Eleven (4 page)

“My darling,” it began, and he could scarcely bear to read its gush of sentiment, and folded the page up before anyone in the engineering department where he worked could see him reading it. He both liked and disliked having the letter in his pocket. He kept telling himself that he hadn’t really expected a letter, but he knew that wasn’t true. Why wouldn’t she have written? She suggested they go somewhere together next weekend (evidently Dusenberry was as free as the wind), and she asked him to set the time and place.

He thought of her as he worked at his desk, thought of the ardent, palpitating, faceless piece of femininity in Scranton, that he could manipulate with a word. Ironic! And he couldn’t even make Rosalind answer him from Paris!

“God!” he whispered, and got up from his desk. He left the office without a word to anyone.

He had just thought of something fatal. It had occurred to him that Rosalind might all this time be planning how to break it to him that she didn’t love him, that she never could. He could not get the idea out of his mind. Now instead of imagining her happy, puzzled, or secretly pleased face, he saw her frowning over the awkward chore of composing a letter that would break it all off. He felt her pondering the phrases that would do it most gently.

The idea so upset him that he could do nothing that evening. The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that she
was
writing to him, or contemplating writing to him, to end it. He could imagine the exact steps by which she might have come to the decision: after the first brief period of missing him, must have come a realization that she could do without him when she was occupied with her job and her friends in Paris, as he knew she must be. Second, the reality of the circumstances that he was in America and she in Europe might have put her off. But above all, perhaps, the fact that she had discovered she didn’t really love him. This at least must be true, because people simply didn’t neglect for so long to write to people they cared about.

Abruptly he stood up, staring at the clock, facing it like a thing he fought. 8:17 p.m., September 15th. He bore its whole weight upon his tense body and his clenched hands. Twenty-five days, so many hours, so many minutes, since his first letter. . . . His mind slid from under the weight and fastened on the girl in Scranton. He felt he owed her a reply. He read her letter over again, more carefully, sentimentally lingering over a phrase here and there, as if he cared profoundly about her hopeless and dangling love, almost as if it were his own love. Here was someone who pled with him to tell her a time and place of meeting. Ardent, eager, a captive of herself only, she was a bird poised to fly. Suddenly, he went to the telephone and dictated a telegram:

Meet me Grand Central Terminal Lexington side Friday 6 p.m. Love, R.

Friday was the day after tomorrow.

Thursday there was still no letter, no letter from Rosalind, and now he had not the courage or perhaps the physical energy to imagine
anything about her. There was only his love inside him, undiminished, and heavy as a rock. As soon as he got up Friday morning, he thought of the girl in Scranton. She would be getting up this morning and packing her bag, or if she went to work at all, would move in a dreamworld of Dusenberry all the day.

When he went downstairs, he saw the red and blue border of an airmail envelope in his box, and felt a slow, almost painful shock. He opened the box and dragged the long flimsy envelope out, his hands shaking, dropping his keys at his feet. The letter was only about fifteen typewritten lines.

Don,

Terribly sorry to have waited so long to answer your letter, but it’s been one thing after another here. Only today got settled enough to begin work. Was delayed in Rome first of all, and getting the apartment organized here has been hellish because of strikes of electricians and whatnot.

You are an angel, Don, I know that and I won’t forget it. I won’t forget our days on the Côte either. But darling, I can’t see myself changing my life radically and abruptly either to marry here or anywhere. I can’t possibly get to the States Christmas, things are too busy here, and why should you uproot yourself from New York? Maybe by Christmas, maybe by the time you get this, your feelings will have changed a bit.

But will you write me again? And not let this make you unhappy? And can we see each other again some time? Maybe unexpectedly and wonderfully as it was in Juan-les-Pins?

Rosalind

He stuffed the letter into his pocket and plunged out of the door. His thoughts were a chaos, signals of a mortal distress, cries of a silent death, the confused orders of a routed army to rally itself before it was too late, not to give up, not to die.

One thought came through fairly clearly: he had frightened her. His stupid, unrestrained avowal, his torrent of plans had positively turned her against him. If he had said only half as much, she would have known how much he loved her. But he had been specific. He had said, “Darling, I adore you. Can you come to New York over Christmas? If not, I can fly to Paris. I want to marry you. If you prefer to live in Europe, I’ll arrange to live there, too. I can so easily . . .”

What an imbecile he had been!

His mind was already busy at correcting the mistake, already composing the next casual, affectionate letter that would give her some space to breathe in. He would write it this very evening, carefully, and get it exactly right.

Don left the office rather early that afternoon, and was home by a few minutes after 5. The clock reminded him that the girl from Scranton would be at Grand Central at 6 o’clock. He should go and meet her, he thought, though he didn’t know why. He certainly wouldn’t speak to her. He wouldn’t even know her if he saw her, of course. Still, the Grand Central Terminal, rather than the girl, pulled at him like a steady, gentle magnet. He began to change his clothes. He put on his best suit, hesitantly fingered the tie rack, and snatched off a solid blue tie. He felt unsteady and weak, rather as if he were evaporating like the cool sweat that kept forming on his forehead.

He walked downtown toward Forty-second Street.

He saw two or three young women at the Lexington Avenue entrance of the Terminal who might have been Edith W. Whitcomb. He looked for something initialled that they carried, but they had nothing with initials. Then one of the girls met the person she had been waiting for, and suddenly he was sure Edith was the blonde girl in the black cloth coat and the black beret with the military pin. Yes, there was an anxiety in her wide, round eyes that couldn’t have come from anything else but the anticipation of someone she loved, and anxiously loved. She looked about twenty-two, unmarried, fresh and hopeful—hope, that was the thing about her—and she carried a small suitcase, just the size for a weekend. He hovered near her for a few minutes, and she gave him not the slightest glance. She stood at the right of the big doors and inside them, stretching on tiptoe now and then to see over the rushing, bumping crowds. A glow of light from the doorway showed her rounded, pinkish cheek, the sheen of her hair, the eagerness of her straining eyes. It was already 6:35.

Of course, it might not be she, he thought. Then he felt suddenly bored, vaguely ashamed of himself, and walked over to Third Avenue to get something to eat, or at least a cup of coffee. He went into a coffee shop. He had bought a newspaper, and he propped it up and tried to read as he waited to be served. But when the waitress came, he realized he did not want anything, and got up with a murmured apology. He’d go back and see if the girl was still there, he thought. He hoped she wasn’t there, because it was a rotten trick he’d played. If she was still there, he really ought to confess to her that it was a trick.

She was still there. As soon as he saw her, she started walking with her suitcase toward the the information desk. He watched her circle the information desk and come back again, start for the same
spot by the doors, then change it for the other side, as if for luck. And the beautiful, flying line of her eyebrow was tensely set now at an angle of tortured waiting, of almost hopeless hope.

But there is still that shred of hope, he thought to himself, and simple as it was, he felt it the strongest concept, the strongest truth that had ever come to him.

He walked past her, and now she did glance at him, and looked immediately beyond him. She was staring across Lexington Avenue and into space. Her young, round eyes were brightening with tears, he noticed.

With his hands in his pockets, he strolled past, looking her straight in the face, and as she glanced irritably at him, he smiled. Her eyes came back to him, full of shock and resentment, and he laughed, a short laugh that simply burst from him. But he might as well have cried, he thought. He just happened to have laughed instead. He knew what the girl was feeling. He knew exactly.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She started, and looked at him in puzzled surprise.

“Sorry,” he repeated, and turned away.

When he looked back, she was staring at him with a frowning bewilderment that was almost like fear. Then she looked away and stretched superiorly high on her toes to peer over the bobbing heads—and the last thing he saw of her was her shining eyes with the determined, senseless, self-abandoned hope in them.

And as he walked up Lexington Avenue, he did cry. Now his eyes were exactly like those of the girl, he knew, shining, full of a relentless hope. He lifted his head proudly. He had his letter to Rosalind to write tonight. He began to compose it.

THE TERRAPIN

Victor heard the elevator door open, his mother’s quick footsteps in the hall, and he flipped his book shut. He shoved it under the sofa pillow out of sight, and winced as he heard it slip between sofa and wall and fall to the floor with a thud. Her key was in the lock.

“Hello, Vee-ector-r!” she cried, raising one arm in the air. Her other arm circled a big brown paper bag, her hand held a cluster of little bags. “I have been to my publisher and to the market and also to the fish market,” she told him. “Why aren’t you out playing? It’s a lovely, lovely day!”

“I was out,” he said. “For a little while. I got cold.”

“Ugh!” She was unloading the grocery bag in the tiny kitchen off the foyer. “You are seeck, you know that? In the month of October, you are cold? I see all kinds of children playing on the sidewalk. Even, I think, that boy you like. What’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” Victor said. His mother wasn’t really listening, anyway. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his short, too small
shorts, making them tighter than ever, and walked aimlessly around the living-room, looking down at his heavy, scuffed shoes. At least his mother had to buy him shoes that fit him, and he rather liked these shoes, because they had the thickest soles of any he had ever owned, and they had heavy toes that rose up a little, like mountain climbers’ shoes. Victor paused at the window and looked straight out at a toast-colored apartment building across Third Avenue. He and his mother lived on the eighteenth floor, next to the top floor where the penthouses were. The building across the street was even taller than this one. Victor had liked their Riverside Drive apartment better. He had liked the school he had gone to there better. Here they laughed at his clothes. In the other school, they had finally got tired of laughing at them.

“You don’t want to go out?” asked his mother, coming into the living-room, wiping her hands briskly on a paper bag. She sniffed her palms. “Ugh! That stee-enk!”

“No, Mama,” Victor said patiently.

“Today is Saturday.”

“I know.”

“Can you say the days of the week?”

“Of course.”

“Say them.”

“I don’t want to say them. I know them.” His eyes began to sting around the edges with tears. “I’ve known them for years. Years and years. Kids five years old can say the days of the week.”

But his mother was not listening. She was bending over the drawing-table in the corner of the room. She had worked late on something last night. On his sofa bed in the opposite corner of the
room, Victor had not been able to sleep until two in the morning, when his mother had gone to bed on the studio couch.

“Come here, Veector. Did you see this?”

Victor came on dragging feet, hands still in his pockets. No, he hadn’t even glanced at her drawing-board this morning, hadn’t wanted to.

“This is Pedro, the little donkey. I invented him last night. What do you think? And this is Miguel, the little Mexican boy who rides him. They ride and ride all over Mexico, and Miguel thinks they are lost, but Pedro knows the way home all the time, and . . .”

Victor did not listen. He deliberately shut his ears in a way he had learned to do from many years of practice, but boredom, frustration—he knew the word frustration, had read all about it—clamped his shoulders, weighed like a stone in his body, pressed hatred and tears up to his eyes, as if a volcano were churning in him. He had hoped his mother might take a hint from his saying that he was cold in his silly short shorts. He had hoped his mother might remember what he had told her, that the fellow he had wanted to get acquainted with downstairs, a fellow who looked about his own age, eleven, had laughed at his short pants on Monday afternoon.
They make you wear your kid brother’s pants or something?
Victor had drifted away, mortified. What if the fellow knew he didn’t even own any longer pants, not even a pair of knickers, much less
long
pants, even blue jeans! His mother, for some cock-eyed reason, wanted him to look “French,” and made him wear short shorts and stockings that came to just below his knees, and dopey shirts with round collars. His mother wanted him to stay about six years old, for ever, all his life. She liked to test out her drawings on him.
Veector is my sounding board
, she sometimes
said to her friends.
I show my drawings to Veector and I
know
if children will like them
. Often Victor said he liked stories that he did not like, or drawings that he was indifferent to, because he felt sorry for his mother and because it put her in a better mood if he said he liked them. He was quite tired now of children’s book illustrations, if he had ever in his life liked them—he really couldn’t remember—and now he had two favorites: Howard Pyle’s illustrations in some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s books and Cruikshank’s in Dickens. It was too bad, Victor thought, that he was absolutely the last person of whom his mother should have asked an opinion, because he simply
hated
children’s illustrations. And it was a wonder his mother didn’t see this, because she hadn’t sold any illustrations for books for years and years, not since
Wimple-Dimple
, a book whose jacket was all torn and turning yellow now from age, which sat in the center of the bookshelf in a little cleared spot, propped up against the back of the bookcase so everyone could see it. Victor had been seven years old when that book was printed. His mother liked to tell people and remind him, too, that he had told her what he wanted to see her draw, had watched her make every drawing, had shown his opinion by laughing or not, and that she had been absolutely guided by him. Victor doubted this very much, because first of all the story was somebody else’s and had been written before his mother did the drawings, and her drawings had had to follow the story, naturally. Since then, his mother had done only a few illustrations now and then for magazines for children, how to make paper pumpkins and black paper cats for Hallowe’en and things like that, though she took her portfolio around to publishers all the time. Their income came from his father, who was a wealthy businessman in France, an
exporter of perfumes. His mother said he was very wealthy and very handsome. But he had married again, he never wrote, and Victor had no interest in him, didn’t even care if he never saw a picture of him, and he never had. His father was French with some Polish, and his mother was Hungarian with some French. The word Hungarian made Victor think of gypsies, but when he had asked his mother once, she had said emphatically that she hadn’t any gypsy blood, and she had been annoyed that Victor brought the question up.