Although it was smack between breakfast and lunch rushes when I got to The Royal, the place was busy, as always. A few tables were available, so that the only people standing were those at the takeout window near the front.
I got in line to place my order, not at all impatient because I delighted in the atmosphere of the diner. Such a mélange of aromas. Hamburger patties on the griddle, bubbling with melted cheese. Bacon. Butter-scrambled eggs with ham. Mere bread becoming toast. All of those smells and more were threaded through with cigarette smoke; if you did not live through those times, you will need some imagination to understand how reliably people tolerated one another’s habits and foibles in those days.
Clink of flatware, clatter of dishes, waitresses calling out orders in diner lingo, a ceaselessly rising and falling and rising tide of conversation among the customers: It was music of a kind, at the same time soothing and invigorating, such a human place and time, when no one texted at the table or had an Internet to surf while they ate or carried a cell phone the ring of which could never be ignored.
Waiting in line, I enjoyed looking around, seeing the different kinds of people, wondering who they were, what lives they returned to when they left The Royal—and it was then that I saw Tilton, my father. Against the farther wall, a row of booths extended the length of the diner. He sat in one toward the back, in animated conversation with someone across the table from him, gesturing with a fork.
I almost didn’t recognize him because he’d grown a beard. He wore a black turtleneck and some kind of silver medallion on a silver chain.
Because the booths had high backs, I couldn’t see the companion with whom Tilton so vigorously conversed. I wondered if it might be Miss Delvane, the writer and would-be rodeo novelist. I was curious, of course, but I was more spooked than anything.
If Tilton glanced in my direction and spotted me, nothing good could follow. Not yet having placed my takeout order, I turned at once away from him and hurried to the door, praying that nothing I wore would identify me to him. The quilted jacket was identical to a million others. Although my striped toboggan cap was a beacon on my head, my mother had given it to me for Christmas, less than a week earlier, and my father had never seen it.
Outside, leaving the congenial world of The Royal, slapped in the face by a gust of cold wind, I initially intended to run, to get out of the immediate neighborhood and beyond Tilton’s reach. But I’d gone not ten feet when intuition took hold of me as surely as a hand gripping my arm, brought me to a stop, and told me that I needed to know with whom my father was having a late breakfast or early lunch, that the identity of his companion must be of crucial importance.
After all these years, I occasionally wonder how my life would have been different if in that fateful moment I had followed my first impulse and had run. But I suppose that what we call intuition is just one of the many ways that the still small voice in our souls speaks to us, if we will listen, and that inner companion wants only what is best for us. If I had run, no doubt what might have happened to me would have been far worse than what did happen, my losses even greater than they have been, my story darker than the one I’ve lived. And yet I wonder.
38
Directly across Forestall Street from The Royal stood a shoe-repair shop on the ground level of a century-old four-story brick building, the upper floors of which might have offered either offices for businesses with uncertain prospects or apartments even cheaper than our own. Beside that structure lay an empty plot of ground, where another building had been torn down in the name of progress; but progress evidently had gone elsewhere. A decrepit chain-link fence surrounded the lot; years earlier the gate had been broken down and never replaced. In warmer weather, neighborhood kids gathered there to play kickball and other games.
When I came out of the diner, traffic was light, and I crossed the street in mid-block. The bright sun painted the pavement with the black shadows of bare-limbed trees, and in the fitful winter wind, those silhouettes twitched underfoot like the many tangled legs of agitated spiders.
I went through the gap in the fence where the gate had once been and stood behind the chain-link, watching the diner. Around me, the ground was mostly barren, hard-packed dirt with here and there a few bristles of withered weeds, empty soda-pop cans, and scraps of paper litter.