Some Came Running (40 page)

He had never seen the new bridge before, not to notice, anyway. Its construction had changed the whole face of the land. It dominated everything. You were always aware of it, of its bulk there, even when you could not see it in the dark like now. High up over the town, way out at the northern edge, where the single little business street became a gravel road out into the country, and where it soared above two little houses on its concrete bastions, it flung its spans across the river into Indiana and made everything else look small. You could not be outdoors anywhere in the town without being conscious of its mass there. Like a mountain. Or an ocean that you lived beside.

Dave drove slowly on downtown, just as aware of it a quarter of a mile away as he had been right beside it, past the old rose-brick courthouse, which did not have a square around it as in Parkman but was two blocks back off the single business street on the river bluff, as if whoever had built it there in the old days had expected the town to grow up around it quickly and make its own square. It was a beautiful old building, simple and austere in its Revolutionary Period style like those courthouses you saw in Virginia and Pennsylvania, from which it had been copied. The huge DAR sign out in front could not take away from it, nor could it destroy his feeling of having moved back in time.

It was strange, Dave thought; he had been coming over here all the time when he was a kid, and he had never realized it was historic. Until just now. Maybe it was because of the way Bob French had talked about it so, that night at Frank’s, excitedly, lovingly. Or maybe it was just that you had to go away for a long time and then come back, in order to realize your home country had as many stories and romantic castles and ruined mansions as Hawthorne’s Massachusetts or Faulkner’s Mississippi. It was a strange mood he was in, and he couldn’t shake it. He would have to, before he got to the Frenches’. Funny, in all the times he had been in Israel, he had never once been inside the old courthouse museum. He would have to go. Sometime.

If they just had taste, he thought, thinking of the huge DAR sign.

He turned left toward the black loom of the bridge when he reached the single business street. There were three or four blocks of little business houses side by side along it, mostly one story, mostly clapboard. Bob French’s house was right at the end of the business section on the river side of the street, separated from the last little business building by the cinder alley that deadened fifty yards back at the bluff. The driveway entrance was at the corner, and over it the old wrought-iron gate to which Bob had had the local blacksmith add his name for it in twisted iron.
Last Retreat.
From back in among the trees, downstairs lights shone out.

Dave remembered it all very clearly, now he saw it. The old brick house with its long, narrow corniced windows, the steep, tinned mansard roof with projecting dormered windows, and the little front porch with its small less-than-one-story Ionic columns, which always looked as though the builder had put this up last when he was running out of money. He remembered it well. This same cinder alley right here was one of the places where they had used to park with their home-brew beer, in high school. He had always thought very rich people must live there.

He turned in under the gate, the little Plymouth’s wheels grinding in the crushed rock driveway. The trees were, as Bob described, very large and a number of them showed the mottled bark of sycamores in the light of his headlights. Before he could get stopped in the parking space up next to the house, a side door opened throwing light out across the yard.

“Right here!” Gwen French’s voice called to him. “Come in this way!”

He turned off the ignition and pulled the key and followed along the little brick walk to where she stood in the doorway, wondering if this could be taken as a propitious sign—that she obviously had been watching for him; maybe even anxiously?

“Well, you’re a sight for sore eyes!” Gwen smiled, looking him over. “Come on in. You look all right.” She led him inside. “I heard by the grapevine that you must have had yourself quite a time in Indianapolis with that gambler ’Bama. So I didn’t know whether to expect you healthy and all in one piece or not,” she said merrily.

“Hello, Gwen, how are you,” he muttered. Of a sudden, shyness had overtaken him again. He felt that she could see through him and his patently obvious designs upon her. They were on a landing of a staircase that went down into the high vaulted darkness of the cellar, he noticed, while thinking unhappily that she didn’t sound very jealous. She led him up several steps into a room then, stepping aside for him to enter first, and what he saw had the effect of bringing him to a standstill in the doorway momentarily. He had to consciously make himself step on inside. Behind him Gwen followed him on in, smiling.

“I was just cooking,” she said. “From the way you talked on the phone, I didn’t know when you’d get here. Or I’d have had it ready now.” She went on past him to the stove.

They were in the kitchen. But what a kitchen! It was at least twenty-five feet wide, and it must have been all of fifty or sixty feet long. Cupboards and cabinets—and at the near end, kitchen equipment—encroached upon its size only a little; a not unusually high ceiling added to the impression of immense length; five great support beams running crossways of the room added to it, too. Dave had the sudden impression he was staring down a huge hall in a medieval castle. And at the far end was a big brick fireplace painted white, fully five feet high by seven or eight feet long, bookshelves all around it, and in which a brightly blazing fire cheerfully ate its way into a huge back log. Beside it, his head turned this way, sat Bob French grinning at him.

“Well, what do you think of our kitchen?” he said delightedly, like a child showing off a new bicycle. “You’re seeing it from the best place to see it,” he added, getting up.

Dave couldn’t help grinning; it was obvious Old Bob had posed himself there deliberately, not vainly but thoughtfully, to give the perspective and size of a human figure in the room. Bob, coming down toward him, returned his grin with a smile.

“It’s beautiful,” Dave said, “very beautiful.” And it was, too. It was like a haven, like a haven on a snowy, blowing, freezing night. Like in one of those old-fashioned Christmas card pictures you always loved to look at but didn’t much believe in places like that anymore.

The far end had been arranged around the fireplace, in which still hung several old wrought-iron cranes. Two divans sat facing each other at right angles to the fireplace in front of it, between them a low, round coffee table. Back of these, a large, dark, heavy antique table with massive turned legs and ladder-back chairs around it, set for dinner with thick restaurant china, that old-fashioned olive green ware like you used to see in Chinese restaurants years ago. Under almost all of this furniture, with vivid blocks and angles of contrasting colors, was the biggest Indian rug Dave had ever seen. It stretched almost from wall to wall. On its edges were two reading chairs with floor lamps beside them. In one corner sat a big console radio-phonograph with shelves of records built around it. Bookcases stood along the sidewalls and over them near the ceiling were hung old-fashioned plate rails holding a motley collection of old pewter and German steins and handpainted plates painted with fat monks and drinking and hunting scenes. It was a room out of any artistic temperament’s dream; he had used to dream of rooms like this himself, once. Only he had never expected to have one.

“It’s not as expensive as you might think,” Bob grinned at him, as if reading his mind. “We did most of the work on it ourselves. And we already had most of the furnishings, in the family you know. And, of course, we already had the room here to begin with.”

“I told him he could not put books in the kitchen because the grease from the cooking would ruin them. But he went ahead and did it anyway,” Gwen smiled. “But I did get him to promise to keep them down at the other end.” Standing at the kitchen counter, she was cutting lettuce and some tomatoes into a big heavy bowl of the same olive green ware that was on the table, her hands moving swiftly. On the stove was a single big pot, boiling.

“What’s a fireplace without books?” Bob grinned. He shook hands with Dave. “I did all the carpentry myself,” he said proudly, “I built all these shelves and cupboards. You’ll have a martini I imagine, won’t you, Dave?”

“Yes,” Dave said. “Yes, thanks. It’s a beautiful place,” he said simply.

“It really is you know,” Bob said shyly. He went off to the bar, down at the other end of the long counter.

Dave watched him go, then looked back at the room. The bad mood he had had sitting in the crummy hotel room, coupled to that strange feeling of having moved back in time when he drove down off the highway into Israel, and to walk into the beauty and romance and graciousness of this place, all of it together was almost too much to keep up with. He could not escape a sudden feeling that here suddenly for the first time in his life of thirty-seven years he had walked into a place that was safe. And the more he looked at it, the stronger the feeling. Just safe. That was the only word. Safe from the savageries of frightened men. Safe from the witch burnings and destructions of people determined by their guilts to prove themselves unguilty. Safe from the frightful insanities of reason and honor and justice and happiness and—and love. Especially love. Safe and secure and beautiful and—and reasonable. He felt as though all his life until he walked in here he had been frightened, full of terror, and hungry and thirsty and itchy and exhausted and—and—whatever else there was, he finished lamely.

“You seem surprised,” Gwen said, smiling at him over her shoulder. “What did you expect? To find us living in some falling-down Southern mansion?”

“We were really only joking about the wind coming through the walls you know,” Bob said from the other end of the counter.

“No, but I certainly didn’t expect anything like this,” Dave said. It was as if all those other things, those fears and terrors, had suddenly relaxed allowing him to expand himself with these people, expand his lungs. It wasn’t only the place. It was them, too. Both of them. That they could have
created
it, this place. In Parkman, Illinois! That anyone of their depth and sensitivity, which was so much like his own, he thought, could even have had an
opportunity
to create this place in Parkman, Illinois. You didn’t expect to find people like yourself in Parkman, Illinois, he thought quite frankly.

He felt warm, and confident, and expanding, down in the very bottom of his lungs as he filled his chest.

“It’s almost medieval,” he said.

“It is rather, in a way,” Bob said, pleased, from down at the bar.

Dave had a ridiculous desire to please him, to make him feel good. “I’ve seen old kitchens in Nuremberg and Munich that looked almost like this,” he said thinking that it wasn’t so false at that.

“Oh, say! I
am
flattered,” Bob said. “You mention Nuremberg. A great many of my things here came from Bavaria. I went to school over there, you know,” he said.

“Yes, I knew,” Dave said. He turned to look at Gwen. She had just squatted down to get something out of a cupboard.

Her back was to him, as she bent forward. The fresh-looking housedress she had on was tucked up under her knees, drawing its skirt tight over her hips, outlining the twin roundnesses of her buttocks there, full stretched now inside the flowered material, and separated by the cleft between them which ran on underneath, disappearing.

Like two desert hillocks in California, he thought staring—separated by a steeply eroded, brush-grown arroyo wash.

She pushed things around inside the cupboard.

God, he thought exuberantly. It was strange, wasn’t it, how when you got up very close to women they were much bigger all over than they looked from a distance.

Especially love; he thought. If a man could just live here in this place, just stay here alone, he could be free of the insanity of love. Love was only loneliness. Love was only fear. If he could just live here, alone, he could be serene. I could be sane, he thought. God! to find a place like this in Parkman, Illinois.

God, to find hips like this in Parkman, Illinois! he thought as she straightened up.

Gwen had turned around and was standing looking at him.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said, and turned back to the stove.

“It’s really a beautiful place,” he said.

“Thank you,” Gwen said, not looking up.

Dave turned to look at something else. Sandwiched in amongst all the more modern kitchen fixtures was an old-fashioned brick cooking fireplace. He looked at this. It was a beauty, and in it—or rather over it—the cast-iron door of an old built in oven. On the white brick wall around it hung an ancient set of heavy gauge copper skillets, eight in all, ranging in size from one that was almost three feet across and looked like a small table down to a little two-egg one. Near them hung a huge matching teakettle on an old iron hook in the wall. Bob French put a filled martini glass in his hand from beside him.

“I got those at a logging camp in Wisconsin, years ago,” he said. “Our fishing party stopped there. They were actually using them. I had to go to town and buy a set of iron ones for them before they’d sell me these.” He laughed; “then I had to draft my fishing friends to help me get them out.”

“They’re beautiful,” Dave said. Again, like with everything else here, he thought, they fit.

“We
still
use them,” Gwen said almost angrily. “All except the big one. I don’t believe in not using things.” She frowned at both of them as if she expected to argue, and there was a look of irritation on her face. Dave thought he knew why, but then it was gone and she turned around to them cocking her head on one side.

“You know, some man made those,” she said with a kind of wistful thoughtfulness. “Some lumberjack, sitting out in the woods somewhere day after day by himself, working on them. He was probably big and hairy and ugly; and he probably put everything he ever felt about life and beauty and frustration into the making of them. He’s probably dead now, whoever he was.” She moved, and started to go on with her work. “Isn’t it strange? Here they still are, in our kitchen, and we use them.” Her voice sounded sad. “We should use them.”