The Lone Pilgrim: Stories by Colwin Laurie

Author:Colwin, Laurie [Colwin, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781497674363
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

We got our news about Delia’s father from upperclassmen whose sisters, now in college or married, had (or had friends who had) spent afternoons with him. We learned that he took girls he met on buses or in museums for coffee at Hildegard’s Tea Room, or the Petite Trianon. He met older women—Jane Dalsimer’s mother was said to be one—for drinks at the Russian Bar or the Carlsbad Café. It made sense to us that he did things like that. Our fathers were not the stuff of romantic heroes—who would want to go to a café with one of them? But Delia’s father was. You could not imagine him having anything as ordinary as a profession or a job. Spy was the closest we could get to a suitable occupation for him. We could see him smoking a cigarette and wearing a beret—standing at a train station, in the shadows. These images came from the novels we read and the foreign movies we went to see on Saturday afternoons. Our fathers had been in the war, but Delia’s father had fought in the Resistance, which was quite another thing.

Our dealings with the opposite sex included infantile crushes on boys from one school or another whom we met at dances. When one of these boys liked you, he took any occasion he could to bump you. If you liked him back, your response was to slap him.

But to go for a drink, to sit in a banquette, to have a man light a cigarette, or light yours. The closeness of legs under the table. The whole thing seemed electrifying.

Mr. Schwantes liked girls like Mary Shiller or Grace Herbert, Vivvie’s sister. These were the great beauties of our school, girls who were asked out to dinner by famous playwrights and bankers. He saw girls when they graduated from college, after their first marriages, their second babies, their divorces. He was fond not only of grown-up school girls but of rich women who lavished so much money and attention on themselves that they gleamed. He liked interesting- and ravaged-looking European women who wore beautiful, severe clothes—older women. He liked interesting-looking girls—some of them Vanessa’s friends, no wonder she hated him—who wore trousers, smoked too much, and pouted. He liked big, windblown former debutantes who always looked nearsighted and skinny models with silvery blonde hair. When he was with his wife he looked subdued and solicitous, careful as he took her arm. He held her just close enough to make the hearts of his other conquests jump, should they ever run into him when he was with his wife. That closeness announced a bond understood only by the two of them, but the fact was that nobody understood anything about the Schwanteses.

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