“The hall room, you mean?” the woman asked, regarding him clinically.
“That’s right.”
“Not till fall,” she said.
“Could I… look at it?”
“Well, I…”
“I thought I might stay overnight,” he said, hastily, “that is, if—”
“Oh,
“I would,” he said. “Sort of renew old acquaintanceship, you know.”
He smiled self-consciously, wishing he hadn’t said that.
“What would you want to pay?” asked the woman, more concerned with money than with memories.
“Well, I tell you,” he said, impulsively, “I used to pay twenty dollars a month. Suppose I pay you that?”
“For one night?”
He felt foolish. But he couldn’t back down now even though he felt that his offer had been a nostalgic blunder. No room was worth twenty dollars a night.
He caught himself. Why quibble? It was worth that much to relive old memories. Twenty dollars was nothing to him anymore. The past was.
“Glad to pay it,” he said. “Well worth it to me.”
He slid the bills from his wallet with awkward fingers and held them out to her.
He glanced at the bathroom as they walked down the dim lit hall. The familiar sight made him smile. There was something wonderful about returning. He couldn’t help it; there just was.
“Yes, Miss Ada’s been dead nigh onto five years,” the woman said.
His smile faded.
When the woman opened the door to the room he wanted to stand there for a long moment looking at it before letting himself enter once more. But she stood waiting for him and he knew he’d feel ridiculous asking her to wait so he took a deep breath and went in.
He stood there mutely, looking around the room, a sense of inexplicable fright taking hold of him. The room seemed to bring back everything.
“It’s a little dusty but I’ll clean it up when you go out to eat,” the woman said. “I’ll go get you some sheets.”
He didn’t hear her words or her footsteps moving down the hallway. He stood there possessed by the past.
He didn’t know what it was that made him shudder and look around suddenly. It wasn’t a sound or anything he saw. It was a feeling in his body and mind; a sense of unreasonable foreboding.
He jumped with a gasp as the door slammed violently shut. “It’s the wind does it,” said the woman returning with sheets for his old bed.
Broadway The traffic light turned red and he eased down the brake. His gaze moved across the store fronts.
There was the Crown Drug Store, still the same. Next to it, Flora Dame’s Shoe Store. His eyes moved across the street. The Glendale Shop was still there. Barth’s Clothes was still in its old location too.
Something in his mind seemed to loosen and he realized that he had been afraid of seeing the town changed. For when he’d turned the corner onto Broadway and seen that Mrs. Sloane’s Book Shoppe and The College Grille were gone he’d felt almost a sense of betrayal. The town he remembered existed intact in his mind and it gave him a tense, restless feeling to see it partially changed. It was like meeting an old friend and discovering, with a shock, that one of his legs was gone.
But enough things were the same to bring the solemn smile back to his lips.
The College Theatre where he and his friends had gone to midnight shows on Saturday nights after a date or long hours of study. The Collegiate Bowling Alleys; upstairs from them, the pool room.
And downstairs…
Impulsively, he pulled the car to the curb and switched off the motor. He sat there looking, for a moment, at the entrance to the Golden Campus. Then he slid quickly from the car.
The same old awning hung over the doorway, its once gaudy colours worn conservative by time and weather. He moved forward, a smile playing on his lips.
Then a sense of overpowering depression struck him as he stood looking down the steep, narrow staircase. He caught hold of the railing with his fingers and, after hesitating, let himself down slowly. He hadn’t remembered the stairway being
Near the bottom of the stairs, a whirring sound reached his ears. Someone was waxing the small dance floor with rotary brushes. He moved down the last step and saw the small black man following the gently bucking machine around the floor. He saw and heard the metal nose of the polisher bump into one of the columns that marked the boundaries of the dance floor.
Another frown crossed his face. The place was so small, so dingy. Surely memory hadn’t erred that badly. No, he hastily explained to himself. No, it was because the place was empty and there were no lights. It was because the jukebox wasn’t frothing with coloured bubbles and there were no couples dancing.
Unconsciously, he slid his hands into his trouser pockets, a pose he hadn’t assumed more than once or twice since he’d left college eighteen years before. He moved closer to the dance floor, nodding once to the low, battered bandstand as one would to an old acquaintance.
He stood by the dance floor edge and thought of Mary.
How many times had they circled that tiny area, moving to the rhythms that pulsed from the glowing jukebox? Dancing slowly, their bodies intimately close, her warm hand idly stroking the back of his neck. How many times? Something tightened in his stomach. He could almost see her face again. He turned away quickly from the dance floor and looked at the dark wooden booths.
A forced smile raised his lips. Were they still there? He moved around the edge of a column and started for the back.
“You lookin’ for somebody?” the old black man asked.
“No, no,” he said. “I just want to look at something.”
He moved down the rows of booths, trying to ignore the feeling of awkwardness. Which one is it? he asked himself. He couldn’t remember; they all looked the same. He stopped, hands on hips, and looked at all the booths, shaking his head slowly. On the dance floor, the black man finished his polishing, pulled the plug out and drew the lumbering machine away. The place grew deathly still.
He found them in the third booth he looked at. Worn thin, the letters almost as dark as the surrounding wood but, most assuredly, there. He slid into the booth and looked at them.
He thought about all the nights he and Spence and Dave and Norm had sat in this booth dissecting the universe with the deft, assured scalpels of college seniors.
“We thought we had it all,” he murmured. “Every darn bit of it.”
Slowly, he took off his hat and set it down on the table. What he wished for now was a glass of the old beer: that thick, malty brew that filled your veins and pumped your heart, as Spence used to say.
He nodded his head in appreciation, toasting a quiet toast.
“To you,” he whispered. “The unbeatable past.”
As he said it, he looked up from the table and saw a young man standing far across the room at the shadowy foot of the stairway. Johnson looked at the young man, unable to see him sharply without his glasses on.
After a moment, the young man turned and went back up the stairs. Johnson smiled to himself. Come back at six, he thought. The place doesn’t open till six.
That made him think again of all the nights he’d spent down here in the musty dimness, drinking beer, talking, dancing, spending his youth with the casual improvidence of a millionaire.
