After Leslie Waller. After the first dinner he had ever eaten at Schrafft’s, Palmer sat back and sighed, not so much in appreciation of the meal

(to be continued)

After the first dinner he had ever eaten at Schrafft’s, Palmer sat back and sighed, not so much in appreciation of the meal, but in silent recognition of the fact that millions of people regularly ate such meals and, apparently, came back for more. He had agreed to Schrafft’s, on Virginia Clary’s suggestion, in simple accord with the unspoken fact that it would be impossible for him to run into anyone he knew there. At the time, her choice had seemed an admirable compromise between the need to be fed and the need to minimize, without any outright intrigue, the fact that they were eating together.

“That look on your face,” she said after the waitress had cleared away their dishes. “After all, I warned you you’d be better off with the Tom turkey.”

“With pineapple-and-chestnut dressing?” Palmer asked in a semi-strick­en voice. “My father warned me never to eat turkey before Thanksgiving or after Christmas. Unfortunately, he had nothing to say on the subject of chicken loaf.”

She smiled and sipped her water. Palmer noticed that in the somewhat subdued lighting of Schrafft’s, with its faintly rosy tint, the deep shadows in which her eyes were set seemed less stark, more becoming. Although she couldn’t be considered beautiful, he told himself now, she was certainly attractive enough, in a small, intense way.

“That’s the third time,” she said then, “that you’ve quoted your father.”

“He turned out a tremendous number of quotations in his time. Should 1 apologize?”

“I think it’s old-fashioned and charming,” she said. “People who haven’t yet learned to hate their parents are quite rare in New York.” “You even have your mother’s picture on your desk.”

“She lives with me. Or vice versa. I’m never sure. Not,” she went on hur­riedly, “that we’re devoted to each other We keep a kind of armed truce. She’s never really forgiven me for going to work at a bank.”

“Bad as all that?” he asked.

“A bank foreclosed our house in Hollis in 19-oh-31.”

“Your mother can’t forgive that?”

“Neither would you if the house meant to you what it did to my folks. We’d lived most of our lives in the upper Yorkville section, the part they call Spanish Harlem now.

When my father managed to make the downpayment on that bungalow in Hollis... I tell you, it was Hallelujah Day. And then, after only three years, to...” Her voice died away. “But then,” she went on more strongly, “we had a lot of company in 1931. All our neighbors were foreclosed, too.”

“It was quite a year.”

“What happened to you in 1931?” she asked.

Palmer shrugged. “Nothing much. I think it was my freshman year at college. Well insulated from the outside world, to say the least.” “Class of’34?”

“Yes. Another great year.”

“I was class of ’34 at Barnard,” she said.

Palmer’s eyebrows went up slightly, then came slowly down. He won­dered whether she had seen the movement, decided that she undoubtedly had and then, suddenly, wondered why he had bothered to try concealing it. “I’d never believe it,” he said then. “You don’t look old enough.”

“I’m a few years younger than you, at any rate,” she said. “I was ahead of my class at Holy Name. Graduated when I was fourteen with a scholar­ship to Marymount, but we couldn’t afford me living out of town. My moth­er wouldn’t hear of me at a co-ed school like C.C.N.Y. I was just about to matriculate at Hunter when this Barnard thing came through, thanks to Paddy Culhane.”

Palmer sat forward slightly. “Why is that name familiar?”

“He was our old district captain in East Harlem”.

“Any relation to Big Vie Culhane?”

She looked at him in vague amazement. “His father.”

“Did you know Big Vie?”

“Of course,” she said. “He went to the boys’ part of Holy Name”.

“Ever seen him since?”

She frowned. “Many times. I used to be a newspaper gal, you know. Is something wrong?”

Palmer shook his head. “Not at all. Quite the contrary, if anything.”

She watched him for a moment, then sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “Anyway,” she said then, “that’s all there is to the history of Virginia Clary. Except that I’m working on my mother every spare moment I get, try­ing to wean her from this unreasoning hatred of banks.”

“You could have lied to her, told her you were working in a house of ill fame.”

“I thought of that,” she said. “But then she’d insist on me going to Mass every morning. It’s easier this way.”

Without warning, the waitress plopped menus in front of them with the question, “Dessert?”

“Just coffee,” Virginia Clary said.

“The same.”

“You get dessert on the dinner,” the waitress reminded Palmer.

“I know.”

“Loganberry shrub, luxuro peach smash, kumquat supreme huckleber­ries in wine.”

“Just coffee,” Palmer said, trying not to wince.

“I may have some peanut-butter snowball left.”

“Just coffee, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

Date: 2015-07-17; view: 503; Нарушение авторских прав