“No, really. I feel like walking. Come kiss me good-by, everyone.”
There was a succession of soft, cool cheeks laid against his. His grandmother held Carol up and she kissed him loudly on the chin, leaving a little wet place that he wiped off absent-mindedly with the cuff of his sleeve.
“Look, Mom,” he said, when his mother stepped forward to hug him, “you tell Joanne good-by for me, okay? And Susannah. Tell Joanne I’m sorry to leave without—”
“Of course I will,” she said automatically. “Try to get some sleep on the train, Ben Joe.”
Gram kissed him again, with her usual angry vigor, and said, “Don’t buy a thing on the train if you can help it, Benjy. You never know how much they’re going to upcharge. Me, now, I have some idea, because I used to be a good friend of Simon McCarroll that sold cigarettes and Baby Ruths on the train from here to Raleigh some twenty years back. He used to say to me, ‘Bethy Jay,’ he says, ‘you’ll never know how they upcharge on these here trains,’ and I’d answer back, I’d say—” She stopped, staring off into space. It was her habit, when saying good-by’s, to lead the conversation in another direction and ignore the fact that anyone was leaving. Taking advantage of her pause, Ben Joe’s mother patted him on the shoulder and became brisk and cheerful, just as she always did at such times.
“I know you’ll have a good trip, Ben Joe,” she said.
“You got enough money?” Jenny asked.
“I think so. Jenny, you tell Susannah to take good care of my guitar, will you?”
“I will. Bye, Ben Joe.”
“Good-by.”
His sisters smiled and began turning back to their gin-rummy game. His mother led the way to the front door.
“You’ll tell her too, won’t you?” he said to her. “Tell her it’s a good guitar, and a good hourglass and all. Don’t let her go forgetting—”
“Oh, Ben Joe.” She laughed and pulled the door open for him. “Everything’ll take care of itself.”
“Maybe.”
“Everything works out on its own, with no effects from what anyone does …”
He bent to pick up his suitcase and smiled at her. “Good-by, Mom,” he said.
“Good-by, Ben Joe. I want you to do well on that test.”
He started out across the porch, and the door closed behind him.
When he was across the street from his house he turned and looked back at it. It sat silently in the twilight, with the bay windows lit yellow by the lamps inside and the irregular little stained-glass and rose windows glowing here and there against the vague white clapboards. When he was far away from home, and picturing what it looked like, this wasn’t the way he saw it at all. He saw it as it had been when he was small — a giant of a place, with children playing on the sunlit lawn and yellow flowers growing in two straight lines along the walk. Now, as he looked at the house, he tried to make the real picture stay in his memory. If he remembered it only as it looked right now, would he miss it as much? He couldn’t tell. He stood there for maybe five minutes, but he couldn’t make the house register on his mind at all. It might be any other house on the block; it might be anyone’s.
He turned again and set off for the station. The night was growing rapidly darker, and his eyes seemed wide and cool in his head from straining to see. Occasionally he met people going alone or in two’s on after-supper errands, and because it was not really pitch-dark yet, almost all of them spoke cheerfully or at least nodded to Ben Joe whether they knew him or not. Ben Joe smiled back at them. To the older women, walking their dogs or talking to friends on front walks, he gave a deep nod that was almost a bow, just as his father had done before him. Two children playing hopscotch on white-chalked lines that they could barely see stepped aside to let him pass. He walked between the lines gingerly so as not to mess them up, and didn’t speak until the smaller one, the boy, said hello.
“Hello,” said Ben Joe.
“Hello,” the little boy said again.
“Hello,” Ben Joe called back.
“Hello—”
“You hush now,” his sister whispered.
“Oh,” the little boy said sadly. Ben Joe turned right on Main Street, smiling.
People were gathering sparsely around the glittering little movie house, and he could see dressed-up couples eating opposite each other in the small restaurant he passed. Just before he crossed to head down the gravel road to the station, a huge, red-faced old man in earmuffs stopped beside him and said, “You Dr. Hawkes’s son?”
“Yes,” Ben Joe said.
“Going away?”
“Yes.”
“Funny thing,” the man said, shaking his head. “I outlived my doctor. I outlived my doctor, whaddaya know.”
It was what he always said. Ben Joe smiled, and when the light changed, he crossed the street.
The gravel road was just a path of grayish-white under his feet, but he could see well enough to walk without difficulty. Even so, he went very slowly. He stared ahead, to where the station house, with its orange windows, sat beside the railroad tracks. The tracks were mere silver ribbons now, gleaming under tall, curved lamps. All around there was nothing but darkness, marked occasionally by the dark, shining back of some parked car. Ben Joe shivered. He suddenly plunked his suitcase at his feet and after a minute sat on it, folding his arms, staring at the station house and still shivering so hard that he had to clamp his teeth together. He didn’t know what he wanted; he didn’t know whether he wanted Shelley to meet him there or never to show up at all. If she was there, what would he say? Would he be glad to see her? If she wasn’t there, he would climb on the train and leave and then it would be he who was the injured party; something would at last be clearly settled and he could turn his back on it forever. He looked at the blank orange windows, still far away, as if they could by some sign let him know if she was there and tell him what to do about it. No sign appeared. A new idea came; he could wait a while, till after his train had left, and then surreptitiously catch a local to Raleigh and take the later train from there. But what good would that do? The picture arose in his mind of chains of future wakeful nights spent wondering whether he should have gone into the station or not. He rose, picked up his suitcase again, and continued on down the hill.
It was warm and bright inside, and the waiting room smelled of cigar smoke and pulp magazines. Nearest Ben Joe was a group of businessmen, all very noisy and active, who mulled around in a tight little circle calling out nicknames and switching their brief cases to their left hands as they leaned forward to greet someone.
“Excuse me,” Ben Joe said.
They remained cheerfully in his path, too solid and fat to be sidled past. He changed directions, veering to the right of them and continuing down the next aisle. A small Negro man and his family stood there; the man, dressed stiffly and correctly for the trip north, was counting a small pile of wrinkled dollar bills. His wife and children strained forward, watching anxiously; the man wet his lips and fumbled through the bills.
“Excuse me,” Ben Joe said.
The husband moved aside, still counting. With his suitcase held high and tight to his body so as not to bump anyone, Ben Joe edged past them and came into the center of the waiting room. He looked around quickly, for the first time since he had entered the station. His eyes skimmed over two sailors and a group of soldiers and an old woman with a lumber jacket on; then he saw Shelley.
She was sitting in the far corner, next to the door that led out to the tracks. At her feet were two suitcases and a red net grocery bag. Ben Joe let out his breath, not realizing until then that he had been holding it, but he didn’t go over to her right away. He just stood there, holding onto the handle of his suitcase with both hands in front of him as if he were a child with a book satchel. He suddenly felt like a child, like a tiny, long-ago Ben Joe poised outside a crowded living room, knowing that sooner or later he must take that one step to the inside of the room and meet the people there, but hanging back anyway. He shifted the suitcase to one side. At that moment Shelley looked up at him, away from the tips of her new high-heeled shoes and toward the center of the waiting room, where she found, purely by accident, the silent, watchful face of Ben Joe. Ben Joe forced himself to life again. He crossed the floor, his face heavy and self-conscious under Shelley’s grave stare.