Mrs. Elkin"s lips tightened. Large-boned, calmly moving, she had few fussy mannerisms; it was only her voice that fiddled. "Time they realized their father isn"t getting any younger."
In the silence, the percolator chortled on the stove. The cup shook in her father"s veined hand, and a drop fell on the waxy linen of his cuff, near the lion-headed cuff link. He set the cup carefully down.
Mrs. Elkin"s cheekbones and eyelids reddened. It was known that she lived among dreamers who could be educated for the worst only by her savage ability to get under the skins of those she loved and must awaken; this was why she was compelled first to tear down the self-deceptive veils with which they wreathed themselves and only afterwards could poultice up their wounds with love-with the tray of food brought to the banished boy, the party dress ironed to perfection for the girl who had given up going. All this was known, and now contemplated.
"Joe ..." said Mrs. Elkin.
Raising his head, Mr. Elkin took off his nosegla.s.ses and rubbed at the inflamed prints on either side of his nose. The luxuriant up-twirl of his dated moustache looked suddenly too jaunty for his exposed face. He slid the gla.s.ses into their case, which popped shut with a snap, and looked at his wife. "For G.o.d"s sake, Hattie, take that d.a.m.n thing off your head!"
Hester, chewing a soda cracker, heard the sound twice: the dry champing heard by their ears, at the same time magnified in her head. Wishing that she might melt from the room, carrying her dislocation with her, she started to tiptoe from the table.
"Come on back now, and finish your supper," said her father, pleading, anxious as always to deny the ugly breach, to cover it over with the kindness that bled from him steadily, that he could never learn not to expect in return.
"I"m sleepy." With the word, sleep fell on her like a blow. Seeing herself already in a mound of blankets, folded impervious in her own arms until tomorrow, she turned away, down the hall to the haven of her room.
She was halfway into the darkened room before she felt the alteration in it. Thinking that some of the furniture must be ranged along the walls, she moved confidently toward the island of the bed. Her body pa.s.sed through its image with the ease of fingers pa.s.sing through a locket. A moving reflection from the headlights of a car going by in the street below traveled up one wall, trembled watery on the ceiling, and swept down the other wall, leaving a scene fanned into an instant"s being, and gone. There was nothing in the room.
She turned and ran back down the hall, cracking a knee against chairs stacked one-over-one, as in restaurants in the early morning. Lumpily shrouded barriers extended all along the walls. She felt down them, hunting a cream-colored bed with insets of caning, the surely discoverable scallop-shape of a mirror, the bureau with bow-front swagged in wooden roses, in a pattern that was like a silly friend.
Holding onto the bruised knee, she limped back to the kitchen and confronted her mother. "Where"s all my room?" she said.
"What?" asked her father, puzzled.
"Oh, I meant to tell you," answered her mother, composedly. "You"re to sleep in Grandma"s old room. Your nightgown"s there on the bed."
"But where"s my furniture?"
"You"re to have Grandma"s old set. You know that. How many bedrooms do you think we"ll have, in the new place!"
"What have you done with the child"s things!" Mr. Elkin"s face was already shrunken with a warding-off of the answer.
Mrs. Elkin hesitated, but only to trim a note of triumph. "I-sold them."
"I might know you"d start dramatizing," he said. "There"s no need to act as if we were down to our last penny."
"Are we?" Hester saw it, copper-bright and final, in the linted seam of his pocket.
For answer, he pulled her onto his lap. She perched there awkwardly, conscious of her gangling legs, but savoring the old position of comfort. "Almost forgot what I brought you from downtown," he said, fumbling in the pocket and bringing out two objects. "New compa.s.s for Kinny," he said, laying it on the table. "And this-for you." In his palm, he held a tiny, round vanity-case of translucent, rosy enamel and painted flowers, its cover fitted with a golden latch.
"Fellow brought it in the office," he mumbled.
Mrs. Elkin, for whom the extras of life had a touch of the dissolute, turned her head aside.
Hester, warming the pink gift in her hand, stood up between them, in the gap between her mother, immovable on her plateau of the practical, and her father, wavering curator of intangibles he could a.s.sert but not protect. All this was known, yet there was never a way to say it. She aligned her free hand on his shoulder. "I wonder what I would have looked like," she said in a hard voice, "if you had not married her." Without waiting for an answer to what was not after all a question, she left the kitchen again.
In the doorway of her room, she stopped, waiting until she could half-see in the darkness. The nude walls poured from ceiling to floor, regarding her. Refracted in her mind, she saw the room as it had been, its objects s.p.a.ced with the exact ruler of remembrance but already blurred with the double-edge of the past. Wading carefully into its center, she set the gift down on the bare floor. She knelt over it a moment. Then she walked out and closed the door.
In her grandmother"s room, she flipped the light switch on and off just long enough to see the odd note of her own sprigged flannel gown on the huge bed. The room, shrouded in dust-covers since its owner"s death, had the reserve of disuse. Ordinarily Hester would have tried the locks of the trunks which held the vestees of broderie anglaise and the threadlace shawls, and run a scuttling finger through bureau drawers still full of pa.s.s.e.m.e.nterie rejected by the raiding relatives six months ago. Tonight, she had begun to understand the mechanics of desecration. She stepped out of her clothes and into the nightdress, feeling as strange here as on the one night she had spent in the hospital. Crouched down under the comforter, she gripped her ankles with her hands. Burrowing her head into the blackness between her knees, listening to the purling of her own breath, she slept.
Sometime during the night she woke, her heart hammering up from a dream in which two hands, smooth, anonymous and huge, emerging wrist upward from mist, wrestled with one another, the great fingers twining in silent, marble struggle. From beneath a coverlet of stone, she waited for the mushrooming s.p.a.ces of the dream to settle and ebb. Through the open door of the bathroom connecting with her parents" bedroom, she heard their voices, locked and vying.
"No!" said her mother, in a whisper as long-drawn as a scream. "I won"t let you have it. What should be kept for your own children. To let it go down the family drain, like all the rest."
"By G.o.d," said her father"s voice, "how would you have it, except for me? How many women are there who can buy ten thousand dollars" worth of stock out of their household allowance?"
"Sixteen years," said her mother, still in that shuddering whisper. "Licking their backsides. Being the Auslander. Being the responsible one. Carrying the bedpans to your mother, so your sisters could visit, and drink cream. ... And the miles and miles of fine words, of fine feelings that the Elkins have such a talent for-as long as someone else underwrites them ... Someone cra.s.s-like me."
"No one asked you to martyr yourself. Who do you think I work for, if not for you and the children?"
"For anyone who gets to you first with a few cheap words to make you feel big Ike. For anyone who will say "dear Joe.""
"Now listen, Hattie-"
"You corrupt people," said her mother, her voice rising. "Because you are too weak to refuse them."
"For the last time ..."
"No!" said her mother. "Not this time," the words pulling from her as if she spun them one by one from a pit of resolve. "Not if you go down on your knees."
"G.o.d, what kind of woman are you, to make a man abase himself so? Over money," said her father, his voice ratchety and breathy.
"Family of leeches, leeches," intoned her mother. "Sister Flora"s husband can"t get a job in anyone else"s business, but dear Joe will give him one. Sister Mamie can"t live with her rotter of a husband, but she can talk about his aristocratic Leesburg connections, as long as dear Joe will help her out. And the bookkeeper you won"t accuse of stealing from you, because he is your sister-in-law"s brother. Even your brother"s widow, that low Irish, complaining about the settlement you gave her. What was he but a shoe salesman until he brought her from Chicago, and dear Joe gave him the factory to manage. Fine manager."
"Leave the dead alone!" Her father"s voice had an empty sound. There was a pause, in which the edges of silence rubbed together.
"Ask the dead for your collateral."
From beneath the stone coverlet, Hester heard that last, faceless word sink into the quiet. After a time, someone shut the connecting door.
In the hollow of the bed, the dream waited to grow again. With an effort, she pushed up the rim of stone, and slipped out of bed. Dragging after her the comforter, suddenly light and threatless in her hand, she felt her way down the corridor to Kinny"s room. Always in a state of embattled flux, even packing day had scarcely dislodged it from the norm, and its shadows had the clutter of homeliness.
She sat on the edge of his bed and drew the comforter around her, nestling toward him, feeling him warm and insensate beside her, smelling of boy-sweat and grubbiness, and infinitely removed. From behind them, the moiling quarrel between her parents pierced through her, past her, into the world beyond. All of it had been known, but she could now see, as never before, the exact angle of its interception. On the one side stood her mother, the denying one, the unraveler of other people"s facades, but resolute and forceful by her very lack of some dimension; on the other side stood her father, made weak by his awareness of others, carrying like a phylactery the burden of his kindliness. And flawed with their difference, she felt herself falling endlessly, soundlessly, in the gulf between.
On Kinny"s shoulder, rounded in sleep, a lozenge of light wavered. She put out her hand hopefully, but she had lost the trick of playing with such semblances. She tried to cry, but could not summon that childish scald. Though she could not name the bird now hovering, she knew its nature. Slowly the bird descended, and chose. She began to weep the spa.r.s.e, grudging tears of the grown.
The Sound of Waiting.
SUNDAY WAS THE DAY you hung around listening to the echoes of yourself. In the fat silences after dinner, everyone hovered, holding on to the dwindling thread of yesterday"s routine, wretchedly waiting to join it to that of tomorrow. Outside, the soft tearing sound of the traffic rushed people to innumerable delights and conclusions; inside the ticking room antic.i.p.ation swelled like a bell that was never sounded. Laved, in fresh clothes, the body thudded, poised for its adventure, until the sharp definitive click of the lamps slid the day down from the hope of change into the pigeonhole of reality.
For all, for everyone except his father. For him, Sunday was a kind of justification, whose rest he took in the biblical sense, a patriarch relaxing superbly from converse into the sleep where he lay now, the mock-fierce mustache stirred by the breath from the hidden kindly mouth, the delicately made spatted ankles, out of another era, crossed sideways on the sofa.
If he moved now, his father would stir irritably, muttering "Eh? Where"re you going now? Can"t you spend a day with your family?" for, to his almost tribal sense of family, outside interests were always to be secondary, and-with the dwindling of his own family contemporaries by death-the attainment of adulthood in his children and their increasing focus outside the home seemed to induce in him a pathetic rage, almost as if over a breach of allegiance.
If wholly awakened now, he would rise to potter testily with his cigar, roughing the newspapers back into coherence with mutterings against the disorderliness of the rest of the family, or, if fate provided an attentive Sunday visitor, settling benignly again into the anecdotes that eructated like bubbles from the ferment of his memory. "Salesman"s talk," his mother called it, for to her his father"s expansiveness, always a continual social embarra.s.sment to her aloofness, had become even more of a reminder that his father was really an old man now, that the long gap of age between them would never again be bridged. His father was old enough to be his grandfather-had the gap between his father and himself never really been bridged at all because of this alone, he wondered? Or was it because his father belonged to the last outpost of a generation which regarded its children as the final insignia of a full life, perhaps, but always as extensions of its own ident.i.ty, interposing between them and it a wall of gla.s.s, through which the pattern of daily intimacies might be filtered, but through which the self-contained globe of a child"s private world was forever inadmissible?
Over and above the flood of real "goods" that his father sold twinklingly, unfailingly, in the backslapping camaraderie of business, his father was a salesman, he thought-a salesman of the past. Rootless though the family had long been, in the shifting way of the apartment dweller, because of his father they had continued to live as if they still had attics and cellars, their closets and rooms crammed with the droppings of generations, the yellowed inanimates that had pitilessly survived the transient fingerprints of the flesh. When he, his son, had looked about him at the ma.s.s of young men at college with him, he had felt that, compared to his own, their backgrounds were as truncated, as flat, as their tidy one-step-above hire-purchase homes, where a family picture was an anachronism that must not mar the current scheme, where the old and worn must immediately be slip-covered with the new. And it had seemed to him then, that although he had never had the permanence of a homestead, of the landed people, he was rooted, he had been nourished, in the rich compost of his father"s reminiscence.
But now, in the taut room, where the silence stretched like a wire vibrating with impulses that were never heard, he felt suddenly that his father had always been as remote to him as a figure in a pageant, or as a storyteller between whose knees he had been gripped, enthralled, but whose recitative backward glance had never bent itself to him. And torn, half by a jealousy for that panoramic experience, that sweep of life that he and his own contemporaries might never duplicate, he looked across at his father with regret, feeling that he, the son, had listened indeed, but had never himself been heard. From all the crooning corners of his childhood he could hear his father"s teasing, crowing voice: "Sure, boy. I"ve been everywhere! I"ve been to Europe, I-rup, O-rup, and Stir-rup!"
As in the faded primary tints of a lithograph on a thumbed calendar, he could see, he could almost remember the dusty provincial streets and lanes of the post-Civil War Richmond of sixty-five years ago, and the little boy with black Fauntleroy curls being dragged along by the gaunt, arrogant Negro woman, past the jeers of the street urchins.
"Plenty of professional Southerners talk about their colored mammies-but Awnt Nell-she was a real woman. Freed woman too, but she would never leave your grandmother. And proud of my curls-as if they were her own boy"s! Kept me getting in fights over "em. Then she took to follering around behind me, "til I went to Maw and cried to have "em cut off. Stayed with us too; wouldn"t go away even after Paw"s business went bad with the rest." ... The remembered voice went on, like a record he could pluck out from the years at will.
"Guess I should have been a lawyer. Always wanted to be." Yes, his father would have liked that-the poised strut in front of the attentive jury, the poured-out display of the enormous, sometimes inaccurately p.r.o.nounced vocabulary.
"Left school too early. Heh! The Academy-that"s where we went in those days-all religions alike. Academy of St. Joseph. That old harridan there-Miss Atwell-she never did like me. One day she said to me "Joe! Come up here!" And she had the ruler in her hand. Now your grandmother-she never raised her hand to the eight of us, and she kept us all in line. I wasn"t gawn to stand for any ruler rapped on my knuckles. So I walked up there ... and I stood there ... and I put out my hand. And when she raised the ruler I took it, and broke it over my knee, and threw it out the window. I left there and I never went back. Never. Only time I ever made my mother cry. Swore I would never make her cry again. I was a good son, and I didn"t. But I never went back there again."
Then the first job-the grocery store-almost like the stereotype beginnings of the self-made American, but with the imprint of the fastidious Joe, the bon vivant, the fin de siecle beau-to-be, already implicit in the tale.
"That herring barrel! Seemed "s if everybody who came into that store wanted herring. So I"d reach my hand down in that cold slithery mess of stuff and haul up one of those herring. Ugh! Quit that job as quick as I could ... went into a lawyer"s office licking stamps. At the end of a week I went to Mr. Fitzmorris (your grandmother was married from his house) and I said "Mr. Fitzmorris, I want to leave."
""Why Joe," he says, "what"s the matter?"
""Mr. Fitzmorris," I said, "my tongue is sore!"
"He sat back and laughed and laughed. "Why Joe," he says, "we"ll give you a sponge!""
In the stereopticon of his mind he could see his father"s hand reaching down into the barrel, but somehow it was not the raw hand of the thirteen-year-old boy, but the elegant knotted hand with the raised blue veins and the brown diamond finger ring, in the graphically ill.u.s.trative gesture he had seen again and again, the hand he saw now drooping over the sofa, lifted imperceptibly now and again in the current of slumber.
Glancing back into the dimness of the foyer, he could see the huge triple-doored bookcase, its sagging shelves stuffed three-deep with the books that had been his father"s education. He thought of his own studies, the slow acquisition of the accepted opinions on the world"s literature, sedulously gathered from the squeezings of the compartmented minds of his professors, the easy access to the ponderous libraries with their mountains of ticketed references as available as his daily dinner. Yet it had been years before he could mention a book of which his father had not heard. "Balda.s.sare Castiglione!" his father would say, taking the book from his hand, rolling the syllables on his tongue. "The Courtier! My G.o.d, it must be nearly fifty years since I saw that!" For a moment a formless eagerness has trembled on his own lips, as if he might say at last "What do you-?-This is what I-Let us exchange ..." but the book would be handed back, the sighing revelation had not been made, the moment pa.s.sed.
All during the early years while his father had been selling soap for a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia he had also been studying Italian in the evenings so that he could read Dante in the original, or picking his way through Horace and Ovid with the aid of the "trots" that would have been forbidden to him had he gone to college. On one shelf of the bookcase, Mademoiselle de Maupin, the Memoires de Ninon de Lenclos, and a row of Balzac stood as evidence of the years in New Orleans, where, only in his twenties, but already the dashing representative of "Oakley and Co., Manufacturers and Perfumers, Founded 1817," he had, according to his own testimony, spent half his time at Antoine"s, and the rest on the pouting bosoms of Creole ladies of good family. On the other shelves Ra.s.selas, Prince of Abyssinia, a red-edged set of Thackeray, and some funereally bound Waverley novels were jumbled together; copies of Burns, Mrs. Browning, and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre might be interlarded with the Victoriana of Quiller-Couch, Sir Edmund Gosse, and an old copy of Will Carleton"s Farm Legends. In the brown dusk of the foyer they all melted together, holding under their dusty gilt a repository of his own childhood, for on them he had fed also, and from them had been drawn the innumerable orotund tags of his father"s conversation.
Stealthily he rose and went to the window. On one of the nearby tables lay the broken-backed copy of Pope from which his father often quoted, its cover scrolled and illuminated to look like a church window. Published by William P. Nimmo of Edinburgh. He had never realized until he was almost grown that his father"s vaunting chant was not literally true; that his father had never actually been out of America. Where had he picked this up? He opened it and read the inscription: "J. Henri Elkin, Mar. 26th, 1882," and beneath that, underlined with flourishes, "sans puer et sans reproche." With a smile for the insouciant motto and the error in spelling, both so typical of his father, he grimaced at his own forgotten inscription underneath, written in the brash pencil of his soph.o.m.ore year:-"J. H. Elkin, Jr., Jan. 5th, 1929. De gustibus non est disputandum."
"Europe, I-rup, O-rup, and Stir-rup," he thought bitterly. He had believed it of his father; in a way it was his trouble that he still believed, not only for his father, but for himself. The phrase had meant for him all the perilous seas beyond the cas.e.m.e.nt, all the width of the future that lay before the "compleat," the "whole" man, all the roads to Rome. When he heard the foghorns lowing on the river, the phrase sometimes came to him still, with a quickening of inexplicable delight and unease.
Now suddenly its echoes brought to him, with an a.s.sociation he did not understand, the image, sharp and disturbing, of the gla.s.s of anise on Anna Guryan"s table.
Shutting the image out, he turned his back to the sleeping figure and stared out the window, past the blurred palette of the park with its motley strollers, to the strong blue of the river, which struck through the tentative spring air like a flail. It was not too late to fill the day that was draining away from him with one of those commonplace devices for seeking human warmth, a dinner, a date, a movie-the little second-rate enterprises where there was always the chance, after all, that reality might explode upon one in the exchange of a word, a recognition, an embrace.
He turned over a roster of people in his mind: the earnest young men of his own age, whose conversation would turn inevitably from books and jobs to girls, with the fascinated allusiveness of inexperience, or the gauche young girls tricked out in the bright dresses, shrill patter, and the finger-snapping gestures of allurement that would lead them not too improperly to their goal of a doctor or a dentist.
There was no one, nothing that he could sc.r.a.pe up that would serve as a palliative for the driving sense of alienation, of constriction, that sent him out more and more on his free Sat.u.r.day afternoons and Sundays, prowling the dim drowsy art galleries, standing before each picture as if it were a window to a world, yet always subtly conscious of the current of people moving behind him, their dress and their speech, and of how he, in his stance before the picture, looked to them. Or he would walk the brilliant mid-town streets briskly, as if he had a destination, savoring the expensive color and movement, glancing at the great carved upheaval of buildings with a pride almost of ownership, until a dusk the color of melancholy blended all the outlines of faces and buildings in a brooding preamble to the great play of light that was to come.
Then he would flee into the haven of some small restaurant, always somehow, the wrong one, where, under the slack gaze of the waiter, he would choose from the menu with an exaggerated sense of the importance of his choice, and eat his dinner slowly, head bent, whetting himself against the knife of his solitude, until home seemed at last the only destination there was, and he would rise and go. Home, exhausted, ready at last for its commonplaces, he would let himself into the dim clogged air of the hall. Nodding over a book, his father would look up to mutter his half-irritated "Where"ve you been?" and to all the sounds and stimuli singing in his head the remark would be like a shutter, closing down between the halves of himself, and he would reply guiltily, almost as if he had been lying, "Just around" ... or "Nowhere."
Tomorrow, delivered once more from the disturbed, uninhabited s.p.a.ces of the week end, he would sink almost gratefully into the round of his job, that job which was so far from the context of his home that he could never have expected it to be understood at home, had he ever been asked. Along with the hundreds of others spewed out by the colleges the previous summer, into professions that had no room for them, he had found a place in the only employment where there was room, in the vast framework of the city"s welfare department. He had been at it almost a year now, toiling up the steps of tenements in neighborhoods he had never before seen, delivering his blue and yellow tickets to existence to his one hundred and forty families.
In the beginning it had been exciting, almost romantic, to penetrate deeper into the unknown capillaries of the city that he loved, finding, in the midst of the decaying East Side tenements, the rococo h.o.a.rdings on an old theatre that had been the glory of his father"s day, seeing a date on the crumbling pink facade of the stables on Cherry Street where the peddlers kept their nags, reading the layered history of the city like a palimpsest. But lately it had seemed more and more as if he were immured in the catacombs of a daily round, from which he would never work himself up into the clear.
He thought of the families he would be visiting tomorrow, each of them like a little aperture into the world that really was. There would be the whine of Mrs. Barnes, born, raised, and married, on some form of aid, but with the steamy smell of comfort somehow always in her kitchen.
"Now there"s William," she would whisper, with her sidelong glance. "Poor boy, he"s a diabetic, you know. He needs special food." And the boy William would stand there with his over-sharp, delicate Irish face averted, his hunched shoulders straining away from notice. In the next house, Mr. McCue, "bra.s.sworker for thirty years," would once more exhume the badge to which he clung, the bank book showing the $4000 savings which had lasted three and a half years until now, and on his broad brick face there would be the usual look of puzzlement at what could happen to a man who had worked and done what was right and proper.
This was Yorkville, but over on 95th, near the river, the stunted inhabitants had seemed to him at first like a race of anthropophagi whose faces he never would be able to distinguish one from the other. Stumbling once through one of these buildings, in search of a family that was about to be evicted, he had pa.s.sed through room after room in which the varicolored women, sprawling on daybeds, or huddled around tables in shrieking atonal conversation, had paid no more attention to him than if he had been invisible. Pa.s.sing on into the dark center of the building, he had found himself in a black windowless room where there was no light but the red sparks flying out from under the frying pan in which a girl with wild Hottentot hair was cooking fish. She had looked at him indifferently, as though she would not have been surprised if he had grown from the floor, and had replied hoa.r.s.ely to his question: "Family? There ain" no families here." He had stood there for a moment in the disoriented blackness, feeling himself shrunk to a pinpoint, a clot in time, and it had seemed to him that he had penetrated to the nadir of the world, where personality was at an end.
In the quiet planes of the room behind him, his father"s breathing went on, like a gentle, insistent susurrus from a world that had been. Only that morning, the radio, playing Grofe"s "Grand Canyon Suite," with its swaying theme of the donkeys, had reminded him, as always, of one of his father"s favorite anecdotes, one that, as a boy, he had never heard without an ache of emulation, of desire for the avenues of action that would one day be his.
"That summer I was eighteen, Mr. Oakley sent me out all the way to San Francisco. Some responsibility for a boy, but I"d been working there in New York for him for two years, and he trusted me. Travelling on the Union Pacific, met a man in the dining-car, Colonel Yates, big mine-owner out there. Took a liking to me and invited me to stop off the next day and go down to one of his mines. I thought I shouldn"t stop off to do it, but he said "Listen, boy! You want to see the world, or not?" So the next morning I got off with him, but when he saw me he said, "G.o.d, boy! You can"t go down a mine in those clothes!" You see, those days, every salesman of any account dressed to look the part, and I had on a three-b.u.t.ton cutaway and a top hat.
""Colonel," I said, "these are the only clothes I have." And it was true, too. He shook his head, but we went on anyhow, and when I saw that canyon we were going down into I wished I"d stayed home in New York. A drop down into nothing for miles, and the only way to go down it was a narrow little trail not wide enough for a man. What they did, they used these little Kentucky single-footers, mincing from side to side, one foot in front of the other. Well, I looked at that donkey, and he looked at me, and I flipped up my coat-tails and got on. Went all the way down that canyon with my top hat on my head, and my coat-tails hanging down behind!"
The picture of his father, middle-sized, dapper, in the raw West of the eighteen-eighties, brought back momentarily the pride and tenderness which had always been a part of the feeling that he supposed was meant by the term "filial." As a boy he had never minded that his aging father had never joined in the baseball games like other fathers, or taken him swimming, for in his tales of the trotting-races at Saratoga, the fights in which John L. Sullivan had battered round after round bare-knuckled, the c.o.c.kfights held secretly in a grimy cul-de-sac in New Orleans, had been the heady sense of an apprenticeship to the masculine world. And blending always with that gamy recall of the sporting world of the nineties had been the undercurrent that was implicit in his father"s knowing allusion, in the slow spreading smile of reminiscence, in the anecdote lopped off at an unsuitable part-an undercurrent that spread beneath his talk, moving provocatively under the lace of words like a musky perfume-the sense of beautiful women.
Outside he could almost feel the subtle pressing of the sooty spring air, snubbing against the pane like an invitation. In his mind he traversed again the grim woodcut streets of his "district" wondering whether Sunday brought eas.e.m.e.nt there, or whether there too, it was like a vacuum sucking the inhabitants into a realization of despair. He thought again of Anna Guryan, whom he had first visited two days before.
The address had been that of an old tenement off Hester Street, most of the occupants of which were already on his list. On the paper-strewn gritty stoop he had met old Mr. Askenasi, evidently on his way to the barber-shop for the pre-Sabbath "shave with hot towels" to which the Jewish men, young and old, clung, throughout the humiliation of being on relief, as to a last shred of independence and manhood, though there might be no cholla for the table, or little tea for the gla.s.s.
"Guryan?" The old man had shaken his head. Then he had drawn back, pressing his lips together. "That one? You mean she will get on the relief too?" Throwing up his hands, he had exploded in a torrent of Yiddish. Then he had drawn closer. "Listen!" he had whispered in English, patting the other rhythmically on the shoulder for emphasis. "Since she has been here that door has never been closed. All hours of the night, men going up there. It is a shame for the other people in the house. Listen ..." But at the other"s guardedly professional lack of response he had broken off and gone on down the stoop, turning once to shake his head angrily with a glance that was like an accusation.
He had found the door easily enough, on the ground floor to the left, as one entered the dank focus of smells that was the hall. Most of these apartments led directly into the kitchen from the hall, and his first impression as he entered was that the kitchen was far cleaner than most, partly perhaps because the furniture was so spa.r.s.e and there was no litter of food, or evidence of where it might be stored. He had been prepared for one of the volubly evasive women who were flocking to the protective disguise of the relief rolls, or who were occasionally referred to him by the probation officers on a promise to "go straight," many of them fat and aging, distinguished from the neighborhood women only by their carefully hammered hair and the clear, aseptic finish of their make-up.
He had found her sitting at the table, a small, deceptively young woman, her figure thin and unexuberant under the dark blue dress. To his first surprised glance she had appeared dated somehow, possibly because of the way she wore her hair, close to her head in the casque effect of the flapper period, with its sharp black wings pointed flatly against the white-powdered oval of her face. As she answered his formal questions in the slurred, uncla.s.sified monotone of her speech, her poised hands folded in her lap, he had been reminded of that Egyptian cat in the Museum, which had come through the erosive sands of the centuries and the trembling hands of archaeologists, to sit finally on its chill pedestal in the echoing gallery, regarding the modern world still with its glance of impenetrable dislike. He had found himself avoiding her unreflecting onyx gaze, which slid over him as if she were making some secret a.s.sessment of himself. Ruffled, he made a show of scrawling her answers in his notebook, a technique he hated and almost never used, partly because he had always felt too keenly the humiliation of those who were being probed, and partly because he had found soon enough that the intonations of misery were not easily forgotten.
She had just been discharged from the hospital, she said, and had told them she had no means of support. They had told her to go to the relief. The janitor of the building was a friend of hers and had let her have the apartment free until the end of the month, since the rent collector had already made his rounds. The furniture? The janitor had lent her an old bed for the back room, and the kitchen set had been left by the previous occupant.
In this neighborhood, where everything was sold and exchanged down to the very nail-parings of existence, where old men sat in front of stalls formed by their knees and the sidewalk, haggling over used shoestrings, a few screws and bent nails, even a single boot, he had known this could not be true. Even so, the kitchen table stood between them, irrefutably new, its white baked-enamel surface shining like a statement.
Raising his head to confront her with this, he had found that he could not say the bald words, and across the table he had seen a thin film of triumph slide over the opaque slits of her eyes. With a gesture of finality she had risen for the first time and pulled the chain on the light bulb that hung over them. Behind her the two blotches of windows sprang forward onto his sight like two frames holding forth the dark. On one uncurtained sill there was a bottle. Reaching for it, she drew a shot-gla.s.s from the table drawer, and poured.
"Anise. You have some."
He had refused, out of a conflict of reasons that were obscure to him, the least of which was that the rules of his job would have forbidden it. Gathering up his pencil and notebook, he retreated to the door, explaining hurriedly that he would let her know the decision of the office.
She had opened the door for him, clasping it close against her to let him by.
"All right. You come back and let me know. Any time." A smile had widened her lips, spreading like oil, and just before the door closed, looking down, he had seen, like a revelation, an intimacy, the pink inner orifice of her mouth.
Hurrying into the half-tones of the evening, all the way home in the swaying push of the subway, even now, as he leaned against the pane, he had retained in his mind, like the central core of an undifferentiated whirl of feeling, the image of the gla.s.s of anise waiting on the table, light radiating from its icy viscous white as from a prism.
Behind him on the sofa his father still slept, punctuating with his breath the quiet that pressed on the eardrums like a weight. For one warm moment it seemed almost possible to him that, shaking the slumped shoulders, touching the brown crepe hand, he might awaken his father beyond the present minute, into an awareness of him at last; in some long shared conversation, that backward elegiac glance would for once be forced fully, openly, on him, and he might say, "Father ... was it so for you? ... For what is it I wait?" Instantly the fantasy shrank, and he winced at the picture of the clumsy byplay that would really occur, knowing that between them lay the benumbing sleep of the years, a drowse from which it was not possible to awake.
Outside the window there was sound, motion, involvement, even if only in one of his long aimless hegiras through the streets. He turned slowly and left the room. Down the long hall, the first door open on the right was that of his parents" bedroom. Entering, he picked up the hairbrush from his father"s chifferobe and began brushing his hair.
Even here, the sense of his father"s youth was present to him, like a minimizing mirror in which he saw himself. On the high chifferobe, neatly arranged, as were all his father"s accouterments, lay the silver toilette set of which the hairbrush, with a handle, in the old style, like a woman"s, was a part. There was a broad clothes-brush, then a narrower hat-brush, and a small stud-box, all with heavy intricately wrought tops of silver repousse, in the center of each the flat shield with the monogram JHE, and a soap-box, like a huge Easter egg of plain silver, on its top the embossed head of a nymph with twining silver hair. One saw odd pieces of similar sets now, unwanted and forlorn, in the dusty jackdaw windows of Third Avenue junk shops, crowded among the sad statuary and implements of a period that was done but had not quite yet slipped into the cherishable patina of the antique. Holding the brush, he remembered.
"Who do you suppose is in New York?" his father had chuckled from behind the Times one morning at breakfast, sitting there easy and fresh, wearing one of the dandified light silk ties and curious scarf-pins from the collection that crowded his dresser drawers, a mode that his wife could never persuade him to discard, that was as much a part of his style as the faint odor of cologne left clinging to the crumpled towels in the bathroom.
"Letty Danvers," said his father. "Arrived on the Queen Mary. Stopping at the Great Northern. That"s where they all used to stop in the old days."
"Who"s Letty Danvers?" he had asked, savoring the graceful English name on his tongue, sensing already, in his mother"s stiffness, the possibility of mischief. In the portfolio of family pictures there were several of unidentified women, mostly in profile, in the clear unshaded photographic style of another day, staring large-eyed and proud from under the curled fringe of their bangs. His mother would never confess to a knowledge of who they were. "Ask your father!" she would say, tossing back her head.