The Progress of Love

window where she intended to wait. She keeps looking around, waiting for the girl to come up behind her. Not yet. Other, taller people join the line and she has to keep peering around them, wanting to make sure the girl can see where she is. She has to move forward with the line, and when it’s her turn she has no choice but to go in. It’s time she went, anyway.
    She gets out as quickly as possible. The girl is still not there.Not in the lineup. Not hanging around the galley or sitting in any of the back seats. The line is shorter now and there is room for Mary Jo to stand by the window. She waits there, shivering, wishing she had brought her jacket.
    In the washroom, she didn’t take time to put on fresh lipstick. She does so now, looking at her reflection in the dark window. Suppose she decided to speak to somebody about the girl—what would they think of her? She could speak to somebody now—that older, rather grim-looking stewardess with the coppery eye makeup, who seems to be in charge, or the steward, who looks distracted but more approachable. She could tell them what the girl had said, and about her trembling. She could voice her suspicions. But what do those amount to? The girl has not really said anything that suspicions can be firmly based on. She is Eskimo, she is sixteen, she is going to Hawaii with a much older man who is not her father. Is sixteen underage? Is taking a girl to Hawaii a crime? She may be more than sixteen after all; she certainly looks it. She may be drunk and lying. She may be his wife, though she doesn’t wear a ring. He may certainly be some sort of relative. If Mary Jo says anything now, she will be seen as a meddling woman, who has had one drink and may have had more. She may be seen as someone trying to get hold of the girl for her own purposes.
    The girl herself will have to say more if anything is to be done.
    You can’t be helped if you don’t ask for it.
    You will have to say what you want.
    You will have to say.
    Mary Jo walks slowly back to her seat, checking on the way to see if the girl has moved, if she is sitting somewhere else. She looks for the large docile head with its black ponytail.
    Nowhere.
    But when she is nearly back to her seat she sees that the girl has moved. She has moved back to where she was sitting before beside the man. They have been provided with two more whiskeys.
    Perhaps he grabbed her when she got up, and forced her to sit down with him. Mary Jo should have seen that the girl went first. But could she have persuaded her, made her understand? Did the girl really understand that help was being offered?
    Mary Jo stands in the aisle putting on her jacket. She looks down at the couple, but they don’t look at her. She sits down and snaps on her reading light, then turns it off. Nobody is watching the movie anymore. The Greek baby is crying, and the father is walking it up and down the aisle. The little Indian girls have toppled over on each other, and their brother is asleep in his mother’s narrow lap.
    Dr. Streeter would soon put Mary Jo straight about this. Some kinds of concern—he has made her admit this—are little more than frivolity and self-indulgence. With their self-indulgent good intentions, people are apt to do more harm than good. And that is what she might do in this case.
    Yes. But he could always turn to what was inside people, inside their chests. If this girl had a faulty heart, even if she was twenty years older, forty years older, than she is, even if her life was totally muddled and useless and her brain half-rotted with drink—even then he would put himself completely at her service. He withheld nothing, he used himself up in such rescues or attempted rescues. If it was a problem of the real heart, the bloody, pumping, burdened heart inside a person’s chest.
    Dr. Streeter’s voice has an underlying sadness. It’s not only his voice. His breathing is sad. An incurable, calm, and decent sadness is what he breathes out over the phone before you even hear his voice. He would be displeased if you told him that. Not that he particularly wishes to be thought jolly. But he would think it unnecessary, impertinent, for anybody to assume that he is sad.
    This sadness seems to come from obedience. Mary Jo can just recognize that, never understand it. She thinks there is an obedience about men that women can’t understand. (What would Rhea say to that?) It’s not the things he knows about—Mary Jo could manage that—but