An American Comedy

== AN AMERICAN COMEDY ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
John Ruffo got out among the rubble of stone and steel
at the approach to the bridge. "Well," he said to his chauffeur,
"you can wait for me here; I'll be back pretty quick; I got to see Koulous
a second, that's all." 
This was a fiction and quite gratuitous, as if it
mattered to the chauffeur, who was thinking only of the stone dust and the
smoke from the work tugs that hung red in the sunset light, presently to want
removal from the glittering surfaces of his employer's imported limousine. The
contractor might as well have been frank. "I got to have a look at my
bridge because I'm proud." 
The stone foreman wasn't there anyway; five o'clock
had blown long since. No one was about but the watchman, unslinging his supper
pail in the shadow of one of the piers, as Ruffo, nodding, walked on along the
causeway which, curving gently upward between its granite parapets, swung out
high above the muddy-brown reach of Iron River. Come nearly to the middle,
where unfinished stonework left a gap of raw steel to go on, he lit a cigar and
looked around him, to the east, to the south, then westward, lastly to the
north. 
This was really what he had come for. He did it often
of an evening, after the workmen were gone and before it grew too dark to
survey, in solitude so, and from a height, the strong, beautiful, gigantic
thing he had made. 
Eastward there was the city of Iron River, the sun's
last rays flaming a deeper red in the smoke from the ranked chimneys in the
North End, where John Ruffo had come as a boy of five to live with his parents
and five brothers and sisters in two rooms in Switch Street, above a grain
store where there were rats. 
To the south, half a mile down the truncated pyramid
of the stream, was one of the two shames of Iron River, the McKinley Avenue Drawbridge
(the other, the Tenth Street, was as far to the north). Adequate in their days—
their days had been respectively fourteen and twenty-four years ago— it was a
decade since the peak of their usefulness had passed, and, ceasing to be
assets, they had become drags on the limbs of the giant that should have grown.
To the west were the Claybury Hills. Against the fires
of evening they lifted half opaque, like a drift of smoke, in which all things,
far and near, were of the same weight and substance, equal strokes of a brush
full of a dilute shadow color. A terrain roughly three miles by two, he didn't
need to peer; he knew it in cartographic detail. Meadville, terminus of the
McKinley trolley, two thousand souls, car barns, a few stores, and a filling station.
Withered ganglia of suburban bungalows lost in wastes of cabbages and cans.
Foelker's Woods. 
"Fairyland" at South Claybury, with its
skeleton scenic railway and its rotting ferry barges. Claybury Center. Once,
with its new carriage factory, Claybury had set out to be a city; now, huddled
down beside the abandoned works, it eyed the real city across the water with
the dull eyes of a starveling child. It didn't seem to know even yet what John
Ruffo was about. 
But as Ruffo dreamed from his height above the river
he saw it all transfigured in the magic of the deepening dusk. He saw the woods
razed, the fields obliterated, and the silence routed by the irruption of
pavements and foundations, the clangor of bells, beat of machinery, all the
voices of the habitation of men. He saw towers growing, factories and tall
office towers cutting up through the twilight first with skeleton blades of
steel, then overclothed with granite, brick, and glass. The smoking shadows
turned to smoke. 
When he was a boy a patch of that far blue wasteland
stood framed in the river end of Switch Street, and he remembered how his
father and mother, natives of the Carraras, used to stand in the litter and
racket sometimes and gaze at it sadly. How little they had dreamed that in the
day when that shore had become life or death to the city and to the race they
had made their own, it would be no Son of the American Revolution from the
Middle Fields who should reach out an arm boned with steel and sinewed with
stone to grasp it, but a ragged-panted and dusty-haired Giovanni, their son! 
Ruffo knocked off the ash and set the fire end of his
cigar to glowing. He was not a poet. He wore a close-cropped mustache, a serge
suit, and a derby hat, and he got things done. Done honestly, too, now, after
the years of pinching and paring and nip and tuck. It was amazing what a sense
of dominance it gave a fellow to be able at last to watch, not the margin of
profit in a pier, but the beauty of its strength as it grew. They would
remember him for this bridge when he was dead. Indeed, now, he would not die.
This bridge was John Ruffo, his body stretched in an arc of power across the
beaten stream. He felt the traffic of twin cities, generations to come,
sweeping over his indomitable body. Where there had been hundreds there were
thousands, born of this bridge, fed and reared by it, the line of John Ruffo in
the destiny of the Western race. 
He turned to the north. On a stone scow, moored not
far away, a slightly built man in well-fitting but long-worn and ill-pressed
tweeds was just getting up from a campstool, a portfolio and a box of water
colors in his hands. Bareheaded, he stood for a moment gazing up at the nearest
of the arches, reared cathedral-big from where he stood. A lemon-yellow light
still glowed in the height of the sky, but already the river, the bridge, and
the figure of the sketcher grew dim. From above the fellow looked Lilliputian. 
"Now, who the devil?" Ruffo wrinkled his
forehead and peered more intently. Then he unwrinkled it abruptly, threw his
cigar butt away, and laughed. It wasn't a loud laugh, but it was trenchant and
full-flavored. It had taken thirty-three years to make. 
Leaning over the parapet, he spread his arms wide.
"Davie! Ay, you! David Winter! Hallo!" 
The water-colorist, already picking his way shoreward
across the neighboring barges, looked up, wrinkled his own brow, then wagged an
arm in return. 
Ruffo surrendered to an impulse. "How do you like
the bridge? Pretty fair, ain't it? Well, it's all yours, David; you built it,
not me!" 
Getting back from the edge, he laughed again, softly.
The joke tickled him as nothing ever had before, and this was because he alone
knew that what he had bawled down was true. Almost literally, that
unpretentious little shade, barge-hopping shoreward down there, had built the
Centennial Bridge. 
The more Ruffo thought of it . . . 
In the days when he was eleven, in the fourth grade in
school, Davie Winter was the dude kid from the Middle Fields. He made fellows
want to spit. His lunchbox, for one thing, the sandwiches all done up in tissue
paper. The way he washed his hands with his handkerchief after doing this or
that. The habit he had of sitting off by himself and watching, a quiet smile
moving his lips from time to time, as if something funny had happened that no
one else in the gang had seen. It made a guy want to haul off and belt him one.
There were marbles one recess time. They had got Davie
in. And suddenly there he was, his silly bare-kneed legs astride the ring. 
"No, you don't touch 'em, John Ruffo; you fudged
a mile." 
"I never!" 
"You did too, you cheat; six inches, and I saw
you." 
"You lie like hell; you ast any of 'em. Tony, did
I? There! Yah!" 
Davie's face grew pinched and green. "If you
touch one of these marbles — " 
"Ya-a-ah! What'll you do?" John humped and
shuffled in a war dance behind his famous "guard." "Come on, ya
yellah! Want t' fight? Til put a head on ya!" 
Howls and yowls. Davie's voice sounded frail among
them. 
"We fight now and Miss Rucker'll stop us, and you
know it. You're bigger than me; it'll take me some time to lick you. Come to
the Dumps after school." 
The word ran. After school it seemed as if everybody
lived out the Dumps way. The caravan lengthened. Having to cross the
residential district known as Middle Fields, it took advantage of all back
streets and alleys possible. And this, as it turned out, was its undoing. 
John, his heart swollen and his face red with the
worship of his backers, saw the danger first. Sometimes, between spells in the
mills, his father went about doing people's gardens, and there he was now in
the flesh, bargaining with a householder over an alley gate not twenty yards
ahead. 
"Jigger!" breathed John, bringing Davie and
the whole parade to a stand. The sanguine glow drained from his cheeks as he
saw the parental eye upon him. "Jigger, there's my old man! Listen, guys,
if he asts ya — " 
The guys had fled, however, leaving the two champions
transfixed in emptiness to answer for themselves whatever "astin' "
there was to be. 
Then the wonder occurred. Ruffo Senior came toward
them, but he wasn't the first; the householder, a slender gentleman in an old
soft-woven suit, got his legs over the gate and led the way, a look of humorous
inquiry in his eyes. 
"Well, well," he said in a museful baritone,
studying the dust of them that fled. "What seems to be the matter, David,
my son?" 
John gasped a good one. What a hole this was! He hoped
Davie could lie. But then he must gasp again. "This kid and I," Davie
was saying, "are going to have a fight, and we don't want anyone
interfering. So please don't, Dad." 
It was the Italian that interfered. Scandalized, he
made a grab at his presumptuous offspring. "Fighta, eh? Fighta with a
gentlaman's boy? You littla devil, I learna you. You say excusa me,
queek!" 
But Davie's father lifted a hand. He was silent
himself for a moment, studying the two youngsters with pursed lip and a gravely
twinkling eye. 
"What's the trouble between — " He stopped,
flushed slightly, and inclined his head. "I'm sorry! I beg your pardon.
Well," he addressed himself to the confounded laborer, "what could be
simpler? Shall we go in?" 
The house was of old brick, serenely proportioned, its
cornices showing in high cream-white flecks through the foliage of the trees in
the spacious yard. The room into which they were ushered was such a one as John
had never dreamed of; no darkness anywhere, yet rich in shadows, the things in
it, massive but uncrowded, shining with a dull old luster, and not as furniture
that is varnished shines. 
There was a decanter on a sideboard; from it Mr.
Winter poured two glasses of a wine as brown as November leaves and offered old
Ruffo one. The gardener, deeper than ever in the maze, drank in abashed gulps;
Mr. Winter sipped his with the leisure of appreciation, talking cordially about
plants the while. Only when it seemed he had quite forgotten the grim business
in hand did he bow to the waiting enemies, produce from a closet a cardboard
box, and from the box four brown-leather pillows with thumbs. 
It was a godsend for the morale of the rattled Switch
Street kid. "Boxin' gloves!" he railed to himself. "Pew! That
ain't no fightin', that ain't." 
There was something queer about Davie's father.
Stopping short in his handling of the gloves, almost as if he had heard John's
thoughts, he glanced at him quickly and shrewdly. "Oh!" he said then.
"Quite right." Restoring the pillows to the box, he returned it
quietly to its old place in the closet. 
The same thing happened in the yard. It was about
rounds this time. 
"Shall we call the rounds a minute each, Mr.
Ruffo?" 
Ruffo nodded and grinned with uncomprehending
enthusiasm. John glowered at the grass. Rounds! He wanted to spit. That was a
silly dude way for two guys to fight it out between them. 
Once more Mr. Winter divined. After a moment's study
he asked: "Which one of you is the challenger?" 
"Huh?" It was the first time John had opened
his mouth, except to gape. 
"I mean, which one of you But never mind. After
all." Mr. 
Winter put his watch away with a stiff little nod.
"We'll eliminate the rounds. Stand up to it, boys. Get it off your
souls." 
Bare-knuckled, then, and without mete or measure. But
still it wasn't like a scrap. Sunlight through broken foliage of pear and
cherry trees, dappling the smooth-rolled turf. It wasn't like the Dumps.
Parents standing, deliberately hands-off. It wasn't like the gang. John's
appetite was gone. 
David kept hitting him. He ought by rights to have
been slaughtering this weedy-limbed, thin-necked sis of a kid; he couldn't get
over it. Batting ineptly at the white wrists that kept somehow weaving in to
tap him with their sharp-knuckled fists, as he began to sweat and grunt he grew
furious, but furious only with himself, and of what use is that to a fellow in
a scrap? 
There's no telling how long it would have gone on so,
had it not been for old Ruffo's anxiety to bend before his betters. 
"By gosh, gentlaman," he exulted aloud in
specious zeal at one of Davie's shrewder thrusts, "datta keed he gotta
sci'nce, he gotta! He putta it all ova my Giovanni, by gosh!" 
John dropped his hands. "He what? Put it over me!
Why, you old fool!" 
Heat struck his heart and redness cleared his eyes.
Now he was different; this was another thing. Lowering his head, scowling
furiously, he charged, athirst for gore. He roared in his throat, swinging
windmill arms. 
Where had he been? Good Pete, he had been dumb. Wise
in the lore of alley battle, trained in the rough-and-tumble of gang wars, in
his stage fright he had been acting like a guy without any legs. Where, pray,
were his feet? 
Science? Bah! Pipestem arms shooting here and there in
lead and feint and parry? Bah! Here's a trick worth ten times your science. Out
with a foot, unseen, curved like a flash at the back of the enemy's ankle; a
jerk; and as your man, tripped, claws at the air for a balance the air can't
give, a good easy bang in the jaw to lend him something to dream about, lying
on the grass. 
"Put it over me, eh? Ya-a-ah!" 
In the hush of victory there was one sound, the
whistle of Davie's father's intaken breath. It wasn't loud, but there was that
about it which brought the street cub about-face, knees bent to dodge either
right or left as the need might be. Mr. Winter hadn't stirred, however; he had
only put his hands out of sight behind him, clamped his lips together, and gone
gray. 
Ruffo Senior rushed into palliative protest.
"That ain'ta right; my Giovanni, he gotta alia the luck, alia the
luck." 
Mr. Winter opened a slit in his mouth, and, still
without removing his narrowed eyes from his son's conqueror's, he said in a
harsh voice: "David, get up." 
David obeyed, uncertain of knee. His father groped,
got hold of his shoulder, and fetched him to his side, tight. 
"No, son! Not a word!" 
That was all. On the way to the gate, still holding
the boy to him by a blue-knuckled grip on a collarbone, he talked gravely and
politely about plantings, and inquired of the elder Ruffo what the weather was
going to be. 
The poor man could hardly answer, for his eagerness
now to be away. After all he was flesh and blood; he couldn't be expected to
throttle forever his pride in the battling prodigy Heaven had given him for a
son. No sooner were they beyond whisper shot across the street than it began to
issue in little jets from the safer side of his mouth: "Gooda boy! Ha-ha!
That reecha kid, what he theenk, he can fighta my Giovann'? Ho-ho! Ya want some
cand'?" 
Towed along, chattel of triumph, John twisted his head
and looked back. In the white gateway Davie and his father still stood, two
slender figures erect, the one holding the other to his side grimly, as if
still saying: "No, son! Not a word!" 
Not a word about what? Something mysterious and horrid
began to happen to the apple of victory; it began to taste like ashes in John's
mouth. "Gripes! I licked 'im, didn't I? I put a head on 'im good, didn't
I, the poor puke?" 
The loudening elation of his father maddened him. He
jerked his hand free. "Y' old fool! What ya think ya swellin' about, huh?
That boy's went and put it onto me— I dunno how, but somehow. You guineas make
me sick!" 
What had he done, or what hadn't he done; where was
the catch in it all? It looked as though he were never to know, for when he
turned again the Winters had withdrawn into the peaceful green twilight of the
old yard and the gate had swung to with a wooden clack. 
"All right, you wait! " He knotted his fists
and winked his burning eyes. "You wait, ya dude ya, you're so smart! You
wait; I'll show ya a thing!" 
"I'll show you a thing!" 
It was amazing now, looking back from the top of the
Centennial Bridge, to see how John Ruffo's whole life had been shaped and
dominated by that cry. For years, piling buildings on top of one another,
cutting streets, playing politics, he had not thought of it; momentum carries
on sometimes long after the impulse that gave it birth is gone. 
Davie wore the cleanest shirts in the school. "I
can wear cleaner'n him; I'll show you if I can't." With John, his mother
in the mills, a clean shirt meant a new one. Indolent by nature, he worked at
any catchpenny job. Sometimes, if he was lucky, he could sneak a coveted
garment off a Jew's barrow in North River Street. The moral problem was no
problem to the North End kid. It was the same with his studies. Davie got good
marks without seeming to try or care. 
"You watch; I'll show 'im!" How John
studied; how he sweat and swore and persecuted his simple lump of a brain! How
he peeped at the papers of brighter children, hearkened to whispers, hunted out
marked books— anything, any way, so long as the answer was got! There he had it
on Davie, if he could but have known. He could do things that Davie couldn't; he
could laugh at molehills that were mountains to the Elm Street lad; for the
battle of the new America he was infinitely better fitted, for he was stripped
to the buff. 
And he did get the answers and the shirts. Raw,
uncomfortable new shirts, bulging out stiff from his pants top: what a fierce
joy it was to crackle to his seat past Davie's! What a thrill it was that ran
in his arm that day in algebra class when, to a question of Mr. Olliphant's,
Davie Winter had to shake his head! To John Ruffo it was like the end of a
marathon. It wasn't like lifting his hand; it was like breaking out a banner in
the wind. The one trouble was that he might not be able to answer after all,
for the lump of triumph in his throat. 
He had to peep once in Davie's direction. Davie was
looking at that waving hand of his, not ruefully, as might have been expected,
but musingly, something as he used to do when he sat off by himself and watched
the gang. Touched by a mistrust as instinctive and as old, John stared up at it
himself. For the first time in his life he looked at his own hand. And then he
knew. It was the fingernails. The very whiteness of the shirt cuff made them
only the blacker. The lump in his throat turned poison. His elbow buckled and
the hand that had been a banner came tumbling down. 
"Damn him and double damn him! You wait; I'll
show him yet!" 
And he did show him, in the matter of Celestine
Lafarge. 
John had never thought much about Celestine till David
began going with her. Nobody had. There were dozens that seemed prettier and
more fun to the eyes of eighteen than the French-Canadian girl who dressed
nearly always in brown or black and lived behind a harness shop in North Water
Street. The reason was that she was the kind one had to look at in a certain
mood and more times than •twice before one began to see what she really was. 
John never would have seen if it hadn't been for
David. He never really did, indeed, till the summer evening when he sat in the
Lafarge parlor, perverse and uninvited, and watched her waiting for the tony
beau from the Middle Fields who was that night not destined to come. 
"Lookin' for anybody'n particular, Celia?" 
"Oh no." She yawned. Then, the polished
surface of her selfcontrol broken for a moment as her eyes ran from the clock
to the deepening dusk outside: "Didn't I tell you once, no, for heaven's
sake?" 
"Well, then, why don't we slide over to Fairyland
and shoot some chutes or dance a few? Huh?" 
"Well— thanks— but I'm— I'd have to ask Father,
and he's not at home." 
"Oh, he ain't, ain't he?" John could have
chortled. It had been so simple, a matter of a little innuendo here, a
half-stopped sentence there, in the harnessmaker's hearing: "Wonder what
that tailor-made pet's after, smellin' around down here in the North End? Mmmm.
Well, that kind's the kind can get it— and get away with it— them good family
boys." 
It had been even simpler with the gang. No need of
indirection there. 
"You guys hang out at Casey's and when you see
the dude gettin' off the car you nail 'im and nail 'im good enough to last the
night. Let old man Lafarge do the showin'; you do the work." 
"Lookin' for anybody'n particular, Celia?" 
"Didn't I tell you— oh, haven't I told you ten
times— no?" 
"Well, how about over to Fairyland?" 
It grew dim and it grew dark. John enjoyed himself.
Back at his ease on a sofa, he contented himself for the time with studying the
cold, still loveliness of Celestine. And the sweetest of it was that it was
David himself who had "put him onto it"; opened his eyes. And once
tasted with the eyes, the quality of her beauty, which was like that of flowers
seldom seen, growing in shady places, left not much for a fellow to run after
in the brighter allurements of such as Rita Nero and Myrtle O'Hare. 
Then, too, there was something that went deeper than
this sensuous satisfaction of the eye; there was a fillip to the imagination
and a challenge in her smoldering stillness and her sullen, edged, fastidious
separation. John supposed that he was just discovering it this summer, not
knowing that it wasn't till this summer that it had come. 
He hadn't an idea, of course, of the confusion, the
doubt, and conflict of that last vacation when David "went with"
Celestine Lafarge. When he saw David getting down from the car to walk into the
littered purlieus of North River, he couldn't guess the gantlet David ran—
curiosity, fascination, chivalry, bewilderment, self-questioning. Nor any more
could he comprehend the ordeal the summer was for Celestine, asked to believe
in fairy tales, asked to stand on tiptoe, till her head swam, in order to seem
taller than she could really ever be. 
And so, not knowing this, John never fathomed why she
acted as she did when, enough time wasted, he crossed the dark parlor and
grabbed her in his arms. Her choking, clawing, and tugging he expected and
understood. But when they ceased of a sudden and when she came lopping down
full weight against his chest with what sounded like a sob, he never knew in
his jubilation that the lopping was down from tiptoe, and the sob nine tenths a
sigh. 
She seemed as dull as sleep, making no protest when he
kissed her. But when he demanded: "How about over to Fairyland now,
eh?" she was alive again. 
"Yes! Quick! Come on! Yes! Yes!" 
The ferry barge, jeweled with lights. The Ferris
wheel, the car whirled high against the summer stars. The nectar of soda
fountain, the ambrosia of hot-dog stand. The triumphant hug. The wild, strong
kiss in the dark. 
"Did that doll-face ever kiss you like that,
huh?" 
A peal of mirth, threaded thin with hysteria.
"Kiss me? Him?" 
John was in the parlor next night when David came. He
held her hand while she talked with the loser through the veil of beaded
strings at the window. 
"Did you mistake your nights, or what? This ain't
Tuesday." (Yesterday it would have been "isn't"; the
"ain't" was sullenly stressed.) 
David stood with his shoulders slightly contracted in
the dusk outside. He spoke with an almost painful care, as he did always, for
some reason, with Celestine. 
"I'm sorry, but I was— I was unavoidably
detained." 
"Well, I'm sorry, but — " Celestine closed
her eyes, but the sudden tears squeezed out. "I'm sorry," she cried
roughly, "but I've unavoidably got another date this evening, that's
all!" As David turned away she came down like lead on John's knees and hid
her face away. "Let's go to Fairyland— quick!" 
David didn't come to their wedding; he had gone off to
college the day before. He sent them a gift, however. 
It was a picture under glass, in a narrow mahogany
frame. It was a small picture at that, and what was worse it hadn't cost him a
cent, for it was a thing he had done by hand, Celestine's head in profile,
drawn in pencil on the day of the seniors' picnic at Rocky Point, half a dozen
lines of an utter simplicity. Perhaps David himself would have smiled at it now
after these years. Or perhaps he wouldn't have. 
John did more than smile, that morning of his wedding
day. The one thing he had never suspected in David was niggardliness; the
discovery was balm to his self-esteem. Holding the little sketch up against the
background of that room full of solid treasures, cut glass and rugs and china,
silver pie knives and brass beds, given lavishly by those who could ill afford
to give at all, he saw the humor of his years of self-abasement, and he laughed
aloud. 
But then something curious happened; the laugh died in
his mouth, and he was glad of a sudden that he was alone in the room. He didn't
know what it was; he only knew that somehow, with David, he always laughed too
soon. Oppressed, he laid the sketch down and went away and handled richer
things. But willy-nilly his eyes would stray back to it, lying as simple there
in the glittering rout of possessions as a daisy picked in a field of memory. 
He flung around and doubled up his fists. 
"You— you — " Words stuck in his throat and
his face grew purple. "You— you just wait!" 
The sketch hung in their room as long as they had only
their room in North River. Then it hung in the parlor of their tenement in
Corbett Street. Celestine arranged the furniture, and what could John say? And
after all, perhaps, no better thing could have happened for the health of
John's career. In the past David had only come and gone; now he was with them,
in that picture of the girl Celestine, all the while. 
"Yes, but I'll show you yet!" 
A man can lift himself by the bootstraps, given the
anger and the will. 
More than once he caught his wife idle, when she
should have been busy, brooding at that picture on the wall. He knew what she
was thinking, what she was dreaming amid the racket and squalor of her North
End home. It whipped him to a dark fury of deeds. He took chances no man should
take, with his mortal limbs and his immortal soul, and with the law.
"Never you mind; you wait! A house in Middle Fields! What's Middle Fields?
I'll take you somewhere that's somewhere, and you'll wear your diamonds before
I'm done!" 
And what in truth was Middle Fields? Fifteen years
after that wedding gift had been lost in the shuffle of progressive movings and
forgotten in the beginnings of their success, they drove one evening across the
region once known as Middle Fields. It was the day of their last removal; they
were on their way to the big limestone residence on Bellevue Heights. By a
simple chance of geography their way led them through Elm Street itself. 
At either end of David's block apartment buildings had
gone up long before, had housed a reputable society for a while, and then, as
industry rolled southward, had given up the battle of gentility and become
little better than warrens of the office-working class. The Winter place in the
middle was no longer a place, but a well. John was startled, the house seemed
to have shrunk so. It looked dingy, too, and pitifully out of fashion in its
overshadowed huddle of dying trees. 
Neither he nor Celestine spoke as they whirled by.
There was nothing to say: it was all said. John didn't even feel like exulting.
He was a little scared in his heart by what life can do when it tries. 
That was three years ago. It was nearer thirty-three years
ago that he had stood and shook his fists after the aristocratic lad he had
somehow not "put a head on" and cried: "I'll show you a
thing!" Tonight, leaning out with his arms spread across the twilight
heavens, he had showed a middle-aged dabbler in water colors the Centennial
Twin City Bridge. 
Throwing the butt of his third cigar away, Ruffo
thought of his chauffeur. "Guess he thinks I must've fallen off or
something." The sky, apple green in the west, was turning deep blue above
the town. There were footfalls on the raw concrete behind him. Supposing it to
be the watchman (puzzled too by his employer's loitering), he did not turn
immediately from his good-night survey of the hills. But it wasn't the
watchman. It was David Winter. 
"Well, John, hullo! It's been a long time, hasn't
it?" 
Engrossed as he had been in his memories, Ruffo turned
with a start, instinctively defensive. Then, as his gaze ran over the mild,
dust-colored form of his old schoolmate he re-remembered, relaxed, and indulged
in an inward grin. "Well, well, Davie Winter, I'll be! Put 'er
there!" His hand engulfed the other's. A merry thought came. What if he
should really squeeze! He had a picture of the demigod of his youth squirming
like a dishrag in agony at the end of his powerful arm. He was merciful,
though; he didn't squeeze. 
"How do you like it?" He took his paw back
and waved it over the bridge. 
David's long, deep-lined face worked for a moment, a
light gathering in his eyes. In that light, it seemed to Ruffo, was pay for all
that had ever been. 
"By jingo, John, it is a beauty, though, isn't
it?" 
"Yes, and not only a beauty, David; it's strong.
It's adequate. It's honest." The contractor lifted a foot and brought it
down heavily, as if to prove by the ring the proud integrity of the span. 
"Every last cubic inch of it, David, an honest
bridge." 
"You don't need to tell me; I've got eyes. I want
to thank you, John." 
Wanted to thank him? Why? But then it came to Ruffo
that that would be like David, taking it upon himself to speak in the name of
Iron River, forgetting that the Iron River of the Middle Fields day was lost
from sight in the giant of now. Nevertheless, somewhere between his humor and
his self-esteem the builder was touched. There was a curious lightning transformation;
a debt was canceled. 
He wondered how he had ever managed to hate this
quiet, baggy, unassuming fellow, who seemed content to let the world march by.
Almost he loved him. The long-buried Latin in him urged him to embrace his
ancient enemy; he compromised by slapping him on the shoulder. "Glad you
like it, old man! I ain't seen you in a coon's age, David; still living the
same old place?" 
"Yes, same old place. It's a deep root there."
"I was thinking, maybe— I was passing that way a
while ago " 
"I know; it's changed. But when five generations
of you have lived and died in the same place, John " 
Ruffo nodded with a false solemnity, enormously
tickled. "My family was like that back in the old country, I guess,
sticking always the same old place." 
"And you, John; you've lived in a dozen already,
and built this bridge." But the museful smile, reminiscent of the dude
kid, went away. "Built this bridge," David repeated. "It is
blamed funny about life, John. There we were in school together, scrapping like
a couple of terriers— and here, after years and years, out of the hundreds of
thousands it might have been, I find it's you that's on the job. It beats a
fellow how such things can happen." 
"That's easy, how it happened. It happened just
because I put in a bid that made the rest look sick. And why? I'll tell you a
secret, David. I'm not figuring to make a cent on this particular job. I don't
know's I can make you see exactly why I done it, but it's like this.  
I've made a few dollars in my time. I've made enough.
This bridge here now is my— my— er " 
"I know, John. Every artist has to have one once,
at least," David ruminated. "And that makes it all the queerer,
doesn't it?" 
"Queerer? What?" Ruffo rubbed his hat around
on his head. There was a time when he would have been offended by this trick of
David's of talking in enigmas, but now he was too wise. He was too indulgent.
He passed it off. 
"Well, well, David, I'm certainly glad to have
seen you again. You must come up and see us some evening— 120 Bellevue Road—
you must. It's funny I never run across you around town, though, ain't it,
though?" 
"Oh, me, I'm a bit of a bum; that's the trouble.
Of course I'm in New York part of the time with the business, and part of the
rest I drift. I'm just now back from eight months' tramping it on the other
side." 
"Making sketches? I see you busy striking one off
down there a while ago." 
"Yes, it's rather fun, seeing the likenesses— and
the zmlikenesses— between the figment and the fact." 
"Uh— yeah— mmmm." Once more Ruffo rubbed his
hat around on his scalp. "Do a lot of that, don't you, sketching?" 
"I fool around with it, yes. We do, though, don't
we, we architects, those of us that are worth our salt?" 
Ruffo chuckled. Same old highbrow Davie, his head off
somewhere else. 
"Got any there?" He poked an indulgent thumb
at David's portfolio. 
"Pretty dark to see 'em." David was too much
the artist, however, not to open it quickly. "Some of them old as the
hills." He riffled the unmounted sheets and smiled. " 'Hills' is the
right word. Look at this, and this." 
He lifted his head and nodded toward the Claybury
rise, steep dark blue against what light of heaven there was left. "I've
been at them a lot, as you'll see. I'm fond of those hills. We used to have a
farm out behind the Corners; I used to go squirrel-shooting there with my
grandfather when I was eight. So you can understand. You can see why I've
always rather dreaded the day when those hills, those woods and meadows —
" 
He left it there with an oddly emotional lift of the
shoulders and flipped over more sheets. "See here again, John. I've rather
cherished those old hills. You'll do it yourself, John; you'll cherish
something, someday, when you've lived with it a hundred and fifty years again.
In a way I've loved those two old bridges for their very inadequacy, even while
I've hated them horribly for what they are. They're about as bad, of course, as
they can be, in every principle. If there had to be another bridge, though,
I've always prayed we'd go the whole hog; I've always hoped it would be in
scale with its landscape and in keeping with its destiny. It must have breadth
and depth and power, you know. It must have the weight of what's behind it. But
not dead weight. Living! It must move. It must march. No, John, it must hurtle.
And— it, John RufTo, I believe it does!" 
He uncovered still another sketch, done in bold lines
and massed shadows. The flush that had grown on his cheeks was creased by a
sudden smile, half eager, half whimsical. "How do you think it stands as a
portrait, John?" 
Ruffo wasn't much at pictures. Moreover, the light was
failing. He had to bend and peer. It was his bridge all right. Taken from a
nether angle of perspective, it swept down in a stunning arc across the
composition, beneath an arch a glimpse of the lower river, sunsetlit; above and
beyond it the flame-rimmed wall of the Claybury Hills. Pursing his lips, he
nodded judiciously. But then his nods grew slower. There was something wrong. 
"Why, looka here, David, where's the steel?
You've gone to work and sketched it off as if it was done already." 
David beamed. Ruffo wasn't so happy. He felt for a
moment the grievance of the man of deeds. "If it was as easy to dash it
off in the solid goods," he grumbled belligerently, "as it is with
some paints and a little water " He came to a full stop. "Looka here,
you never 
done this here tonight!" 
"Hardly. Look at the date, man." 
RufTo bent nearer and peered where David's finger was.
Metaphorically, and beginning to feel funny at his midriff, he rubbed his eyes.
"What you givin' us? This date here— it's three years old." 
"Why— naturally." It was David's turn to be
at a loss. "I've got one here somewhere that's nearly five. Why, the
Hartley, Blake & Winter blueprints you've been working with are nearly
three" 
Ruffo stood and let the words run through his brain:
"Hartley, 
Blake & Winter." How many hundreds of times
had he looked at that firm's name on the blue sheets of drawings, and never
once seen it at all! ". . . & Winter!" 
David grinned of a sudden, moved by something comic in
the big workman's posture. 
"Good lord, man, how long did you imagine it took
an architect to dream out a bridge like this?"
Category:Steele
Category:Published