6

“You don’t look like you’re from around here.”

A slight emphasis on you. And he was smiling.

She didn’t seem to have heard, exactly. Poised yet childlike in her manner. The slightest flicker of attention directed upward at him as her red-lacquered nails took his ticket from him yet there came her blinding flash of a smile: “Sir, thank you!” As if he’d won a prize. As if for the late-afternoon half-price $2.50 he’d been granted entrance to a holy shrine and not the mildewy-smelling interior of the Bay Palace Theater where a rerun of West Side Story was showing.

Deftly she tore the green ticket in two and handed him back the stub already looking past his shoulder with that luminous smile at whoever was pushing close behind him: “Sir, thank you!”

New usherette at the Bay Palace Theater. Dove-gray trousers with flared legs, snug-fitting little bolero jacket with crimson piping. And, on the just-perceptibly padded shoulders, gold braid epaulettes. Prominent shiny bangs across her forehead, skimming her eyebrows. Dark brown, dark-red-brown hair. And the long-handled flashlight she took up with girlish zest, leading older patrons, or moms with young children, into the shadowy interior of the movie house where on the frayed carpet you might unknowingly kick a discarded box of popcorn or a part-eaten candy bar tangled in its wrapper: “This way, please!”

She might have been any age between nineteen and twenty-nine. He wasn’t a keen judge of ages as he wasn’t a keen judge of character: wishing to see the best in others as a way of wishing that others might see only the best, the crispy rind of surface charm and American decency, in him.

He couldn’t recall having taken notice of any usher/usherette at the local movie house before. It was rare for anyone to make an impression upon him. Nor was he a frequent patron of movies, in fact. American pop culture bored him to hell. The only twentieth-century music that engaged him was jazz. His was a jazz sensibility meaning at the margins. In a white man’s skin by accident of birth.

Here in Malin Head Bay at the northern edge of New York State in the off-season everyone was local. Few summer residents lingered beyond Labor Day. The usherette had to be local, but new to the area. Gallagher was himself a new local: one of those summer residents who’d lingered.

His family had had a summer place on Grindstone Island, a “camp” as such places were called, for decades. Grindstone Island was one of the larger of the Thousand Islands, a few miles west of Malin Head Bay in the St. Lawrence River. Gallagher had been coming to the island in the summer, for much of his life; since his divorce in 1959 he’d taken to spending more and more of the year in Malin Head Bay, alone. He’d bought a small house by the river. He played jazz piano at the Malin Head Inn two or three nights a week. He still owned property near Albany, in the suburban village of Ardmoor Park, where the Gallaghers lived; he remained a co-owner of the house in which his former wife lived, with her new husband and family. He did not think of himself in exile nor as estranged from the Gallaghers for that made his situation appear more romantic, more isolated and significant than it was.

What ever became of Chet Gallagher?

Moved away from Albany. Living up by the St. Lawrence.

Divorced? Estranged from the family?

Something like that.

He’d been seeing the new usherette in Malin Head Bay, he realized. Not gone looking for her but, yes he’d seen her. Maybe at the Lucky 13 over the summer. Maybe at the Malin Head Inn. Maybe on Main Street, Beach Street. In the IGA pushing a wobbly wire cart in the early evening when there were few customers for most residents of Malin Head Bay ate supper at 6 P.M. if not earlier. He seemed to recall that the girl had had a young child with her.

Hoped not.

They ever have children, Chet and his wife?

She does, now. But not his.

The usherette had smiled at him as if her life depended upon it but had tactfully ignored his inane remark. He was thinking now he might have alarmed her. He was thinking now he’d made her uneasy and he’d meant only to be friendly as an ordinary guy in Malin Head Bay might be friendly, maybe he should go back and apologize, yes but he wasn’t going to, he knew better. Leave this one alone was the wisest strategy as he groped for a seat in the darkened near-deserted smokers’ loge at the rear of the theater.

And a second time, a few weeks later at the Bay Palace Theater he saw her, he’d forgotten her in the interim and seeing her again felt a stab of excitement, recognition. A man might make the mistake in such a situation thinking the woman will know him, too.

This evening the usherette was selling tickets. In her pert little military-style costume, in the ticket booth in the brightly lighted lobby. He was struck as before by the young woman’s manner: her ardent smile. She was one whose face is transformed by smiling as by a sudden implosion of light.

Her hair was different: pulled back into a ponytail swinging between her shoulder blades, partway down her back. You could see that she liked feeling it there, took a childlike sensuous pleasure in shaking, shifting her head.

The mood came over Gallagher at once. Weak-jointed, swallowing hard as if he’d been drinking whiskey and was dehydrated. You ain’t been blue. No no no.

Yet, oddly he’d forgotten this young woman until now. Since the evening of West Side Story weeks ago. Now it was October, a new season. Though Gallagher was emotionally estranged from his father Thaddeus and had not been close to the family for much of his adult life, yet he was involved in some of the Gallagher Media Group properties: radio-TV stations in Malin Head Bay, Alexandria Bay, Watertown. He remained a consultant and sometime-columnist for the Watertown Standard and its half-dozen rural affiliates in the Adirondack region: the only liberal Democrat associated with Gallagher Media, tolerated as a renegade. And he had his jazz gigs which paid little except in pleasure and were coming to be the center of his unraveled life.

When he wasn’t actively drinking he had AA meetings in Watertown, forty miles south of Malin Head Bay. There, Chet Gallagher was something of a spiritual leader.

Which is why, Gallagher thought, waiting in the brief line to buy his ticket for The Miracle Worker, a man yearns to meet an attractive young woman who doesn’t know him. A woman is hope, a woman’s smile is hope. No more can you live without hope than you can live without oxygen.

“Hello! That’s two-fifty, sir.”

Gallagher pushed a crisp new five-dollar bill beneath the wicket. He’d vowed he would not make a fool of himself this time, yet heard his voice innocently inquire, “Do you recommend this movie? It’s supposed to be”-pausing not knowing what to say, not wanting to offend the dazzling smile-“pretty arduous.”

Regretting arduous. Really he’d meant tough going.

The smiling young woman took Gallagher’s money, deftly punched cash register keys with a flash of her red-lacquered nails, pushed change and green ticket toward him with a flourish. She was looking even more attractive than she’d looked back in September, her eyes were warmly dark-brown, alert. Her carefully applied red lipstick matched her nails and Gallagher saw, couldn’t prevent the rapid search of his gaze, she wore no rings on any of her fingers.

“Oh no, sir! It isn’t arduous it’s hopeful. It kind of breaks your heart, but then it makes you”-in her breathy downstate voice, almost vehement, as if Gallagher had challenged the deepest beliefs of her soul-“rejoice, you are alive.”