Free Greenwich by Howard Fast Page B

no use and left them at the little book shack at the dump, where volunteers put them on shelves, and they were free to anyone who wanted them.
    Both Belle Haven, a corner of Greenwich shore where houses were even more expensive than in the Back Country, and the dump were within walking distance of Chickahominy, perhaps the most modest neighborhood in Greenwich; and since Christina lived in Chickahominy, she felt that her summer job was perfect.
    Christina was a beautiful young woman who, living in a world of blond girls, some natural, some out of a bottle, was totally unconscious of her own beauty. She was five feet three inches, smaller than most Greenwich girls of her age, slender, with budding breasts, ivory skin, and jet black hair, cut short because she was not proud of jet black hair.
    She had met Dickie Castle, Richard’s son, some weeks ago at the book shack. Sally Castle, Dickie’s stepmother, belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the Detective Book Club, but since Sally read only an occasional detective story, the unread books tended to pile up. Neither Dickie nor his father read books, and there were no bookshelves in the house that were not loaded with bric-a-brac—which accounted for Dickie appearing at the book shack one morning with a bag of books.
    Dickie was seventeen, and he would be going into the twelfth grade at Greenwich Village School, the most pretentious, if not the most esteemed, private school in Greenwich. At seventeen, his sexual experience approached that of his father’s, but that was not unusual in the circle where he moved, and perhaps because Christina was so unlike most of the girls he knew, he was taken with her. Having struck up a conversation and discovering that she appeared at the book shack between nine and ten in the morning, he managed to be there and meet her three times, each time returning books he had chosen almost at random and which he never opened.
    He kept asking her for a date. Christina, ashamed to tell him that she did not date, finally gave in, got her mother’s permission, and agreed to dinner and a movie. In her mind, dinner meant pizza and the movie, a local show on Railroad Avenue, where the film complex offered three choices.
    Christina put on a pretty yellow cotton dress and a thin white sweater. She had no high-heel shoes, and finally she decided on her white flats instead of the sneakers she usually wore. Dickie picked her up just before six o’clock in his two-seater BMW. She had seen the BMW before, when Dickie came to the dump, but BMWs were so common in Greenwich that she didn’t think it unusual that he should have one at his disposal, and she liked the style of the car with its convertible top down and black leather upholstery. She had heard her mother and father talk about the disproportion between income and car in Greenwich, so she simply accepted it, asking only, “Is it your dad’s car?”
    â€œIt’s mine. Dad gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday. That was almost a year ago,” he added. He was a good-looking boy, blond hair and blue eyes, and if he didn’t mind that she was poor, the BMW was no proof that he was rich. Of course, he went to the Village School, and that took money. But he didn’t appear disturbed when he picked her up in front of the small house in Chickahominy. He didn’t talk very much, except to say that he had heard that Godzilla wasn’t a great film and that he didn’t like lizards much. She asked him whether everyone called him Dickie, and he replied, “Yeah, guess so.” But none of the boys she knew in high school talked very much. She said she liked Dick better, and he said, “Sure,” and burst out laughing. She blushed when she realized what he was thinking.
    In the movie house, he let his hand drop onto her thigh. She pushed it off. When he did it again, she said, “Please, Dickie, I’m trying to watch the