Reluctantly but resignedly I walked over to where Steve sat. A quietly stunning girl who looked vaguely familiar sat next to his right, a nice looking clean-cut guy sat to his left. On that guy’s left was a local mechanic I know named Buddy Kelly, and on the other side of the girl was an older guy.

“Arthur! Come meet my friends!”

“Hi, Buddy,” I said, to Buddy.

“Hiya, Arnold.”

“Oh my God, I keep calling you Arthur,” said Steve. “And I don’t know why. Can I just keep calling you Arthur?”

“Yeah, why not,” I said.

He introduced me to the others. The girl was named Daphne and the older man was introduced as Mac, her father. The other fellow was named Dick Ridpath.

Dick asked me if I would like a drink, and I said I’d take a beer. I started to reach into my pocket, but he insisted on buying. What the heck, I let him buy me a beer

There weren’t any empty stools nearby, and so I stood there sipping my beer. I tried not to stare goggle-eyed at this Daphne girl, who seemed a little young to be in a bar, but what the heck again, she was with her father.

The man Dick was extremely handsome, as was Mac, who was sturdy man in his late forties I suppose. Both of them were also unusually well-spoken. Buddy on the other hand is a short troll-like kind of guy, but a genial enough fellow.

“I’m so glad you came!” said Steve. “Where’s — um — Alexia?”

“Elektra,” I said.

“Where is she? You should see her,” he said to all the others, swivelling his head and practically bouncing on his stool like a six-year-old. “She’s incredibly beautiful. This lustrous dark hair, deep brown eyes, the most lovely olive complexion.”

“Steve,” said the girl. She had a rather deep voice for such a young woman, she couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and yet she seemed almost supernaturally self-possessed.

“Yes, sweetheart?” said Steve.

“Don’t you know you should absolutely never extol the beauty of one woman in front of another woman?”

Steve clapped his hand to his mouth, and said something, but it was unintelligible.

“Take your hand away from your mouth, Steve,” said Daphne, smiling slightly.

He did.

“I’m so terribly abashed,” he said.

“I forgive you.”

“But let me just say, darling Daphne, do you know how beautiful my friend Arthur’s inamorata is?”

“No, how beautiful is she, Steve?”

“She’s almost as beautiful as you are, darling Daphne.”

“Now you’re on the right track,” she said. “Dick, buy Steve another beer.”

Dick did this, and when the bartender laid the beer down Steve reached for it greedily.

The bar was packed. The storm had driven all the fishermen onto shore, and by the way they were shouting and drinking it looked like the fishing boat fleet wouldn’t be going out again at first light, if at all.

There was one empty table and Dick suggested we move to it so we could all be more comfortable, although he obviously meant so that I could be more comfortable, since I was the only one standing.

A couple of minutes after we moved to the table Steve laid his head on his arms and fell asleep, while the rest of us chatted.

Dick was a commander in the navy, and he seemed to be some sort of family friend to this Mac fellow, whose last name I eventually divined was MacNamara, and whose mother-in-law owned a house not far from my aunts’ on Windsor Avenue. The girl Daphne was at Bryn Mawr College, and I slowly recognized her as a pretty but somewhat somber face I had seen around town in past summers, each year a little taller and a lot more — what’s the word? Imperious? Or even like the way the Blessed Mother looks in some old paintings, beautiful and calm but somehow somewhat bored or even miffed about something.

By the way I just want to interpolate that if despite my present lamentable state of willy-nilly agnosticism there really is a Blessed Virgin I mean no disrespect by the above sentence or, now that I look at it again, should I say sentence fragment.

Let’s put it this way about my new companions: except for Buddy, and I had no idea what he was doing in such a group, they were all way out of my league. These were people who not only had gone to college but who had gone to good colleges, people who read magazines like the New Yorker and Holiday, not the Olney Times or the Catholic Standard and Times or dare I say True.

But for some reason they were all friendly to me.

Dick asked me about myself.

I just didn’t feel like going into it all, but I didn’t want to lie, so I said I was on a disability leave from the railroad, leaving out the fact that the disability was entirely mental.

As I sat and chatted with these nice people that soaring free feeling I had felt on leaving Elektra slowly seeped away, and was replaced by a pleasant drowsiness.

I finished my beer and said I should be going.

But for some reason I felt responsible for Steve. I shook his arm, figuring I’d get him up and try to walk him home. At first he wouldn’t wake up, but then the beginning instrumental part of a song came on the jukebox and suddenly his head popped up and he began to sing in a loud falsetto voice:

Big girls don’t cry
Big girls don’t cry

Then he fell out of his chair and onto the floor.

“Oh dear,” said Daphne.

“Well, I’d say Steve has had enough for one night,” said Mac.

“Do you know where he’s staying, Arnold?” Dick asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. “The Chalfonte.”

“Give me a hand. My car’s outside. You good people stay here and Arnold and I will get young Steve home.”

Steve was very light, he felt like a strawman as Dick and I lifted him up and threw an arm over each of our backs and then frog-marched him out the door to the guffawing cheers and hoorahs of the fishermen and dockworkers at the bar and tables. Steve even moved his legs a little bit, like a marionette handled by a drunken puppeteer, and if he didn’t exactly help us he didn’t hinder us in his removal.

I expected Dick to have some fancy sports car but it turned out to be a Volkswagen, sitting there pale blue in the light of the parking lot. We deposited Steve in the back, and I got in the passenger seat and Dick got behind the wheel. We both rolled down our windows to let in the cool salty air.

“So, where is this alleged Chalfonte?” he said.

He stuck the key into the ignition but instead of turning it he took a rumpled looking cigarette out of his shirt pocket.

“Head straight up Congress here and then make a left,” I said.

He brought a lighter out of his bermuda shorts pocket.

“You wouldn’t mind if I smoked a reefer, would you, Arnold?”

“Uh, no,” I said.

He lit it up, took a big drag, and held it in.

Without letting out the smoke he said, in only a slightly strained voice.

“Would you like some?”

“Okay,” I said.

I took the reefer and took a puff. What the hell. Maybe it was normal nowadays for naval officers to smoke reefers. Maybe it always had been.

“I get just mildly intimidated around Mac,” he said.

“Really?”

To me Dick didn’t seem like the sort of guy who would be intimidated by anyone.

“Yeah,” he said, finally letting out the lungful of smoke. “I’m madly in love with his daughter, for one thing.”

“Daphne,” I said, letting out my own lungful.

“Right,” he said, taking the reefer back from me.

He took another big draw, and then, handing the reefer back to me he turned the ignition key, put the car in gear, and pulled out of the parking lot.

“Thing is, I think she thinks I’m just some boring older guy, some tedious friend of the family.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

“Really?”

He was on North Street now, going past my aunts’ house.

“Go left this corner,” I said. “No, Dick, I think she likes you. Even I could tell that by the way she was looking at you. And I’m horribly unobservant.”

“Well, thanks, buddy. Arnold, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“So, how do you like being a brakeman?”

“Well,” I said, “go left here, on Washington. I liked it okay. It’s all I ever have done really, except for when I was in the army. But now I don’t feel like a brakeman any more.”

“Really? What do you feel like?”

“I don’t feel like anything,” I said. We were passing the reefer back and forth through all this of course. “But I kind of like not feeling like anything.”

“I think I know what you mean,” said Dick. “Like, I never really felt like naval officer defined me. Although I don’t know what would.”

“Just human being is enough I think,” I said.

“Yeah.”

As we went by the Ugly Mug we saw drunk people piling and tumbling out onto the street.

“I write poems,” I ventured.

Dick turned and looked at me.

“Really?”

“I know,” I said. “It’s embarrassing.”

“A brakeman poet.”

“That’s what they call me actually. Some years ago the Philadelphia Bulletin wrote an article about me, and they called me the Rhyming Brakeman. Because every week I publish a poem in the Olney Times.”

“Don’t think I’ve seen that paper.”

“It’s just my neighborhood weekly. I’ve published a poem a week in it every week since I’ve been eighteen.”

Of course I was very “stoned” on the “pot” or else I never would have been making all these humiliating confessions.

“That’s great, Arnold. Y’know, I’m a lifelong Philadelphian myself, and I don’t think I’ve ever even been in Olney, except maybe to go past it in the train.”

“There’s not much reason for anyone ever to go into Olney.”

Dick took a long pause here, knitting his brows.

“That’s not entirely true, Arnold. I have a cousin who used to go up there to go to Zapf’s music store.”

“I stand corrected,” I said. “Turn right on Howard here and it’s just a few blocks to the Chalfonte. Where did you grow up, Dick?”

“Downtown. My family has a house at 19th and Panama.”

Probably one of those nice old townhouses, with dark gables and towers and spiked black fences. But I can’t say I envied Dick, and I don’t know why.

We were quiet and then then came the Chalfonte looming up all large and white and dark-roofed.

Dick pulled up in front of the lobby entrance.

“We should try to get him to walk,” said Dick.

“Right,” I said.

It took a while, and Dick even gently slapped Steve once or twice, but he finally woke up, blinked his eyes and seemed very quickly to grasp the situation. I suppose he was used to this sort of thing.

“Well, here I am,” he said. “Home sweet Chalfonte.”

He managed, with our help, to get out of the car and to stand.

“I can make it from here, guys, thanks.”

But when we let go of his arms he wobbled a few steps forward, then stopped, swaying, and holding his arms outstretched to right and left like a tightrope walker.

“Help,” he said.

We rushed up and each grabbed a shoulder.

I’ll spare myself the description of the rake’s progress that then ensued. Fortunately there was no one at the desk or in the lobby. It’s that kind of an old-fashioned hotel, fortunately for Steve. After about twenty grueling minutes Dick and I finally got him up the stairs to the second floor and into his room, which looked like a squad of burglars had just ransacked it looking for hidden jewels.

We got him in the bed and left. On the way through the lobby Dick pointed to the right.

“Is that a bar down there?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I need a drink after that.”

“So do I,” I said.

So we went down the hall to the King Edward Room, which fortunately was still open.