“Love that bell.” Her eyelids droop, but are open. “Specially on Sundays.” Now she is staring at the ceiling. Remembering? Or reminding herself that she is a working girl—she never has denied that she has loved going back to work. Never to deny what is for what has been—is this the way tragedy, not annulled, for that can’t be, vanishes rather like the dry rot under the housewife’s new season?
“West Side bell.”
She giggles when he says that, teasing reminder of her ingenuous confidence at their first meeting (in the park, over the child and a ball)—“Don’t you just love the West Side?” She is inordinately proud of living here. Yes, he “does”; he is as touchingly vain of his new status as she—“her nurse is off for the day”—is of hers. Bijur himself, the head of the firm, lives here, though of course “a lot further down.” A prince to work for, widower at only fifty, but the whole firm is his family, one son who don’t like the business—a college man like you. That’s a Jewish name, Goodman, but not you. Oh, don’t ask her how she knows. Ingenuously or not, she soon tells him.
As he kneels over her on the bed, he thinks of all he could tell the world and the firm, Bijur, Jerry. A lover always knows more about a woman—we see that he is still wearing his turban—than all the rest of them combined. Particularly a lover she conceals. He could tell her world, so cynically used to the devices of the garment district, that these breasts are real. He could tell the firm, well aware of whom its hard-headed little secretary has her eye on, that she, who quite honestly disapproves of certain girls as “fast,” obstinately keeps a secret that, if once rumored, would burst all her plans. He could tell her boss, in whose office she dresses like all the others—satined and teazled as show girls two steps from bed—that this one perversely slicks back her hair, washes the paint from her face before she goes to bed with a man. And he could tell him, Bijur, who keeps a mistress but is uncomfortable about it now that he is on the board of Temple Emanuel, that this girl, if allowed to requite permanence with the same, will give up her secret at once, and never have another. Never deny what is—or will be—for what was. Bijur is the man she has her eye on.
And he could tell him, he adds to himself, as he places his hand deeply, that this is the way she best likes to begin love.
“Coffee first.” She grins and rolls away from him, and he laughs. At himself—give him his due. Then he brings her the coffee. Two apiece, then the cups clink in their saucers, the spoons idle; anybody can see that this is intermission. There is a scuffle, but anybody, too, knows it for a mock one, can see that the young man in the room here—back there—is the true heir apparent. He stretches his arms to it, to the coffee, the week, the bell, to the age and its summer. Then he plays her the tune.
Just before she lets him, she does what she sometimes does—often on Sundays. She reaches up and tugs his hair, dangling so close on her forehead. “Irisher!” she says, eyes closed. Then nothing more.
This is what he could have told Jerry.
These were Pierre’s “passionate salad days”—a phase he had delightedly discovered himself to be in while reading, with his usual fondness for the passé, in old Edmund Gosse—and no man nearing forty, least of all his biographer, will pass up the chance to linger again briefly those arc-lit byways. We shall not, for instance, see Lovey, that girl so vivid even in arc-light, ever again after that day. For to date, neither has he. But we have seen what he was, or thought he was, in his twenty-first year. And as indicated, the day is not chosen at random.
They drove to Palisades Park that day, swam in the pool and did the funhouses; she had a bouncing fondness for these places, as if she thought of herself as soon to outgrow them—always roved the chance booths with a rube’s faith and could never resist anything eatable from a stall. In the car on the ferry trundling them eastward across the Hudson, she leaned, full of near-beer, on his shoulder, and dreamed aloud of the Bermuda trip with which any groom must make her his down payment, wondering whether she was a good sailor—was he? “I don’t know,” he remembers answering truly, abandoned to his first vision of the city from the river—at this hour a city seen through seven veils, unapproachable from the Jersey side or any other. There was no need to be guarded with her; like everyone up here she knew of him only as a Southerner, and was provincially all but deaf to any accent except her own. Indeed, like his namesake, he had come to have an accent, neutral of itself, that shifted with whomever he talked. But he had touched unwittingly—he had been aboard ship once but could not remember it—on that uncertain bridge leading to all from which he guarded himself. And the city, seen at the widest angle and just before sundown, before its own lights spring it back to merely an electric marvel, an incredibly soaring funhouse, looks long, blue and Himalayan—a cloudland from whose trajectories any man will slide. In that light, as he has often seen it since, it sometimes looks like its own ruin, an Angkor Vat of itself seen centuries on, monument to its own or any man’s self-assertion. He shivered, as once in the courtroom, feeling all the magnitude of his. Then the old ferry, more a piece of land creaked loose from its moorings, grazed its dock again, shivering with him like a sympathetic old lap, and he set the car in motion, rolling carefully between the ferrymen—chewing, noncommittal welcomers hawsering him safely onto the streets of an ordinary evening.
In front of his house she changed into the driver’s seat and left him, to meet the grandparents he must never meet, and the child—who was getting too bright and talkative to meet him often. He was rooming that year in a former frat house whose delinquent exchequer had finally been bought in by the university management. Two terms of this had not yet quite dulled its sybaritic arrangements—the cordovan lounge chairs, bequest of the outgoing brothers of 1927, the pine paneling, gift of a razor manufacturer’s son. At fine French windows opened to the sunset, musing in those chairs on a square of the river framed like a patron’s commission, one could well end the day making the grand tour of one’s expectations. But at this season the place was a scramble of trunks and all the catcalls of farewell, a boardinghouse being evacuated by a yearly plague. He turned away and instead walked westward up the hill along the city cross street that bisected the campus, was in fact privately owned by the college. To renew this privilege in New York, such a street must be closed to public use once a year for twenty-four hours; this was the night when the corporation, not quite disinterestedly, declared a Campus Night, barricading the termini with guards and a few garlands through which anyone with a bursar’s receipt might pass in order to dance on asphalt that, until midnight, was his own.
Tonight hundreds had done so. On the library steps the university band, its ranks already decimated, lumbered along by drumbeat, the brass melody snatched away by the city’s roar. Couples surrounded him, yards from each other but each barely moving on its dime’s worth in the decorous hunch chicly impassive above the knees. Someone had placed the ritual insult, whatever it was, on the head of the statue of Alma Mater. Her dignity, blind and verdigrised in the starlight, had survived it. A tug of war had just died aborning. A few urchins, squeaked in from somewhere, gazed up devotionally at its stragglers, hoping for a football star. But most of the hundreds here came from the vast enrollment of the accessory schools that now all but smothered the austere nucleus of the old liberal arts college—boys from the declining school of pharmacy, men and women from the thickening weed-growth of the “education” courses, theological students holding their beaver-faced dates at arm’s length—Pierre saw scarcely anyone he knew. It was a dull saturnalia, to the sound of bluchers working enthusiastically on stone. But like so much of what he had extracurricularly learned here, it was a social lesson on the hierarchies—so vigorously denied by the country and the college—that persisted here and would be met again outside. One could pretty well tell a man’s status, brought here or projected, by what he did or did not do during June Week. Only the most earnest would attend Baccalaureate Day—these were the future layers of wreaths, setters of cornerstones, along with the prudently early subscribers to the national habit of public joining. To these would be added, at the Senior Dance, men who were desperately engaging themselves to a girl or leaving one, plus a few late recruits from the fraternity house celebrants, more of whom would never get to the main dance. Most of the “intellectuals” (except for those who must blush for arriving family) would abstain from Graduation Day, none of them mount their sheepskins in walnut. At the very top were the men who had attended the university, city-vitiated though it was, because their fathers had, plus a scattering of girls either filling out their postdeb hours or representing the new social consciousness of the old rich. None of these, by now long since off to summer homes or Europe, had ever attended a college function at all. Life made its divisions early, no matter what the Constitution proposed.
Still, as he stood in front of his door again, he was not wholly immune to the mood of the season, feeling the loneliness of one who knew too much too soon, yearning, as precocity does, for some more comfortable division than that encased in itself. The sight of the river could always affect him, and did so now. Circling the city, indeed its primary vein of
extra
-human, by day it thrust the streets back upon their own mortality, miserable or effete. At night it ennobled them. Like any great configuration of landscape, it persuaded the spectator that the stretched dimension was in himself. From where he stood on the embankment the shuffling up on the hill, intermittent blurts of the band, traveled down to him like echoes of some midsummer whirligig, carrying the enviable mystery of the party to which one is not bidden. He let himself luxuriate in the self-pity that was always so fine as long as it was baseless, telling himself that he would have gone back up that hill if he could have taken his regular girl like the rest of them—even while he felt his limbs still suppled with the morning’s lovemaking, the skin of his face and shoulders pleasantly burned with afternoon. A little angry, a little sad, and quite happy, he let himself mourn the circumstance that kept him secret where others could be open, meanwhile preening at the drama of it, descended so early on him, still so young.
As he opened the house door with his special key—there were only twenty-five of them—that outdoors-indoors blend which always excited him followed him in like the heady admixture of life itself, and held him poised. In the swath cast by the hall light the sky looked at once wilder, more blue and shy, visitant piece of that natural world which was the invisible guest outside the most civilized habitation and would end by being the host. Even the weak bulb in the hall, faced with that spectral blue, had gathered to itself the wigwam glow that was the core of all habitation. Life had never been more instant, more real; he was here, floated in on that current of marvel ceaselessly offered to him, the instrument—neither existent without the other. The present suffused him like whisky, as it did in those moments when, reading in some philosopher who strove dubiously to prove the real, he flung the book down, stood up and stretched, conscious of teeth strong enough to chew every appetite, loins ready to swell, a mind, dancing in its own essences, that had no need to prove. He stretched like a cock now, ready to stay up all night if necessary, in order that the world might continue. Not at all sleepy, he would lull himself over some book forgotten by all but him and the faded listing in the catalogue. Generous pity flowed in him for all such, for old Gosse and all those whose salads were over, all philosophers, majestic or piddling, from whom reality, not waiting for definition, had decamped.
As he passed the hall table, he ran his fingers lightly over it; it held no threat for him; the monthly letter from his uncle, arriving always on the first, like a statement and almost as noncommittal, had come the week before, and he had not yet attained the eminence of bills.
His hand stopped.
Rhines Brothers
&
Comp
—He saw the old-fashioned letterhead tip at once, half concealed by mail for other tenants—the factory stationery on which his uncle always wrote.
Your mother has partially regained the use of her hand
, he had written over two years ago.
She sews at the machine again
,
and at Rollins’ suggestion has taken on a few clients. One of the blacks—a woman who has been to the French convent in Memphis
,
does the finishing. Any small motion of the fingers still tires them. So for the moment I shall continue.
It had been kind of him to explain it so, Pierre had thought at the time. But he forgets that I am a dressmaker’s son. Who does the cutting? She would entrust that to no one. There had followed, in that letter and subsequent ones, messages of love from her, and at intervals shirts whose workmanship was unmistakable. But the pretense had been kept up and she had never written. He knew why.
Still he did not move to take up the letter. Whatever it contained was untoward—no one could think otherwise knowing its author, that gradual man. Whatever it held would take him away from here. Something untoward. He would not let himself phrase it further. Pierre raised his head and listened. Except for the caretaker, far off in the basement where his own trunk was already in place with those of the others who would be returning, he was the sole occupant of the house; he and this pile of deserted mail. He knew what he listened for and what he heard—his biographer hears it yet. He was listening to that blind undertow of self which he had been taught to call selfishness, whose instinct is often surer, more cleansing in the end than the gentle, sacrificial waters that overlie. It told him to leave at once, take off for Serlin’s early, abscond as if he had never seen the letter, let it be lost or pursue him too late. Few of us are strong enough to obey that voice. Thetis, when she dips us in the Styx to make us invulnerable, always holds us cannily by the heel. One by one he picked up the envelopes that covered his own, envying the other addressees this flotsam—a few bright throwaways from haberdasheries, a letter, delayed for postage, from Warren Brown’s girl, whom he had married in chapel yesterday morning, several warning library notices to gay defaulters who were gone for good. There it was:
Pierre Goodman.
He stared at the name finally come to terms with by the sender. The envelope was written in his mother’s hand.