Power (11 page)

“But you won't—please, Daddy?”

“He hasn't accepted yet, has he?”

“But I'm going off to school. What harm—”

“I am not worried about your safety or your honor, Dorothy. We'll talk about it when you hear from him.”

I received my reply from Ben the following morning. “Dear Miss Aimesley,” he wrote, “Thank you for your kind invitation. I will be at your home at eleven o'clock in the forenoon on Sunday.” And he signed it “Benjamin R. Holt.” How I scrutinized it and analyzed it! In time, Ben told me that he had rewritten it three times, but I never knew whether to believe that; although it may have been. I never fully understood why Ben wanted so desperately to make a proper impression upon us. Certainly, he wanted nothing from my father. Was he in love with me? Not then, I don't think; yet all of his actions were formal and thoughtful, unlike himself. Or am I being unfair to him? It is so easy to worship Ben, as so many did, that perhaps I am bending over backwards to form a fair picture. I do know that we, myself, my father, and our whole way of life were of a special significance to Ben. I do believe that during the whole course of Ben's life, Father was the only man of close relationship with whom he never quarreled and never broke. In later years, when Ben would rant about the iniquity and hypocrisy of the rich, all the rich, I would remind him of Father. “That's another category,” he would bark at me. “Joe Aimesley's a civilized man!”

Anyway, I showed Father the note. “Do you want to go?” he asked me.

“Of course I do. I wouldn't have written him otherwise, and I'm so ashamed of it.”

“Of letting him know that you like him?”

“Yes.”

“If he couldn't see it for himself, he has no sense.”

“And you won't make me have Aunt Alice or someone like that for a chaperon?”

Father just looked at me and shook his head in despair, and so it had worked, and I had my day with Ben Holt. And it was that day that made all the difference in the world, and I don't regret it. I don't suppose I could have loved anyone who wasn't like Ben, and I'm glad it was Ben.

Those were the days of long dresses. I wore a pink cotton with a red silk sash, but before that I was up at six o'clock to see to the picnic lunch. At seven-thirty, when Mrs. Privit entered her kitchen, I had turned her work table into an utter confusion of boiled eggs, sliced olives, mashed anchovies, ham paste, liver paste, and pickles. She drove me out of there and said she would finish it herself. Not only did she disapprove of my plans for the day, but she saw it as an alternative to church.

We were only intermittent churchgoers, for my father was an unprejudiced agnostic, but when I was home, his sister, my Aunt Alice Aimesley, who was one of the leaders of the woman's suffrage movement in eastern Pennsylvania, would turn up each Sunday morning to see that I attended church. Her attitude mystified my father, for most of the year Aunt Alice was lecturing here and there and all over the country on the suffrage movement with never even a nod to religion. It was only in Ringman that she took an interest in the godless upbringing of her poor motherless niece. This Sunday I had finished dressing, at about half past ten, and came downstairs to hear her arguing with my father.

I paused on the stairs to listen to her contention that my wickedness was threefold: not only was I missing church service to picnic, but my companion in iniquity was a miner, and I was proceeding unchaperoned. To which my father replied,

“That comes poorly from anyone, but badly from you, Alice.”

“Just what do you mean?”

“Do you wear one face for the suffrage movement and another for Ringman?”

“Of all the insufferable accusations—”

“I am not accusing you of anything, Alice. I am simply pointing out that this is Dorothy's last Sunday at home before she returns to school, and I intend for her to spend it as she desires. I will not have you questioning her morality or her intentions. If you are going to fight for the freedom and liberation of your sex, you might as well apply your credo here in Ringman as anywhere else.”

I had never heard Father talk to his sister like that before, and the result was that she stormed out of the house without waiting to speak to me. When I came downstairs, Father had gone into his study. He never mentioned the incident, and promptly at eleven, Ben appeared, scrubbed and cleaned and wearing the same black suit. He brought me a bouquet of roses, beautiful, long-stemmed red roses that even then were quite expensive. It was a lovely gift, and after I had put them into a vase, I called Father out of his study to admire them. Then Mrs. Privit, her mouth drawn into a thin and disapproving line, appeared with the picnic basket, which Ben took and hooked on his arm, just as though a Sunday picnic were a weekly matter with him. Father told us to enjoy ourselves, and we walked out of the house and down the road with never a word between us until Ben thought to ask me where I would like to go.

“We might climb Belfast Ridge and picnic on one of the flat rocks there.”

He agreed, and then remembered to tell me how pretty I looked.

“Thank you,” I smiled.

“I mean, I thought of it when I first saw you, but I didn't have all my wits about me.”

“Oh?”

He didn't speak for a while after that, and we strolled down the road, each of us immersed in meditation. Away from our house, toward the wagon track that went up Belfast Ridge in those days, were only farmhouses. Today, a part of that area has been developed for small homes and the rest of it is a golf course. There is a shopping center where the new highway cuts into Belfast Ridge, and it is all very busy and garish; but at the time I write of, there were only the rolling fields and the clumps and windbreaks of maple and oak and birch, the colors changing already in the early autumn and glints of yellow and gold all over the landscape. One of the ironies of coal and the men who mine it is that so often the veins lie in the most beautiful country imaginable—a good description for the hills that surround Ringman. And that was such a cool and clear morning that my whole memory of the day is crisp and glistening.

It was the first time we had ever been alone with each other, and I was still smarting with shame at my boldness for having written to him. Ben must have sensed this, because he mentioned that he was grateful to me for having taken the initiative and written to him. He thanked me.

“Don't thank me,” I said. “I can't pretend that I am pleased with myself.”

“Why not?”

“Because young ladies don't make advances toward young men they barely know.”

“Well, surely it's not an advance to write me a note and say that you would like to see me again.”

“It certainly is!” I snapped.

He looked at me with amazement and pointed out that if I hadn't written the note, we probably would not have seen each other again for a long time—if ever.

“That doesn't matter.”

“Well, please tell me, Miss Aimesley,” he said, stopping short and facing me, “do you or don't you want to spend the day with me?”

“Of course I do,” I blurted out, almost in tears at this point.

“Then what's this all about?”

“
You
should have written to
me
.”

We walked on again and for a while in silence. Ben was shaking his head. “Oh no,” he finally said. “I guess you never open your eyes and take a good look at the world, do you, Miss Aimesley?”

“Of course I do.”

“You keep saying that.”

“What?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, what do you want me to say, Mr. Holt? I'm afraid I'm a very ordinary person. I'm afraid pearls of wisdom can't drop from my lips every time I open my mouth.”

“You're not a very ordinary person at all, and I'm not much good at polite small talk, Miss Aimesley. How could I write you a letter? Or call on you? Or anything like that? I'm a miner. My name is Ben Holt, and I live in Mrs. Tarragon's boardinghouse, and if I had a brain in my head, I would have torn your letter to pieces and forgotten all about it.”

“Why didn't you?”

“Because I'm a damned fool enough to think that you're the most desirable and loveliest woman I ever saw in all my life, and because you and your father made me feel like a human being.”

That quieted me. We walked on for ten or fifteen minutes without a word being said, and then I saw three young men coming down the road on bicycles. They were miners in Levis and blue shirts, and they rode girls on their handlebars, skinny, giggling, screeching girls, and they all set up a shout of welcome when they saw Ben, “Benny!” “Benny, buddy!” “Oh, what a nifty, what a peach that is, Benny!” They braked to a stop, two of the girls tumbling off, and gathered around us. Flustered and mumbling for the first time since I knew him, Ben introduced me. The boys were shaggy-haired, pale, their skin tattooed with coal dust. Their speech was the strange nasal dialect of the miners in that part of Pennsylvania. They looked at me closely; they recognized my name; they nodded, muttered a few words, and then rode off. The girls said nothing at all. They departed in a mixture of restraint, irritation, and deference; and all I could think of was that here on Sunday, when the poorest workman put on his best, three young miners were out in Levis. It was a small, unworthy thought, but they became the image of Ben and Ben became them, and my heart sank, and I think I would have given everything I owned in the world to be back safely at home, never knowing that a Ben Holt existed in this world.

As for Ben, he seemed to know what was going on in my mind. His wide face was thoughtful and grave, and as we walked on, he appeared to be a thousand miles away; so much so that I was shocked when he said to me, very gently,

“Would you like me to take you home, Miss Aimesley?”

“Oh? Oh no—no. Why should you think that I want to go home?”

“Well—well, it's kind of hard for someone like you to be out with a roughneck for the first time and enjoy it and feel secure.”

“You're not a roughneck,” I replied indignantly. “If you were, I certainly would not be out walking with you on a Sunday!”

“Or any other day?” he smiled.

“Or any other day, Mr. Holt. And as for
someone like me
—I hardly think you have a right to talk in terms of
someone like me
, Mr. Holt, since you know nothing about me.”

“I'm sorry.”

“And as for feeling secure, I feel perfectly secure. Or are you suggesting that I ought to feel afraid of you, Mr. Holt?”

“You know that I'm suggesting nothing of the kind, Miss Aimesley. And the last thing in the world I desired was to make you angry.”

“But I am not angry, Mr. Holt—not at all.”

And now, suddenly, we were both of us smiling and relaxed for the first time, and feeling young and splendid in the fine noonday sun, and climbing bravely up the wagon track to Belfast Ridge. Once or twice, where the road was very rough, Ben gave me his hand. I remember the size of it. It closed over my hand and devoured it, and the hard, calloused surface of his palm gripped my fingers like iron. We didn't say much going up the hill; it's a hard climb, and we saved our breath, and then presently, we stood on the top, the world unfolding beneath us, woods and fields and hills on one side to the west of us, and on the other side, eastward, the collieries, the scarred earth, the piles of culm, the spur tracks and trestles and clefts of erosion, and the dull, dirty brick company houses of the miners, lying in the haze across the valley, terrace upon terrace, swinging around and folding down finally into the streets of Ringman.

Ben found a broad, flat rock, and I said that it would do splendidly as a table. I refused to let Ben help me unpack the basket, but insisted that he sit down and rest himself. He hardly took his eyes off me now, and he was relaxed enough to ask me whether I would mind his smoking a cigar.

“Not at all,” I said. “I like cigar smoke.”

“Well, the miner's consolation is not exactly a cigar, but up here the wind will blow away the smoke, Miss Aimesley—Miss Aimesley?”

“Yes?”

“May I call you Dorothy?”

I nodded, going on with the lunch and not daring to look up at him right then. I knew that his eyes were on me. He went on,

“You see, Dorothy—those kids—well, a miner's kids—it's hard to talk about mining. It's just so hard.”

“I don't understand why.”

“Well, how can I explain it? Where do you start? It's like we're a people apart—a race apart. I once read a book by a man called Kingsley, a book called
The Water Babies
, supposedly a kid's book in England. I was just a kid when I picked it up and read it—a book about a chimney sweep who was dirty because he didn't care about being clean. I remember how enraged I was when I read it, not because it was a snobbish, silly book, but because this damn fool who wrote it didn't understand that you can't clean chimneys without getting dirty—and that soot is not just dirt.” Ben held out one of his big hands. “I scrubbed for fifteen minutes this morning, and the tattoo of the mines is still there.”

Now I faced him, and our eyes met. He grinned suddenly, spread his arms, and leaned back where he sat there on the ground. I offered him a sandwich. It was tiny. He swallowed it in two bites, and I gave him another one and a hard-boiled egg. He was hungry, and I was pleased to see that he liked the food. “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Holt,” I said to him. He said, “Ben Holt.” “Ben Holt, then. Tell me about yourself, Ben.” But he wanted to know where to begin, how to begin. He looked at me in my pink dress, and I sensed what he was thinking. “There was a man called Ollie Bricker, whom I tried to kill once by dropping a lump of coal off a tipple onto his head. But I missed him. I was just a kid. Is that the kind of thing you want to know about me? Does it tell you anything about me?”