last of a bolt or dye lot or of a pattern that was being discontinued. On Donna the finished dresses her mother made had a look of quality that more expensive dresses did not have on other girls. In the beginning, that is, the material was bought and the dresses made by the mother for the daughter, but after a while the buying and the making were done by the daughter for herself, who had, besides her mother’s skill with the machine, a better eye for color and its ultimate effect in design, and, most of all, a sure feeling for the design itself — whether it was right or wrong and why. Long before she took her correspondence course, she was making sketches in a cheap tablet and cutting patterns from newspapers.
Being pretty, and wearing with a flair her pretty dresses, she was attractive to boys, but she wasn’t particularly popular. There is a legitimate distinction here, of course — and if she was glad of the one, she was undisturbed by the other, for the truth was that boys interested her mildly but not excessively, and she had not yet reached the point where she found them useful.
Her first intimate experience was with a quite small boy, when she herself was quite small, and it didn’t amount to much. He was called Dinky, and he lived for a while with his father and mother and six brothers and sisters in a house three doors away. She played with him sometimes in her back yard or his, and one day they went down into the cellar under his house and explored each other’s areas of difference with curiosity. It seemed a natural enough thing to do, and not too disappointing on the whole. She probably would have been willing to repeat the performance if circumstances had fallen out right for it, but unfortunately Dinky’s family was dispossessed within the week for nonpayment of rent, and he moved away with his father and mother and six brothers and sisters, and she never saw him again. She thought about him for a while, but she didn’t miss him. Once she tried to remember his last name and couldn’t, and this caused her to wonder if she had actually ever known it, but she couldn’t remember that either.
After Dinky, who hardly counted, she grew older, and she knew other boys who also hardly counted, and then when she was fifteen and had not yet decided what kind of person she wanted to be — or rather had not become aware of the kind of person she had to be — there was a boy named David who counted very much and was always remembered and regretted, not for what he was or had or did, but simply because he became an issue over which her father made a fool of himself and of her in the most disgusting way.
She went with this boy to what was called a formal dance — formal meant only that the girls wore long gowns and the boys wore the best they had, whatever that was. The dance was held in the gymnasium of the high school, and Donna wasn’t especially eager to go, but when this boy named David asked her, she decided that she would. He was a handsome boy with light curly hair — but he was not so conceited as many boys who thought they were exceptional merely because they were good-looking — and he was in love with her at the time, though she was not in love with him. His being in love with her made her feel important and fairly responsive.
It was quite a distance from her home to the high school, but they walked there, having no other way of getting there, and after the dance was over at eleven-thirty, they walked home. It was a warm May night with the softest stirring of air, and it was pleasant and exciting walking along the streets together, and she was glad when he took her hand and held it as they walked.
They reached her house about midnight, and sat down together on the edge of the high porch with their feet on the steps below them, and it was different at that time in the ugly neighborhood from what it had ever been or would ever be again, an illusion in the light of stars and moon of grace and quietude. He told her awkwardly that he loved her and asked her if she loved him in return, and she said that she did for his sake and the illusion’s, although she knew with a strange and aching sadness that it was not true, that she was really in love with half an hour of a May night and with herself in that fragment of time. In response to her lie, he put his arms around her and kissed her, and she found it agreeable. When he did it again, she responded by putting her arms around him also, and felt one small breast cupped gently in a hand, and heard behind them in that instant the explosive opening of the screen door.