The rain started again, gently, upon the cottage. It was as dark as night, but a very special feeling, because you knew it was four in the afternoon, though black, and the sun was above all the blackness, oh, very special.
At six o’clock, Linda painted a fresh mouth on. “Well, I hope the food’s good,” she said. It was still raining, a thumping, pounding, never-ending drop of storm upon the house. “What do we do this evening?” she wanted to know.
“Dance? There’s a pavilion, cost a million dollars, built in 1929 just before the crash,” he said, tying his tie. And again he was out of the room, in thought, and under the raining trees, eighteen years ago.
Him and Marion and Skip, running in their rustling slickers, making a noise like cellophane, with the rain patting them all over, their faces greased with it, past the playground and the slides, along the posted road, and to the pavilion. Children were not allowed inside.
They had stood outside with their faces pressed to the screen, watching the people inside, buying drinks, laughing, sitting at the tables, getting up and going out to dance on the dance floor to music that was muted and enclosed. Marion had stood there, enchanted, the light on her face. “Someday,” she had said, “I’m going to be inside, and dance.”
They had stood, with the rain touching around them, in the dark wet night, the rain dripping from the eaves of the pavilion. And the music had played “I Found My Love in Avalon” and things like “In Old Monterrey.”
Then, after half an hour of the rain seeping into their shoes, and their noses chilling, and rain slipping into their raincoat collars, they had turned from the warm pavilion light and walked off, silently, the music fading, down the road back to their cabins.
Someone knocked on the front door. “Sam!” called a voice.
“Hey, you two! Ready? Time for dinner!”
They let Sam in. ‘”How do we get up to the hotel?” asked Linda. “Walk?” She looked at the rain outside the door.
“Why not,” said her husband. “It’d be fun. God, we never do anything anymore, you know what I mean, we never walk anywhere, if we have to go anyplace past a block we get in the car. Hell, let’s put on our raincoats and march up, eh, Sam?”
“Okay with me, how about you, Linda?” cried Sam.
“Oh, walk?” she complained. “All that way? And in this rain?”
“Come off it,” the husband said. “What’s a little rain.”
“All right,” she said.
There was a rustling as they got into raincoats. He laughed a lot and whacked her on the backside and helped her buckle it up tight. “I smell like a rubber walrus,” she said. And then they were out in the lane of green trees, slipping on the squelching grass, in the lane, sinking their rubbered feet into sludge mud furrows where cars came splashing by, whining in the thick wet dark.
“Oh, boy, this is swell!” he shouted.
“Not so fast,” she said.
The wind blew, bending the trees, and by the look of it, it would last a week. The hotel was up the hill and they walked now, with less laughing, though he tried starting it again. It was after Linda slipped and fell that nobody said a thing, though Sam, when helping her up, tried to make a joke.
“If nobody minds, I’m hitching a ride,” she said.
“Oh, be a sport,” he said.
She thumbed the next car going up the hill. When the car stopped, the man in it shouted, “You all want a ride to the hotel?” But he walked on without saying a word, so Sam had to follow.
“That wasn’t polite,” said Sam.
Lightning stood on the sky, like a naked and newborn tree.
Supper was warm, but not of much taste, the coffee was thin and unpalatable and there were not many people in the dining room. It had that end-of-the-season feel, as if everybody had taken their clothes out of storage for the last time, tomorrow the world was ending, the lights would go out, and it was no use trying too hard to please anybody. The lights seemed dim, there was too much forced talk and bad cigar smoke.
“My feet are soaked,” said Linda.
They went down to the pavilion at eight o’clock, and it was big and empty and echoing, with an empty bandstand, which filled slowly until at nine o’clock there were a lot of people seated at the tables, and the orchestra, a nine-piece band (hadn’t it been a twenty-piece band in 1929, wondered the husband), broke into a medley of old tunes.
His cigarettes tasted damp, his suit was moist, his shoes were sopping, but he said nothing. When the orchestra played its third number, he asked Linda out on the floor. There were about seven couples out there, in the rainbow changing lights, in the vast echoing emptiness. His socks squeaked water as he walked, they were very cold.
He held Linda and they danced to “I Found My Love in Avalon,” just because he had telephoned earlier to have it played. They moved quietly around the floor, not speaking.
“My feet are soaking wet,” said Linda, finally.
He held on to her and kept moving. The place was dim and dark and cool and the windows were washed with fresh rain still pouring.
“After this dance,” said Linda, “we’ll go to the cabin.”
He didn’t say yes or no.
He looked across the shining floor, to the empty tables, with a few couples spotted here and there, beyond them, to the watery windows. As he moved Linda across the floor, nearer to the window, he squinted, and there they were.
Outside the window, a few child faces, peering in. One or two. Perhaps three. The light on their faces. The light shining in their eyes. Just for a minute or so.
He said something.
“What’d you say?” asked Linda.
“I said I wish I were outside the window now, looking in,” he said. She looked at him. The music was ending. When he looked at the window again, the faces were gone.
1997
The end
