“Like hell you are!” Sid said in my mind to me. “You are going to see an old girl for tonight’s sake, and not so damn innocently, either, if you ask me.”
I hadn’t asked her, but she kept telling me, and I kept trying not to listen and to think of Beth only as I walked along. Dreamer’s Park was quite a long walk away, on the other side of town, and as an aid to the exclusion of Sid, who refused to be mute or invisible, I began to remember how it used to be with Beth and me in the pre-Thatcher days, and there wasn’t really anything remarkable about it or us or anything we did, but it seemed remarkable at the time, and still did at times like now, and this is the way, to put it clearly, it was.
Beth had been a girl around town, born there and growing up there, and I had known her since way back. She had always been the kind of girl that boys notice, even back in elementary school days when she was a very small girl being noticed by very small boys, but later, sometime in high school, she was suddenly the loveliest girl in the world. This was an opinion I shared with many others, and the truth of the opinion was something we felt instinctively and passionately, although we had never seen all the other girls in the world, or even a fair share of them. She had this pale hair and these brown eyes that seemed sometimes in the light to be almost golden, and she had a natural way of walking that some women have to learn at great expense as an essential element of their professional equipment. It is a way that is difficult and almost impossible to describe, but you have seen it in the best actresses and models, and it has in it a kind of complete grace and vibrancy that communicates itself without excessive intrusion of moving parts.
I was lucky then, in high school, for Beth took a fancy to me that was somewhat greater than, if not exclusive of, the fancies she had in varying degrees for others. Well, you can’t ask for everything. If I didn’t get all of what then passed for love, I at least got more than my share, and it was in this early period of ancient history, along toward the end of it, that we stopped now and again, while passing through Dreamer’s Park, for the modest frolics in the old bandstand which I had mentioned in telecon, and to which I was now headed by shank’s mare.
Soon after that we entered the middle period of this ancient era, and this period lasted for nine years and was characterized mainly by my absence from town. I spent most of seven of the nine at the state university in pre-law and law, which made me twenty-five, and then I worked two more for the Adjutant-General, which made me twenty-seven. I was released, as they say, under honorable conditions, and came home. End of middle period.
I had seen Beth now and then during this time, of course, but not often and never for long, and in the final eighteen months of it, not at all. Now I was home to stay, honorable but undistinguished, never even having met the Adjutant-General, and there was Beth still. If she was not exactly waiting for me, still she was there. She was more or less engaged, in fact, to Sherman Pike, who was about my age and who had become editor of the Record, the local daily, during my absence. Sherm had a good brain and considerable talent, a fine and sensitive fellow, and it was generally conceded that he had a fair prospect of becoming important. I admit that I had been anticipating more of Beth, having learned, as I aged, a lot more about the interesting things you can do with women, even to marrying them, but I was prepared, after I discovered how matters had developed with her and Sherm, to concede and withdraw all claims and look elsewhere for diversion.
But Beth wouldn’t have it that way. Her fancy for Gideon Jones was still strong, although not exclusive, and pretty soon we had taken up what we had never quite put down, and it was better than ever and kept getting better than that. It didn’t last long, not quite a year, which was the time of the third and final pre-Thatcher period, but it was hot while it lasted, and I began to think about marriage just as soon as my infant practice became able to toddle, and we even tried a few samples that we both liked fine. It was too bad about Sherm, but as things turned out, it didn’t make much difference to him, anyhow, for it wasn’t more than four or five months after my return when he went home one evening and died. He had had rheumatic fever as a boy, and the doctor said that it was an impaired heart that caused it. He was buried on a Wednesday afternoon, having had no time to become important after all, in the cemetery on the east edge of town. I went and Beth went, but we didn’t go together.
I had no reason to think that things would be different between us, and they weren’t. Not, that is, until the very end of that brief and final period. Everything was satisfactory, even intense and exciting. Beth went out a couple of times with Wilson Thatcher, and I raised a mild sort of hell about it, but she said it was only for a little
