daughter

JUST THE LOCK-KEEPER'S DAUGHTER

Fred bellied up to the bar at the old North End Fire Company. He nestled his butt into the cushion of the high stool. He sipped the foam from the top of the glass of beer before it ran down. He felt his friend of decades ago, Henry Drevyanko, standing next to him with a foot on the rail, smiling.

Fred was trying to reconstruct the folkways of the bar of his young manhood. The thirtysomething bartender--"Jeeter," Henry called him--sensed his self-consciousness. Jeeter thought Fred was an outsider. I knew this bar before you were born, Fred said in his head.

Fred and Henry had not seen one another for at least forty years. Fred was back in his hometown to check on details of a late uncle's estate. When he came out of the attorney's office on Main Street, Henry almost knocked him over as he walked by.

"Jeezis," said Henry--and before Fred could say no he was following Henry's car to the Fire Company for a beer and catching up.

After his hitch in the Navy, Henry worked thirty-five years at the local tire plant until it closed when he was in his mid-fifties. Since then he drove a school bus. He married Anna Donato from their high school class and with her had three daughters and a son. All the girls had children of their own, eight altogether. The son, Andrew, was an Air Force top gun. Fred said that he couldn't believe his buddy had done all that; it was some life.

After college, Fred never came back to town. He became an accountant with a big firm and lived in another state. He married a nurse from Connecticut and she never bore Fred any children. Henry thought that was remarkable. No kids, he mused. He couldn't imagine it. Fred said there was nothing to it or something and let it go.

Henry had bought the first beer and left the change on the bar. Now Fred pulled out a twenty and dropped it on the bar in front of him. Jeeter knew whose money to pick up when he served the second round. It was the custom of the bar. Fred was getting the old hang of it. He could not believe that the bar and Henry, the ways of long ago, still flourished, right here in front of him. He had thought of his young life as a closed book, complete.

"Jeezis," Henry said.

They remembered some of the neighborhood guys. Oosie Yankowski, at 280 pounds, dancing on the pool table until it finally gave in. Paulie Black in his '48 ragtop Mercury, rolling on a sharp turn in Springville and coming up unhurt. Walt "the merchant" buying junk and selling at a profit so he could feed his youthful alcohol addiction. Jackie Osisek, the slickest running back they knew. Jackie's high school football fame ended in his junior year when he broke his collarbone in the third game of the season; he quit school after that and went to work at the tire plant. He was there on the tire building line to welcome Henry when he began work after the Navy.

When they started remembering some of the girls, after a couple of names Henry held up his finger as if to say wait a minute, we have to really think about this one. He meant Dolores.

Fred had buried the memory of Dolores but it was surfacing in spite of himself. They called her the lock-keeper's daughter. She lived with her father, who rented the stone lock-keeper's house at the end of the canal. The locks still worked in their youth. Dolores as a kid had operated them. Fred and Henry had seen her doing it with her father, opening the gate that let the Schuylkill waters rush in. They didn’t know why the locks still operated; barges had ceased to run before they were born. Operating the locks seemed to be just a lark for Dolores. Lithe and slim, she took charge of that machinery as if she could turn a world with it. Henry said that earth was hauled in to fill the locks in the 'sixties.

The thing about Dolores, Henry said, was that he and she made it together before he took off for boot camp after high school. Fred said he wondered why they were sitting there wanting to remember this a lifetime later. He wanted to look at his watch; he felt a first impulse to end it and be gone. But Henry ordered another beer and then Fred felt he had to stay.

"Jeezis," Fred said.

Sweet arms of such a long time ago seemed to swim back into his mind. That hair, that waist, that melody of a voice. They were not real, surely, but there they were, somewhere in Fred's aging head.

There it was, that first time he felt her unquiet body against his through their heavy coats. It was a winter evening, cold but nice under moonlight. He was clowning on skates on the canal with some of the guys--maybe Henry among them--when she came gliding by. They were all about sixteen or so and waiting impatiently to be grown up, doing the extravagant antics required in the heat of that impatience. She did a little jump and skated backwards away from the other girls. That put her neat rump out in front as she came toward him, knees gently bent, watching where she was going with her head turned to the side. She bumped into him rear end first and he had to reach out and grab her tightly to keep them both from falling.

The next time they met on the ice they were alone. She fell at one point and lay there on the ice on her back, bundled and warm in the cold. She would not move until Fred skated to her and helped her get up. They both lost their balance half way up and went back down, he on top of her. How was it possible for him to have forgotten the length and wetness and warmth of the kiss she gave him that night on the ice? He pinned her arms above her head in mock combat and she allowed him to have his way with her mouth. Her cold cheeks and her warm lips combined to make something he had never felt before and would want to feel again.

You know she was my girl for a while, Fred said to Henry. Henry said he did know. But they had just graduated from high school, Henry remembered, and he was going away to the Navy, probably for good. Dolores told him it was about over with Fred. Fred had never really seriously tried to make out with her, she told Henry. She figured he was getting interested in somebody else or something--anyway, he was going off to college. So she felt like he should go ahead, she told Henry. And he did, thinking she was just the lock-keeper's daughter.

Henry pushed his money forward for another round, though Fred thought it was his turn. Jeeter caught a nod from Henry and picked up his money. Fred began to think he had had enough.

Fred remembered that he had wanted to. Yes, he had wanted really seriously to try to make out with Dolores. Jeezis. Who wouldn't? But he hadn't.

Henry asked Fred if he wanted to know what had happened to Dolores after they all grew up and went their ways. Fred said not really, but why not. Nothing much, Henry said. In fact, she waitressed at the diner in town until just a few years ago, before she got sick. Henry used to banter with her when he went for coffee and donuts. But he never talked with her about that one time together before he went off to boot camp. She married a few times. Kids. Cancer. Death.

Finally, Fred left Henry at the bar and headed back to the airport. He would get a plane home the next morning. He promised Henry he would be in touch but he knew this was unlikely. He wished now that he had stayed at the attorney's office another couple of minutes and had missed the chance meeting.

In the darkened rental car on the Expressway, he began to know why he never came back to his hometown. Something never quite happened to him there; he never quite completed something. It was not just Dolores that he meant but the whole of growing up there. Or the whole of growing up, period. This is not something I ever wanted to come back to remember, he said aloud.

Fred looked out of his airport motel window later and watched the lights of a plane materialize out of the black sky on its way toward landing. He called his wife to tell her he would be arriving home next day about noon. She had expected him late tonight and was disappointed. He explained that he ran into an old guy from the neighborhood and spent some time reminiscing. Lots of good memories, she imagined. He did not say otherwise.

"Jeezis," he said under his breath, hanging up.