“That the way it should be?” she commented.
None of us knew the answer to that one, so since I was the Gang’s specialist in dealing with the lower orders, I remarked brilliantly, “What’s your name?”
“Helen,” she told me.
“How long have you been here?”
“Couple days,” she said, starting back toward the counter.
“Where did you come from?”
She spread her hands. “Oh—places.”
Whereupon Gene, whose humor inclines toward the fantastic, asked, “Did you arrive on a flying disk?” She glanced back at him and said, “Wise guy.”
But all the same she hung around our table, filling sugar basins and what not. We made our conversation especially erudite, each of us merrily spinning his favorite web of half understood intellectual jargon and half-baked private opinion. We were conscious of her presence, all right.
Just as we were leaving, the thing happened. At the doorway something made us all look back. Helen was behind the counter. She was looking at us. Her eyes weren’t dreamy at all, but focused, intent, radiant. She was smiling.
My elbow was touching Es’s naked arm—we were rather crowded in the doorway—and I felt her shiver. Then she gave a tiny jerk and I sensed that Gene, who was holding her other arm (they were more or less sweethearts), had tightened his grip on it.
For perhaps three seconds it stayed just like that, the four of us looking at the one of her. Then Helen shyly dropped her gaze and began to mop the counter with a rag.
We were all very quiet going home.
Next night we went back to Benny’s again, rather earlier. Helen was still there, and quite as beautiful as we remembered her. We exchanged with her a few more of those brief, teasing remarks—her voice no longer sounded so much like Benny’s—and staged some more intellectual pyrotechnics for her benefit. Just before we left, Es went up to her at the counter and talked to her privately for perhaps a minute, at the end of which Helen nodded.
“Ask her to pose for you?” I asked Es when we got outside.
She nodded. “That girl has the most magnificent figure in the world,” she proclaimed fervently.
“Or out of it,” Gene confirmed grudingly.
“And an incredibly exciting skull,” Es finished.
It was characteristic of us that Es should have been the one to really break the ice with Helen. Like most intellectuals, we were rather timid, always setting up barriers against other people. We clung to adolescence and the college, although all of us but Gene had been graduated from it. Instead of getting out into the real world, we lived by sponging off our parents and doing academic odd jobs for the professors (Es had a few private students). Here in our home city we had status, you see. We were looked upon as being frightfully clever and sophisticated, the local “bohemian set” (though Lord knows we were anything but that). Whereas out in the real world we’d have been greenhorns.
We were scared of the world, you see. Scared that it would find out that all our vaunted abilities and projects didn’t amount to much— and that as for solid achievements, there just hadn’t been any. Es was only a mediocre artist; she was afraid to learn from the great, especially the living great, for fear her own affected little individuality would be engulfed. Louis was no philosopher; he merely cultivated a series of intellectual enthusiasms, living in a state of feverish private—and fruitless—excitement over the thoughts of other men. My own defense against reality consisted of knowingness and a cynical attitude; I had a remarkable packrat accumulation of information; I had a line on everything—and also always knew why it wasn’t worth bothering with. As for Gene, he was the best of us and also the worst. A bit younger, he still applied himself to his studies, and showed promise in nuclear physics and math. But something, perhaps his small size and puritanical farm background, had made him moody and contrary, and given him an inclination toward physical violence that threatened some day to get him into real trouble. As it was, he’d had his license taken away for reckless driving. And several times we’d had to intervene—once unsuccessfully—to keep him from getting beaten up in bars.
We talked a great deal about our “work.” Actually we spent much more time reading magazines and detective stories, lazing around, getting drunk, and conducting our endless intellectual palavers.
If we had one real virtue, it was our loyalty to each other, though it wouldn’t take a cynic to point out that we desperately needed each other for an audience. Still, there was some genuine feeling there.
In short, like many people on a planet where mind is wakening and has barely become aware of the eon- old fetters and blindfolds oppressing it, and has had just the faintest glimpse of its tremendous possible future destiny, we were badly cowed—frightened, frustrated, self-centered, slothful, vain, pretentious.
Considering how set we were getting in those attitudes, it is all the more amazing that Helen had the tremendous effect on us that she did. For within a month of meeting her, our attitude toward the whole world had sweetened, we had become genuinely interested in people Instead of being frightened of them, and we were beginning to do real creative work. An astonishing achievement for an unknown little waitress!
It wasn’t that she took us in hand or set us an example, or anything like that. Quite the opposite. I don’t think that Helen was responsible for a half dozen positive statements (and only one really impulsive act) during the whole time we knew her. Rather, she was like a Great Books discussion leader, who never voices an opinion of his own, but only leads other people to voice theirs—playing the part of an intellectual midwife.
Louis and Gene and I would drop over to Es’s, say, and find Helen getting dressed behind the screen or taking a cup of tea after a session of posing. We’d start a discussion and for a while Helen would listen dreamily, just another shadow in the high old shadowy room. But then those startling little questions of hers would begin to come, each one opening a new vista of thought. By the time the discussion was finished—which might be at the Blue Moon bar or under the campus maples or watching the water ripple in the old coal pits— we’d have got somewhere. Instead of ending in weary shoulder-shrugging or cynical grousing at the world or getting drunk out of sheer frustration, we’d finish up with a plan—some facts to check, something to write or shape or try.
And then, people! How would we ever have got close to people without Helen? Without Helen, Old Gus would have stayed an ancient and bleary-eyed dishwasher at Benny’s. But with Helen, Gus became for us what he really was—a figure of romance who had sailed the Seven Seas, who had hunted for gold on the Orinoco with twenty female Indians for porters (because the males were too lazy and proud to hire out to do anything) and who had marched at the head of his Amazon band carrying a newborn baby of one of the women in his generous arms (because the women assured him that a man-child was the only burden a man might carry without dishonor).
Even Gene was softened in his attitudes. I remember once when two handsome truckdrivers tried to pick up Helen at the Blue Moon. Instantly Gene’s jaw muscles bulged and his eyes went blank and he began to wag his right shoulder—and I got ready for a scene. But Helen said a word here and there, threw in a soft laugh, and began to ask the truckdrivers her questions. In ten minutes we were all at ease and the four of us found out things we’d never dreamed about dark highways and diesels and their proud, dark- souled pilots (so like Gene in their temperaments).
But it was on us as individuals that Helen’s influence showed up the biggest. Es’s sculptures acquired an altogether new scope. She dropped her pet mannerisms without a tear and began to take into her work whatever was sound and good. She rapidly developed a style that was classical and yet had in it something that was wholly of the future. Es is getting recognition now and her work is still good, but there was a magic about her “Helenic Period” which she can’t recapture. The magic still lives in the pieces she did at that time-particularly in a nude of Helen that has all the serenity and purpose of the best ancient Egyptian work, and something much more. As we watched that piece take form, as we watched the clay grow into Helen under Es’s hands, we dimly sensed that in some indescribable way Helen was growing into Es at the same time, and Es into Helen. It was such a beautiful, subtle relationship that even Gene couldn’t be jealous.