'Pie?'
'Where is the closest source?' Susan said
Which is how we ended up walking close together underneath a multicolored golf umbrella along Arlington Street and into the Public Gardens where, so lately, I had been with the Broz family.
'Place near the Colonial Theater,' I said, 'will sell you pie and coffee almost any time of the day or night.'
'Mark of an advanced civilization,' Susan said.
She had her arm through mine and her head against my shoulder as we walked through the rain, sheltered by the umbrella. She had her cobalt raincoat on, the collar turned up around her black hair. The lining of the raincoat was chartreuse, and where the collar was up and open at the neck it showed in gleaming contrast under the streetlights. We walked past the statue of
Washington, facing 327
up the Commonwealth Avenue Mall across Arlington Street. If there were bloodstains on the sidewalk, the rain had washed them away, or masked them with its gleaming reflections. The garden was empty on a rainy night, and still, except for the sound of the rain. There was light from the lampposts.
And the ambient city noise made the silence of the garden seem more complete. In the Swan Boat Pond the ducks were huddled under their feathers among the rocks along the shore of the lagoon.
The Common was ahead, across Charles Street, where once the inner harbor had washed against the foot of Beacon Hill, before they dumped in all the landfill and created the Back Bay and pushed the sea back into the harbor and the basin of the Charles River. Once it had really been a back bay, a mix of river water and ocean into which the oldest part of Boston had pushed like the bulge in a balloon.
Across Charles Street, not waiting for the light because there was no traffic, we moved uphill gently, across the Common, angling toward Boylston
Street where an all-night diner served things like pie, and coffee in thick white mugs with cream and sugar. The winding walkways that bent through the
Common were shiny with rain, and the unleaved trees glistened blackly.
Around the lamps there formed a dim halo of mist that softened the light and made it elegant. To our left Beacon Street went up the hill to the
State House, its gold dome lit and visible from everywhere, its Bulfinch frontpretending that what went on inside were matters of gravity and portent. The wind that had, in the late afternoon, slanted the rain in hard as I left police headquarters, had died with the daylight, and the rain, softer now, came down in near perfect silence.
There were no pigeons about the Common at this hour, no squirrels. There was a fragrant bum sleeping on one of the benches under some tented card board which shed most of the rain. And, further along, several others slept, or at least lay still, wrapped in quilts and sleeping bags and newspapers.
'Are you in a pie reverie?' Susan said.
'Cherry,' I said. 'Blueberry, apricot.'
'No apple?'
'Rarely do they make good apple pie,' I said. 'Usually they don't cook the apples enough, and sometimes, too often, they leave, yuk, some of the core in there. Cherry is my favorite.'
'And coffee?'
'Decaf,' I said sadly.
'How embarrassing,' Susan said.
'Caffeine, like youth,' I said, 'is wasted on the young.'
We passed the ancient burial grounds, the little cemetery near Boylston
Street where earnest Calvinists had settled into the ground, relaxed at last.
'Are you planning on pie?' I said.
'No,' Susan said. 'I think I'll just have a cup of hot water, with lemon, and watch you.'
'You walked a mile in the rain to drink hot water?'
'To be with you,' she said. 'You're better than pie.'
And I turned under the umbrella and embraced her with my free arm and pressed my mouth against hers and held her hard against me and smelled her perfume and closed my eyes and kissed her for a long time in the still rain, and even after we stopped kissing, I held on to her and we stood together in the dark under the umbrella, until finally I didn't need to hold on anymore, and it was time to go across the street and have some cherry pie. Which we did.
