There was about her a quality impervious to time: a belligerent and diamondsurfaced respectability.
She had not so much as looked at them, even when they entered and even when McEachern gave her money.
Still without looking at them she made the change, correctly and swiftly, sliding the coins onto the glass counter almost before McEachern had offered the bill; herself somehow definite behind the false glitter of the careful hair, the careful face, like a carved lioness guarding a portal, presenting respectability like a shield behind which the clotted and idle and equivocal men could slant their hats and their thwartfacecurled cigarettes. McEachern counted his change and they went out, into the street.
He was looking at Joe again.
He said:
“I’ll have you remember that place.
There are places in this world where a man may go but a boy, a youth of your age, may not.
That is one of them.
Maybe you should never have gone there. But you must see such so you will know what to avoid and shun.
Perhaps it was as well that you saw it with me present to explain and warn you.
And the dinner there is cheap.”
“What is the matter with it?” Joe said.
“That is the business of the town and not of yours.
You will only mark my words: I’ll not have you go there again unless I am with you.
Which will not be again.
We’ll bring dinner next time, early or no early.”
That was what he saw that day while he was eating swiftly beside the unbending and quietly outraged man, the two of them completely isolated at the center of the long counter with at one end of it the brasshaired woman and at the other the group of men, and the waitress with her demure and downlooking face and her big, too big, hands setting the plates and cups, her head rising from beyond the counter at about the height of a tall child.
Then he and McEachern departed.
He did not expect ever to return.
It was not that McEachern had forbidden him.
He just did not believe that his life would ever again chance there.
It was as if he said to himself,
‘They are not my people.
I can see them but I don’t know what they are doing nor why.
I can hear them but I don’t know what they are saying nor why nor to whom.
I know that there is something about it beside food, eating.
But I don’t know what. And I never will know.’
So it passed from the surface of thinking.
Now and then during the next six months he returned to town, but he did not again even see or pass the restaurant. He could have. But he didn’t think to.
Perhaps he did not need to. More often that he knew perhaps thinking would have suddenly flowed into a picture, shaping, shaped: the long, barren, somehow equivocal counter with the still, coldfaced, violenthaired woman at one end as though guarding it, and at the other men with inwardleaning heads, smoking steadily, lighting and throwing away their constant cigarettes, and the waitress, the woman not much larger than a child going back and forth to the kitchen with her arms overladen with dishes, having to pass on each journey within touching distance of the men who leaned with their slanted hats and spoke to her through the cigarette smoke, murmured to her somewhere near mirth or exultation, and her face musing, demure, downcast, as if she had not heard.
‘I don’t even know what they are saying to her,’ he thought, thinking I don’t even know that what they are saying to her is something that men do not say to a passing child; believing, I do not know yet that in the instant of sleep the eyelid closing prisons within the eye’s self her face demure, pensive; tragic, sad, and young; waiting, colored with all the vague and formless magic of young desire.
That already there is something for love to feed upon: that sleeping I know now why I struck refraining that negro girl three years ago and that she must know it too and be proud too, with waiting and pride.
So he did not expect to see her again, since love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
Very likely he was as much surprised by his action and what it inferred and revealed as McEachern would have been.
It was on Saturday this time, in the spring now.
He had turned eighteen.
Again McEachern had to see the lawyer.
But he was prepared now.
“I’ll be there an hour,” he said. “You can walk about and see the town.”
Again he looked at Joe, hard, calculating, again a little fretted, like a just man forced to compromise between justice and judgment.
“Here,” he said.
He opened his purse and took a coin from it.
It was a dime. “You might try not to throw it away as soon as you can find someone who will take it.
It’s a strange thing,” he said fretfully, looking at Joe, “but it seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
You will be here in one hour.”
He took that coin and went straight to the restaurant.
He did not even put the coin into his pocket.
He did it without plan or design, almost without volition, as if his feet ordered his action and not his head.
He carried the dime clutched hot and small in his palm as a child might.
He entered the screen door, clumsily, stumbling a little.