The Wintering (38 page)

They were two birds fantastically soaring, she imagined. They came back to earth, seemingly many-limbed, perspiring and exhausted human beings. Billy Walter got up eventually and stubbed his toe, headed toward the bathroom. He swung open the door as if clubbing it. When it had banged the wall, he shoved it again toward the bedroom, though it did not close completely. Unmindful and whistling a gay tune, he stood urinating loudly. Amy lay back on the bed to hug her pillow with a sense of deliciousness, laughing.

Preceded by a towel on which he was drying his hands, which he then flung across the room to a chair, Billy Walter came back. Amy got up swiftly, to stand as if experimentally, beside the bed. He looked at her appreciatively. She was still laughing when she went into the bathroom, never bothering to turn on the obliterating faucet.

The clothes of spectators, in stands opposite, had seemed scattered dots of color, like confetti. Distant trees waving in the fall wind had a similar look of frenzy and excitement. Nothing seemed to press inward on her, and Amy felt that she had grown, that inwardly she had expanded. Rising with the crowd to cheer, she watched in exhilaration as pennants flew in the breeze, and programs slung outward by excited fans sailed far. On this sunny afternoon, almost blinded by the brilliant green ball field, she wanted to think of nothing beyond this moment, of nothing more than being at a game with Billy Walter. In her seat, she leaned against him. She had had this morning nothing to put on but the black crepe dress and could not go to Yankee Stadium! Billy Walter quickly solved her dilemma, rushing them downtown in a taxi, which waited while she changed, and took them as swiftly to the field. Figuring it out herself, Amy knew she would have contrived a difficult situation on subways and buses, causing them to arrive for the game both distraught and late.

All around her now faces showed an unreasoned happiness, without guilt. She applauded the players and their striving enthusiastically, having a sense of well-being in the autumn day. Perhaps this was everything. Perhaps, after all, it was enough, she thought, glancing around. Anyway, since she was here, she meant to participate. Players jogged from the dugout and seemed, pointedly, to glance up at Billy Walter, in camaraderie; calling off their names, glimpsing their numbers, he seemed to know them, making Amy envious. Even the peanut vendor, who circled routinely and wearily, stopped to joke, calling Amy “the big boy's better half.” She blushed, remembering that in bed, she had dwelled on having a baby with Billy Walter.

From the stadium gate, where he held up a brand-new suitcase, waving, Billy Walter took a taxi to the airport. Streets over which Amy returned to the city were clogged with dingy houses, the bus driver was melancholy and had no interest in his pretty passenger who tried to make jokes. Gabby as his two-year-old learning to talk, he thought, his frown driving Amy back into silence. Slumped into her seat, she stared out, depressed, knowing that she might turn obsessively inward again. Her loneliness was intensified when, leaving the bus, she had phoned Jeff and received no answer.

Coming from the hospital to stand in pale sunshine on the steps, Jeff then took the arm Amy offered. She hoped to make him smile and descending the steps said, “See, the chrysanthemums are still pretty.” Across the way, however, the trees partly had lost life and, half-bare, cast emaciated shade. Having caught cold, he had been confined past his designated week, and the flowers held little interest, though he smiled dutifully and said they were pretty. He held in one hand toilet articles in a small brown kit. Pressing that arm, Amy shepherded him carefully past traffic, halted with an impatient look, as if tethered by the red light.

Motorists, noting that he came from the hospital slowly, and noting the attentive young woman, thought that even though he relied on her, he had a self-possessed air. It made them conscious of being enclosed in cumbersome and expensive machinery, for his air said he wore and carried all really necessary to own. His tan raincoat was slightly soiled, its wide belt drawn so tightly to his middle, he seemed to have received some blow there, or to expect one. His set face had a pale sheen, like paraffin. Though November had only begun, there was to the air, to the day, some hint of white. Icicles might glisten so, hanging in the sun. Amy reached out a hand to turn up Jeff's coat collar, before they disappeared from the motorists' sight into the park.

An olive-skinned delivery boy, peddling fast on his bike, had lifted malicious eyebrows as if inquiring whether Amy might be a Girl Scout? Having looked quickly away, fearing comment, she glanced back, once, with a feeling that someone came behind her along the path. Visible, only, was the hospital's forbidding roof.

Almost immediately while following the path, Amy and Jeff had begun to alternate passing from sunny spots into chill shadier ones. That set for the afternoon a fitful aura. Although they admitted wanting to scuffle through leaves, lying about in sparse drifts, they did not. The leaves were bright as Indian war paint, red and orange and yellow, and rose up with wind in whirlish dances. Following the walkway, Amy and Jeff happened past the merry-go-round and arrived at the top of an incline to face a lake. Trees stood away from its edges, permitting them to see the variable and uncertain sky, which was thinly blue. Giant clouds of grey overrode the blue, full of rain and possibly of snow. There were no longer swans on the water or people out in boats and a sign on the padlocked dock read, Closed. A bent candy box drifting on the water presently dissolved to spread in many unrelated directions. In this silence, the merry-go-round's deadened music came to mind as well as reminiscent thoughts of childhood: lost things and times. Before those presently here had come, said the desolate place, there had been children and activity and good times, but the desuetude did not promise their return. The effect made Amy linger over the thought of how long she had known Jeff, without significant change in her life. Was she to go on and on as she was? Her moods shifted and changed, like the heavy clouds drifting here and there on the delicately blue sky. She was glad they did not feel the necessity of small talk, and oppositely, she felt as a burden the obligation to break their silences.

“I'm glad you're out of that place, at last,” she said.

“Yes, I'm tired of illness. This may all be over soon.”

“It was a depressing place. And for you to be in it depressed me, too. In fact, I don't like it here any more. I wish we were in our woods, Jeff.”

“That, Amy,” he said, “was beautiful. But it's past. You can't recapture. Though people keep, if they're wise.” And he glanced at her sideways, as if ascertaining whether she were. He put out his hand then. “A leaf's fallen in your hair.” He removed it and gave it to her.

Amy took it like a more valuable gift and stuck it into her purse. “Thank you,” she said. “I'll keep it because it's from you. Somebody said to me once that leaves falling were like people dying. Was that you?”

“No,” he said. “But someone near my age, I'm sure. Your father?”

“I don't think he's ever said anything even that profound,” she said. “It might have been my Uncle Joe, though I never think of him as saying anything poetic. But it must have been one of them.”

Having observed her opposing moods, he said, “I'm going to risk further boring a beautiful young woman by recalling an old saying. The one about the child who grows up and is amazed to discover how much his parents have learned.”

A sudden glimmer in her eyes matched his own, and Amy laughed. “I have to confess. I don't think I've ever understood that saying fully, until just now.” The face she turned toward him expected approval, perhaps appreciation of her being agreeable. Jeff remained absorbed in watching a squirrel running blithely along an iron railing. Feeling rebuffed and looking away, Amy snuggled her cold nose into her coat collar. Aware of her movement, without exactly looking at her, no matter the weather, he thought of sunlight when Amy appeared in that coat. He had to smile when she snuffled her nose, made runny by the day, against the collar. He felt indulgent and spoke more kindly. A feeling from their better times came back. “Shall I take you inside somewhere? Are you too cold?”

“No,” she said. “Not unless you need to rest?” She glanced around at benches, themselves cold-looking with the trees leafless. “Let's walk on to Fifth Avenue and then decide what to do. Unless you want to do something different?”

“No. I need to clear my head and need exercise, too, only slowly. Though I thank you, beautiful Miss Howard, who is growing up. I'm afraid, however, I'm not to be much fun.”

“I didn't know you thought I was looking for fun.”

“Once, I thought I knew a great deal about you. This past week or so, I've not been sure.”

“Does the time you were in the hospital count?” she said defensively. “I tried to come often, but it was tiring just to sit when you were so sleepy and confused. You never could remember things, even that you had sent
Reconstruction.
”

Stopping in the middle of the path, he gripped her elbows and turned her toward him. “Amy, I've had a hard time convincing you of anything. You've been too stubborn and proud and stiff-necked, and gotten away with it because you so often broke my heart. Also because you're beautiful. But damn it, I'm telling you, once and for all, I haven't forgotten. I didn't send the manuscript. I only wish I had thought of it.”

She said, shocked and believing at last, “But then, who did? It's impossible that anyone else did.”

He seemed as stunned as she. “That's something I've got to think out myself,” he said.

“But what's happening to everyone?” she said. “My mother told you how to find me, and now this.” She stared at him as if he had materialized on the path. “It's as if they wanted us to be together.”

“I said once they were enough to make us tear our hair.” He looked as if he had been laughing and were trying to stop, the back of his hand against his lips. “It was when your momma first looked at us cross-eyed, I remember. Now she seems to be looking at us in an entirely different manner.”

“They couldn't change,” Amy said conclusively.

“People do,” he said. “At your age, you grow so fast our people might feel you've bridged the gap between us.”

“Seriously. What are they up to?”

“I am serious.” But when he saw that she looked more angry than mystified, he said, “I'm sorry. I had to laugh. Here we are with our heads together, puzzling over them the way they've probably puzzled over us.” A little against her will, Amy laughed. “Apparently,” he said, “some of them have come up with a solution, which seems to be, Yes.”

She went ahead up the path, faster, as if in pursuit of something. Leaving him behind, she stopped as a traveller halts to figure out direction at a crossroads. She waited for Jeff, who came up the incline seeing the stubborn set of her chin. He had always had the calm belief everything would turn out all right, now worried the time invested might have been wasted. Confusion had made him drink, for if Amy had changed their plans because she was serious about some young man, why hadn't she told him? Always ahead there had been the possiblity of his being replaced, which he had told her. The way she went about with her head down, she did not look happy enough to be in love. When she had come to the hospital, she had worn an impatient and puzzled frown often and sometimes even a devious look.

At their age, what possibly could either her family or his have learned that would change them? Amy felt Jeff knew, or guessed, and would not tell her. That was annoying. But did he know? Having stuck out her chin, she stared straight ahead at where she was going, feeling wrong about questioning Jeff. Yet doubts crept in. Sitting beside him in the hospital, she had even asked herself disloyally whether she really liked all of his work, whether it was good that several of his books had recently begun to have popular acclaim? He had a small wise smile, as he hurried to keep beside her, which she felt was presumptuous. She knew that, at least, her life was going to be happier than his. What had he meant by saying the others meant Yes. To what? she asked herself, suspiciously. Turning at his touch, she followed him to a bench, answering that it would not be too cold to sit down. She did, however, tuck her hands up her coat sleeves for warmth, having forgotten gloves. Jeff studied the upturned toes of his shoes, his heels digging a little into the ground. Opposite them was a bench heavily layered with newspapers, which had obviously been a bed. At its base a pigeon pecked dolefully.

“Imagine having there to sleep,” Amy said.

“Yes,” Jeff said, glancing that way. “Poor lost soul.”

She at once removed her hand from her sleeve and placed it on his arm. “Are you sure,” she said, “that you aren't cold?”

He twined his fingers into hers and said, “I think shortly we should go inside someplace warm.”

“Not where you can have a drink, though.”

“No,” he said, pressing her hand. “I can't risk your anger again. At the hospital, you seemed so often angry. I know you didn't want me there, but I'm real, Amy. And you can't know true feeling unless you love someone despite their faults.”

She looked up the path, hoping for a distraction, for always what he said seemed to his advantage. And not having known how to answer, she watched several young men who were hunkered down beside a bench, playing some game involving a penknife. On the ground, their transistor radio played loudly. Through their shouts, Amy could hear fragments of one of her favorite songs. Billy Walter, liking it, had requested it from the lady with the thumping pudgy fingers. Amy now tapped her fingers lightly to the music, asking, “Do you like this song?”

Jeff's look was distant, either not knowing the song, or that a radio was even playing nearby. He looked in the direction she turned, but said nothing. Amy said defendingly, with a little condescension, that it was really a good tune and the favorite of everyone she knew. He might not have heard, or was paying no attention, and Jeff held up her hand, as if she must see it before her face. “Amy,” he said, the words abrupt and withheld a long time. “You want the world to be a simple place, and it's not. Didn't you see I understood your difficulties growing up because I had been through them, too? I wasn't a pretty young woman whose family pushed her lovingly down every proper path. But I had other things expected of me it wasn't my nature to fulfill. I told you it was difficult to be a writer if you had to start by fighting all the disbelief, and conventionality, of the Southern middle class. It's unfortunate you continue taking the childish attitude that no one understands. That no one has been through what you have.”