Mystery

Moonie, saying everything she had been saving up.

For an instant Tom and Sarah were awkwardly out of rhythm with one another.

“Sorry,” Tom said.

“Don’t be,” Sarah said. “I’m so used to dancing with Moonie, I forgot what it was like with a boy.”

“You don’t mind?”

“No, I’m glad.”

That silenced Tom for a time.

“I haven’t talked to you in so long,” she said at last.

“I know.”

“Are you nervous?”

“No,” Tom said, though he knew that she could feel him trembling. “Maybe a little.”

“I’m sorry I don’t see you anymore.”

“Are you?” said Tom, surprised.

“Sure. We were friends, and now I only see you in Miss Ellinghausen’s cart.”

The music ceased, and like the other couples Tom and Sarah broke apart and waited for instructions. He had not imagined that Sarah Spence actually paid any attention to him in the dancing school cart.

“Fox trot,” the old woman said. Miss Gonsalves began thumping out “But Not For Me.”

“Are you still doing Fritzie’s homework for him?”

“Somebody has to do it,” Tom said.

She laughed and hugged him in a manner that would have brought a reprimand if Miss Ellinghausen had seen it.

“Moonie and I were so bored with each other. You’d think we were being punished. I thought the only boy I’d ever dance with for the rest of my life was Buddy. And Buddy’s sense of rhythm is a little personal.”

“How is he?”

“Does Buddy Redwing seem to you like the kind of person who would write letters? I’m sick of thinking about Buddy—I’m always sick of thinking about Buddy whenever he isn’t around.”

“And when he is around?”

“Oh, you know—Buddy’s so active you can’t think about anything.”

This sentence left Tom feeling a little depressed. He looked down at her smiling up at him, and took in that she was smaller than he remembered, that her blue-grey eyes were very widely spaced, that she smiled easily and warmly and that her smile was surprisingly wide.

“It was so nice of Miss Ellinghausen to give you to me. Or would you rather dance with Posy Tuttle?”

“Posy and I didn’t have much to say to each other.”

“Posy was scared stiff of you, couldn’t you tell?”

“What?”

“You’re so hulking, for one thing, with those enormous shoulders. Posy is used to looking down at boys, that’s why she has that terrible stoop. And I think she found your reputation forbidding. I mean your reputation as the school intellectual.”

“Is that what I am?” This was a little disingenuous.

“But Not For Me” came to an end, and “Cocktails For Two” began.

“Do you remember when I visited you in the hospital?”

“You talked about Buddy then too.”

“I was impressed with him, I will admit. It was interesting to—that he was a Redwing was interesting.”

“Boys,” Miss Ellinghausen said, “right hands on your partners’ spines. Fritz, stop daydreaming.”

When Tom said nothing, Sarah went on, “I mean, they’re so definite. So set apart.”

“What goes on at the compound?”

“They watch movies a lot. They talk about sports. The men get together and talk about business—I saw your grandfather a couple of times. He comes over to see Ralph Redwing. If it wasn’t them, it’d be kind of boring. And Buddy isn’t too boring.” She looked up at him with a flickering smile. “I always think of you when I see your grandfather.”

“I think of you too.” Tom’s depression had blown away as if it never existed.

“You’re not shaking anymore,” she said.

Miss Gonsalves began thumping out something that sounded like “Begin the Beguine.”

“I was so stupid, that day I saw you in the hospital. You know how you go over certain conversations after you had them, and feel terrible about the dumb things you said? That’s how I feel about that day.”

“I was just happy you came.”

“But you were—” She waited.

“You were so different. Grown up.”

“Well, you’ve caught up with me! We’re friends again, aren’t we? We wouldn’t have stopped being friends, if you hadn’t walked in front of a car.” She looked up at him with a face in which an idea was just being born. “Why don’t you come up to Eagle Lake this summer? Fritz could invite you. I could see you every day. We could sit around and talk while Buddy is blowing up fish and wrecking cars.”

Holding Sarah Spence in his arms, Tom felt himself claimed by the daily world, which had seemed so insubstantial in Lamont von Heilitz’s house. This extraordinarily pretty and self-possessed girl seemed to imply, with her long warm smile and stream of sentences that went straight into him like a series of shapely arrows, that everything could always be as it was at this moment. He could dance, he could talk, he could hold Sarah Spence’s surprisingly firm and solid body in his arms without shaking or stuttering. He was the school intellectual—the school something, anyhow. He was hulking, with his enormous shoulders.

“Aren’t you glad they got that madman who killed Marita Hasselgard?” Sarah asked him, her voice bright and careless.

The music stopped. Miss Gonsalves began murdering “Lover.” Miss Ellinghausen wandered past and nodded at him from behind Sarah Spence’s back. She actually gave him a thin dusty smile.

“We should be friends,” she said, and rested her head against his chest.

“Yes,” he said, clearing his throat and separating from her as Miss Ellinghausen tapped Sarah’s shoulder and tried to shrivel them with a betrayed, angry glance. “Yes, we really should.”

At the end of the class, Miss Ellinghausen clapped her hands together, and Miss Gonsalves lowered the upright’s polished lid. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are making excellent progress,” Miss Ellinghausen said. “Next week I shall introduce the tango, a dance which comes to us from the land of Argentina. Basic knowledge of the tango has become essential in smart society, and, considered in itself, the tango is a refined vehicle in which the strongest emotions may find expression in a delicate and controlled fashion. Some of you will see what I mean. Please give my best wishes to your parents.” She turned away to open the door to the hallway.

Sarah and Tom filed through the door and nodded to Miss Ellinghausen, who responded to each of the hasty nods given her by the students with an identical, machine-tooled dip of the head. For the first time since Tom had joined the class, the old lady interrupted her performance at the door long enough to ask a question. “Are the two of you satisfied with the new arrangement?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“Very,” said Sarah.

“Fine,” said Miss Ellinghausen, “there’ll be no more nonsense, then,” and dipped her head in her perfect nod.

Tom followed Sarah out on the broad top step of the townhouse. Fritz Redwing stood at the bottom of the steps, rolling his eyes and gesturing toward the waiting cart.

“Well,” said Tom, wishing that he did not have to leave Sarah Spence, and wondering how she got home.