“We can never go out with each other.”
“So?” She shrugged. “What are we missing?”
“We have to sneak around,” he cried. He was growing angry with her.
“So?” She shrugged again. “There are many things worth sneaking around for. Not everything good is out in the open. Maybe I like secrets.” Her face gleamed with one of her rare soft smiles.
“This afternoon …” he said stubbornly, trying to plant the seed of revolt, arouse that placid peasant docility. “After a … a banquet like this …” He waved his hand over the table. “It’s not right. We should go out, do something, not just sit around.”
“What is there to do?” she asked seriously.
“There’s a band concert in the park,” he said. “A baseball game.”
“I get enough music from Tante Elsa’s phonograph,” she said. “You go to the baseball game for me and tell me who won. I will be very happy here, cleaning up and waiting for you to come home. As long as you come home, I do not want anything else, Tommy.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you today,” he said, giving up. He stood up. “I’ll wipe the dishes.”
“There’s no need,” she said.
“I’ll wipe the dishes,” he said, with great authority.
“My man,” she said. She smiled again, beyond ambition, confident in her simplicities.
The next evening after work, on his way home from the garage on his wobbly Iver Johnson he was passing the town library. On a sudden impulse, he stopped, leaned the bike against a railing, and went in. He hardly read anything at all, not even the sports pages of the newspapers, and he was not a frequenter of libraries. Perhaps in reaction to his brother and his sister, always with their noses in books, and full of fancy sneering ideas.
The hush of the library and the unwelcoming examination of his grease-stained clothes by the lady librarian made him ill at ease, and he wandered around among the shelves, not knowing which book of all these thousands held the information he was looking for. Finally, he had to go to the desk and ask the lady.
“Excuse me,” he said. She was stamping cards, making out prison sentences for books with a little mean snapping motion of her wrist.
“Yes?” She looked up, unfriendly. She could tell a non-book-lover at a glance.
“I want to find out something about Saint Sebastian, ma’am,” he said.
“What do you want to find out about him?”
“Just anything,” he said, sorry he had come in now.
“Try the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” the lady said. “In the Reference Room. SARS to SORC.” She knew her library, the lady.
“Thank you very much, ma’am.” He decided that from now on he would change his clothes at the garage and use Coyne’s sandsoap to get out the top layer of grease from his skin, at least. Clothilde would like that better, too. No use being treated like a dog when you could avoid it.
It took him ten minutes to find the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He pulled out SARS to SORC and took it over to a table and sat down with the book. SEA-URCHIN–SEA-WOLF, SEA-WRACK–SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO. The things that some people fooled with!
There it was, “SEBASTIAN, ST., a Christian martyr whose festival is celebrated on Jan. 20.” Just one paragraph. He couldn’t have been so damned important.
“After the archers had left him for dead,” Tom read, “a devout woman, Irene, came by night to take his body away for burial, but finding him still alive, carried him to her house, where his wounds were dressed. No sooner had he wholly recovered than he hastened to confront the emperor, who ordered him to be instantly carried off and beaten to death with rods.”
Twice, for Christ’s sake, Tom thought. Catholics were nuts. But he still didn’t know why Clothilde had said Saint Sebastian when she had looked at him naked in the bathtub.
He read on. “St. Sebastian is specially invoked against the plague. As a young and beautiful soldlier, he is a favorite subject of sacred art, being most generally represented undraped, and severely though not mortally wounded with arrows.”
Tom closed the book thoughtfully. “A young and beautiful soldier, being most generally represented undraped …” Now he knew. Clothilde. Wonderful Clothilde. Loving him without words, but saying it with her religion, with her food, her body, everything.
Until today he had thought he was kind of funny looking, a snotty kid with a flat face and a sassy expression. Saint Sebastian. The next time he saw those two beauties, Rudolph and Gretchen, he could look them straight in the eye. I have been compared by an older, experienced woman to Saint Sebastian, a young and beautiful soldier. For the first time since he had left home he was sorry he wasn’t going to see his brother and sister that night.
He got up and put the book away. He was about to leave the reference room when it occurred to him that Clothilde was a Saint’s name, too. He searched through the volumes and took out CASTIR to COLE.
Practiced now, he found what he was looking for quickly, although it wasn’t Clothilde, but “CLOTILDA, ST. (d. 544) daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks.”
Tom thought of Clothilde sweating over the stove in the Jordache kitchen and washing Uncle Harold’s underwear and was saddened. Daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks. People didn’t think of the future when they named babies.
He read the rest of the paragraph, but Clotilda didn’t seem to have done all that much, converting her husband and building churches and stuff like that, and getting into trouble with her family. The book didn’t say what entrance requirements she had met to be made a saint.
Tom put the book away, eager to get home to Clothilde. But he stopped at the desk to say, “Thank you, ma’am,” to the lady. He was conscious of a sweet smell. There was a bowl of narcissus on the desk, spears of green, with white flowers, set in a bed of multi-colored pebbles. Then, speaking without thinking, he said, “Can I take out a card, please?”
The lady looked at him, surprised. “Have you ever had a card anywhere before?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. I never had the time to read before.”
The lady gave him a queer look, but pulled out a blank card and asked him his name, age, and address. She printed the information in a funny backward way on the card, stamped the date, and handed the card to him.
“Can I take out a book right away?” he asked.
“If you want,” she said.
He went back to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and took out SARS to SORC. He wanted to have a good look at that paragraph and try to memorize it. But when he stood at the desk to have it stamped, the lady shook her head impatiently. “Put that right back,” she said. “That’s not supposed to leave the Reference Room.”
He returned to the Reference Room and put the volume back. They keep yapping at you to read, he thought resentfully, and then when you finally say okay, I’ll read, they throw a rule in your face.
Still, walking out of the library, he patted his back pocket several times, to feel the nice stiffness of the card in there.
There was fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce for dinner and blueberry pie for dessert. He and Clothilde ate in the kitchen, not saying much.
When they had finished and Clothilde was clearing off the dishes, he went over to her and held her in his arms and said “Clotilda, daughter of the Burgundian king Chilperic, and wife of Clovis, king of the Franks.”
She looked at him, wide-eyed. “What’s that?”
“I wanted to find out where your name came from,” he said. “I went to the library. You’re a king’s daughter and a king’s wife.”