I won’t go into those seven years, except to say that they were rather distressing in the beginning, and I wished that it had been I who died of an impaired heart instead of Sherman Pike. My own was impaired, I felt, but I didn’t die of it, and when Sid came along I was glad I hadn’t. We were married after a while, and it was a good marriage, and I thought of Beth only now and then.
Until tonight, that is, when I tried to think of her exclusively in the evasion of my conscience. This sad summer night of gin and cicadas at the end of seven years. Walking through the night across the town in spite of common sense and Sid.
CHAPTER 5
In your own town, if it is a town of a certain size and character, you probably have a Dreamer’s Park. It is not a large park, occupying only a square block, and it is thickly planted with indigenous trees, possibly oaks and maples and elms and sycamores. Gravel paths, bordered with red bricks set edgewise in the earth, cross the park diagonally from corner to corner, and various gravel tributaries branch off less geometrically from these. Wooden benches with cast-iron legs and arms, the seats and backs constructed of heavy slats, are scattered over the grass beneath the trees, and in one corner, where two streets join, there are a couple of clay tennis courts that are usually not in very good condition. The grass is cut once in a while, but it never has the neat, clipped appearance of golf courses and modern cemeteries. In the center of the park, so that the two diagonal paths must coincide briefly to make their ways around it in a circle, is a wooden bandstand needing paint and repair.
The park is old, as age is reckoned in your town, and not so much use is made of it now as used to be. A few children play there on warm, dry days. A few families or other groups have picnics under the trees on summer evenings. The tennis courts are used occasionally by poor players who are not particular, but there are better courts for better players other places. The green benches under the trees are mostly occupied by old men who have nothing much to do, and who walk there slowly to sit and rest and doze and dream before walking slowly home again. At night, sometimes, lovers stop by.
There are no concerts in the bandstand nowadays, but once, a number of years ago, there was one every Friday night of the warm months from May to September. The concert was played by the town band under the direction of the high school music teacher, who was paid extra for this extra service, and he was glad to have the job because he needed the money. People came from all over town to hear the concerts, sitting on the benches and the grass and in parked cars along the four bounding streets, and quite a thing was made of them. The program was printed in the newspaper Thursday evening, so that everyone might know exactly what he could expect to hear, and temporary refreshment stands were erected for the sale of ice cream cones and candy bars and soda pop. The kids ran around the park and sometimes became noisy enough to interfere with the listening pleasure of their elders, but this was not a serious problem and was generally tolerated with reasonably good grace. The program varied somewhat from week to week, but there were several favorites that reappeared regularly, and almost every concert ended with a stirring rendition, heavy on trumpets and trombones, of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Once each season, near Memorial Day, there was a tenor in the band who laid aside his instrument long enough to sing “My Buddy.”
Nights are long since you went away,
I dream about you all through the day,
My buddy,
My buddy,
Your buddy misses you.
Something like that. The tenor was usually not very true, and the amplifiers didn’t help any in that respect, but the song was appreciated especially by the veterans, which may even have included then, if you are old enough now, someone from Shiloh or Antietam or Gettysburg.
This was Dreamer’s Park, to which I was going, and after a while I got there. I entered the park at its southeast corner, passing between clumps of pfitzers onto the diagonal gravel walk, and it was dark in there under the trees on the walk leading to the heart of the darkness. My heels made crunching sounds on the gravel, and I kept listening for other sounds around me, breathing or whispering or the breathless laughing of lovers, but I couldn’t hear a thing, or see a thing except the trunks of trees and the deeper shadow of the bandstand ahead of me, and then after a few seconds I became aware of a soft and sibilant sound, a kind of hissing, and it was me whistling through my teeth for company.
Arriving at the bandstand, I went a quarter of a turn around the circle and up rickety steps. The stand was also circular, with a shingled peaked roof, and all around the perimeter was a built-in bench that was no more than a hard seat braced at intervals from the floor with two-by-fours, open space between the seat and the floor. I sat down on the bench and began to wait, looking out into the park and listening for the sound of Beth’s feet on the gravel walk, but the only sounds I heard came from the four streets beyond, where cars and pedestrians passed sparsely in four directions. I wondered why Beth
