Stone Lake: part 33

A Star Tribune serialized novel by Richard Horberg

Chapter 11

The story so far: Stone Lake turns out for the opening of the basketball season.

The drive from Stone Lake to Minneapolis took seven hours. Reaching the city just before 3 o'clock in the afternoon, Allen pulled up in back of the Fuller Hotel where his father lived and parked in the lot. His father having arranged with the desk clerk to rent him a room for a few days, he carried in his suitcase, a couple of books and his old typewriter. When he tried to pay for the room, the clerk told him that it had been taken care of.

While waiting for his dad to come home from the market, he went down to the phone booth in the lobby and called Greg Schmidt. They had agreed, by mail, to double-date on Friday night — and to attend the University's production of "Peter Pan," which Greg would get tickets for. On the phone Greg suggested that he could find a date for Allen among the large pool of young women at the Lutheran Student Association. Hesitating, Allen said he wanted to try somebody else first. The previous spring, before he'd met Mary Zane, he had played tennis with a girl named Helen Jacobson, a young woman he had met in one of his classes. He liked her. After hanging up, he called the dorm where she lived and asked for her, not knowing whether she would remember him or not.

Helen Jacobson remembered him. She wasn't doing anything on Friday night, she said, and would be happy to attend the play with him. He was elated.

When his father came home from the market that afternoon, a little after 6 o'clock, he brought two steaks with him. After washing up, he took Allen to a little place down the block where the cook would fry them and serve them up with hash-browns and toast for a nominal price. He introduced Allen to the waitress and a man eating at the counter. "My son," he said. He had done it all his life. "My bodyguard," he would say proudly in the old days.

He was an athlete no more. His heart was not good. His liver was bad. He had varicose veins. As a result of standing behind the counter all day, his feet troubled him.

Once he had been a brawler, fighting with the police as well as his barstool acquaintances, spending a little time in jail. He was a brawler no more. The cops he had once fought with were now his friends. He sat with them in the White Star and the Valhalla on Washington Avenue and drank grape pop while they poured shots from a bottle of Sunny Brook. His middle name being Bror, which in Swedish means brother, he considered himself a humanitarian. "Live and Let Live" was his motto.

Allen remembered one night when he'd taken Mary Zane to visit his father — they'd been bowling — and how easily she'd charmed him. She'd been surprised, however, by the pen-and-ink, framed drawings on the walls, those starkly beautiful young women's curves and long legs, the latter drawn with a single stroke of his pen. But she seemed amused by his little room. And she couldn't believe that he preferred to live on such a busy street, right up front on the main floor of the hotel where all the noisy traffic passed. His dad laughed and said he liked to hear the fire engines and the police sirens and the ambulances going by at night. He was a city boy. As for her, he liked her energy, her smile, her outspokenness.

Sitting at the counter, his father had good news. He'd showed his cartoons to a man named Max Winter, editor of the sports section of "The Shopping News," a weekly paper that Allen had delivered when he was a boy. Max Winter liked his cartoons — especially The Champ series — and was considering printing them, perhaps one every week.

"Maybe I've turned the corner at last," his dad said. "If they publish them I might not get paid much, but a little publicity will help. If the right people see them, who knows how far I can go?"

"Your friends in Stone Lake really liked them, didn't they?"

"They sure did."

"You know, if I get a start, it might help you too."

Allen told himself that his father deserved a little luck.

***

She'd never been to the University Theater before, liked the play and even laughed once or twice. Greg's date — he claimed to have just met her — was a novice. She not only liked the play, she raved about it, especially the crocodile. Allen thought, as he knew Greg did too, that her appreciation was perhaps a bit excessive. On the other hand, Helen Jacobson's might have been a little too cool.

Nevertheless, they had a good time, stopping at a place downtown for Sliced Peach Happy Thoughts (the epitome of sophistication, Allen and Greg thought) afterwards. When they dropped her off at the dorm, Allen accompanied her to the door. "If anything interesting happens at Stone Lake," he said, squeezing her hand, "I might write you."

Then, having taken Greg's date home, they sat in the car for an hour and a half, as they had done in the past, and talked about life, literature — and Stone Lake.

The next day he went to Walter Library at the University to look at some one-act plays, since Superintendent Magnuson told him that he was expected to direct Stone Lake's entry in the state one-act play contest early in March. He hadn't even known that such a contest existed. In the library, he read plays by Barrie, Shaw and Chekhov, then found one by Lord Dunsany that appealed to him. It was very short, used a small cast and was rather dramatic. He thought it was just the right thing. At the play loan library in Northrop Auditorium, he was able to get copies.