Charming Billy by Alice McDermott Page B

moved in front of them again. “We had this one fellow,” he said. “Another pilot.” He began to lean his elbow toward the bar, to launch another story, and Dennis, thinking he was either nearsighted or lazy, pointed again and said, “There’s a man who’s been waiting.”
    Still leaning down, the bartender looked over his shoulder toward the man, and the man—he was no older than themselves—lifted his hand and raised a finger to indicate he was there, as if he were in a crowd of patrons and not alone at the end of a mostly deserted room.
    The bartender turned back to them. “This guy went to Harvard, this pilot I’m talking about, but he was a nice guy just the same, regular. And he comes up to me one morning and he says …”
    Now Billy, beginning to feel parched in sympathy for the man (although his own glass had twice and quite generously been refilled), interrupted to say, “I think there’s a man who needs a drink.”
    This time the bartender didn’t turn around, just bowed his head and smiled a bit—he was a good-looking guy with a strong chin and thick hair—and picked up his story again.
    The girls exchanged a look of both surprise and concern, and then Eva looked at Billy in a way he imagined he would someday find familiar, looking for him to explain. While the bartender continued with his story, the man sat, impassively, his hands folded one upon the other on the bar, and then, without a single look of impatience or anger or disgust, only perhaps a single deep breath, a defeated movement of his shoulders, he swung off the barstool and pushed out the door.
    The boy from Harvard, it seemed, would have flown the bartender to Paris after the liberation, as a wedding present, if he’d survived the war.
    He straightened up again. “This is my round.” But Dennis put his hand over his glass and pointed to the place where the man had been.
    “What is he, a boozer?”
    The bartender turned casually, the cocktail shaker in his hand. He seemed unaware until then that the man had gone, and still maddeningly indifferent to having lost a customer. He shook his head, selecting rye for the girls’ old-fashioneds. “We don’t serve Jews,” he said, as neatly as he poured the drink and placed it on the bar before them.
     
    They were grateful to get outside, and more grateful still to get back into the salesman’s car and return to the dark and elegant roads of East Hampton. “Well, I think it’s a shame,” Mary said from the front seat. “Good Lord, what did you boys fight for anyway? Has he read about the camps? What was the war all about—that poor man.”
    And the other three shook their heads, yes, poor man, but unwilling to let the shame of it, the sluggish, sickening sense of false hope and false promise, invade their idyll in this lovely place.
    Billy leaned down toward Eva’s lap, pointing out her window. “Look there,” he said. “That one. That’s my idea of heaven.”
    They parked at the Coast Guard beach, and the girls sat together on the bumper while the boys found driftwood and built a small fire. While they were gathered around it, the beach became vast and black, and the thud of the invisible ocean, even with its predictable rhythm, seemed relentlessly startling.
    They each put an arm around their girl’s shoulders, and then Dennis lifted the dimming flashlight and asked Mary to take a walk with him down to the shore. Billy and Eva watched the
swaying beam as it moved through the dark and then disappeared over the seawall.
    Eva had her shoes off and her white toes were partially buried in the sand. She had her knees raised under her skirt, the skirt’s hem pulled down around her ankles. She leaned forward when the other two had gone, moving out of his arm to stare at the burning wood and say, “When I was a child, I used to pretend I was a little person caught down there, inside the fire. A lost soul.” She moved a finger to trace an imaginary path. “I’d see myself