playing horseshoes, and the kid with the knife cut the carton of ice cream in half and handed one half to the other kid. and they both dug in with the wooden spoons.
'Doesn't that look good?' I said.
'What?' Mary Ann said.
I pointed the kids out to her again.
She made a face. said. 'Too cold for ice cream.' and handed me back the empty Nehi bottle.
I finished my Nehi off. put the bottles in a wooden carton up by the door near the tobacco-chewing farmers, and gave the red-cheeked kid a buck for the gas and told him to keep the change. His face lit up like nobody had ever done that to him before, and maybe they hadn't.
We rumbled down the road, sitting silently for maybe a hundred miles. I was irritated with Mary Ann. All day so far she had chattered about herself and her ambitions (Hollywood was figuring in her fantasies now), but when I had tried to point out the simple rustic charms of the countryside along the way. like that gas station back there, she had nothing to say- except perhaps. 'They're just a bunch of hicks, Nathan,' or something similar.
We ate supper at a roadside cafe called Twin Oaks, just the other side of Sterling-Rock Falls, where we would catch Illinois highway 3. The place was busy, and we had to sit at the counter, and Mary Ann didn't like that; she also didn't like the looks of the greasy Greek who served us, and she didn't like the way I looked at the young woman doing the cooking, who came out to ask me how I'd liked her pie.
'Little tramp,' Mary Ann said as we drove away.
I shrugged. 'She was cute. And the cherry pie was good, too.'
'She was common.'
'What's wrong with common?'
'Nothing, in your eyes.'
Now she was irritated with
We turned left into Davenport, through a warehouse district and into the downtown. It seemed puny to me, like a scale-model of Chicago that might be displayed at the fair next month. The tallest building, which was maybe twenty stories, of which a good portion was a clock tower, had a beacon light, sort of a pocketwatch version of the Lindbergh Beacon atop the Palmolive Building. But to somebody not Chicago-bred, the Tri-Cities might have seemed like a metropolis Davenport's population alone was sixty thousand, Mary Ann said, third largest city- in Iowa- and the five or six blocks of shops and restaurants probably seemed like the big city to the farmers and small-town folks of the surrounding area.
Mary Ann directed me up a hill, which was Harrison Street, and had me turn to the left, up into an area where Gothic mansions perched on the bluff to look down upon the Tri-Cities; some of the mansions were starting to look a bit down at the mouth and long in the tooth- some seemed to have been turned into apartment houses. The house Mary Ann guided me toward was not one of the Gothic ones, however, but something more modern, a Frank Lloyd Wright-style two-story brown-brick affair that might best be described as a modernistic castle, right down to the art-deco turrets. Sitting at the end of the block, mansions of an earlier day all around, it perched on the edge of the steep hill that fell sharply to a side street below. I pulled into a paved driveway that curved around to the left to a double garage and left the car there. I got my overnight bag and Mary Ann's suitcase out of the rumble seat and a light went on over a side door, near the garage.
He was thin and distinguished-looking, gray-haired with a dark mustache, wearing a pale gray suit and darker gray tie and, most significantly, gray gloves. He stood in the doorway and waited for us to come to him, but his manner, as he swung open the screen door, was friendly he had a reserved but unfeigned smile going.
We stepped into a white, modern kitchen, with a nook off to the left, and I put the bags down as Mary
Ann hugged her father and gestured toward me. almost offhandedly, saying. 'This is Nathan Heller. Daddy.' and left us there in the kitchen alone.
His reserved smile turned into a more open, if embarrassed one. and he said. 'You'll have to excuse my daughter. Mr. Heller. If you've traveled all the way here from Chicago with her. I suppose you know by now that she has a mind of her own. Unfortunately, that mind at times seems in no way connected to the real world.'
This was said with obvious affection for his daughter, but I did appreciate this immediate honesty from a man whose bearing suggested reticence.
'Good to meet you, sir,' I said, and extended my hand without thinking, even though Mary Ann had told me about her father.
He extended a gray-gloved hand, which had only two fingers in it, the thumb and forefinger, and we shook hands. Despite his having only a fraction of a hand to do it with, the grip was as firm as you'd expect a chiropractor's grip to be. I noticed his other, similarly gloved hand appeared to have all its fingers.
My face must've revealed my indecision as to whether or not I should apologize for my faux pas, because he smiled compassionately and said, 'Think nothing of it, Mr. Heller. Shaking hands with people is something I have never given up, despite a shortage of digits.'
I smiled back at him. 'Is that coffee I smell?'
It was perking over on the stove.
'It certainly is,' he said, going over to a cupboard. 'Have you eaten?'
'Yes. we stopped at Sterling-Rock Falls.'
'Good. My cook has Sunday off. and while I've been a bachelor for twenty-some years now, coffee is as yet my only culinary achievement. I'm afraid you'd have been in for cold cuts, had you needed a meal. The coffee, however, I can guarantee. Care to try a cup?'
