THE MAN IN THE BROOKS SHIRT
283
herself away; he had trapped her features in an expression of
utter snobbery.
"You're a pink, I suppose," he said, as if he had noticed
nothing. "It'd sound better to you if I said I was a burglar."
"Yes," she acknowledged, with a comic air of frankness, and
they both laughed. Much later, he gave her a business card that
said he was an executive in Little Steel, but he persisted in describ–
. ing himself as a traveling salesman, and she saw at last that it was
an accident that the joke had turned on her: the joke was a wry,
humble, clownish one that he habitually turned on himself.
When he asked if she would join him in a drink before lunch,
she accepted readily. "Let's go into the diner, though. It may
be cooler."
"I've got a bottle of whiskey in my compartment. I
know
it's
cool there."
Her face stiffened. A compartment was something she had
not counted on. But she did not know (she never had known) how
to refuse. She felt bitterly angry with the man for having exposed
her-so early-to this supreme test of femininity, a test she was
bound to fail, since she would either go into the compartment, not
wanting to (and he would know this and feel contempt for her
malleability), or she would stay out of the compartment, wanting
to have gone in (and he would know this, too, and feel contempt
for her timidity).
The man looked at her face.
"Don't worry," he said in a kind, almost fatherly voice. "It'll
be perfectly proper. I promise to leave the door open." He took
her arm and gave it a slight, reassuring squeeze, and she laughed
out loud, delighted with him for having, as she thought, once again
understood and spared her.
In the compartment, which was off the club car, it
was
cooler.
The highballs, gold in the glasses, tasted, as her own never did,
the way they looked in the White Rock advertisements. There was
something about the efficiency with which his luggage, in brown
calf,
was disposed in that small space, about the white coat of the
black waiter who kept coming in with fresh ice and soda, about
the chicken sandwiches they finally ordered for lunch, that gave
her that sense of ritualistic "rightness" that the Best People are
supposed to bask in. The open door contributed to this sense: it
