Chapter 10
Lawrence and Patricia Davies, the woman Levi lusted over so much in the bookstore, had returned from evening church services at eight forty-five, the same as they always did on Sunday evenings. Also as usual, Kathi and Kerry had managed to find excuses for staying at home; this time it was that old stand-by, homework. That one had always worked, so it was the first one called on when no real reason could be found.
Neither of the Davies' offspring had devoted a minute to their studies while the senior Davies were in church, but neither had they really fooled anyone. Pat and Lawrence knew the children preferred Sunday night television to a watered-down version of Reverend Capper's morning sermon. If the truth were known, they, too, would have preferred Ed Sullivan or Bonanza, but there were appearances to be maintained. Especially with so many of Lawrence's accounting clients regular active members of Morningside Church. It wouldn't do, he always said, to have any of the paying customers think they had an atheist doing their monthly payroll and tax returns.
Patricia had kept enough meat loaf and mashed potatoes aside from mid-day dinner to make a fairly respectable warmed-over supper for the two of them. She knew the kids probably stuffed themselves with Coke and cookies while they were away, so it didn't usually pay to save them anything anyway.
Lawrence had headed straight for his garage-cum-study tacked on the side of their rambling, split-level house in Berkeley. Patricia knew he really spent most of his working hours out there watching the Sunday night re-runs of the weekend's best football, but she always pretended not to notice. What difference did it make, as long as he provided for his family, she always asked herself. And that was something he'd always done well; better than she'd hoped for twenty years ago when they met on a blind date at San Jose State. She was there killing time, working on some meaningless junior college degree to keep from facing the inevitabilities of marriage or a career. Lawrence wasn't even that lucky; he'd been stationed at El Toro during the war, and decided to stay on when the hostilities were over. Only Lawrence found the hostilities had just begun. There wasn't much demand for supply sergeants in post-war California, or anywhere else for that matter. Two years of washing dishes, scrubbing toilets, sweeping walks, and just about any other lousy job you could name, had brought him to the college. Night school at first, where he met Pat.
She was taking a remedial economics course to make up for the one she'd slept through the term before, and he was taking anything he could get, just to build up some credits. A mutual friend paired them up for a party his girl friend was throwing in San Francisco; and the rest was on the record. Married in Vegas, two more years of day-and-night work until Lawrence could finish the requirements for his business administration degree at San Francisco State, and then Kathi came along. Quite unexpectedly, too, not that it mattered now. Little Kerry followed three years later; but by then they were painfully building Lawrence's accounting business in fast-growing San Francisco.
The rambling split-level was from the peak years, the middle fifties when everything the Davies touched seemed to turn to gold. Business was soaring, Lawrence had so many clients he had to hire an assistant and rent a suite of offices over a doctor in the nearby shopping center.
Yes, everything was perfect in those years, but the tinsel and glitter was gone now, swept away by the advent of the computer. Centralized data services could perform the rote functions of small accountants, and at less cost with far greater efficiency. They proved to be almost deadly for Lawrence Davies, a man who found it hard to roll with the burgeoning times. Most of the real business he still held onto today came from old friends and church members -people who could never look him in the eye if they succumbed to the temptations of the computer age. That was why Morningside Church continued to play such an active role in the Davies' life; it was really their source of spiritual fulfillment; without it they'd be just another pair of dull statistics, faceless casualties of automation.
Pat finished the warmed-over meat loaf and potatoes alone. She'd called Lawrence three times on the kitchen Hot Line, as the kids liked to call it. It was one of Lawrence's weekend projects, an intercom between the kitchen and his study in the remodeled garage.
She hardly gave it any thought. Lawrence was often like that; sometimes he'd be so engrossed in a pile of figures he wouldn't come out for hours on end. Pat had just learned to accept it; and to go ahead without him if he didn't answer on the third try.
She piled the dishes neatly in the shabby, old Sears dishwasher, another holdover from the Golden Years, and left them for later, in case there were anymore dishes and bowls to be washed by bedtime. That, too, was another part of Patricia Davies' Daily Routine, a strictly-adhered-to timetable of do's and don't's that twenty years of relatively successful marriage had taught her. Sometimes she daydreamed about how things might have been if she'd married Patrick Godwin when she had the chance. He'd gone on to inherit one of the world's largest copper mines, and she caught snatches of his Society Page social whirl once in a while. But even that was not something she really seriously thought about; the only real, serious interests Pat Davies could claim were her family and her collection of old poetry. The books gave her a satisfaction in life she couldn't find anywhere else. In her specialty field, she was a respected expert, owner of one of California's best collections. And it was nice, sometimes, to be known for something all your own. Not for your husband's money, or your husband's name, but for something uniquely and specially your own.
She brought Kathi, her young teenage daughter, a heaping bowl of vanilla ice cream, as she'd promised, and carried the bowl back to the dishwasher when it was licked clean.
She buzzed one last time for Lawrence, and decided to go see for herself what could possibly be so interesting about a book full of quarterly statement figures from Harrison's Hardware and Tool Rental.
Pat Davies opened the door to Lawrence's study, and stepped down the wooden stairs . . . and into another world - and a night she would never forget.