He felt all alone and strange, with all the bright light and the chrome, as if he were something that had shuffled from the past into a place reserved for the present.
He almost never came downtown any more and that must be the reason for the way he felt. Especially he almost never came down in the evening, although there had been a time he had.
He smiled, remembering how the old crowd used to get together and talk around in circles, about inconsequential things, their talk not getting anywhere and never meaning to.
But that was all ended now. The crowd had disappeared.
Some of them were dead and some had moved away and the few of them still left seldom ventured out.
He sat there, thinking, knowing he was maudlin and not caring if he was, too tired and shaken to flinch away from it.
A hand fell on his shoulder and he swung around, surprised.
Young Bob Martin stood there, and although he smiled, be still had the look of someone who had done a thing that he was unsure of.
“Sir, there are some of us down here at a table,” said young Martin, gulping a little at his own boldness.
Dean nodded. “That’s very nice,” he mumbled.
“We wondered if maybe – that is, Mr. Dean, we’d be pleased if you would care to join us.”
“Well, that is very nice of you, indeed.”
“We didn’t mean, sir – that is -”
“Why, certainly,” said Dean. “I’d be very glad to.”
“Here, sir, let me take your coffee. I won’t spill a drop of it.”
“I’ll trust you, Bob,” said Dean, getting to his feet. “You almost never fumble.”
“I can explain that, Mr. Dean. It’s not that I don’t want to play. It’s just that…”
Dean tapped him on the shoulder lightly. “I understand. There is no need to explain.”
He paused a second, trying to decide if it were wise to say what was in his mind.
He decided to: “If you don’t tell the coach, I might even say I agree with you. There comes a time in life when football begins to seem a little silly.”
Martin grinned, relieved. “You’ve hit it on the head. Exactly.”
He led the way to the table.
There were four of them – Ronald King, George Woods, Judy Charleson and Donna Thompson. All good kids, thought Dean, every one of them. He saw they had been dawdling away at sodas, making them stretch out as long as possible.
They all looked up at him and smiled, and George Woods pulled back a chair in invitation. Dean sat down carefully and placed his hat on the floor beside him. Bob set down the coffee.
“It was good of you to think of me,” said Dean and wondered why he found himself embarrassed. After all, these were his kids – the kids he saw every day in school, the ones be pushed and coddled into an education, the kids he’d never had himself.
“You’re just the man we need,” said Ronald King. “We’ve been talking about Lamont Stiles. He is the only Millville man who ever went to space and…”
“You must have known him, Mr. Dean,” said Judy.
“Yes,” Dean said slowly, “I did know him, but not as well as Stuffy did. Stuffy and he were kids together. I was a little older.”
“What kind of man is he?” asked Donna.
Dean chuckled. “Lamont Stiles? He was the town’s delinquent. He was poor in school and he had no home life and he just mostly ran wild. If there was trouble, you could bet your life that Lamont had had a hand in it. Everyone said that Lamont never would amount to anything and when it had been said often enough and long enough, Lamont must have taken it to heart…”
He talked on and on, and they asked him questions, and Ronald King went to the counter and came back with another cup of coffee for him.
The talk switched from Stiles to football. King and Martin told him what they had told the coach. Then the talk went on to problems in student government and from that to the new theories in ionic drive, announced just recently.
Dean did not do all the talking; he did a lot of listening, too, and he asked questions of his own and time flowed on unnoticed.
Suddenly the lights blinked and Dean looked up, startled.
Judy laughed at him. “That means the place is closing. It’s the signal that we have to leave.”
“I see,” said Dean. “Do you folks do this often – staying until closing time, I mean?”
“Not often,” Bob Martin told him. “On weekdays, there is too much studying.”
“I remember many years ago -” Dean began, then left the words hanging in the air.
Yes, indeed, be thought, many years ago. And again tonight!
He looked at them, the five faces around the table. Courtesy, he thought, and kindness and respect. But something more than that.
Talking with them, he had forgotten he was old. They had accepted him as another human being, not as an aged human being, not as a symbol of authority. They had moved over for him and made him one of them and themselves one of him; they had broken down the barrier not only of pupil and teacher, but of age and youth as well.
“I have my car,” Bob Martin said. “Can I drive you home?”
Dean picked his hat from off the floor and rose slowly to his feet.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I think I’d like to walk. I have an idea or two I’d like to mull a bit. Walking helps one think.”
“Come again,” said Judy Charleson. “Some other Friday night, perhaps.”
“Why, thanks,” said Dean, “I do believe I will.”
Great kids, he told himself with a certain pride. Full of a kindness and a courtesy beyond even normal adult courtesy and kindness. Not brash, not condescending, not like kids at all, and yet with the shine of youthfulness and the idealism and ambition that walked hand in hand with youth.
Premature adults, lacking cynicism… And that was an important thing, the lack of cynicism.
Surely there could be nothing wrong in a humanity like that. Perhaps this was the very coin in which the Sitters paid for the childhood they had stolen… if they had stolen it. For they might not have stolen it; they might merely have captured it and stored it.
And in such a case, then they had given free this new maturity and this new equality. And they had taken something which would have been lost in any event – something for which the human race had no use at all, but which was the stuff of life for the Sitter people.
They had taken youth and beauty and they had stored it in the house; they had preserved something that a human could not preserve except in memory. They had caught a fleeting thing and held it and it was there – the harvest of many years; the house was bulging with it.
Lamont Stiles, he wondered, talking in his mind to that man so long ago, so far away, how much did you know? What purpose was in your mind?
Perhaps a rebuke to the smugness of the town that had driven him to greatness. Perhaps a hope, maybe a certainty, that no one in Millville could ever say again, as they had said of Lamont Stiles, that this or that boy or girl would amount to nothing.
That much, perhaps, but surely not any more than that.
Donna had put her hand upon his arm, was tugging at his sleeve.
“Come on, Mr. Dean,” she urged. “You can’t stay standing here.”
They walked with him to the door and said good night and he went up the street at a little faster gait, it seemed to him, than he ordinarily traveled.
But that, he told himself quite seriously, was because now he was just slightly younger than he had been a couple of hours before.
Dean went on even faster and he didn’t hobble and he wasn’t tired at all, but he wouldn’t admit it to himself – for it was a dream, a hope, a seeking after that one never must admit. Until one said it aloud, there was no commitment to the hope, but once the word was spoken, then bitter disappointment lurked behind a tree.
He was walking in the wrong direction. He should be heading back for home. It was getting late and he should be in bed.
And he mustn’t speak the word. He must not breathe the thought.
He went up the walk, past the shrub-choked lawn, and he saw that the light still filtered through the drawn drapes.
He stopped on the stoop and the thought flashed through his mind: There are Stuffy and myself and old Abe Hawkins. There are a lot of us…