Otto noticed that Constance's cheeks were not really so pale or chiseled as they had seemed the other day, nor her eyes so icy cold. He blushed but then talked about himself.
*
Mr. White stood amongst some trees outside the hall, smoking, trying to decide what to do. He imagined himself walking into the hall to a round of applause, but a sting of reprobation checked him. He knew that was not how it would actually be.
He liked standing in twilight between the dark of the trees and the light of the party, but after bracing himself he crushed out his cigarette and walked toward the back door. He cracked it door, slid in, and then stood behind some bunting that had been hung on the back wall, not quite committing himself, listening to the sounds of music and laughs and voices. He looked out from between crepe streamers at the great mass of heads, hoary and slick and young and eager and crazy and smooth and blue, all bobbing and moving in epicycles more complex than Copernicus could have dreamt up. They bowed, nodded, wagged, shook, recoiled, tilted, flirted, dared, sallied, and laughed.
Then as he scanned the crowd his eyes caught on one woman above all the rest. She was about his age and wore a green and gold dress and stood at the far end of the room, and she was tall and dark and slim and strong like Artemis come to Earth. Her bright brown eyes scanned the hall.
He felt his heart leap and everything that was not this woman melted away. Unconsciously he stepped forward and tore through the bunting.
A great hush fell, followed by whispers and gasps, and finally a round of applause – not loud but not as faint as he had feared.
"Hello!" he said. "Please continue to enjoy yourselves."
The crowd’s silence and staring hung half-a-second more, then reverie poured back in to fill the gap like the sea un-parting behind Moses.
A few people began to approach him.
"Nice to come back at this time of progress..."
"...lots of hungry people..."
"Your mother said I could have her icebox..."
But White held up his hands to silence them and Otto appeared at his side just in the nick of time to intervene. "All in good time, all in good time," Otto said kindly but forcefully while backing White out from amongst them.
"Nice entrance," he said, turning back to his employer. But White was gone.
Ernest dashed through the crowd trying to find the woman he had seen. But she was nowhere. He poked his head into this clutch of gaggling fools then that one, but she was nowhere to be found. Finally, on an impulse, he dashed out the front door.
The cool black air hit his face. He tried to think like she would think. He raced around to the back of the hall and followed a lane between the tall grass and the trees. He came to where the path skirted the edge of the creek and saw her green and golden figure walking away. He ran and caught up with her, but she did not seem surprised to see him.
"Hello Atalanta," he said.
Atalanta Jones was his own age and dark-haired and tall and had a beautiful hawk-like face. Her brown eyes held a ferocity as they turned on him. But he did not care. He stared at her and his chaotic world of stunts and skyscrapers and pyramids and asymmetrical bad art melted away. He felt like he was finally where he wanted to be.
She stood firmly in front of him, as tall and strong as he was, and glared. "You are a stupid shit to come back here, Ernest. You break everything you touch, and you surround yourself with trinkets because you can’t stand yourself. You broke your own life years ago. You broke mine."
"That’s not true."
But her brown eyes held a pride that weighed scorn in them, and an injury he knew as well as he knew himself, and he knew he had no words to meet it, and he vowed he would just shut up and take it. She was so beautiful – still now, still then – always. It was the one thing he had wounded time to try to own, wounded his own time, his own life, to try to make himself one notch smaller so he could fit inside a picture frame that had her in it.
"Ernest, it is true. You made a shit of yourself and left this town and life has gone on. You can’t accomplish a thing by coming back here."
"You came here tonight because you wanted to find me."
That struck fire in her, and she looked at him. "Find you? You could have had me twenty years ago if your one goal in life hadn’t been to prove that you were one notch better than your old man, than this town, than everything that was more a part of you than the rest of the world put together."
He shot back. "Has anyone ever done more in their lives to try to "have you"? You were too busy playing the pauper belle of three counties that everybody courted but no one took home to mom and dad. You wanted to be wanted but you sure as hell didn’t want to give in to me – to give away whatever it was that made sure you could never be hurt."
"Ernest White..!"
"Listen," he said. "I came back here and I’m going to stay here. We need to see what we are going to do about it."
She stood off and fixed the shadows with a hard dark stare.
"Atalanta..."
"You're an idiot to come back."
"Atalanta..."
"You're an idiot."
"I know that."
"I don't trust you. I don’t believe you came back for me – with you, it’s always about you – it’s never about anyone else."
"Well it is now. And furthermore, did you not come upon me while I was asleep in my office the other night and put flowers in my hair?"
She looked shocked. "Why, to even make such an accusation – why would I do such a stupid thing?"
"So you deny it?"
"Of course I deny it. You probably did it yourself while you were drunk."
"Hardly!"
"Well then, I guess you’ve attracted the affection of some madwoman of the hills, Ernest. Heaven protect you."
He stared at her and felt simultaneously confounded and seething. For her part she looked off deep into the woods but then laughed abruptly and turned back to him. "My God, look at you – you look old and worn out. Life is killing you."
"I know," he said. "I’ve missed you. You are one of the few people I ever met who knew the right mix of death in life – of risk when protection would kill you, of protection when the world would eat you alive. You knew sorrow when you needed it but love and boldness in the whole damn big adventure. And not some stupid adventure like a jungle expedition or a trip to Giza. Just living."
"Good God, Ernest!"
She turned and began walking briskly down the lane. Ernest followed her, but it was not until they were far down the road that she let him catch up and walk beside her. But in the end, she did.
*
Back at the party, Otto set out to locate his employer, but his course of action was interrupted by a crescendo of angry voices coming from the entrance to the hall.
Maye Weather's voice rose shrilly: "Gentlemen, please, some order, some order!"
Otto saw Maye and Port vainly interposing between the entrance and a throng of disheveled workmen. They had the lean, bedraggled, defensive look that was characteristic of so many of the men imported to work on the dam.
"What's the idea of not inviting us?" said a gaunt fellow with a complexion of pallor and soot. "Aren't we good enough for this?" Some of the younger faces behind him gawked at all the lights and colors.
I'm just trying keep a little order," Maye insisted, "Your belligerence is not in keeping with the festivities."
But the gang of about twenty workmen shoved in en masse, and as they did so a group of sturdy farm lads moved in to meet them. Maye retreated to the vicinity of the punchbowl. Necks tightened and jaws clenched on both sides, and then somebody threw a haymaker and a melee ensued. Women screamed and the crowd pulled back but stayed close enough to watch. VFW men hustled up from the back of the hall ready to reenlist, and others shouted encouragement.
Almost as soon as the ruckus had begun, however, a pistol shot rent the air. All heads turned to see the sheriff in the doorway. He was a middle-aged and p
ear-shaped man, and his bulldog face looked weary and perturbed.
"There'll be no brawls here," he said in as stern a voice as he could muster. "You people should know better – all of you. But since you don't y'all go home. Everyone."
"They – they weren't invited..." Maye began meekly.
The sheriff looked unimpressed. "Invited, not invited – do I look like I have the manpower to sort this out? Everyone has to go." he said.
Someone turned off the music. Silence hung for a few seconds, then bodies began to shuffle sulkily toward the door. People exchanged handshakes and heads bowed together in whispered farewells. The sheriff eyed everyone as they walked past, returning greetings when deserved and prying his eyes into downcast faces when appropriate.
When most of the revelers had departed the sheriff took off his hat and wiped his brow.
Maye Weather walked up wearily beside him and fanned herself with one hand. She was florid with excitement and exhaustion.
"You put on one hell of a doing, Maye," he said. "Didn't know you had it in you."
She nodded and stared off vacantly and unwittingly took a long sip of punch directly from the ladle.
The sheriff found an amber-colored bottle he liked, downed a shot, and gave a little cough of appreciation.
"I hear Mr. White causes trouble wherever he goes," the sheriff muttered, though without much conviction. He cradled the bottle he liked. "I'll be taking this with me as evidence," he said. With that he excused himself and disappeared out the door.
When at last the hall was empty Maye stood in one corner and let out one long sigh. The space before her, that had been life-filled and bustling just moments ago, was now an empty shell littered with torn bunting, confetti, and balloons.
Otto came up and handed both her and Port Gil a push broom. He then proceeded to the far corner with his own.
*
The next day Ernest came home late in the morning. His face was wrinkled up like an unmade bed. He said only a few gruff words to Otto, grabbed a cup of cold coffee and scowled, stabbed at his breakfast like it was his mortal enemy, and then buried himself in his books.
Chapter 5
Atalanta Jones was dark with more than a hint of the French blood that early fur traders had brought to this corner of the state.
Ernest had met her during the years between his inheritance and the completion of his education abroad, when he had finished a study of law and even won a few cases just prove he was not completely useless and idle, when his quickly-maturing and dandifying personage would come home each summer from the world to this little spot of a town like he expected a parade. He never got along with his father, and the father would make little effort to acknowledge him in return. In any case, each summer the father looked smaller and weaker whereas Ernest White seemed ever more vitalized by whatever extravagant exploits he'd indulged in.
Finally, one summer when Ernest was about 25, he returned home and found his father very ill. The house seemed quiet except for the sound of his father's coughing in the back room. Ernest took off his hat and stepped inside. The nurse his parents had hired had not shown up that day and Ernest's mother had her hands full caring for the sick man. Ernest met her near the back room and she asked him to sit with his father while she fixed some supper.
"Read the Bible to him," she said.
"He's never read that damned thing in his life," Ernest replied.
"Do it anyway. He wants to hear it now."
Suddenly his father began breathing very awkwardly. Ernest and his mother went into his room and his father woke up but did not seem to be aware of where he was. Ernest stood transfixed by the sight of just how feeble the old man was, so his mother moved in past him and crouched near her husband and picked up the Bible and began reading to him from a random page of Psalms. Ernest left the room to get some air but came back a minute later when he discovered he'd left his hat behind.
When he stepped back in the bedroom his father was awake and haggard, and his mother was sitting beside him. Ernest stood just inside the doorway.
"It's always been the money," his father said, "that lets you think you're special. Even now you're ungrateful. Without it you'd be lost."
Ernest denied this, but his mother's face wrinkled when it looked like they might argue, and she pushed Ernest's hat into his hands and shooed him from the room.
After that argument he set about to prove his father wrong. He set up a small law office in New York and lived solely off its gains, returning at night to a small room he rented. And soon he was doing well. He had successfully defended a prodigal Rockefeller against a headline-grabbing woman with nothing to lose and a body made for tabloid scandal. After that he was in demand but took his leisure to pick and choose. Several firms were watching him and thinking of making him a partner. Ernest would mull over his rising fame and rock backward in his spring-loaded brown chair in his small brown office and listen to the busy city and dream about his future.
But he had met a beautiful young woman named Constance when he came home for the his father's illness, and so to give himself some respite from New York and to rub his father's nose in his success, he decided to start a small law office back in Blaze, for a summer maybe, maybe longer. And though Constance was beautiful he often found himself meeting another girl instead – Atalanta. While Constance was the daughter of some state power broker and always off at socials for girls of her plateau, Atalanta was the daughter of a widowed railroad workman. She carried herself with an unconscious bodily confidence and strength of presence that was who she was, not who she wanted to be, and that made her marvelously beautiful.
It came to be that Constance was his ambition and Atalanta its respite, and he recklessly pursued an arrangement that was unfair to both.
Constance was gone most of one month in the summer, and it was during that month that White's affections deepened for Atalanta. And one day as summer was waning, Ernest White brought a big band into town for her and had them play in the town's square at night beneath paper lanterns while he taught her dance steps, and most of the town came out from their homes in twos and threes to join them, and nearly everybody found an excuse to celebrate something, and Ernest White was in a crowd and yet alone with her, and he was as happy as he ever thought he'd be.
Only three weeks later, however, she had left town and left him, and Ernest White had no idea where she'd gone though he could think of reasons why she'd departed. After that Ernest White locked himself in his rented house for three days and then came out as the white suit man for the first time. He called the bankers from their dinner tables and collected his inheritance and admitted his old man was right about him and chucked the keys to his law office as far as he could. The next morning he sat by himself at a bench at the depot, buttoned in white and with a flask beside him, soused to the gills by 8:00 A.M. and waiting for the first train out of there. He left home with all the money he could grab. He reclaimed the inheritance and set out into the world to make a fool of it and of himself.
And fifteen years later, he came home.
*
From Otto's Journal:
I first met Ernest White years ago in Vienna. A generation back my family came to America from the old world, and I had come from a long line of watch-makers. My father sent back to Europe to work in my uncle's watch repair shop as a way of paying him back for helping put me through school. It was while I was in Europe that I met Mr. White. One afternoon when I was about to leave my uncle's shop I received word that a very distinguished visitor at a nearby hotel needed a watch repaired right away. So I went to see him. When I arrived I was escorted to the gold door of the most expensive suite there. I could hear Chopin being played badly on a piano within. I knocked, and knocked, and finally a Chinese man in a ruby kimono opened the door. He bowed and ushered me in to his 'master' - a tanned and lanky young man wearing a white suit and holding a brandy. It was Ernest.
"Here, fix this," he said and tossed me the cheapest, gau
diest watch I had ever seen. He said he'd purchased it from a vendor in Baghdad and paid a fortune for it, but none of dancing girls undulated anymore.
My God, how he hovered while I tried to work! He'd get in my light and make all sorts of suggestions on what I should do, and he'd pick up parts while I was working with them and then drop them into the thick carpet or into his brandy snifter. Finally I had to shout at him to quit. That only made him smile and retire to the piano where he began playing loud discordant notes until after fifteen minutes I threw up my hands and shouted, "This thing's a damn piece of junk! I don't care how much you paid for it. It's a wreck. And you rich - you never take care of anything. It looks like you've kept it in your car's gearbox the past six months. I'm sorry but this'll never run again."
But he just smiled calmly. "My God," he said, "You're really not very good at this sort of thing."
"That's not it," I tried to tell him. "You..."
"Oh yes, it's me," he said, "I'm careless. I'm irresponsible. But you - you're actually honest. I could use a man like you."
I was too angry to accept his compliment, so I excused myself and left.
A year later I was still in Vienna and I'd had a hard day in my uncle's shop and was in a bar rewarding myself with a beer when I overheard boisterous conversation coming from a corner table and noticed Mr. White seated there, surrounded by an odd troupe of the rich, the talented, the eclectic, and their hangers-on. They laughed and lectured and pouted and shrieked and tried to best each other while discussing some recent expedition to Tibet.
I saw that White was much quieter than those around him. There was a white bandage on his head, pushing his golden hair up off his brow.
I walked up and he recognized me. It was the first smile I'd seen on his face since I'd been watching him.
"I remember you," he said. "You're the watch maker I drove insane."
"Look," I said, "This crowd isn't making you happy, is it?"
"Well, of course not," he answered.
"Then why don't you just leave? If you need someone you can trust, I'll work for you."