Free Loon Lake by E. L. Doctorow Page B

didn’t, they certainly ran to his advantage. My rage flared as if it were the last wound to be felt and the slowest to heal.
    As time went on I understood that I lay in a room of the staff house where perhaps fifteen or twenty people lived who wore the green livery, forest-green for the outdoor workers, the paler shade for the indoor. They all looked somewhat stolidly alike, as if related.
    I was alert to find a friend and I did. She was a girl of the pale greenset, a young maid in the big house who shyly looked in on me, advancing each time a little farther into the room until finally she showed up in mid-morning one day when everyone else was working. She had seen we were the same age and that was enough.
    Her name was Libby. She didn’t think of not answering any question that occurred to me.
    This place was called Loon Lake. It was the domain of the same F. W. Bennett of the Bennett Autobody Works. Did I know the name? He was very rich. He owned thirty thousand acres here and it was just one of his places. He owned the lake itself, the water in the lake, the land under the water and the fish that swam in it.
    “But not the dogs,” I said.
    “Oh no,” she said, “those are wild-running, those dogs. It’s the fault of the people who own them and can’t feed them anymore. And then they go off and forage and breed wild and hunt in packs.”
    “The people?”
    “The dogs. All through the mountains it’s like that, not just here. Does it hurt?” she asked.
    “It don’t tickle.”
    A tremor went through her. She held her arms as if she was cold.
    “Tell me, does your F. W. Bennett have a wife?”
    “Oh, sure! She’s famous. The Mrs. Bennett who wins all the air races. Her picture’s in the papers. Lucinda Bennett?”
    “Oh, her,” I said. “The one with the blond hair?”
    “No, she’s a brunette.” Libby touched her own hair, which was brunet too. Like all her features it was ordinary. She was possessed of a sort of plain prettiness that caused you to study her and wish this feature or that might be better.
    “Brunettes are my favorite,” I said.
    She blushed. She was a simple innocent person, she granted me her own youthful face on the world without knowing who I was or where I came from. In five minutes I had her whole history. Her uncle, one of the groundkeepers, had gotten her the job. She made twelve dollars a week plus room and board. She was fervent in her gratitude. She spoke in what I could tell was the communal piety of the staff. How nervously lucky theywould have to feel, how clannish in their good fortune exempt in these mountains from an afflicted age. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Bennett came or went separately or together or had guests or didn’t, but the place was maintained all year round including the dead of winter.
    “Don’t you get lonely up here?” I said.
    She thought a long time. “Well, I send six dollars to my father in Albany.”
    Not realizing this was enough for me to feel chastened, she frowned and cast about in her mind for justification. “You’d be surprised who comes here,” she said. She brightened “You get to see famous people.”
    “Who?”
    “Why, big politicians, and prime ministers from England. And Jeanette MacDonald? She was here in the spring! She’s beautiful. I saw her clothes. She gave me five dollars!”
    “Who else?”
    “Oh well, I never saw him, it was before I came. But Charlie Chaplin.”
    “Sure,” I said. “On roller skates.”
    She looked then suddenly frightened. Who would doubt her word? She turned and left the room, and I thought to myself well that’s that. But a short while later she returned, softly closing the door behind her. She held a large leatherbound book to her chest and looked at me over the gilt edge with bright excited eyes. “I better not get caught,” she said.
    It was the Loon Lake guest book. She fixed the pillows so I could pull myself up and she sat on the side of the bed and opened the book to a page marked