Chapter Nine #2
All the times Cal had looked up at the jangle of the shop bell over the past several days, and here she was, suddenly in front of him.
He admitted with a smile that he didn’t know what the Ashcan School was, the closest he came to knowing about art was comic books, and you don’t frame anything from those.
“Aren’t comic books a form of art?” she said.
Cal blinked. “Are they?”
Margaret didn’t really think so, but it was easy enough to fib. “They’re pictures someone imagines and makes. That sounds like art to me.”
“I’ve never met anyone who thought that,” Cal said.
Well, now he had, she said. Then she asked if there was any chance he might be able to stop by her house on his way home that evening—just for a couple of minutes, to help her hang the Dolice.
As if she didn’t know another living soul who could help her with such a thing.
And, of course, as if she couldn’t do it perfectly easily herself.
—
The painting was representational, there was no denying that, she said.
But it was also suggestive. This yellow line suggested a spotlight in the distance.
This little patch of red suggested light from an alley.
But it was the bold use of pinks and oranges that had drawn her to it, and the offset of deep blue, and the light—the light!
—rendered in saffron and a soft lemon chiffon giving way to saffron, warming the canvas and softening all the lines.
Cal, forgetting to take full breaths, saw everything as soon as she pointed it out but never would have noticed on his own. Could he guess her favorite aspect of the painting?
“The colors, it sounds like. Or maybe the size?”
She shook her head, said, “Is it dusk, or is it dawn? It’s up to the viewer.”
True, but Cal’s eye was drawn elsewhere. To her wedding band, for one. To the picture on the mantel of a man in Navy blues. And to that wall in the foyer, with its rocks and plants and running water—like something out of a jungle movie.
While he was preparing the painting—screwing in the little eyehooks and winding the wire—she asked suddenly, “Do you like to dance?” Then remembered his limp and hoped the question wasn’t insensitive.
She and a few friends had been running an informal dance studio for the last couple of years, she said.
Above Dads maybe he’d seen it?
Cal hadn’t but said he didn’t get over to Irwin much. She invited him to drop in some evening, then mentioned that Wednesdays and Fridays were the nights she was usually there.
Finished wiring, he leaned across the sideboard to hold the Dolice against the wall while she asked him to inch it right, left, up a little.
He felt her breath on his forearm as she made pencil marks to indicate where the painting should go.
Then he tapped in the nail and eased the wire down onto the hook.
They stood together at the far end of the room and admired their efforts.
“Like it there?” he asked.
“I do. Thank you so much for your help.”
“Glad to. I should probably be heading out, though.”
Of course he should. And would. The moment of silence that followed affirmed that. But before they left the dining room, Cal said, “So, I’m just curious, if you had to choose, which would you want it to be—dawn or dusk?”
Margaret looked at the painting again and narrowed her eyes. “I’d want them both.”
—
Three nights later, his Citizens Defense patrol took him out of his neighborhood and all the way downtown, where, on Irwin Street, he heard music coming from over the clothing store and saw shadows moving against the second-floor windows.
The stairs creaked as he ascended.
Step It Up had been a bleak and musty space when Ruth and Agnes and several of their friends had convinced Mr. Rubinski to let them use it—just a big room with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, but Ruth had brought in extra floor lamps from home, and, with Mr. Rubinski’s permission, she and Agnes had painted the walls a warm shade of salmon.
They’d hung a Spars poster, a Waves poster, a picture of Count Basie, and a tinted photo of FDR. They’d placed a half dozen mismatched chairs against the walls, along with a small table for a portable record player and a wheeled cart for drinks and snacks.
No one pretended Step It Up was an actual business.
They didn’t charge money to attend, and Mr. Rubinski didn’t ask them for rent so long as they kept the music down and didn’t disturb the storage room in the back—doorless, but partitioned off with a dark velvet curtain.
The studio was usually open three nights a week for anyone who cared to show up, and the number of available dance partners on any given evening could go from slim to plenty.
Tonight was a relatively full house: six of them in attendance.
When Cal appeared at the top of the stairs, Margaret was hunched down flipping through the milk crate of records on the floor.
She was thrilled to see him but tried not to let that show as she stood and crossed the room to shake his hand, then introduced him to the others.
Ruth and Mrs. Cox recognized him from school.
Mrs. Fletcher recognized him from the hardware store.
“I’m not here to dance,” Cal said. “Just wanted to watch the fun and say hi. Little break from the rounds.” He tapped his CDC armband.
Ruth reminded Cal that they’d once cut open a frog together in science class. Cal remembered her then—her laugh, and her funny comments about the viscera. Agnes offered him a cigarette, iced tea. He declined both but thanked her.
Mrs. Fletcher whistled to get everyone’s attention and placed another record on the turntable.
Cal walked over to one of the chairs against the wall and sat down.
He watched as they tried out something called the European Jive.
Margaret danced with Agnes. Ruth danced with Mrs. Fletcher.
Brenda Rhodes, who, at twenty-three, was the youngest of them all, danced with Mrs. Cox. Then they switched off.
“I just remembered,” Agnes said, turning to Cal between songs, “I heard through the grapevine you married Becky Hanover. So that’s how you ended up at the hardware store on Sutton. How’s Becky?”
“Fine,” Cal said quickly, from his chair. “Doing great.”
“Does she still”—Agnes held a hand out level, fingers splayed, and see-sawed it—“read tea leaves and things?”
“She must,” Mrs. Cox said. “She advertises.”
Cal said he’d take that iced tea after all.
“You sure you don’t want to dance?” Brenda said, handing him the glass.
He shook his head.
The staircase creaked again. Sam Liddick, the lantern-jawed, dark-haired sprinter who’d earned multiple ribbons in county track events and had been hired to be a coach at the high school just before Pearl Harbor, appeared on the landing.
“Well, well,” Mrs. Fletcher said, “the hero returns!”
Sam was wearing a beige silk shirt and olive-colored trousers, and he was thinner than he’d been when he enlisted, his cheekbones more pronounced, his belt strap curling an extra couple of inches past the buckle. Mrs. Fletcher gave him a hug and asked him how things were, over there.
“We egged Germany pretty good, I guess,” he said.
“But what about the Pacific?” Agnes asked. She tipped her head toward Margaret. “We’ve got husbands out at sea, and nobody seems to know when they’ll be back. Or they aren’t telling us.”
“Lighten up, Agnes,” Ruth said. “Sam isn’t the secretary of war. He came to dance—didn’t you, Sam?”
“Of course he did.” Mrs. Fletcher bent over the record crate. “That’s why I invited him. This boy won the blue ribbon in the Hancock County Dance-Off before he shipped out.” She chose a record and set it on the turntable. “Come on, Sam. Tranky Doo!”
Sam hardly looked fit enough to stand upright for very long, much less dance.
But when the music started, it all came back to him and he began to move.
He apple-jacked and shorty-Nelson’d, knee-tapped and Suzie Q’d.
He didn’t look at any of them while he did this but kept returning his eyes to a spot on the wall in between the Waves and Count Basie. A grin crept into his face.
When he was done, they applauded. Mrs. Cox walked over, took his arm, and motioned to Mrs. Fletcher. “Put on something we can Sweetie Pie to, Addie.”
After the Sweetie Pie came the foxtrot, which was even more demanding than the Tranky Doo and enough to take Sam’s breath away and make him drop down into the chair one over from Cal’s.
“We need another fan in here,” Ruth said, snapping the front of her dress away from her chest.
Sam touched his sleeve to his forehead. He introduced himself to Cal.
“Cal Jenkins,” Cal said and shook his hand across the empty chair. They’d been a year apart in school, had passed each other in the hall countless times, but their worlds hadn’t overlapped.
“You’re not dancing?”
“Not my thing.” Cal waited for the next question: Then what are you doing here? When that didn’t come he said, “You just got back, huh?”
Sam nodded. As the two of them watched the women moving around the room, he leaned in close to Cal and said in a softer voice, “I spent the last four months in a POW camp in Moosburg.”
Cal was alarmed by this, couldn’t even imagine. “What was that like?”
“I saw a guy get shot in the back just for standing too close to a fence, that’s what it was like. I’m sure glad as hell to be back.”
“I’ll bet,” Cal said.
With some guidance from Ruth, Brenda was practicing her box step, but she kept cutting her eyes over to Sam Liddick.
“Not like that,” Ruth said. “It’s slow, quick-quick. Slow, quick-quick. Is that your idea of a box?”
“You serve?” Sam asked Cal.
“Couldn’t.”
“Farm deferment?”
Cal extended his left leg and wagged the shoe with the extra-thick sole.
Sam stared at it for a moment, then said, “Oh, yeah. You were the kid with the limp.”
“I tried to volunteer. Went in for my physical, but no dice.”