Duet for Three (26 page)

So she was startled, pulling on her coat at the end of a meeting, to hear a voice at her shoulder, a hesitant low one; a man's voice. “Mrs. Benson? I don't believe we've ever been formally introduced, but you probably know my name's Bill Baker.” A small man, not much taller than she, with receding grey hair combed directly back from his forehead, no apologies or camouflage there. “I was wondering if you might be interested at all in having dinner with me. Perhaps this weekend, on Saturday?”

He'd rehearsed, she could tell. Had perhaps sat through this meeting with his eyes on her downcast head, speculating and worrying and hoping to be brave. “I don't know,” she hesitated. After all, what did she know about him? Anyone could join a church group: although he looked harmless enough, and he'd been a member for a long time; she'd certainly seen him at meetings, without especially noticing him. His size was reassuring, too.

“Just dinner,” he was saying. “I assure you, nothing more.”

Well, why not? She smiled and said, “That would be very nice, yes, thank you.”

“I'll be going out Saturday,” she told Aggie with satisfaction.

“Are you going to marry him?” asked Frances, who was twelve and at an irritatingly blunt and insensitive stage.

“Don't be ridiculous,” June snapped. “I've barely met him. In any case, I am married.”

He worked, he told her over dinner in one of the town's fancier restaurants, which had licences to sell liquor (a change from the sort of place she used to go to during the war — where she'd met Herb), in one of the new plants in town. It manufactured boxes. He'd used to work for the same company in its former plant, in another, similar town, and had moved on here when the firm expanded and built this new factory. “These days,” he said, “it's more automated than it used to be. All new equipment. So I was lucky to have a job when they offered me the one here.”

He thought the town pretty. He said he had never married, but hinted at a previous involvement. He asked her what she did and how she lived. “Then you're a widow?” he asked. “For very long?”

She could hardly lie. “No. I'm married. My husband and I no longer live together.” She simply couldn't say those words in any other than a forbidding way, couldn't bear it if he inquired further. The result was that he flushed, embarrassed, and she felt clumsy.

She was very surprised when, as he left her in front of Aggie's house, he asked, “Could we do this again next Saturday? Or perhaps take in a movie?”

“Certainly, that would be fine.”

She wondered later, though, why she had agreed. Not because he appealed to her, because she doubted that anyone would. Nor was he likely to become a friend, like Aggie's Barney. She didn't even think he was especially interesting. She thought perhaps she might have agreed mainly to show Aggie, to be able to say, “I'm going out Saturday,” as if it were a triumph.

But surely it was also flattering to think of him watching her at those meetings, becoming interested. It seemed she could still be wanted, if not, she hoped, desired. She hoped there would not be that sort of awkward moment to deal with.

“I'm sorry about the movie,” he said. “I should have checked before I suggested that.” There only was one theatre, although there were reports another was in the works as the town expanded. “I'm afraid it's one of those Elvis Presley ones. Perhaps we should think of something else.”

Oh dear. There wasn't much else to do, and she'd rather counted on the movie to fill a couple of hours without the need for conversation. “Do you bowl?” he asked.

“No, I'm afraid I never have.”

“Would you like to learn? It's a good game.”

She wasn't a bit interested in learning to bowl. On the other hand, she had no other suggestions. The only alternative seemed to be going for a walk, which would require a terrifying degree of conversation.

He said he was a patient teacher, and it was a good thing because she couldn't get the hang of it at all. Most of her balls rolled aimlessly and hopelessly into the gutter, or she managed to hit a single pin, but the wrong one. What was really worrying her was the shoes: having to rent them. Who knew who'd worn them before, the condition of their feet?

“We could maybe,” he suggested eventually, “go some place a little quieter and have a beer.”

“I'm afraid I don't drink.”

“Coffee then, and a bite to eat after all this exercise.”

She thought, “I want to go home,” but it was too early. What a stupid situation, though, a daughter having to stay out late to keep a mother from fussing.

“So,” he said, nervously making conversation in the restaurant, “how did you come to join the group at the church?”

“Oh, I'm interested in Bible study, and then, it's an outing, too. Everyone needs interests outside of work and home,” stealing Aggie's argument.

He brightened. “Me too. I mean, that's sort of why I go. That and the bowling keep me busy. I'm on the bowling team at work, and then I sometimes go on my own. Good bunch of people at the church, too.”

Probably they were. She hadn't especially noticed.

“You have a daughter?”

“Yes, she's twelve.”

“It must be nice, having a family,” he said wistfully. She heard an echo of Herb in there, although that wasn't fair, and she was sure Bill did not resemble him in the slightest.

“My mother looks after her a good deal. I had to go back to teaching, just when Frances started school.”

“That was when, ah, your marriage ended?”

“Yes.”

“So it's been some time.”

“Seven years.”

Seven years was longer then her marriage had been. A daughter who had been just starting school then would soon be off to high school, and she herself was middle-aged. She felt pale. While other people might feel themselves flushing, blood rushing to the face, she could feel the opposite, blood seeping away.

“You look tired,” he said. “You must have a busy life. Perhaps we should go.”

At least it was something, going out, and he seemed safe enough. She had a sense of time having been wasted this evening, but what would she have done with it otherwise? Read, marked papers, watched television with Aggie. Frances was out with a friend. Probably at the Presley movie (what a good thing she and Bill did not go there after all). He had filled a certain amount of time, and might do so again in the future. That seemed all right, not too strenuous or demanding.

They stopped, walking her home, for a red light. When it turned green and they stepped off the sidewalk, he cupped a hand beneath her elbow. It was like being shot. She whipped her arm away in a reflex movement that took her off balance, so that she stumbled and almost fell. Herb courting her, guiding and protective and aiming for more; so there was no difference, they were all the same, not to be trusted.

He was bewildered. “Did I do something wrong? I'm terribly sorry, what did I do?”

“Nothing at all.” Oh, she was cool now, cold. She knew where she stood. “But I can see my own way home from here, there's no need for you to come with me.” She marched briskly away, but he followed, like a stray puppy, she thought, hoping for a good meal. “Please, tell me what's wrong? I've made you angry, but I don't know why.”

She turned and faced him. “I'm not angry. But I am perfectly capable of getting myself home. So I'll say good night now, and thank you for the evening.”

“But will I see you again? How about next Saturday? There'll be another movie on by then, maybe something good.”

“No, thank you for asking but I think not. Good night.”

Now that she'd discerned his hidden intentions, she was a little frightened, and walked more swiftly in case he tried to follow. But he didn't.

The trouble, she realized later, was that now she couldn't go to any more church group meetings; would not be able to sit in the same room with him, as if nothing had happened. She wondered just what had happened; perhaps she had over-reacted? Certainly she had behaved without grace. But no, she'd been right. And the important thing was having learned that a Herb could be anywhere, beneath any harmless face.

“You're not going to those meetings any more?” Aggie asked.

“No, I've quit.” Aggie looked as if she would like to ask why, but for once did not.

“What happened to your boyfriend, Mother?” Frances asked, grinning.

“He was not my boyfriend,” June snapped. “And it's not your business.”

“Oh, Mother, I was joking. Can't you take a joke?”

What did Aggie and Frances think was so funny all the time? Their jokes, June thought, were often just camouflage for cruelty.

And Frances, who had stretched up and slimmed down and was turning into a teenager (how did that happen so fast? Here was someone quite different from the child June remembered), this young girl was asking June's permission to go out on a date.

“Certainly not, you're far too young,” June ruled.

“But Mother, it's not like a real date, there'll be a whole bunch of us.”

“No, I told you, you're too young.” She could at least try to protect her daughter from all those clutching, cupping, treacherous hands.

“Then,” Frances said, hands on hips, chilly eyes on her mother, “when will I be old enough?”

When? Never, please God. “Sixteen,” June blurted, with a feeling that surely that was sufficiently in the future that something might happen in the meantime to keep Frances permanently safe.

“Sixteen.” Frances nodded. “All right, I hope you realize you're ruining my life, but you don't likely care. But I'll remember. I'm going to have a date on my sixteenth birthday, so don't bother having a cake or anything. I'll be out.”

“
What
a child,” June sighed later.

“Not a child, you know,” Aggie answered, glancing up from her book.

Aggie's fault, all this, June was sure: opening up so many dangerous possibilities to Frances. And how would Aggie know what she was talking about? Only from books, and whose life was so neat?

What a storm, a tempest, a nightmare of emotions Frances's adolescence was. How cold she could be, and how hot. She also had a long memory and, as promised, announced on her sixteenth birthday that she would not be home for dinner because she had a date. June's mouth, opened to protest, closed again in the face of Frances's defiant glare.

Thereafter she was often out, an airy “I'm off to the movie, see you guys later” as she ran down the stairs and out the door.

“Don't worry about her,” Aggie advised. “She's got a good head on her shoulders, she won't do anything foolish.”

Going out at all was foolish, as far as June could see. And boys were even worse than grown-up men, who at least had developed a veneer of control.

Sometimes she wondered, looking at her daughter, where she could have come from. She was like a changeling: switched at birth with some narrower, meeker child in the hospital nursery.

Aggie seemed to have a point about the influence of simply living in different times. Except she said, “Take advantage,” while June had to warn, “Take care.”

How was it to be Frances, young, with boys coming, shyly or arrogantly, to the door to take her places, buying her movies and soda pop and french fries? How was it to walk along a street holding hands right out in public, and a week later to be doing the same with someone else? How was it to sit on the phone for hours, laughing and gossiping and whispering with friends? Some nights Frances flung herself upstairs to her room and slammed the door, and even from downstairs, June and Aggie would hear noisy sobbing. She seemed to have no sense of
withholding
, which surely made her dangerously vulnerable to those treacherous things, emotions.

“It's a good thing, really,” Aggie advised. “She'll know what she's doing better than we did.”

Without Frances as a buffer, June and Aggie spent more time alone together, and June supposed it was no wonder they got on each other's nerves. Not that they talked much, but when they did, they could hardly agree. Aggie, looking up from one of her newsmagazines, said, “Isn't it extraordinary, all this civil rights business in the States? Can you imagine people beating other people and threatening them, even little kids, to keep them from going to school together? You'd think I'd know better by now. I keep forgetting how wicked people can be.”

She was horrified, too, at American assassinations, shaking her head in front of the television set, saying over and over, “My God.”

Well of course June was horrified too, no question about it. She was also terrified by the violence. What if it spread, what if people took up the idea from what they saw on their television screens and brought it here, onto her sidewalks and into her home? But she also felt, although she could never seem to explain it so that Aggie understood, that she could see people driven to certain actions by the terror of change. The desperation of having a foothold and seeing someone trying to slip it away from underneath.