a book out of the library they wouldn’t have any students left. Downtown, some of the boys go in and cut the pages right out of the reference books with razor blades. He must be a crank, that Phelan.”
As she talked on with the sympathy he expected, Jim wanted to tell her more. He wanted to tell her the whole story, for Father Phelan had done more than suspend him. The priest had told him there was a “smoothness and cleverness” in his character that was “not fitting.” What it amounted to, Jim had concluded bitterly, was he had called him a sneak. It was the capstone to his increasing load of doubts about himself. “You’re not worth a shit,” as his father had put it graphically in his rage in the car that morning. There were so many doubts, so many fears that he wanted to talk about. He almost started. But he didn’t have the courage.
“What are you going to do now?” Jill asked.
“Take it easy for two weeks,” Jim replied. “What the heck. Don’t pass up a vacation.”
“Will you be back in school in time for the Freshman Prom?”
He thought for a moment. “Yeah. I guess so.”
She hoped he’d follow up on the subject, but he let it drop. He was probably taking Eva anyway.
Chapter 3
Jill came back to the house with Jim. When Mr. Meagher heard her voice, he left the television set and came out to greet her. “Ah, Jill,” he said. She went right to him, and kissed his cheek as she always did, and he grinned.
“You’re a high blossom,” he told her, “from a sweet tree.”
Jill loved it. She loved him too. And he’d do anything for her. Just the opposite of his attitude toward Eva. The father wouldn’t give Eva the time of day from an armful of watches. The Polock. She wasn’t even Polish, but he had decided she looked Polish.
“What have you got against the Polish?” Jim had asked him one time.
“You’d starve to death with them,” the father said. “When I was new in this country, I went out once with a Polock, and she brought me to the house, and opened the ice-box, and sure there wasn’t a damn thing on the five shelves, but an apple, and that with hair growing on it.”
That was the origin of his favorite name for Eva: Hairy Apple.
Jim grabbed his baseball glove and went off to a ballgame in the park, leaving his father with Jill. As he walked along the street, punching his fist into the pocket to soften the leather, he wondered how his father ever got around to asking out a Polish girl in the first place. He must certainly have been a different man in those days. And what would his father have been like on a date? Jim couldn’t even imagine it. For the girl it must have been like going out with a grizzly bear. But no, he would have been tender, as he was with Jill. He was so many contradictions, that man.
Chapter 4
When Jill left the Meaghers’, she walked across to her own yard in a happy mood. The ride with Jim had been fun; a talk with Florence had been interesting; and the visit with Mr. Meagher, who showered affection on her, made her tranquil. She went to the lilacs along the fence and inhaled long and deeply: they had been in bloom three days. It was lilac time at South’s, she thought to herself, and tried to remember what song it was that that line was trying to bring to mind. She went up to the porch and decided to indulge herself in her favorite pastime: just to think for a while.
By nature she was reflective. Her father called her “the greatest thinker ever wore skirts.” Jack teased her too, and told her she was in another world. But she had to. And she made very satisfying discoveries too, even if they took her a long time. When she finally had a whole situation analyzed, the actual event would be way in the past. A boy would say something on a date that she wouldn’t quite understand, and she would not pursue it at the moment because it wouldn’t be that important. But still she wouldn’t forget. She would tuck it in the grab-bag in her mind. It might not be until months later that it would suddenly dawn: “That’s what he meant!” Then she’d be happy.
Today she had two items for her grab-bag: Jim running his finger across the back of her leg in the A&P, and Florence’s panic over Ralph’s visit.
She rested her sneakers on the rail of the porch, and smiled when she thought about Jim. She remembered the party after graduation from Saint Margaret’s Elementary School when they were fourteen. At the party her brother Jack turned out the lights in the living room, and the whole group played Flashlight, Spin-the-Bottle, and Post-Office. Jack was the star since he was the best-looking of the boys, and easily the most aggressive. Jill had to sit against the wall, and watch the girls throw things at Jack, and squeal and act silly. But when it came Jim Meagher’s turn to pick someone to go to the post office, he had picked her, and she was delighted. When the two of them had shut the door to the group, she stood with her heart almost stopped, and closed her eyes and waited for the kiss. She got a cruel disappointment, for it turned out he had no courage at all. He backed and slid along the wall away from her. He looked ill. There was nothing to do but wait. After a minute, Jack hammered on the door and demanded, “What’s going on in there?”
He tried to open the door but Jill used all her strength to hold the knob against him. Finally Jim said in a small voice from up the hallway, “We’d better go back in, Jill.” As he passed her to enter the living room, he gave her a quick kiss and then ran. Jill smiled more when she remembered how wild with suspicion Jack was. “You didn’t have to take so long.”
He even got sore at Jim, having made the natural error of projecting what he would have done behind the door. Jim of course was delighted to be suspected; he walked around the room like a rooster. It was all very funny.
The other situation in the grab-bag, the dinner Florence was giving for Ralph and his family, was not so funny. It disturbed Jill to see anyone to get as upset as Florence was. She had actually called Jill “Mary” when Jill was leaving the house. Several times during the conversation it was clear she wasn’t paying attention to what was being said at all. But Jill knew what was most disturbing about the situation: it was so calculating. Florence was on a campaign to get Ralph, and the campaign was at a critical stage, the meeting of the families.
Well, the families had to get together at some stage of the romance, didn’t they? Yes. But they didn’t have to get together before an engagement. For Florence to take this step before a ring was given was to force the issue. It was a critical moment in Florence’s campaign; hence her panic. The problem was that Florence was on a campaign. She was like Jill’s girlfriend, Nancy McGann. Nancy went to nursing school, and picked out a medical student the first week she was there. For two years she refused dates with any of the other medical students so as not to give even the appearance of being entangled with anyone else. In the end, she got him. She told the story to Jill in the afterglow of her victory. Jill was shocked. She said, as cautiously as she could, that she had always had the idea that in Providence her man would come along. Nancy had stiffened and replied, “God helps those who help themselves.”
Jill suspected her own attitude was somewhat romanticized and silly. How would two people get together unless someone did some planning? But still, she couldn’t shake the idea that her own attitude in the end made more sense. Perhaps, she thought, it was because we know so little about another person that we have to trust in God that we won’t make an absurd choice.
She was hard on Florence, she knew. Florence would be a good wife. On Saturday mornings, when Florence decided to bake, she baked for everybody, and the Connollys and the Souths and the other neighbors got a cake as well
