Friend of My Youth

path along the river. A most delectable, heedless, soft, and giddy sort of girl.
Little Antoinette
. Jack talked about her in front of Hazel and to Hazel as easily as if he had known her not just in another country but in another world. Your Blond Bundle, Hazel used to call her. She imagined Antoinette wearing some sort of woolly pastel sleeper outfit, and she thought that she would have had silky, babyish hair, a soft, bruised mouth.
    Hazel herself was a blonde when Jack first met her, though not a giddy one. She was shy and prudish and intelligent. Jack triumphed easily over the shyness and the prudery, and he was not as irritated as most men were, then, by the intelligence. He took it as a kind of joke.
    Now the man was back, with a tray. On the tray were two whiskies and a jug of water.
    He served Hazel her drink and took the other drink himself. He settled into the chair opposite her.
    So he wasn’t the barman. He was a stranger who had bought her a drink. She began to protest.
    “I rang the bell,” she said. “I thought you had come because I rang the bell.”
    “That bell is useless,” he said with satisfaction. “No. Antoinette told me she had put you in here, so I thought I’d come and inquire if you were thirsty.”
    Antoinette.
    “Antoinette,” Hazel said. “Is that the lady I was speaking to this afternoon?” She felt a drop inside: her heart or her stomach or her courage—whatever it is that drops.
    “Antoinette,” he said. “That’s the lady.”
    “And is she the manager of the hotel?”
    “She is the owner of the hotel.”
    The problem was just the opposite of what she had expected. It was not that people had moved away and the buildings were gone and had left no trace. Just the opposite. The very first person that she had spoken to that afternoon had been Antoinette.
    She should have known, though—she should have known that such a tidy woman, Antoinette, wouldn’t employ this fellow as a barman. Look at his baggy brown pants and the burn hole in the front of his V-neck sweater. Underneath the sweater was a dingy shirt and tie. But he didn’t look ill cared for or downhearted. Instead, he looked like a man who thought so well of himself that he could afford to be a bit slovenly. He had a stocky,strong body, a square, flushed face, fluffy white hair springing up in a vigorous frill around his forehead. He was pleased that she had mistaken him for the barman, as if that might be a kind of trick he’d played on her. In the classroom she would have picked him for a possible troublemaker, not the rowdy, or the silly, or the positively sneering and disgusted kind, but the kind who sits at the back of the class, smart and indolent, making remarks you can’t quite be sure of. Mild, shrewd, determined subversion—one of the hardest things to root out of a classroom. What you have to do—Hazel had said this to younger teachers, or those who tended to get discouraged more easily than she did—what you have to do is find some way of firing up their intelligence. Make it a tool, not a toy. The intelligence of such a person is underemployed.
    What did she care about this man anyway? All the world is not a classroom. I’ve got your number, she said to herself; but I don’t have to do anything about it.
    She was thinking about him to keep her mind off Antoinette.
    He told her that his name was Dudley Brown and that he was a solicitor. He said that he lived here (she took that to mean he had a room in the hotel) and that his office was just down the street. A permanent guest—a widower, then, or a bachelor. She thought a bachelor. That twinkly, edgy air of satisfaction didn’t usually survive married life.
    Too young, in spite of the white hair, a few years too young, to have been in the war.
    “So have you come over here looking for your roots?” he said. He gave the word its most exaggerated American pronunciation.
    “I’m Canadian,” Hazel said quite pleasantly. “We don’t say ‘roots’ that way.”
    “Ah, I beg your pardon,” he said. “I’m afraid we do that. We do tend to lump you all together, you and the Americans.”
    Then she started to tell him her business—why not? Shetold him that her husband had been here during the war and that they had always planned to make this trip together, but they hadn’t, and her husband had died, and now she had come by herself. This was only half true. She had often suggested such a trip to Jack, but he had always said no. She