It becomes evident that Hilda and we know each other. I remember Hilda"s cheekbones-sharp, and slowly red. The woman, all smiles now, moves toward us and lightly strokes Lotte"s collar. That year, Lotte and I have made a fetish of dressing alike; we have on navy serge dresses with white collars pinned with identical silver bars.
"Little teachers!" the woman says. "Like little teachers!" She hovers over the counter a minute, then thrusts a small box of crackers, the kind with marshmallow, into Lotte"s hand. The baby sets up a cry and is pushed behind the woman"s skirt. The boy on the bed stares at the box but says nothing. Confused, Lotte holds out her nickel. The woman hesitates, then shakes her head, refusing. Two fingers hover again over Lotte"s collar but do not touch it. "Hilda will be teacher," the woman says. She makes a kind of genuflection of despair toward the place behind her, and we see that on a shelf there, in the midst of jumbled crockery and pans, is a man"s picture, dark-bordered, in front of which a flame flickers, burning deep in a thick gla.s.s. She makes another gesture, as if she were pulling a cowl over her head, lets her hand fall against her skirt, and edges after us as we sidle toward the door. She bends over us. "Your mamas have what for me to sew, maybe? Or to clean?"
Hilda speaks, a short, guttural phrase in the language we do not understand. It is the only time she speaks. The woman steps back. Lotte still has the nickel in her open hand. Now Hilda is at the door. And now I see her mouth, the long lips pressed tight, turned down at the corners. She reaches out and takes Lotte"s nickel. Then we are outside the door.
I do not remember anything about the rest of the walk home. But I remember that as I round the corner to my own street, alone, and am suddenly out of the wind, the air is like blue powder, and from the entrance to my house, as the doorman opens it and murmurs a greeting, the clean light scours the pavement. In the elevator, to my wind-smarting eyes the people look warmly blurry and gilded, and the elevator, rising perfectly, hums.
Lotte and I do not ever go back, of course, and we quickly forget the whole thing, for as the school year advances, the gap widens permanently between girls like us and those other unilluminated ones who are grinding seriously toward becoming teachers, for many of whose families the possession of a teacher daughter will be one of the bootstraps by which they will lift themselves to a feeling of security-that trust in education which is the dominant security in a country that prides itself on offering no other.
Then a bad time comes for me. My mother, after the birth of another child, late in life, is very ill and is sent away-to hunt for a warmer climate, it is said, although long afterward I know that it is a climate of the spirit for which she hunts. Once or twice during that time, she is brought home, able only to stand helplessly at the window, holding on to me, the tears running down her face. Then she is taken away again, for our windows are five flights up.
Business is bad, too, everywhere, and my father makes longer and longer sales trips away from home. We have a housekeeper, Mrs. Gallagher, who is really the baby"s nurse, since we cannot afford a cook and a nurse, too. She does not wash my hair regularly or bother about my habits, and I grow dirty and unkempt. She is always whining after me to give up my favorite dresses to her own daughter, "a poor widow"s child in a convent," after which, applying to my father for money, she buys me new dresses, probably with the daughter in mind, and my clothes become oddly tight and loud. Months later, after she is gone, it is found that she has drunk up a good part of my father"s h.o.a.rded wines, but now no one knows this, and she is a good nurse, crooning, starched and fierce, over the basket that holds the baby, whom she possessively loves. Standing behind her, looking at the basket, which she keeps cloudy with dotted swiss and wreathed in rosy ribbon, I think to myself that the baby nestled there looks like a pink heart. Perhaps I think secretly, too, that I am the displaced heart.
So I begin to steal. Not at home, but at school. There I am now one of the lowest scholars. I have altogether lost track in Latin, and when I am sent to the board in geometry, I stand there desperately in front of the mazy diagram, the chalk in my slack hand, watching the teacher"s long neck, in which the red impatience rises until it looks like a crane"s leg. "Next!" she says, finally, and I walk back to my seat. At test time, I try frantically to copy, but the smart, safe ones ignore my pleading signal. And once the visiting nurse sends me home because there are nits in my bushy, tangled hair. Thereafter, when I follow on the heels of the crowd to the soda parlor-my hand guarding several days" saved-up carfare, in the hope of finding someone to treat-the sorority is closed.
So, day after day, I treat myself. For by now, although there is plenty of food at home and Mrs. Gallagher packs me thick sandwiches (mostly of cheese, which she buys conveniently in a big slab to last the week)-by now I am really hungry only and constantly for sweets. I live on the thought of them, for the suspended moment when the nugget is warm in my mouth or crammed, waiting, in my hidden hand. And the sweets that comfort me most are those bought secretly and eaten alone. It never occurs to me to ask Mrs. Gallagher for spending money. At noontime, habitually now, I slip into the dark coatroom, where the girls" coats are hung, one on top of another, and, sliding a hand from pocket to pocket, one can pretend to be looking for one"s own. And there, once again, I meet Hilda.
We meet face to face in the lumpy shadows of the coatroom, each of us with a hand in the pocket of a coat that is not her own. We know this on the instant, recognition clamoring between us, two animals who touch each other"s scent in the prowling dark. I inch my hand out of the gritty pocket and let it fall at my side. I do not see what Hilda does with her hand. But in that moment before we move, in the furry dusk of that windowless room, I see what is in her eyes. I do not give it a name. But I am the first to leave.
Even now, I cannot give it a name. It eludes me, as do the names of those whom, for layered reason upon reason, we cannot bear to remember. I have remembered as best I can.
The rest belongs to that amalgam called growing up, during which, like everyone else, I learn to stumble along somehow between truth and compromise. Shortly after that day, I fall ill of jaundice, and I am ill for a long while. During that time, my mother returns home, restored-or perhaps my illness is in part her restorative. Her housewifely shock at what she finds blows through our home like a cleansing wind, and her tonic scolding, severe and rational as of old, is like the bromide that disperses horror. When I go back to school, after months of absence, I have the transient prestige of one who has been seriously ill, and with my rehabilitated appearance this is almost enough to reinstate me. Then an English teacher discovers my poems, and although I am never again a sound student in any other cla.s.s, I attain a certain eminence in hers, and I rise, with each display coaxed out of me, rung by rung, until I am safe; Meanwhile, Hilda has dropped out of school. I never ask, but she is gone, and I do not see her there again.
Once, some ten years later, I think I see her. During the year after I am married, but not yet a mother, or yet a widow, a friend takes me to a meeting for the Spanish resistance, at which a well-known woman poet speaks. On the fringes of the departing crowd outside the shabby hall, young men and women are distributing pamphlets, shaking canisters for contributions. I catch sight of one of them, a girl in a brown leather jacket, with cropped blond hair, a smudge of lipstick that conceals the shape of the mouth, but a smudge of excitement on cheekbones that are the same. I strain to look at her, to decide, but the crowd is pressing, the night is rainy, and I lose sight of her before I am sure. But now I have reason to be sure. Yes, it was she.
It was she-and I have remembered as best I can. While I have sat here, the moonlight, falling white on the cast-down figure of the other waker, slumped now in sleep, showing up each brilliant, signal detail of the room in a last, proffered perspective, has flooded in and waned. I hear the first crepitations of morning. I am alone with my life, and with the long view.
They will tell us this morning that we must come down off our pin point into the arena. But a pin point can become an arena.
They will tell us that while we, in our easy compa.s.sion, have carried the hunger of others in our minds, they have carried it on their backs. And this is true. For this, even when they say it corruptly, is their strength-and our indefensible shame.
They will tell us that we have been able to cherish values beyond hunger only because we have never known basic hunger ourselves-and this will be true also. But this is our paradox-and this is our stronghold, too.
They will tell us, finally, that there is no place for people like us, that the middle ground is for angels, not for men. But there is a place. For in the absence of angels and arbiters from a world of light, men and women must take their place.
Therefore, I am here, sitting opposite the white bulletin on the wall. For the last justification for people like us is to remember people like Hilda with justice. Therefore, in this room where there is no c.o.c.kcrow except of conscience, I have remembered everything I can about Hilda Kantrowitz, who, this morning, is to be our prosecutor.
I will need to close my eyes when I have to enter the little latrine.
The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street.
WHEN THE SCREAM CAME, from downstairs in the street five flights below her bedroom window, Mrs. Hazlitt, who in her month"s tenancy of the flat had become the lightest of sleepers, stumbled up, groped her way past the empty second twin bed that stood nearer the window, and looked out. There was nothing to be seen of course-the apartment house she was in, though smartly kept up to the standards of the neighborhood, dated from the era of front fire escapes, and the sound, if it had come at all, had come from directly beneath them. From other half-insomniac nights she knew that the hour must be somewhere between three and four in the morning. The "all-night" doorman who guarded the huge facade of the apartment house opposite had retired, per custom, to some region behind its canopy; the one down the block at the corner of First, who blew his taxi-whistle so incessantly that she had for some nights mistaken it for a traffic policeman"s, had been quiet for a long time. Even the white-shaded lamp that burned all day and most of the night on the floor of the little gray townhouse sandwiched between the tall buildings across the way-an invalid"s light perhaps-had been quenched. At this hour the wide expanse of the avenue, Fifty-seventh Street at its easternmost end, looked calm, rea.s.suring and amazingly silent for one of the main arteries of the city. The cross-town bus service had long since ceased; the truck traffic over on First made only an occasional dim rumble. If she went into the next room, where there was a French window opening like a double door, and leaned out, absurd idea, in her nightgown, she would see, far down to the right, the lamps of a portion of the Queensboro Bridge, quietly necklaced on the night. In the blur beneath them, out of range but comfortable to imagine, the beautiful cul-de-sac of Sutton Square must be musing, Edwardian in the starlight, its one antique bow-front jutting over the river shimmering below. And in the facades opposite her, lights were still spotted here and there, as was always the case, even in the small hours, in New York. Other consciousnesses were awake, a vigil of anonymous neighbors whom she would never know, that still gave one the hive-sense of never being utterly alone.
All was silent. No, she must have dreamed it, reinterpreted in her doze some routine sound, perhaps the siren of the police car that often keened through this street but never stopped, no doubt on its way to the more tumultuous West Side. Until the death of her husband, companion of twenty years, eight months ago, her ability to sleep had always been healthy and immediate; since then it had gradually, not unnaturally deteriorated, but this was the worst; she had never done this before. For she could still hear very clearly the character of the sound, or rather its lack of one-a long, oddly sustained note, then a shorter one, both perfectly even, not discernible as a man"s or a woman"s, and without-yes, without the color of any emotion-surely the sound that one heard in dreams. Never a woman of small midnight fears in either city or country, as a girl she had done settlement work on some of this city"s blackest streets, as a mining engineer"s wife had nestled peacefully within the shrieking velvet of an Andes night. Not to give herself special marks for this, it was still all the more reason why what she had heard, or thought she had heard, must have been hallucinatory. A harsh word, but she must be stern with herself at the very beginnings of any such, of what could presage the sort of disintegrated widowhood, full of the mouse-fears and softening self-indulgences of the manless, that she could not, would not abide. Scarcely a second or two could have elapsed between that long-yes, that was it, soulless-cry, and her arrival at the window. And look, down there on the street and upward, everything remained motionless. Not a soul, in answer, had erupted from a doorway. All the fanlights of the lobbies shone serenely. Up above, no one leaned, not a window had flapped wide. After twenty years of living outside of the city, she could still flatter herself that she knew New York down to the ground-she had been born here, and raised. Secretly mourning it, missing it through all the happiest suburban years, she had kept up with it like a scholar, building a red-book of it for herself even through all its savage, incontinent rebuilding. She still knew all its neighborhoods. She knew. And this was one in which such a sound would be policed at once, such a cry serviced at once, if only by doormen running. No, the fault, the disturbance, must be hers.
Reaching into the pretty, built-in wardrobe on her right-the flat, with so many features that made it more like a house, fireplace, high ceilings, had attracted her from the first for this reason-she took out a warm dressing gown and sat down on the bed to put on her slippers. The window was wide open and she meant to leave it that way; country living had made unbearable the steam heat of her youth. There was no point to winter otherwise, and she-she and Sam-had always been ones to enjoy the weather as it came. Perhaps she had been unwise to give up the dog, excuse for walks early and late, outlet for talking aloud-the city was full of them. Unwise too, in the self-denuding impulse of loss, to have made herself that solitary in readiness for a city where she would have to remake friends, and no longer had kin. And charming as this flat was, wooed as she increasingly was by the delicately winning personality of its unknown, absent owner, Mrs. Berry, by her bric-a-brac, her cookbooks, even by her widowhood, almost as recent as Mrs. Hazlitt"s own-perhaps it would be best to do something about getting the empty second twin bed removed from this room. No doubt Mrs. Berry, fled to London, possibly even residing in the rooms of yet a third woman in search of recommended change, would understand. Mrs. Hazlitt stretched her arms, able to smile at this imagined procession of women inhabiting each other"s rooms, fallen one against the other like a pack of playing cards. How could she have forgotten what anyone who had reached middle age through the normal amount of trouble should know, that the very horizontal position itself of sleep, when one could not, laid one open to every attack from within, on a couch with no psychiatrist to listen but oneself. The best way to meet the horrors was on two feet, vertical. What she meant to do now was to fix herself a sensible hot drink, not coffee, reminiscent of shared midnight snacks, not even tea, but a nursery drink, cocoa. In a lifetime, she thought, there are probably two eras of the sleep that is utterly sound: the nursery sleep (if one had the lucky kind of childhood I did) and the sleep next or near the heart and body of the one permanently loved and loving, if one has been lucky enough for that too. I must learn from within, as well as without, that both are over. She stood up, tying her sash more firmly. And at that the moment the scream came again.
She listened, rigid. It came exactly as remembered, one shrilled long note, then the shorter second, like a cut-off Amen to the first and of the same timbre, dreadful in its cool, a madness expended almost with calm, near the edge of joy. No wonder she had thought of the siren; this had the same note of terror controlled. One could not tell whether it sped toward a victim or from one. As before, it seemed to come from directly below.
Shaking, she leaned out, could see nothing because of the high sill, ran into the next room, opened the French window and all but stood on the fire escape. As she did so, the sound, certainly human, had just ceased; at the same moment a cab, going slowly down the middle of the avenue, its toplight up, veered directly toward her, as if the driver too had heard, poised there beneath her with its nose pointed toward the curb, then veered sharply back to the center of the street, gathered speed, and drove on. Immediately behind it another cab, toplight off, slowed up, performed exactly the same orbit, then it too, with a hasty squeal of brakes, made for the center street and sped away. In the confusion of noises she thought she heard the grind of a window-sash coming down, then a slam-perhaps the downstairs door of the adjoining set of flats, or of this one. Dropping to her knees, she leaned both palms on the floor-level lintel of the window and peered down through the iron slats of her fire escape and the successive ones below. Crouched that way, she could see straight back to the building line. To the left, a streetlamp cast a pale, even glow on empty sidewalk and the free s.p.a.ce of curb either side of a hydrant; to the right, the shadows were obscure, but motionless. She saw nothing to conjure into a half-expected human bundle lying still, heard no footfall staggering or slipping away. Not more than a minute or two could have elapsed since she had heard the cry. Tilting her head up at the facade opposite, she saw that their simple pattern of lit windows seemed the same. While she stared, one of the squares blotted out, then another, both on floors not too high to have heard. Would no one, having heard, attend? Would she?
Standing up, her hand on the hasp of the French window, she felt herself still shaking, not with fear, but with the effort to keep herself from in some way heeding that cry. Again she told herself that she had been born here, knew the city"s ways, had not the auslander"s incredulity about some of them. These ways had hardened since her day, people had warned her, to an indifference beyond that of any civilized city; there were no "good" neighborhoods now, none of any kind really, except the half-hostile enclosure that each family must build for itself. She had discounted this, knowing unsentimentally what city life was; even in the tender version of it that was her childhood there had been noises, human ones, that the most responsible people, the kindest, had shrugged away, saying, "Nothing, dear. Something outside." What she had not taken into account was her own twenty years of living elsewhere, where such a cry in the night would be succored at once if only for gossip"s sake, if only because one gave up privacy-anonymity-forever, when one went to live in a house on a road. If only, she thought, holding herself rigid to stop her trembling, because it would be the cry of someone one knew. Nevertheless, it took all her strength not to rush downstairs, to hang on to the handle, while in her mind"s eye she ran out of her apartment door, remembering to take the key, pressed the elevator b.u.t.ton and waited, went down at the car"s deliberate pace. After that there would be the inner, buzzer door to open, then at last the door to the outside. No, it would take too long, and it was already too late for the phone; by the time police could come or she could find the number of the superintendent in his back bas.e.m.e.nt-and when either answered-what would she say? She looked at the fire escape. Not counting hers, there must be three others between herself and the street. Whether there was a ladder extending from the lowest one she could not remember; possibly one hung by one"s hands and dropped to the ground. Years ago there had been more of them, even the better houses had had them in their rear areaways, but she had never in her life seen one used. And this one fronted direct on the avenue. It was this that brought her to her senses-the vision of herself in her blue robe creeping down the front of a building on Fifty-seventh Street, hanging by her hands until she dropped to the ground. She shut the long window quickly, leaning her weight against it to help the slightly swollen frame into place, and turned the handle counterclockwise, shooting the long vertical bolt. The bolt fell into place with a thump she had never noticed before but already seemed familiar. Probably, she thought, sighing, it was the kind of sound-old hardware on old wood-that more often went with a house.
In the kitchen, over her cocoa, she shook herself with a reminiscent tremble, in the way one did after a narrow escape. It was a gesture made more often to a companion, an auditor. Easy enough to make the larger gestures involved in cutting down one"s life to the pattern of the single: the selling of a house, the arranging of income or new occupation. Even the abnegation of s.e.x had a drama that lent one strength, made one hold up one"s head as one saw oneself traveling a clear, melancholy line. It was the small gestures for which there was no possible sublimation, the sudden phrase, posture-to no auditor, the constant clueing of ident.i.ty in another"s-its cessation. "Dear me," she would have said-they would have come to town for the winter months as they had often planned, and he would have just returned from an overnight business trip-"what do you suppose I"d have done, Sam, if I"d gone all the way, in my housecoat, really found myself outside? Funny how the distinction between outdoors and in breaks down in the country. I"d forgotten how absolute it is here-with so many barriers between." Of course, she thought, that"s the simple reason why here, in the city, the sense of responsibility has to weaken. Who could maintain it, through a door, an elevator, a door and a door, toward everyone, anyone, who screamed? Perhaps that was the real reason she had come here, she thought, washing the cup under the faucet. Where the walls are sound-proofed there are no more "people next door" with their ready "ca.s.serole" pity, at worst with the harbored glow of their own family life peering from their averted eyelids like the lamplight from under their eaves. Perhaps she had known all along that the best way to learn how to live alone was to come to the place where people really were.
She set the cup out for the morning and added a plate and a spoon. It was wiser not to let herself deteriorate to the utterly casual; besides, the sight of them always gave her a certain pleasure, like a greeting, if only from herself of the night before. Tomorrow she had a meeting, of one of the two hospital boards on which, luckily for now, she had served for years. There was plenty more of that kind of useful occupation available and no one would care a hoot whether what once she had done for conscience" sake she now did for her own. The meeting was not scheduled until two. Before that she would manage to inquire very discreetly, careful not to appear either eccentric or too friendly, both of which made city people uneasy, as to whether anyone else in the building had heard what she had. This too she would do for discipline"s sake. There was no longer any doubt that the sound had been real.
The next morning at eight-thirty, dressed to go out except for her coat, she waited just inside her door for one or the other of the tenants on her floor to emerge. Her heart pounded at the very queerness of what she was doing, but she overruled it; if she did feel somewhat too interested, too much as if she were embarking on a chase, then let her get it out of her system at once, and have done. How to do so was precisely what she had considered while dressing. The problem was not to make too many inquiries, too earnest ones, and not to seem to be making any personal overture, from which people would naturally withdraw. One did not make inconvenient, hothouse friendships in the place one lived in, here. Therefore she had decided to limit her approaches to three-the first to the girl who lived in the adjacent apartment, who could usually be encountered at this hour and was the only tenant she knew for sure lived in the front of the building-back tenants were less likely to have heard. For the rest, she must trust to luck. And whatever the outcome, she would not let herself pursue the matter beyond today.
She opened the door a crack and listened. Still too early. Actually the place, being small-six floors of four or five flats each-had a more intimate feeling than most. According to the super"s wife, Mrs. Stump, with whom she had had a chat or two in the hall, many of the tenants, clinging to ceiling rents in what had become a fancier district, had been here for years, a few for the thirty since the place had been built. This would account for so many middle-aged and elderly, seemingly either single or the remnants of families-besides various quiet, well-mannered women who, like herself, did not work, she had noticed at times two men who were obviously father and son, two others who, from their ages and nameplate, noticed at mail-time, might be brothers, and a mother with the only child in the place-a subdued little girl of about eight. As soon as a tenant of long standing vacated or died, Mrs. Stump had added, the larger units were converted to smaller, and this would account for the substratum of slightly showier or younger occupants: two modish blondes, a couple of homburged "decorator" types-all more in keeping with the newly sub-theatrical, antique-shop character of the neighborhood-as well as for the "career girl" on her floor. Mrs. Berry, who from evidences in the flat should be something past forty like herself, belonged to the first group, having been here, with her husband of course until recently, since just after the war. A pity that she, Mrs. Berry, who from her books, her one charming letter, her own situation, might have been just the person to understand, even share Mrs. Hazlitt"s reaction to the event of last night, was not here. But this was nonsense; if she were, then she, Mrs. Hazlitt, would not be. She thought again of the chain of women, sighed, and immediately chid herself for this new habit of sighing, as well as for this alarming mound of gratuitous information she seemed to have acquired, in less than a month, about people with whom she was in no way concerned. At that moment she heard the door next hers creak open. Quickly she put on her coat, opened her door and bent to pick up the morning paper. The girl coming out stepped back, dropping one of a pile of boxes she was carrying. Mrs. Hazlitt returned it to her, pressed the b.u.t.ton for the elevator, and when it came, held the door. It was the girl she had seen twice before; for the first time they had a nice exchange of smiles.
"Whoops, I"m late," said the girl, craning to look at her watch.
"Me too," said Mrs. Hazlitt, as the cage slid slowly down. She drew breath. "Overslept, once I did get to sleep. Rather a noisy night outside-did you hear all that fuss, must have been around three or four?" She waited hopefully for the answer: Why yes indeed, what on earth was it, did you?
"Uh-uh," said the girl, shaking her head serenely. ""Fraid the three of us sleep like a log, that"s the trouble. My roommates are still at it, lucky stiffs." She checked her watch again, was first out of the elevator, nodded her thanks when Mrs. Hazlitt hurried to hold the buzzer door for her because of the boxes, managed the outer door herself, and departed.
Mrs. Hazlitt walked briskly around the corner to the bakery, came back with her bag of two brioches, and reentered. Imagine, there are three of them, she thought, and I never knew. Well, I envy them their log. The inner door, usually locked, was propped open. Mrs. Stump was on her knees just behind it, washing the marble floor, as she did every day. It was certainly a tidy house, not luxurious but up to a firmly well-bred standard, just the sort a woman like Mrs. Berry would have, that she herself, when the sublease was over, would like to find. Nodding to Mrs. Stump, she went past her to the row of bra.s.s mail slots, pretending to search her own although she knew it was too early, weighing whether she ought to risk wasting one of her three chances on her.
"Mail don"t come till ten," said Mrs. Stump from behind her.
"Yes, I know," said Mrs. Hazlitt, recalling suddenly that they had had this exchange before. "But I forgot to check yesterday."
"Yesterday va.s.s holiday."
"Oh, so it was." Guiltily Mrs. Hazlitt entered the elevator and faced the door, relieved when it closed. The truth was that she had known yesterday was a holiday and had checked the mail anyway. The truth was that she often did this even on Sundays here, often even more than once. It made an errand in the long expanse of a day when she either flinched from the daily walk that was too dreary to do alone on Sunday, or had not provided herself with a ticket to something. One had to tidy one"s hair, spruce a bit for the possible regard of someone in the hall, and when she did see someone, although of course they never spoke, she always returned feeling refreshed, reaffirmed.
Upstairs again, she felt that way now; her day had begun in the eyes of others, as a day should. She made a few phone calls to laundry and bank, and felt even better. Curious how, when one lived alone, one began to feel that only one"s own consciousness held up the world, and at the very same time that only an incursion into the world, or a recognition from it, made one continue to exist at all. There was another phone call she might make, to a friend up in the country, who had broken an ankle, but she would save that for a time when she needed it more. This was yet another discipline-not to become a phone bore. The era when she herself had been a victim of such, had often thought of the phone as a nuisance, now seemed as distant as China. She looked at the clock-time enough to make another pot of coffee. With it she ate a brioche slowly, then with the pleasant sense of hurry she now had so seldom, another.
At ten sharp she went downstairs again, resolving to take her chance with whoever might be there. As she emerged from the elevator she saw that she was in luck; the owner of a big brown poodle-a tall, well set up man of sixty or so-was bent over his mail slot while the dog stood by. It was the simplest of matters to make an overture to the poodle, who was already politely nosing the palm she offered him, to expose her own love of the breed, remarking on this one"s exceptional manners, to skip lightly on from the question of barking to noise in general, to a particular noise.
"Ah well, Coco"s had stage training," said his owner, in answer to her compliments. She guessed that his owner might have had the same; he had that fine, bravura face which aging actors of another generation often had, a trifle shallow for its years perhaps but very fine, and he inclined toward her with the same majestic politeness as his dog, looking into her face very intently as she spoke, answering her in the slender, semi-British accent she recalled from matinee idols of her youth. She had to repeat her question on the noise. This time she firmly gave the sound its name-a scream, really rather an unusual scream.
"A scream?" The man straightened. She thought that for a moment he looked dismayed. Then he pursed his lips very judiciously, in almost an acting-out of that kind of response. "Come to think of it, ye-es, I may have heard something." He squared his shoulders. "But no doubt I just turned over. And Coco"s a city dog, very blase fellow. Rather imagine he did too." He tipped his excellent homburg. "Good morning," he added, with sudden reserve, and turned away, giving a flick to the dog"s leash that started the animal off with his master behind him.
"Good morning," she called after them, "and thanks for the tip on where to get one like Coco." Coco looked back at her, but his master, back turned, disentangling the leash from the doork.n.o.b, did not, and went out without answering.
So I"ve done it after all, she thought. Too friendly. Especially too friendly since I"m a woman. Her face grew hot at this probable estimate of her-gushy woman chattering over-brightly, lingering in the hall. Bore of a woman who heard things at night, no doubt looked under the bed before she got into it. No, she thought, there was something-when I mentioned the scream. At the aural memory of that latter, still clear, she felt her resolve stiffen. Also-what a dunce she was being-there were the taxis. Taxis, one of them occupied, did not veer, one after the other, on an empty street, without reason. Emboldened, she bent to look at the man"s mailbox. The name, Reginald Warwick, certainly fitted her imaginary dossier, but that was not what gave her pause. Apartment 3A. Hers was 5A. He lived in the front, two floors beneath her, where he must have heard.
As she inserted the key in her apartment door, she heard the telephone ringing, fumbled the key and dropped it, then had to open the double lock above. All part of the city picture, she thought resentfully, remembering their four doors, never locked, in the country-utterly foolhardy, never to be dreamed of here. Even if she had, there were Mrs. Berry"s possessions to be considered, nothing extraordinary, but rather like the modest crotchety bits of treasure she had inherited or acquired herself-in the matter of bric-a-brac alone there was really quite a kinship between them. The phone was still ringing as she entered. She raced toward it eagerly. It was the secretary of the hospital board, telling her that this afternoon"s meeting was put off.
"Oh ... oh dear," said Mrs. Hazlitt. "I mean-I"m so sorry to hear about Mrs. Levin. Hope it"s nothing serious."
"I really couldn"t say," said the secretary. "But we"ve enough for a quorum the week after." She rang off.
Mrs. Hazlitt put down the phone, alarmed at the sudden sinking of her heart over such a minor reversal. She had looked forward to seeing people of course, but particularly to spending an afternoon in the brightly capable impersonality of the boardroom, among men and women who brought with them a sense of indefinable swathes of well-being extending behind them, of such a superfluity of it, from lives as full as their checkbooks, that they were met in that efficient room to dispense what overflowed. The meeting would have been an antidote to that dark, anarchic version of the city which had been obsessing her; it would have been a reminder that everywhere, on flight after flight of the city"s high, brilliant floors, similar groups of the responsible were convening, could always be applied to, were in command. The phone gave a reminiscent tinkle as she pushed it aside, and she waited, but there was no further ring. She looked at her calendar, scribbled with domestic markings-the hairdresser on Tuesday, a fitting for her spring suit, the date when she must appear at the lawyer"s for the closing on the sale of the house. Beyond that she had a dinner party with old acquaintances on the following Thursday, tickets with a woman friend for the Philharmonic on Sat.u.r.day week. Certainly she was not dest.i.tute of either company or activity. But the facts were that within the next two weeks, she could look forward to only two occasions when she would be communicating on any terms of intimacy with people who, within limits, knew "who" she was. A default on either would be felt keenly-much more than the collapse of this afternoon"s little-prop. Absently she twiddled the dial back and forth. Proportion was what went first "in solitary"; circling one"s own small platform in s.p.a.ce, the need for speech mute in one"s own throat, one developed an abnormal concern over the night-cries of others. No, she thought, remembering the board meeting, those high convocations of the responsible, I"ve promised-Lord knows who, myself, somebody. She stood up and gave herself a smart slap on the b.u.t.tock. "Come on, Millie," she said, using the nickname her husband always had. "Get on with it." She started to leave the room, then remained in its center, hand at mouth, wondering. Talking aloud to oneself was more common than admitted; almost everyone did. It was merely that she could not decide whether or not she had.
Around eleven o"clock, making up a bundle of lingerie, she went down to the bas.e.m.e.nt where there was a community washing machine, set the machine"s cycle, and went back upstairs. Forty minutes later she went through the same routine, shifting the wet clothes to the dryer. At one o"clock she returned for the finished clothes and carried them up. This made six trips in all, but at no time had she met anyone en route; it was Sat.u.r.day afternoon, perhaps a bad time. At two she went out to do her weekend shopping. The streets were buzzing, the women in the supermarket evidently laying in enough stores for a visitation of giants. Outside the market, a few kids from Third Avenue always waited in hope of tips for carrying, and on impulse, although her load was small, she engaged a boy of about ten. On the way home, promising him extra for waiting, she stopped at the patisserie where she always lingered for the sheer gilt-and-chocolate gaiety of the place, bought her brioches for the morning, and, again on impulse, an eclair for the boy. Going up in the elevator they encountered the mother and small girl, but she had never found any pretext for addressing that glum pair, the mother engaged as usual in a low, toneless tongue-lashing of the child. Divorcee, Mrs. Hazlitt fancied, and no man in the offing, an inconvenient child. In the kitchen, she tipped the boy and offered him the pastry. After an astonished glance, he wolfed it with a practical air, peering at her furtively between bites, and darted off at once, looking askance over his shoulder at her "See you next Sat.u.r.day, maybe." Obviously he had been brought up to believe that only witches dispensed free gingerbread. In front of the bathroom mirror, Mrs. Hazlitt, tidying up before her walk, almost ritual now, to Sutton Square, regarded her image, not yet a witch"s but certainly a fool"s, a country-cookie-jar fool"s. "Oh, well, you"re company," she said, quite consciously aloud this time, and for some reason this cheered her. Before leaving, she went over face and costume with the laborious attention she always gave them nowadays before going anywhere outside.
Again, when she rode down, she met no one, but she walked with bracing step, making herself take a circuitous route for health"s sake, all the way to Bloomingdale"s, then on to Park and around again, along the Fifty-eighth Street bridge pa.s.s, the dejectedly frivolous shops that lurked near it, before she let herself approach the house with the niche with the little statue of Dante in it, then the Square. Sitting in the Square, the air rapidly blueing now, lapping her like reverie, she wondered whether any of the residents of the windows surrounding her had noticed her almost daily presence, half hoped they had. Before it became too much of a habit, of course, she would stop coming. Meanwhile, if she took off her distance gla.s.ses, the scene before her, seen through the tender, Whistlerian blur of myopia-misted gray bridge, blue and green lights of a barge going at its tranced pace downriver-was the very likeness of a corner of the Chelsea embankment, glimpsed throughout a winter of happy teatime windows seven years ago, from a certain angle below Battersea Bridge. Surely it was blameless to remember past happiness if one did so without self-pity, better still, of course, to be able to speak of it to someone in an even, healing voice. Idly she wondered where Mrs. Berry was living in London. The flat in Cheyne Walk would just have suited her. "Just the thing for you," she would have said to her had she known her. "The Sebrings still let it every season. We always meant to go back." Her watch said five and the air was chilling. She walked rapidly home through the evening scurry, the hour of appointments, catching its excitement as she too hurried, half-persuaded of her own appointment, mythical but still possible, with someone as yet unknown. Outside her own building she paused. All day long she had been entering it from the westerly side. Now, approaching from the east, she saw that the fire escape on this side did end in a ladder, about four feet above her. Anyone moderately tall, like herself, would have had an easy drop of it, as she would have done last night. Shaking her head at that crazy image, she looked up at the brilliant hives all around her. Lights were cramming in, crowding on, but she knew too much now about their nighttime progression, their gradual decline to a single indifferent string on that rising, insomniac silence in which she might lie until morning, dreading to hear again what no one else would appear to have heard. Scaring myself to death, she thought (or muttered?), and in the same instant resolved to drop all limits, go down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and interrogate the Stumps, sit on the bench in the lobby and accost anyone who came in, ring doorbells if necessary, until she had confirmation-and not go upstairs until she had. "Excuse me," said someone. She turned. A small, frail, elderly woman, smiling timidly, waited to get past her through the outer door.
"Oh-sorry," said Mrs. Hazlitt. "Why-good evening!" she added with a rush, an enormous rush of relief. "Here-let me," she said more quietly, opening the door with a numb sense of grat.i.tude for having been tugged back from the brink of what she saw now, at the touch of a voice, had been panic. For here was a tenant, unaccountably forgotten, with whom she was almost on speaking terms, a gentle old sort, badly crippled with arthritis, for whom Mrs. Hazlitt had once or twice unlocked the inner door. She did so now.
"Thank you, my dear-my hands are that k.n.o.bbly." There was the trace of brogue that Mrs. Hazlitt had noticed before. The old woman, her gray hair spa.r.s.e from the disease but freshly done in the artfully messy arrangements used to conceal the skulls of old ladies, her broadtail coat not new but excellently maintained, gave off the comfortable essence, pleasing as rosewater, of one who had been serenely protected all her life. Unmarried, for she had that strangely deducible aura about her even before one noted the lack of ring, she had also a certain simpleness, now almost bygone, of those household women who had never gone to business-Mrs. Hazlitt had put her down as perhaps the relict sister of a contractor, or of a school superintendent of the days when the system had been Irish from top to bottom, at the top, of Irish of just this cla.s.s. The old lady fumbled now with the minute key to her mailbox.
"May I?"
"Ah, if you would now. Couldn"t manage it when I came down. The fingers don"t seem to warm up until evening. It"s 2B."
Mrs. Hazlitt, inserting the key, barely noticed the name-Finan. 2B would be a front apartment also, in the line adjacent to the A"s.
"And you would be the lady in Mrs. Berry"s. Such a nicely spoken woman, she was."
"Oh yes, isn"t she," said Mrs. Hazlitt. "I mean ... I just came through the agent. But when you live in a person"s house-do you know her?"
"Just to speak. Half as long as me, they"d lived here. Fifteen years." The old lady took the one letter Mrs. Hazlitt pa.s.sed her, the yellow-fronted rent bill whose duplicate she herself had received this morning. "Ah well, we"re always sure of this one, aren"t we?" Nodding her thanks, she shuffled toward the elevator on built-up shoes shaped like hods. "Still, it"s a nice, quiet building, and lucky we are to be in it these days."
There was such a rickety bravery about her, of neat habits long overborne by the imprecisions of age, of dowager hat set slightly askew by fingers unable to deal with a key yet living alone, that Mrs. Hazlitt, reluctant to shake the poor, tottery dear further, had to remind herself of the moment before their encounter.
"Last night?" The old blue eyes looked blank, then brightened. "Ah no, I must have taken one of my Seconals. Otherwise I"d have heard it surely. "Auntie," my niece always says-"what if there should be a fire, and you there sleeping away?" Do what she says, I do sometimes, only to hear every pin drop till morning." She shook her head, entering the elevator. "Going up?"
"N-no," said Mrs. Hazlitt. "I-have to wait here for a minute." She sat down on the bench, the token bench that she had never seen anybody sitting on, and watched the car door close on the little figure still shaking its head, borne upward like a fairy G.o.dmother, willing but unable to oblige. The car"s hum stopped, then its light glowed on again. Someone else was coming down. No, this is the nadir, Mrs. Hazlitt thought. Whether I heard it or not, I"m obviously no longer myself. Sleeping pills for me too, though I"ve never-and no more nonsense. And no more questioning, no matter who.
The car door opened. "Wssht!" said Mrs. Finan, scuttling out again. "I"ve just remembered. Not last night, but two weeks ago. And once before that. A scream, you said?"
Mrs. Hazlitt stood up. Almost unable to speak, for the tears that suddenly wrenched her throat, she described it.
"That"s it, just what I told my niece on the phone next morning. Like nothing human, and yet it was. I"d taken my Seconal too early, so there I was wide awake again, lying there just thinking, when it came. "Auntie," she tried to tell me, "it was just one of the sireens. Or hoodlums maybe."" Miss Finan reached up very slowly and settled her hat. "The city"s gone down, you know. Not what it was," she said in a reduced voice, casting a glance over her shoulder, as if whatever the city now was loomed behind her. "But I"ve laid awake on this street too many years, I said, not to know what I hear." She leaned forward. "But-she ... they think I"m getting old, you know," she said, in the whisper used to confide the unimaginable. "So ... well ... when I heard it again I just didn"t tell her."
Mrs. Hazlitt grubbed for her handkerchief, found it and blew her nose. Breaking down, she thought-I never knew what a literal phrase it is. For she felt as if all the muscles that usually held her up, knee to ankle, had slipped their knots and were melting her, unless she could stop them, to the floor. "I"m not normally such a nervous woman," she managed to say. "But it was just that no one else seemed to-why, there were people with lights on, but they just seemed to ignore."
The old lady nodded absently. "Well, thank G.o.d my hearing"s as good as ever. Hmm. Wait till I tell Jennie that!" She began making her painful way back to the car.
Mrs. Hazlitt put out a hand to delay her. "In case it-I mean, in case somebody ought to be notified-do you have any idea what it was?"
"Oh, I don"t know. And what could we-?" Miss Finan shrugged, eager to get along. Still, gossip was tempting. "I did think-" She paused, lowering her voice uneasily. "Like somebody in a fit, it was. We"d a s.e.xton at church taken that way with epilepsy once. And it stopped short like that, just as if somebody"d clapped a hand over its mouth, poor devil. Then the next time I thought-no, more like a signal, like somebody calling. You know the things you"ll think at night." She turned, clearly eager to get away.
"But, oughtn"t we to inquire?" Mrs. Hazlitt thought of the taxis. "In case it came from this building?"
"This build-" For a moment Miss Finan looked scared, her chin trembling, eyes rounded in the misty, affronted stare that the old gave, not to physical danger, but to a new idea swum too late into their ken. Then she drew herself up, all five feet of her bowed backbone. "Not from here it wouldn"t. Across from that big place, maybe. Lots of riffraff there, not used to their money. Or from Third Avenue, maybe. There"s always been tenements there." She looked at Mrs. Hazlitt with an obtuse patronage that reminded her of an old nurse who had first instructed her on the social order, blandly mixing up all first causes-disease, money, poverty, sn.o.bbery-with a firm illogic that had still seemed somehow in possession-far more firmly so than her own good-hearted parents-of the crude facts. "New to the city, are you," she said, more kindly. "It takes a while."
This time they rode up together. "Now you remember," Miss Finan said, on leaving. "You"ve two locks on your door, one downstairs. Get a telephone put in by your bed. Snug as a bug in a rug you are then. Nothing to get at you but what"s there already. That"s what I always tell myself when I"m wakeful. Nothing to get at you then but the Old Nick."
The door closed on her. Watching her go, Mrs. Hazlitt envied her the simplicity, even the spinsterhood that had barred her from imagination as it had from experience. Even the narrowing-in of age would have its compensations, tenderly constricting the horizon as it cramped the fingers, adding the best of locks to Miss Finan"s snugness, on her way by now to the triumphant phone call to Jennie.
But that was sinful, to wish for that too soon, what"s more it was sentimental, in just the way she had vowed to avoid. Mrs. Hazlitt pushed the b.u.t.ton for Down. Emerging from the building, she looked back at it from the corner, back at her day of contrived exits and entrances, abortive conversations. People were hurrying in and out now at a great rate. An invisible gla.s.s separated her from them; she was no longer in the fold.
Later that night, Mrs. Hazlitt, once more preparing for bed, peered down at the streets through the slats of the Venetian blind. Catching herself in the att.i.tude of peering made her uneasy. Darkening the room behind her, she raised the blind. After dinner in one of the good French restaurants on Third Avenue and a Tati movie afterwards-the French were such competent dispensers of gaiety-she could review her day more as a convalescent does his delirium-"Did I really say-do-that?" And even here she was addressing a vis-a-vis, so deeply was the habit ingrained. But she could see her self-imposed project now for what it was-only a hysterical seeking after conversation, the final breaking-point, like the old-fashioned "crisis" in pneumonia, of the long, low fever of loneliness unexpressed. Even the city, gazed at squarely, was really no anarchy, only a huge diffuseness that returned to the eye of the beholder, to the walker in its streets, even to the closed dream of its sleeper, his own mood, dark or light. Dozens of the solitary must be looking down at it with her, most of them with some modus vivendi, many of them booking themselves into life with the same painful intentness, the way the middle-aged sometimes set themselves to learning the tango. And a queer booking you gave yourself today, she told herself, the words lilting with Miss Finan"s Irish, this being the last exchange of speech she had had. Testing the words aloud, she found her way with accents, always such a delight to Sam, as good as ever. Well, she had heard a scream, had discovered someone else who had heard it. And now to forget it as promised; the day was done. Prowling the room a bit, she took up her robe, draped it over her shoulders, still more providently put it on. "Oh Millie," she said, tossing the dark mirror a look of scorn as she pa.s.sed it "you"re such a sensible woman."
Wear out Mrs. Berry"s carpet you will, Millie, she thought, twenty minutes later by the bedroom clock, but the accent, adulterated now by Sam"s, had escaped her. Had the scream had an accent? The trouble was that the mind had its own discipline; one could remember, even with a smile, the story of the man promised all the gold in the world if he could but go for two minutes thinking of the word "hippopotamus." She stopped in front of the mirror, seeking her smile, but it too had escaped. "Hippopotamus," she said, to her dark image. The knuckles of one hand rose, somnambulist, as she watched, and pressed against her teeth. She forced the hand, hers, down again. I will say it again, aloud, she thought, and while I am saying it I will be sure to say to myself that I am saying it aloud. She did so. "Hippopotamus." For a long moment she remained there, staring into the mirror. Then she turned and snapped on every light in the room.
Across from her, in another mirror, the full-length one, herself regarded her. She went forward to it, to that image so irritatingly familiar, so constant as life changed it, so necessarily dear. Fair hair, if maintained too late in life, too brightly, always made the most sensible of women look foolish. There was hers, allowed to gray gently, disordered no more than was natural in the boudoir, framing a face still rational, if strained. "Dear me," she said to it. "All you need is somebody to talk to, get it out of your system. Somebody like yourself." As if prodded, she turned and surveyed the room.
Even in the glare of the lights, the naked black projected from the window, the room sent out to her, in half a dozen pleasant little touches, the same sense of its compatible owner that she had had from the beginning. There, flung down, was Mrs. Berry"s copy of The Eustace Diamonds, a book that she had always meant to read and had been delighted to find here, along with many others of its ilk and still others she herself owned. How many people knew good bisque and how cheaply it might still be collected, or could let it hobn.o.b so amiably with grandmotherly bits of Tiffanyware, even with the chipped Quimper ashtrays that Mrs. Berry, like Mrs. Hazlitt at the time of her own marriage, must once have thought the cutest in the world. There were the white walls, with the silly, strawberry-mouthed Marie Laurencin just above the Beerbohm, the presence of good faded colors, the absence of the new or fauve. On the night table were the scissors, placed, like everything in the house, where Mrs. Hazlitt would have had them, near them a relic that winked of her own childhood-and kept on, she would wager, for the same reason-a magnifying gla.s.s exactly like her father"s. Above them, the only floor lamp in the house, least offensive of its kind, towered above all the table ones, sign of a struggle between practicality and grace that she knew well, whose end she could applaud. Everywhere indeed there were the same signs of the struggles toward taste, the decline of taste into the prejudices of comfort, that went with a whole milieu and a generation-both hers. And over there was, even more personally, the second bed.
Mrs. Hazlitt sat down on it. If it were moved, into the study say, a few things out of storage with it, how sympathetically this flat might be shared. Nonsense, sheer fantasy to go on like this, to fancy herself embarking on the pitiable twin-life of leftover women, much less with a stranger. But was a woman a stranger if you happened to know that on her twelfth birthday she had received a copy of Dr. Dolittle, inscribed to Helena Nelson from her loving father, if you knew the secret, packrat place in the linen closet where she stuffed the neglected mending, of another, in a kitchen drawer, full of broken Mexican terrines and clipped recipes as shamefully grimy as your own cherished ones, if you knew that on 2/11/58 and on 7/25/57 a Dr. Burke had prescribed what looked to be sulfa pills, never used, that must have cured her at the point of purchase, as had embarra.s.singly happened time and again to yourself? If, in short, you knew almost every endearing thing about her, except her face?
Mrs. Hazlitt, blinking in the excessive light, looked sideways. She knew where there was a photograph alb.u.m, tumbled once by accident from its shunted place in the bookshelf, and at once honorably replaced. She had seen enough to know that the snapshots, not pasted in separately, would have to be exhumed, one by one, from their packets. No, she told herself, she already knew more than enough of Mrs. Berry from all that had been so trustfully exposed here-enough to know that this was the sort of prying to which Mrs. Berry, like herself, would never stoop. Somehow this clinched it-their understanding. She could see them exchanging notes at some future meeting, Mrs. Berry saying, "Why, do you know-one night, when I was in London-"-herself, the vis-a-vis, nodding, their perfect rapprochement. Then what would be wrong in using, when so handily provided, so graciously awaiting her, such a comforting vis-a-vis, now?
Mrs. Hazlitt found herself standing, the room"s glare pressing on her as if she were arraigned in a police line-up, as if, she reminded herself irritably, it were not self-imposed. She forced herself to make a circuit of the room, turning out each lamp with the crisp, no-nonsense flick of the wrist that nurses employed. At the one lamp still burning she hesitated, reluctant to cross over that last shadow-line. Then, with a shrug, she turned it out and sat down in the darkness, in one of the two opposing boudoir chairs. For long minutes she sat there. Once or twice she trembled on the verge of speech, covered it with a swallow. The conventions that guarded the mind in its strict relationship with the tongue were the hardest to flaunt. But this was the century of talk, of the long talk, in which all were healthily urged to confide. Even the children were encouraged toward, praised for, the imaginary companion. Why should the grown person, who for circ.u.mstance beyond his control had no other, be denied? As she watched the window, the light in the small gray house was extinguished. Some minutes later the doorman across the way disappeared. Without looking at the luminous dial of the clock, she could feel the silence aging, ripening. At last she bent forward to the opposite chair.
"Helena?" she said.
Her voice, clear-cut, surprised her. There was nothing so strange about it. The walls remained walls. No one could hear her, or cared to, and now, tucking her feet up, she could remember how cozy this could be, with someone opposite. "Helena," she said. "Wait till I tell you what happened while you were away."
She told her everything. At first she stumbled, went back, as if she were rehearsing in front of a mirror. Several times she froze, unsure whether a sentence had been spoken aloud entirely, or had begun, or terminated, unspoken, in the mind. But as she went on, this wavering borderline seemed only to resemble the clued conversation, meshed with silences, between two people who knew each other well. By the time she had finished her account she was almost at ease, settling back into the comfortably shared midnight post-mortem that always restored balance to the world-so nearly could she imagine the face, not unlike her own, in the chair opposite, smiling ruefully at her over the boy and his gingerbread fears, wondering mischievously with her as to in which of the shapes of temptation the Old Nick visited Miss Finan.
"That girl and her log!" said Mrs. Hazlitt. "You know how, when they"re that young, you want to smash in the smugness. And yet, when you think of all they"ve got to go through, you feel so maternal. Even if-" Even if, came the nod, imperceptibly-you"ve never had children, like us.
For a while they were silent. "Warwick!" said Mrs. Hazlitt then. "Years ago there was an actor-Robert Warwick. I was in love with him-at about the age of eight." Then she smiled, bridling slightly, at the dark chair opposite, whose occupant would know her age. "Oh, all right then-twelve. But what is it, do you suppose, always makes old actors look seedy, even when they"re not? Daylight maybe. Or all the pretenses." She ruminated. "Why ... do you know," she said slowly, "I think I"ve got it. The way he looked in my face when I was speaking, and the way the dog turned back and he didn"t. He was lip-reading. Why, the poor old boy is deaf!" She settled back, dropping her slippers one by one to the floor. "Of course, that"s it. And he wouldn"t want to admit that he couldn"t have heard it. Probably doesn"t dare wear an aid. Poor old boy, pretty dreary for him if he is an actor, and I"ll bet he is." She sighed, a luxury permitted now. "Ah, well. Frail reed-Miss Finan. Lucky for me, though, that I stumbled on her." And on you.
A police siren sounded, m.u.f.fled less and less by distance, approaching. She was at the window in time to see the car"s red dome light streak by as it always did, its alarum dying behind it. Nothing else was on the road "And there were the taxis," she said, looking down. "I don"t know why I keep forgetting them. Veering to the side like that, one right after the other, and one had his light out, so it wasn"t for a fare. Nothing on the curb either. Then they both shot away, almost as if they"d caught sight of something up here. And wanted no part of it-the way people do in this town. Wish you could"ve seen them-it was eerie." There was no response from behind her.
She sat down again. Yes, there was a response, for the first time faintly contrary.
"No," she said. "It certainly was not the siren. I was up in a flash. I"d have seen it." She found herself clenching the arms of the chair. "Besides," she said, in a quieter voice, "don"t you remember? I heard it twice."
There was no answer. Glancing sideways, she saw the string of lights opposite, not quite of last night"s pattern. But the silence was the same, opened to its perfect hour like a century plant, multiple-rooted, that came of age every night. The silence was in full bloom, and it had its own sound. Hark hark, no dogs do bark. And there is n.o.body in the chair.
Never was, never had been. It was sad to be up at this hour and sane. For now is the hour, now is the hour when all good men are asleep. Her hand smoothed the rim of the wastebasket, about the height from the floor of a dog"s collar. Get one tomorrow. But how to manage until then, with all this silence speaking?
She made herself stretch out on the bed, close her eyes. "Sam," she said at last, as she had sworn never to do in thought or word, "I"m lonely." Listening vainly, she thought how wise her resolve had been. Too late, now she had tested his loss to the full, knew him for the void he was-far more of a one than Mrs. Berry, who, though unknown, was still somewhere. By using the name of love, when she had been ready to settle for anybody, she had sent him into the void forever. Opening her eyes, adjusted now to the sourceless city light that never ceased trickling on ceiling, lancing from mirrors, she turned her head right to left, left to right on the pillow, in a gesture to the one auditor who remained.
"No," she said, in the dry voice of correction. "I"m not lonely. I"m alone."
Almost at once she raised herself on her elbow, her head c.o.c.ked. No, she had heard nothing from outside. But in her mind"s ear she could hear the sound of the word she had just spoken, its final syllable tw.a.n.ging like a tuning fork, infinitely receding to octaves above itself, infinitely returning. In what seemed scarcely a stride, she was in the next room, at the French window, brought there by that thin, directional vibration which not necessarily even the blind would hear. For she had recognized it. She had identified the accent of the scream.
The long window frame, its swollen wood shoved tight by her the night before, at first would not budge; then, as she put both hands on the hasp and braced her knees, it gave slowly, grinding inward, the heavy man-high bolt thumping down. Both so