“You don’t smoke?”

“No.” She felt that she was not living up to the level of the place and the rules of the situation by not smoking, but she had tried two or three times and it had made her cough and go red eyed and she had given up the experiment. Also, her mother smoked, day and night, and anything her mother did Gretchen didn’t want to do.

“Good,” Boylan said, lighting his cigarette with a gold lighter he took from his pocket and put down on the bar beside the monogrammed case. “I don’t like girls to smoke. It takes away the fragrance of youth.”

Fancy talk, she thought. But it didn’t offend her now. He was putting himself out to please her. She was suddenly conscious of the odor of the perfume that she had dabbed on herself in the washroom at the office. She worried that it might seem cheap to him. “I must say,” she said, “I was surprised you knew my name.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don’t think I’ve seen you more than once or twice at the Works. And you never come through the office.”

“I’ve seen you,” he said. “I wondered what a girl who looked like you was doing in a dreary place like Boylan’s Brick and Tile Works.”

“It isn’t as awful as all that,” she said defensively.

“No? I’m glad to hear that. I was under the impression that all my employees found it intolerable. I make it a point not to visit it more than fifteen minutes a month. I find it depresses me.”

The headwaiter appeared. “Ready now, sir.”

“Leave your drink, pet,” Boylan said, helping her off her stool. “Bernard’ll bring it in.”

They followed the headwaiter into the dining room. Eight or ten of the tables were occupied. A full colonel and a party of young officers. Other tweedy couples. There were flowers on the polished fake-colonial tables and rows of shining glasses. There is nobody here who makes less than ten thousand dollars a year, she thought.

The conversation in the room dropped as they followed the headwaiter to a small table at the window, overlooking the river far below. She felt the young officers regarding her. She touched her hair. She knew what was going on in their minds. She was sorry Mr. Boylan wasn’t younger.

The headwaiter held the chair for her and she sat down and put the large, creamy napkin demurely over her lap. Bernard came in with their unfinished Daiquiris on a tray and put them down on the table.

“Thank you, sir,” he said as he backed off.

The headwaiter appeared with a bottle of red wine from France and the table waiter came up with their first course. There was no manpower shortage at The Old Farmer’s Inn.

The headwaiter ceremoniously poured a little of the wine into a huge, deep glass. Boylan sniffed it, tasted it, looked up, squinting, at the ceiling, as he kept it for a moment in his mouth before swallowing. He nodded at the headwaiter. “Very good, Lawrence,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” the headwaiter said. With all those thank you’s, Gretchen thought, the bill was going to be horrendous.

The headwaiter poured the wine into her glass, then into Boylan’s. Boylan raised his glass to her and they both sipped the wine. It had a strange dusty taste and was warm. Eventually, she was sure, she was going to learn to like that taste.

“I hope you like hearts of palm,” Boylan said. “I developed the taste in Jamaica. That was before the war, of course.”

“It’s delicious.” It tasted like a flat nothing to her, but she liked the idea that a whole noble palm tree had been cut down just to serve her one small, delicate dish.

“When the war is over,” he said, picking at his plate, “I’m going to go down there and settle. Jamaica. Just lie on the white sand in the sun from year’s end to year’s end. When the boys come marching home this country’s going to be impossible. A world fit for heroes to live in,” he said mockingly, “is hardly fit for Theodore Boylan to live in. You must come and visit me.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll rhumba on down on my salary from the Boylan Brick and Tile Works.”

He laughed. “It is the proud boast of my family,” he said, “that we have underpaid our help since 1887.”

“Family?” she said. As far as she knew, he was the only Boylan extant. It was common knowledge that he lived alone in the mansion behind the stone walls of the great estate outside town. With servants, of course.

“Imperial,” he said. “We are spread in our glory from coast to coast, from pine-clad Maine to orange-scented California. Aside from the Boylan Cement plant and the Boylan Brick and Tile Works in Port Philip, there are Boylan shipyards, Boylan oil companies, Boylan heavy-duty machinery plants throughout the length and breadth of this great land, each with a Boylan brother or uncle or cousin at its head, supplying the sinews of war at cost-plus to our beloved country. There is even a Major General Boylan who strikes shrewd blows in his nation’s cause in the Service of Supply in Washington. Family? Let there be the sniff of a dollar in the air and there you will find a Boylan, first on the line.”

She was not used to people running down their own families; her loyalties were simple. Her face must have showed her disappointment.

“You’re shocked,” Boylan said. Again that crooked look of amusement.

“Not really,” she said. She thought of her own family. “Only people inside a family know how much love they deserve.”

“Oh, I’m not all bad,” Boylan said. “There’s one virtue which my family has in abundance and I admire it without reservation.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re rich. They’re verrry, verrry rich.” He laughed.

“Still,” she said, hoping that he wasn’t as bad as he sounded, that it was just a show-off lunchtime act that he was performing to impress an empty-headed girl, “still, you work. The Boylans’ve done a lot for this town …”

“They certainly have,” he said. “They have bled it white. Naturally, they feel a sentimental interest in it. Port Philip is the most insignificant of the imperial possessions, not worth the time of a true, one hundred percent, up-and-at-em male Boylan, but they do not abandon it. The last and the least of the line, your humble servant, is delegated to the lowly home province to lend the magic of the name and the authority of the living family presence at least once or twice a month to the relic. I perform my ritual duties with all due respect and look forward to Jamaica when the guns have fallen silent.”

He not only hates the family, she thought, he hates himself.

His quick, pale eyes noted the minute change in her expression. “You don’t like me,” he said.

“That isn’t true,” she said. “It’s just that you’re different from anyone I know.”

“Different better or different worse?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He nodded gravely. “I abide the question,” he said. “Drink up. Here comes another bottle of wine.”

Somehow, they had gone through the whole bottle of wine and they hadn’t reached the main course yet. The headwaiter gave them fresh glasses and there was the ceremony of tasting once more. The wine had flushed her face and throat. The conversation in the rest of the restaurant seemed to have receded and came to her ears now in a regular, reassuring rhythm, like the sound of distant surf. She suddenly felt at home in the polished old room and she laughed aloud.

“Why are you laughing?” Boylan asked suspiciously.

“Because I’m here,” she said, “and I could be so many other places instead.”

“You must drink more often,” he said. “Wine becomes you.” He reached over and patted her hand. His hand was dry and firm on her skin. “You’re beautiful, pet, beautiful, beautiful.”

“I think so, too,” she said.

It was his turn to laugh.

“Today,” she said.

By the time the waiter brought their coffee she was drunk. She had never been drunk before in her life so she didn’t know that she was drunk. All she knew was that all colors were clearer, that the river below her was cobalt, that the sun lowering in the sky over the faraway western bluffs was of a heartbreaking gold. All the tastes in her mouth were like summertime and the man opposite her was not a stranger and her employer, but her best and most intimate friend, his fine, tanned face kindly and marvelously attentive, the occasional touch of his hand on hers of a welcome calm dryness, his laugh an accolade to her wit. She could tell him anything, her secrets were his.