Sweet Water Read Free Page B

children,” I’d say, and that would be the end of the story.
        
This is the story I told my father.
    I met Amory Clyde at a piano recital he was giving. Afterward, he walked me back to the gates of the college and asked if he could see me again. From then on, one thing just seemed to lead to another.
    * * *
    This is the story the family Bible tells.
    Amory Vincent Clyde, born January 27, 1913. Constance Winn Whitfield, born October 14, 1917. United in Matrimony September 22, 1937. Horace Whitfield Clyde, born March 15, 1938.
        
This is the story I tell myself.
    The dance hall was dim and smoky, like a grainy photograph. Tricia and Marie, my roommates from the teachers college, had persuaded me to come, though I’d told them I was not allowed to dance. The week before, they’d convinced me to climb through a trapdoor to the roof above our bedroom in the women’s dormitory, which was guarded like a citadel, and smoke cigarettes. The first time I inhaled, I felt my stomach flip with nausea, but I didn’t choke. Soon we were going up there every night.
    The night we went to the dance hall, we waited until all the lights in the dormitory were out and then escaped down the fire stairs. We’d brought high-heeled shoes in a paper bag, and Tricia had rouge and lipstick, which we applied squinting into the circular mirror of a compact under a streetlight. The three of us entered the hall as though we were on a mission. The few cigarettes we’d smoked outside in the dark had made me heady.
    When I first saw Amory he was standing at the bar with a drink in his hand. His hair was golden, wavy and long in the front, and his fingers, wrapped around a whiskey glass, were narrow and delicate. He didn’t look as if he had done a day’s work in his life. I liked that about him. He was talking to a woman with her back turned to me. When she took out a cigarette he set down his drink and produced a silver lighter, flicking it with one hand, cupping the flame with the other. He was smooth, I could see: smooth bordering on slick.
    When he started playing the piano I felt something ignite in the pit of my stomach. His playing was butter on corn. I felt myself swaying to the music, almost dancing, and the thrill of taboos breaking one after another was like fireworks in my head. A song I didn’t recognize turned into “Mood Indigo,” and suddenly I was humming along andthen singing, and then, somehow, standing at the piano with him, looking into his cloudy blue eyes.
    I always get that mood indigo
Since my baby said good-bye
In the evening when the lights are low
I’m so lonely I could cry …
    When the song ended we were staring at each other. He picked up his drink, took a swallow, and said, “You’ve got quite a voice.”
    “Thank you.” I leaned a little closer to the piano. “Where’d you learn to play like that?”
    “Oh, here and there.” He ran his fingers up and down the keys. “Do you play?”
    “Used to,” I said. “But then, everybody takes lessons, I guess.”
    He laughed. “Maybe where you’re from. What’s your name?”
    I told him.
    “Pretty name for a pretty dame.”
    I blushed. Part of me wondered how many times he’d used that same line; but a bigger part of me didn’t care.
    “I’m Amory Clyde,” he said, extending his hand. When I reached out to shake it, he held mine tight. “I hope you like my name, Miss Constance Whitfield, because someday I’m going to give it to you as a present.”
    That night, behind the dance hall, I was kissed for the first time in my life, by a man I had known less than two hours. He touched my breast beneath my thin polka-dotted dress, and I, intoxicated by his whiskey breath and virtuoso hands, did not even try to stop him. His tongue moved inside my mouth as softly as his hand caressed my nipple. All the while, he moved his thin, lithe body against mine in precisely the kind of dance that the Baptists tried so hard to prevent.
    To his credit, when I