His inquiries about her around town aroused discouraging reactions:
"She is damaged goods," said local paper’s printer devil.
"Why’s that?"
"Hard like a diamond." the smudgy youth said, "That ice never melts. Her dad runs the labor commission and she went away East to some fancy school. She wants to read or write or something. You have no shot at her."
"Me?"
"You, me – anyone."
"What's her name?"
"Constance Marchant – she thinks she knows everything."
White scowled back at the man.
Over the course of the next few weeks he made it his mission to attract her attention. He got a big sign for his law office and had his name and title painted in big gold letters across its front window. But as a means of arousing her interest it didn’t work. He had seen her walk past a dozen times while he sat in there pretending to pour over the books for some big case, but she never looked up. So one morning when he saw her go into the café he made it his business to just happen to go there at the same time.
He walked in the door and smoothed his gold hair and walked to her table and introduced himself.
"Hello," he said. "I don't think I've had the pleasure of meeting you. I'm Ernest White."
Her eyes lifted for half a moment but scarcely registered, save to briefly appraise him like just another local rube. She quickly and pertly reburied herself in a book he identified as Dora Russell's "Right to be Happy." Libertine, he noted, libertine.
"I am going to be out of here soon," she recited, "and so in the interest of protecting men’s hearts I refuse to make attachments. It's not personal, just policy."
"I see."
"So we are in agreement then," she said. "No childish games of quarry or prey?"
"I could answer you if I could be sure you were talking to me and not your book."
She raised her eyes. They were lovely and hard and green. "So, we are in agreement then, Mr. Man-in-the-fancy-suit? No childish games? I really haven't the interest or the time."
He looked back at her with eyes as blue and serene as he could make them. "I promise you, Miss..?"
"Constance Marchant."
"I promise you, Miss Marchant, that I will not be a waste of your time." He tipped his hat and spun on his heels. He took his coffee from the waitress and departed, hoping that he had put a sufficient agitation in her mind to set her eyes to follow him.
A week of silence followed and then a day came when looked out of his law office and saw her trying to load several big packages in the back of her car in a thunderstorm. He ran out and came up beside her.
"Let me help you."
Her hair was flat and her makeup ran. "I can manage."
"Quit being such a prig, unless you want to drown before you finish this."
She glared at him but then moved aside to let him help.
He lifted one. "What’s in these? Lead?"
"Books."
He hastily loaded the last few.
"Well," she said, "Those boxes aren’t going to unload themselves. If you want to play the gentleman, hop in."
He had barely set both feet to the floorboard before she threw the car down the road with a lurch that pushed him back in his seat, and a few minutes later they were pulling up to a white three-story Victorian house that an old woman let to boarders. It had seen better days but was still mostly vertical, and it had a spidery staircase on the outside that wound its way up to different landings.
White looked up at it. "Let me guess..."
"Yes, I'm on the third floor. "
She opened the trunk and stacked two big boxes in his arms then took a hat box for herself and led the way. He followed her up the staircase then waited while she fumbled inordinately long for a key. She finally found it, turned it in the lock and let him in.
Once inside the door he dropped the boxes from his aching arms and then looked around. It was a wide bright room with wood floors and tall windows and a few efficient pieces of white shaker furniture – a table and chairs, a desk and bookcase, a settee, a bed and a nightstand. On her desk was a photograph of a graduating class at college.
"Yes, that's me – third from the left, second row. Here – I have a whole book of photos. You might as well get all the curiosity out of your system, because I can tell you are extremely nosy."
She went to the bookshelves and took down a big burgundy yearbook and a scrapbook as well, and tossed these to him. "Well, have a seat – look through them."
"It would help if you could tell me what I’m seeing."
"Very well – let me put some water on for tea first."
She put the water on and then took a seat beside him.
"Yes – that’s me with my first pony – I come from horse-raising folks. My grandmother made that riding outfit for me and I hated it. But see here, I’ve put most of my college pictures in the front. I know that’s not orthodox, but I wanted it that way. My parents had to assert their prairie royalty by sending me somewhere East that even dirt farmers have heard of, so they can tell their friends. But of course I loved it."
"So why aren’t you with your parents now?"
"Going to college made it difficult to go back to their supervision. I need to let my brain unpack at its own pace. But yes, in the end I will return to their paternal umbrage, live under their roof and let them feed me, and take an interest in the assortment of thick-necked suitors they have assembled for my pleasure. Each and every one of them guarantees me a future of hosting teas for politicians’ wives and championing a non-threatening socially edifying cause as the unelected busybody spouse of someone important – oh, and the chance to have lots and lots of babies. And as they court me I will make goo-goo eyes in appreciation of their manhood and ponder my fate like a raven admiring bright stones. But all I promise is to spend every cent of their money."
He laughed. "My God you're jaded!"
"Jaded? I'm realistic. A person's got to rely on themselves for happiness. Love is over-rated. The most we can hope for is to maximize happiness through calculated social strategies."
He stared at her until he thought he could detect the ghost of a smile, but then they turned to the scrapbook once more though with her one inch closer to him.
"But why come here? Why to Blaze?"
"It was not without its advantages. It is quiet and removed from my family but not too far, and I could relocate here and not be the biggest oddity in town."
"So you do know who I am!"
"In a way – I know who you think you are – a man of the world, a would-be expert on everything."
This time she did smile, sardonically, and that let him notice her lovely pale complexion and her hair flat from rain, and he felt the warmth of her body radiating from her damp crepe dress and he sat one notch closer and she let him, and so they passed the rest of the afternoon.
There followed a month of increasingly close companionship, and in time they took to walking through town together like each other’s oasis. White was proud to see the slackened faces of rival men watching him walk beside her. She in turn came to expand extravagantly into the role of the urbane woman in the uncouth setting, and she sent out bold looks in reply to scowls of condemnation that were mostly imagined.
*
One afternoon as he moved an arm around her and some cow-eyed look came into his eyes she pulled back:
"I can't get serious," she said.
"Why? Because there's someone else?"
She threw her head back and laughed. "Because there's me!"
*
Another afternoon found them out in a field with her easel set up, she painting and he foraging through the remains of a picnic after arranging and rearranging some haystacks at her request in order to make them look more real. She continued the conversation of the other day:
"Let's have what we have while we have it. You do agree, don't you? Everything about your sensibility says you agree. We're both too young and
bright to be encumbered. Besides, it's not very modern."
"No, it isn't."
"Precisely," she said and made a decisive stab of her brush at the painting. "Now let's take this back to my apartment and decide if it's any better than the others."
He agreed and climbed in her car and she sat in the passenger seat beside him and on the way she leaned against him and they fell into each other such that the painting was left to dry in the car outside the apartment.
*
But one day when he came to pick her up she was quiet and sardonic and not dressed to go out and after a while he decided just to shut up and not say anything, and he put his hat back on and excused himself and went for a stroll about town. The air was warm and dry after a humid mid-morning and the afternoon hung in a lazy respite like a hammock. He stopped in the café for coffee and it was there that he overheard the scuttlebutt he confronted her with later.
"Your fiancée back East dumped you?"
She folded up tightly on her settee and said nothing.
"That's not very modern of you."
She said nothing and tightened up and rebuffed his chastisement, not even meeting his eyes, so he left. He buried himself in some law books in his office for awhile, drew up some documents, then looked up and saw it was twilight and headed home.
He was getting ready for bed late that night when he heard a knock at the door. He answered it, and it was her.
"Not very nice of you," he said, "Playing me when you had someone else. Guess you won't get to be Mrs. "Married to the Junior Ambassador to Luxembourg" after all."
"He was a pig." She tried to lean again him but he pulled back.
Ernest stood stock still in his doorway like he was blocking the egress of a salesman. "I’m sorry – is there something else to be said?"
"It was an infatuation that festered too long and became a habit. Being stuck at college makes one do that." She paused. "I'm glad it's over."
He couldn't tell if he believed her, but after making her just stand there looking small and foolish for a full minute, he melted just a bit and he let her in.
After that their association settled into a conventional routine, and she began to talk more of her father and his career, and something in her seemed to be happy that something else had given way, and she began to praise the prospects of a man in a proper situation. But as she did he could feel a loss as their relationship pulled away from the shore of what it first had been, and he began to feel disquiet at its slide into a convenient arrangement that aped intimacy.
And then she saw him see Atalanta, this girl who was tanned and young and strong and calm, a local girl White had scarcely been aware of growing up, but borne up now on youth fulfilled one notch beyond its boldest promise. Constance saw his eyes seeing her in town and first thought nothing of it, and then with sudden revelation thought everything of it.
"She's nothing – I have talked to her maybe twice. I'm drafting papers for her father to settle his brother's estate."
But Constance quarreled with White and said he had to decide, and she went off to an aunt’s house for a month to let her absence speak for itself.
And White decided he had to figure out the other woman who had burst into his mind like a thunderclap. With Constance there had the affection for a companion, but with Atalanta there was something bigger and stronger than him. The thought of wanting her to love him made him want to be better than he thought he could be.
*
Orange fire hung like a blob of marmalade in the sky and over the bare foundation of a building down by the river where the town had been when it was first settled, only to be ravaged decades past by a flood and left in a confusion of broken buildings and empty lanes reclaimed by trees and weeds. Atalanta's father's house was the last building before the old town began, down a slope of trees some young and upright but some still toppled and deposited by the historic deluge, heaps of brown timber now nearly hidden in the grass, and the two of them sitting on a foundation scraped clean years ago by a wall of water but now dry and bare and quiet in the sun and the ghosts of abandoned buildings hiding under trees not far in the distance, hollow, some in fields now fenced for cattle and valued by no one but animals who sought their shade.
Ernest and Atalanta sat on the middle of three steps of concrete up to the foundation of nothing. From here to the West her house was the last structure of the "new" town in sight; to the east and downhill the old town trailed in abandon and decay, throwing itself beneath the cover of vegetation like ghosts surprised by an unexpected and instant sunrise, an amalgam of catastrophe punctuated by one big hulk of a broken mill tossed high into the trees. The tops of dusty-smelling cottonwoods sang with birds piping the calls they saved for the hot of the day and the joy of life pulled up from the matted floor through hot sap and exhausted toward the blob of marmalade through green leaves blanched but strident in the sun. She sat with her knees drawn up and her faded blue skirt swept back from her ankles. She sat with her back to the old and her face to the new, turned toward her house and beyond, and through her face poured the mix of haunted structures and reclaiming Nature, pushed through her toward him like a sudden hot fragrance of a bloom of trumpet vine, wild and big as to draw you in, so orange as to rival the sun, like the force of life and memory from what was to what is and then past that, a force on which desire paints faces, beautiful heart-breaking faces into any of which you would gladly pour your whole life, and the ebony in her eyes lit fiercely with power from that first failed merger of nature and desire, with a primal knowingness that preserved and watched and waited, and she looking at him and past him, just a girl, a heartbreakingly lovely girl with auburn hair and the deep tanned skin and strong bare calves and through it all the nature of a hawk, and she looked at him then past him at that last habitable house before the old flood's ruins, a last of the first houses, cast in an older and darker style and costumed here and there with modernity, but not convincing and not much. And when she smiled he was awed by her femaleness, her beauty and patient creativity and mystery and power.
They met and tested each other's strength at some time and place neither bothered to record, and neither found the other wanting, and they fell into each other's magnetism with a warmth and wonder equal to a new world waiting to be consumed and a wanting to know and be known. They fell into fast company, and Constance was gone and Atalanta made everything new to him, and it was fun to show off for her and tell her about all the weird and wonderful things of the world.
*
White would leave his office at twilight and go to meet Atalanta at the interurban's depot. Atalanta supported her father by teaching at a mission school in a small town twenty miles away. He'd meet her at the depot, the small electric train jolting into town on wobbly light rails in orange evening. He'd wait and watch as maybe three or four people would step off then there she'd be, wearing a pale cotton dress, hips round beneath cotton, strong calves stepping down and one hand brushing back a wisp of brown hair, eyes down and maybe a little tired then looking up to see him. They'd walk away, the depot behind them, the sound of the small odd train creaking and humming and pulling away, and Main Street mostly deserted with folks away to supper, but here and there a few children already out playing again, and breezes were just beginning to stir as the orange skies slid toward pink then purple. And Ernest White would walk beside her with this little smile coming now and again to his face, both of them looking down neither saying anything for a while, but Ernest White looking at her now and trying to catch her glance, then some small joke from him, or some funny thing he'd noticed that day and set aside in his mind like a little jewel to share with her. And when she'd look and smile and chide him for his childishness he'd put an arm around her and kiss her, and they'd walk together to his car or stroll to the hotel dining room for supper, and when he looked at her he knew he loved her very much. And after being quiet for a half-an-hour or so, just long enough to keep his insane horse play at bay while she re
covered from her work, she would look up and have to agree she liked him, knowing full well that admitting as much would mean no sleep that night, as he'd pile her into his car and take her off for some all-night adventure, like to the smoky jazz halls. And the next day when she returned to the classroom she'd astonish all the children by looking like an absolutely beautiful disaster.
*
And all the while his father malingered, sick but perched stubbornly on the line separating decay and demise. Ernest visited as seldom as possible, keeping barely within the boundary of the least acceptable standard of civility. The consequence of Ernest’s stay in town was that he found himself having to becoming more familiar to it than he’d have liked. He found himself having to talk now and then with men who were acquainted his father or his family in one way or another one notch more closely than his new-minted and seamless cosmopolitan personality care to remember or acknowledge.
He talked to the sheriff more than he cared. Noah Larr had known both Chris and Isaiah White in their youths, and he felt a familiarity to talk to Ernest. He came up while Ernest was speaking with a young man named Michael who was in his own way was an oddity of the town, afflicted with an illness that left him bound in metal braces and sealed from the world of his teen-aged peers, leaving him to only pivot and watch as they buzzed up and down Main Street in their games and conspiracies.
Larr came down Main Street and approached Ernest and Michael with an outstretched hand and a smile.
"This boy keeping you out of trouble?" he laughed, putting a hand on Michael’s shoulder and looking at Ernest. "I tell you he has the eyes of Argus. He knows what goes on in town – he'd make a great deputy."
"Someday, maybe," Michael said.
"You keep it in mind," Noah said. "You have the skills, and ladies like uniforms." He laughed, and then leaned in to White and said, "You know, if it ever crossed your mind, you could sell me a strip of land Chris bought years ago when he was young and I was trying to run the family business, and we were both headstrong and stupid."
White looked at him. "You ran the business once?"
Larr laughed. "Years ago, but not very well. It fell to me simply because I was the oldest son, though probably the least suited to the task. When my brother and sisters grew up they proved much better at it – they ousted me – hah! But Chris didn't make it easy on me at the time. We got into a tiff and he bought one strip that meant nothing to him but would have given our business easy access to the railroad."