Chapter Eleven #3
“I don’t know what kind of brass they are. What’s it matter?”
“Split nut holds better.”
“I’m giving it to you, for God’s sake.”
Cal wandered away from them, toward the front of the store.
Through the glass, across Sutton, he spotted Margaret standing by the curb.
She was dressed in a dark blue skirt and a white blouse, framed perfectly by the arched entrance of the record store in the background.
She looked a little like someone in a Norman Rockwell painting, in fact.
He waved.
She waved back. Then she motioned him across the street.
He re-tucked his shirt. Glanced behind him to his son and father-in-law, his father and the dog, then ducked outside and fast-walked over.
He’d never seen Margaret look worried before.
Her eyes were the same beautiful green but her lids were crimped around them, pulling the outside corners down.
Her brow bore a new horizontal crease. He wanted to fall into her, hold on to her.
But something had happened, he could tell. He asked her how she’d been.
Poorly, she said. She asked if they could talk, but not here and not now. Later, she said. Could he do eight o’clock? Not at her house but at the studio—if he was going to be out on one of his patrols.
—
Step It Up was sometimes busy on a Saturday, but on this particular Saturday evening Margaret knew it would be empty.
Ruth and Mrs. Fletcher were both out of town.
Mrs. Cox had her son and daughter-in-law visiting from Chicago.
Brenda Rhodes was on a date with Sam Liddick, and Agnes was still sequestered in her widowhood.
They didn’t turn the lights on, just in case anyone else—the effervescent Mr. Pruitt, for example—should happen to look up from the street and think the place was open.
They sat side-by-side on two mismatched chairs pushed against the wall, their faces lit only by the glow coming from the streetlamp.
Cal listened as Margaret told him everything she knew about what had happened to Felix, and she tried to explain why, in the time since receiving the telegram, she hadn’t been able to see him or talk to him.
Not when she didn’t know if Felix was dead or alive.
And after Felix had called, a week ago, she’d just felt paralyzed. She hoped Cal understood.
“Of course,” he said. “What a relief this must be for you.”
She nodded.
“I was worried it was bad news.”
“Me too.”
“This is going to be such a”—he couldn’t think of how else to say it—“big change for you.”
Oh yes.
“Have you been preparing?” He forced a little laugh into his voice, trying to lift the moment. “How do you even do that?”
By not having you naked in my house, she thought.
She’d taken all of Felix’s shirts, clean but folded in a drawer for three years, to be washed and re-pressed.
She’d gone to the grocery store and bought all the things she could think of that he liked to eat (including licorice) and as many Lucky Strikes as the elderly man at the office supply store would sell her.
She’d been saving the weekly sports roundup sections and had them stacked beside Felix’s recliner in the den.
She didn’t want to talk about any of that with Cal, though.
She just wanted to tell him, face-to-face, that they had to stop seeing each other.
“I’m glad you did,” he said. “I mean, I sort of thought we already had, but I’m glad you told me.”
“Not that what we had wasn’t—well, you know what it was. Anyway, thank you.”
He was devastated and relieved at the same time. Mostly relieved. He said, “My pleasure,” and she smiled just a little.
They heard footsteps on the stairs. Soft voices.
There was no door at the top of the staircase, just the little vestibule that opened onto the room they were in; if they turned on the lights now, whoever was coming up would notice because the stairs would suddenly become illuminated.
It was either the fire escape or the storage room for them.
The door to the fire escape shrieked terribly, Margaret knew from all the times she’d opened it to let out the cigarette smoke.
She took Cal’s hand and led him through the dark velvet curtain and into the storage room—just as Brenda Rhodes and Sam Liddick reached the top of the stairs.
Sam had taken Brenda out to dinner, and over dessert he’d fished from his shirt pocket a ring—his grandmother’s, it turned out—and proposed.
He said he knew it was soon because they’d only met two months ago.
Brenda said she’d been waiting for a month, and yes.
To celebrate, Sam had bought them a pint of whiskey and they’d come to Step It Up to dance.
They left the room dark. There was barely light enough to see into the record box, but Brenda knew what she was looking for, and in a minute she was setting the needle down on “Where or When.” It was her favorite song, she told him as they slow-danced.
Recorded on New Year’s Eve of 1941, in New York City, just three weeks after Pearl Harbor.
Wasn’t that buttery clarinet beautiful? Poor Glenn Miller, playing his heart out.
And Peggy Lee’s voice was like a whisper.
“But now I’ve talked through it,” Brenda said softly into Sam’s neck.
“Let’s hear it again.” She stepped away just long enough to reset the needle.
The song had a dreamy, irresistible lull.
The volume was so low that Cal and Margaret, behind the curtain, could hear the shuffle of Brenda’s and Sam’s feet.
In a sliver of moonlight penetrating the storeroom’s skylight they saw that they had about six-foot square to stand in, the rest of the space taken up by a rack of big suits (for dads) and a rack of little suits (for lads), upright bolts of fabric, and a dressmaker’s dummy that evoked, for Margaret, Lydia’s Truly.
How glad she was that Lydia couldn’t see her now—a married woman hiding in a darkened storage room with a man who wasn’t her husband, while her husband recovered from his war wounds in a faraway hospital.
And so it seems that we have met before
And laughed before and loved before
But who knows where or when?
When the song started for the third time, she heard Cal exhale through his nose, almost laughing at their predicament.
He took a step forward, put one hand on her hip, and held the other out to the side.
She took that hand, and they danced, barely moving their feet for fear of making the floor creak.
They danced through yet another playing of the song, and the thought flashed through Cal’s head that they wouldn’t be doing this if Margaret had found out her husband had died, they were only doing it because he was coming home, and wasn’t that strange?
A version of this same thought occurred to Margaret, as well, but by the time the newly betrothed couple turned off the record player and wandered out into the night, Cal and Margaret had other things to think about.
They both knew they were never going to be together again, this way.
While they hadn’t come looking for the opportunity, now they couldn’t see the sense in letting it go by.
Maybe it was in the nature of last hurrahs, Margaret thought in the darkness of the studio with the echo of the music still in their bodies, that they could be just a little bit reckless.