The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 26

"I wanted them to take you in," Anderson said. "A few of us together could have pushed it through-but all the others made such a G.o.d-d.a.m.ned stink about it, we gave in. I suppose you heard." He looked at Spanner, mistaking the latter's unresponsiveness for accusation perhaps, and went on.

"If we hadn't all been so d.a.m.ned unseeing, so sure of ourselves in those days ..." He broke off. "Ah well," he said, "that's water over the dam." And grasping Spanner's shoulders, he looked down at him in an unsteady bid for forgiveness, just before he released him with a brotherly slap on the back, and turned away, embarra.s.sed. Standing there, it was as if Spanner felt the flat of it, not between his shoulder blades, but stinging on his suddenly hot cheek-that sharp slap of revelation.

Point of Departure.

AFTERWARD, LEANING THEIR ELBOWS on the mantel, they lit cigarettes and stared at each other warily. The late afternoon, seeping into the small apartment, pushed back its boundaries, melted them into shadow, intruding into the comfortably trivial box the long finger of s.p.a.ce.

They were, she thought, like two people holding on to the opposite ends of a string, each anxious to let go first, or at least soon, without offending the other, yet each reluctant to drop the curling, lapsing bond between them. Always, afterward, there was the sense of a dialectic, a question not concluded; after the blind engulfment the two separate egos collected themselves painfully, slowly donned their bits of protective armor, and maneuvered once more for place.

It would be easy, good, she thought, to talk long and intimately afterward, to meet on close ground, divested of all pretense. But they never want this; they never do. The long, probing conversations that women tried to force upon them, getting closer to the nerve of personality-how they hated them, retreating from them brusquely into silence, sheepishly into the commonplace of the consolatory pat! Or, after the aura of wanting had ebbed, did they too feel a little bereft, bare, in front of the speculative, now disenchanted eyes opposite them; did they too conceal a fumbling need to linger a little longer in the dark recesses of emotion, to examine, to a.s.sess what had been separate, had blended, and now was separate again?

Doubting this, she could see him, so quickly, so expertly casual, leaving in a few minutes, gathering up his hat and his briefcase with a delicate a.s.sumption of reluctance, exhaling a last relieved whiff of tenderness into her ear. Out of some obscure pride she never went to the door with him; he never remarked on this but always closed the door very gently, like someone leaving a sickroom. She could imagine him standing on the doorstep downstairs, squaring his shoulders and making straight for a bar, eager to immerse himself quickly in the swapping masculine talk of baseball scores and prize fights, blow by blow-all the vicarious jaunty brag that sat upon him as inappropriately as a c.o.c.kaded paper party hat, but that was indulged in alike, she knew, by the simple male and the clever.

Opposite, already a little absent, he stared at her a trifle wryly, pulling gratefully at his cigarette. Now, he knew, would begin the gentle process of disengagement that he had learned long ago, defensively, to perform so well. Now it would be like a game of gesture in which he excelled, in which it would be as if, smiling the tolerant smile of experience, he divested himself one by one of a series of clinging hands, until he stood again remote, inaccessible, free. Only later, when the warmth and almost all the conquest had worn away, would the slow rise of irritation with self and women begin, then the slight guilt of satiety that would enable the resolve to be made, and finally the shrug and the forgetfulness.

Regretfully, as if taking leave of a landscape that had pleased, he broke his glance from the eyes opposite him, looked down at the hand that lay perhaps intentionally near his on the mantel, curved upward, open. Warned, he had felt all afternoon the too recognizable air of intensity, of special pleading, that had surrounded her; in a woman of less taste it would have taken the form of a dress too tight, or a flock of bows in the hair. Intelligent women stimulated rather than repelled him, if they had the other attraction too; their withdrawals and defenses were heightened by subtleties that it was a challenge to explore and subdue. But in the end it was all the same-gazing up at you afterward with their liquid pained stare, detecting the coil of softness in you that half appreciated, half understood, they all pleaded for an avowal-of what?

The hand on the mantel brushed his, and was withdrawn.

"It's pathetic, isn't it," she whispered, "the spectacle of people trying to reach one another? By any means. Everywhere." There was a rush, a grating of honesty, in her tone that she deprecated immediately with a quick covering smile.

The remark hung too nakedly on the air. He nodded ruefully, and allowing his hand to touch hers for a moment, he stared into their palms, and they stood together for a moment, joined over the body of their failure.

Patting her shoulder in a light rhythm, one, two, three, he grasped her chin tight in his hand and looked down at her for quite a time.

"See you," he said. "Better run for my train." As he took up his hat and briefcase half embarra.s.sedly, leaning against the mantel she was watching him silently, and it was so that he caught the last image of her as he let himself out the door, easing the k.n.o.b to.

Blinking in the light of the outdoors, which was a lot stronger than one would suspect after that dim apartment of hers, he brought that image with him, but, s.h.i.+elding him, his mind s.h.i.+fted, rioting pleasurably among the warmer images of the early afternoon. All the way down the avenue from the park he carried these with him, until at Forty-second Street, sauntering toward Grand Central, he joined the streams of women carrying their light pastel packages of hose, ribbons, blouses-all the paraphernalia of women at the turn of a season. He was used to seeing them in the train, haggard after the day-long scavenger hunt for the hat to go with the shoes that went with the dress-riding home for the long ritual of unguents that would arm them once more. From his wife, and his sisters before her, he knew it well-the ritual that would transform the kimonoed, the oiled, the bepinned one into the handsome, curled, confident woman waiting at the door, Venus risen triumphant on a sh.e.l.l of empty boxes.

For a while now, out of a sense of the just, the cautious moment, he would be free, but inevitably he would be alert again to the puff of organdie at a throat, a mouth so richly, redly drawn over the scanter curve of lip beneath, a look, plaintive or ripe-the whole froth of femininity that they all put out like entangling scarves. They would be drawn to him too, often out of an awareness of his sensitivity to them, only to be confused by the proffered warmth for warmth of a relations.h.i.+p that ended, not in the conventional brutalities of a rejection they might have understood, but in the firm, knowing refusal to be involved in the abject spiritual surrender which they always ended up by demanding, for which they all longed.

Either they caught you young and eager, as he had been, and-nailed down by their allies, time and habit-incredibly, swiftly, you were a member of the country club, with a mortgage, while across the room, herded together with the others, in their unblus.h.i.+ng, blatant discussions of the idiosyncrasies of husbands, they proclaimed your indenture to them-or else, in the byways of sub rosa relations.h.i.+ps, there too, sooner or later, they strangled calm with their demoniacal need for finality, possession, grown all the stronger because it could not be socially displayed. Perhaps, he thought, it is the riddled period in which we live, in which people are driven endlessly upon one another, hoping to find, in the person of another one of the bewildered, the a priori love, the certainty, the touchstone.

He had reached Grand Central and the long sloping entrance to the suburban trains. Across the way his usual stop-in place beckoned with its promise of a muted jumble of light, noise, and clinking gla.s.sware in which feeling could be drowned. Perhaps it is worse for the women, he thought, but they are the worst-all of them Penelopes, trying to weave you into the fabric of their lives, building on you in one way or the other until you have to get out from under. Squaring his shoulders, he s.h.i.+fted his briefcase, and walked on toward the sure nepenthe, the comfortable glaze of the bar.

In the apartment, she stood still at the mantel, reluctant to acknowledge the gap in the room, to close it over finally with movement, change. At last she walked over to the sofa and sat down, shrinking into the cus.h.i.+on for its warmth. The room was always like this afterward, like a deserted theatre, and, half actress, half spectator, she sat and mulled over what had gone before, forming, as if into a stylized ballet, the whole interchange of responses that had been their meeting, forestalling, by this means, the sure humming rise of depression.

Her last exclamation, which had been as alienating to him, she knew, as the shock of a cry for help thrust suddenly into the most casual of conversations, had come from the heart, the heart that she knew, by unspoken agreement with him, with all of them perhaps, must always be held behind one. Only among the very young might it be otherwise, possibly ... before they had acquired the destroying talent for compromise that eased-as it more and more deflated-the drama of experience.

Perhaps, she thought, curvetting so lightly, so "modernly," as we have been taught to do, over the sharp stick of emotion, never daring the ba.n.a.l, the stark word, it is our reticences that trap us after all. It happened everywhere: behind the tidy doors of marriage, in the dark bed of adventure, or in the social b.u.mpings against one another in the crowded rooms where people ma.s.sed together protectively in frenetic gaiety, hiding stubbornly-"I am alone"-using liquor, music, s.e.x, to say-"You, too?" It happened, sometimes, in rooms at the end of the day, after the scratch of gossip, the long political sighs, were done, and there was a lull, with people staring reflectively into their gla.s.ses, twirling the stems, that the lull deepened, a sentence died on the air, and it was as if everyone had plunged his arm into a deep well, searching, seeking-but no hands met and clasped.

She walked into the kitchen and poured herself a drink. Toward her through the window over the sink the stunted city trees stretched in the soft, mottled weather, all along their weak, cramped boughs, the sure, recrudescent leaves. It would be better if it were autumn now, she thought drearily, when people huddling together at concerts, at parties, in front of fires, can persuade themselves that they are huddled there together against the cold.

Tonight there were people coming in to talk. She knew beforehand how she would sit there, in the anodyne of company, cradling the warmth of what had been, while every so often, half savored because it gave a meaning to the hour, half pushed down lest it rise to the surface and become real hurt, there would come, like water was.h.i.+ng over a sunken buoy, the little knell of sadness for something that had been, that had never quite been, that now had almost certainly ceased to be.

Let.i.tia, Emeritus.

HOLDING THE SMALL WHITE card so as not to bend it, Let.i.tia Reynolds Whyte, aged twenty-four, looked cautiously up and down the main hallway of the school. Only the Senior girls were left in the school now, and most of them were in their rooms, lying on the beds in their underwear, talking dreamily of what they were going to do after graduation, the ones who were not getting married, who were only going to Europe with their parents, or just back to Locust Valley, or Silver Spring, or Charleston, listening enviously to the fluttery, conscious plans of those who were. Through the closed door of the Green Room down at the end of the hall she heard the laughter of the girls closeted there, rehearsing the skits for the Senior Banquet that evening. Tomorrow, hordes of parents would descend on the school for the graduation exercises, but today, the empty lawns outside-carefully shaven to a final unusual neatness that morning by Norval, the gardener-the echoing halls inside, all had had a hush over them, a left behind hush of desertions and departures, of feverish routines suspended, of another school year gone, and another deadened summer begun, in which only Miss Sopes-the Head-the colored cook, and Norval would be left to wait for fall. And, of course, Let.i.tia.

She looked up and down the hall again. All the teachers' cubbyhole private offices were closed and locked, even the larger one at the very end, a former parlor, which was rated by "Papa Davis," Professor Walter Wallace Davis, because he was the oldest, the most distinguished looking, and the only one who was a real professor, having come to Hyacinth Hall after the close of a career in Latin and Greek at the State University. Usually, long after the others had locked up and gone he could be found lingering in the musty brown room with the shabby davenport and the bronze lamp with the purple frosted grapes. "This is my real home, girls. My real home," he would say, leaning forward and smiling expansively, rubbing the grapes with a restless, worrying hand. But today even he had gone home to his palsied sister in their dark old house across the bridge in Minetteville, although he would return tomorrow to address the parents, as he did every year at graduation.

Satisfied that no one was around, Let.i.tia crossed the hall to the large Student Mail box which hung on the wall in its very center. Ordinarily the box was a plain drab, lettered "Hyacinth Hall" in white, a smart, monogram-like inscription which the elder, dead Miss Sopes, the Miss Sopes, in some fierce spinsterish urge, thwarted possibly as to bedspreads and guest towels, had always had imprinted on every wastebasket, towel, door, and object that attached to the Hall. This tradition, like every one which stemmed from the mourned competence of her sister, the present tremulous Miss Rosanna had of course carried on.

Today, in accordance with still another tradition, the box was covered, except for the slit for envelopes, with a large, fanned-out frill of stiff white paper, and stuck above it, a fancily inked sign said "Announcements." All week long Senior girls had been surrept.i.tiously seeking out the box and dropping in their white cards, or slips of pink or blue notepaper, when no one was looking. On Banquet night, the box, lifted from its hooks, would be set in the middle of the draped head table where the cla.s.s officers sat, and after the jerkily rhymed cla.s.s history had been read and the cla.s.s prophecies for each girl had sent them all into gales of merriment, the cla.s.s president, standing solemnly above the box, would dip her hand into it slowly, teasingly, and read off, one by one, the names and announcements of all the girls who were leaving Hyacinth Hall "engaged." Each girl stood, was clapped for, walked forward smiling and reddened to the head table and was handed a long-stemmed rose, which she pinned to her shoulder and wore mincingly the rest of the evening. A girl could not just put any name, or even the name of her "steady" in the box. She had to be really, seriously engaged. Let.i.tia knew, for Senior Banquet, since there were never any boys present, was one of the school functions she was allowed to attend. She had been to two of them already. Tonight's would be the third.

After one more hesitant look around, she bent over the card in her hand, scrutinized it lovingly, tabbing each letter with a slow forefinger. Some of the girls even got themselves engaged just so they could announce it on Banquet night; just so they would not have to be one of the others barred from the flushed group of those who had been tapped, anointed, by love's mysterious rose. Just a few nights ago, Let.i.tia, leaning pressed against the locked connecting side door of her room, the door which led to Willa Mae Fordyce's room on the other side, but was never opened, had heard Willa proclaiming to other murmurous visiting voices: "Why I'd count it a disgrace not to announce on Banquet night, really I would. I just wouldn't feel graduated, honest!" And Willa had given a low, satisfied laugh. She had meant it too, for just this morning, Let.i.tia, stealing breathlessly into Willa's empty room through the unlocked regular door, had seen the slip readied on Willa's desk. "Engaged. Wilhelmina Mary Fordyce and Homer Watson Ames."

Let.i.tia gave her own card a last admiring look. It was beautifully printed-the best she had ever done. In art cla.s.s, Miss Tolliver would often pause, leaning over Let.i.tia's shoulder, and knitting together tenderly her gray, mock-fierce eyebrows, she would say, extra-loud: "'t.i.tia, your copy-work is certainly real nice, dear. Truly lovely." And shaking her head at some imaginary crony in the air, she would make a kind of soft sad sigh and pa.s.s on to the desk of the girl in front.

Almost reluctantly, Let.i.tia raised the hand with the card in it, held it poised near the paper frill for a second, then quickly pushed the card through the slit in the box. She heard the slight sound it made, not the sharp tap of paper falling into empty metal, but a slithery rustle which meant that it had fallen on others like it. She gave her flat, tuneless giggle, which always sounded as if it needed finis.h.i.+ng, and turning away in the dogged, laborious way she had, she walked down the marble steps, out onto the lawn, and across it to the pretty gabled dormitory on the other side.

From behind, with her pale blond hair swinging over the pink cashmere sweater and the dyed-to-match tweed skirt, with her loafers and pink socks, Let.i.tia looked like any one of a dozen others. Even better groomed, even a little too carefully matched, perhaps-as she had been ever since that day, six years ago, when she had walked into her first cla.s.s at the school, her mouth, which peaked way up in the center like a baby's, widened in a grin, on her head, perched clumsily there, the glittering gold sequin and seedpearl cap which an inept uncle, knowing her fondness for s.h.i.+ny gauds, had given her for Christmas. Ever since then, Delia, the light-colored upstairs girl, who had seen service as a personal maid on some of the big estates near the school, had been detailed to go to Miss Let.i.tia's room each morning and set out the proper clothes for the weather and the day. Sometimes, if there was a special occasion, although there seldom was, Delia came in the evening, too. In the summer, when Delia worked elsewhere, Miss Rosanna came herself, and would stand there clucking a little to herself, her una.s.sertive manner sharpened with impatience, although once in a while she spent a little extra time handling greedily the beautiful quality underwear and clothes Let.i.tia's family bought and sent down to her, with never any trouble about sizes or ideas, for the girl had stayed the same and looked the same as when she first came.

Even when people saw her from the front, saw the domed childish forehead, the eyes, large with a painful attention, the peaked fledgling mouth always open as if waiting for someone to push into it the blessed worm of enlightenment-even then they were not sure. Feature by feature the face was a pretty one. It was only as people waited covertly for reflection to shadow the eyes, for a self to a.s.semble and animate the face, that the doubt stole over them. The creeping realization began to form only as, shrinking, they became aware of the presence of that same straining of a blocked sense which they felt in the presence of the deaf who leaned to listen, the blind who stretched to feel. But when they heard the light, singsong rote of the voice, the sentence that petered into a laugh, the laugh that was like a pitch-pipe whose single note was query-then they were sure.

Then it was that, at a tea where Mrs. Reese Reynolds Whyte poured, or at a meeting of which she was inevitably chairman, one or the other of the women would purr in the ear of her neighbor: "You've seen that youngest daughter of Gratia Whyte's ... is she quite ...?" and the other would answer: "All right ... you mean? ..." covering the words with a disclaiming shrug.

"Borderline?" This, avidly, from the inquirer.

"Well ... you know Gratia ..." might come the discreet answer. "She can face up to anything. ... Look at how they drag the father with them ... lectures, everywhere!"

It was through the means of Hyacinth Hall that Mrs. Whyte had faced up to Let.i.tia. The Whytes belonged to those quiet rich who managed to imply, by their abstention from show, their endors.e.m.e.nt of the proper, noncontroversial causes, such as Poetry and Peace, that wealth could be n.o.ble and remain fruitfully in the hands of its rightful inheritors. Summer and winter, their homes had a serene dowdiness possible only to those who could afford to be contemptuous of fas.h.i.+on. Their limousines were the heaviest, but dark, their servants and appurtenances of the most durable best, and none of these was changed too often. Mrs. Whyte had not only "attended" but graduated from one of the severer colleges long before it became commonplace for debutantes to do so, and from the list of benefactions which offered opportunities for conspicuous waste in an altruistic form, she had long since dropped the sponsors.h.i.+p of day nurseries and fallen women, leaving this to the less intellectual members of Society. It was in the poetry leagues and the English-speaking unions that she could be found, and in those spontaneous, pacifist groups of women which were most fervid and vocal just before a war, were as swiftly trans.m.u.ted into "Bundles for Something" during the war's course, and were once again transformed by victory into Leagues for a Proper Peace. It was related of her, and justly, that she had downed in debate (at a benefit) a Justice of the Supreme Court (retired). Her three daughters before Let.i.tia, had been sent, not to Miss Hewitt's Cla.s.ses, or various "Halls" in America or Lausanne, but to Radcliffe, Bryn Mawr, and in one case, Oxford, after which, their doughy faces veiled by Venus-nets of trust funds, they had achieved marriage, and settled down to inheriting their mother's committees.h.i.+ps.

Therefore, when Hyacinth Hall, in straits after the death of its founder, had circulated an appeal to "its friends" to rally and save it, it had not been likely that Mrs. Whyte would appear in that category, since the school was superannuated, of a type she deplored, and located beyond the Eastern seaboard, in a part of America in whose pretenses she did not acquiesce. As for Let.i.tia, she had long since been taught at home by elderly women whose need made them tactful, whose chief function was to maintain the tacit a.s.sumption that she was being taught at all.

On the very day, however, that Mrs. Whyte received the letter from the Hall in her morning mail, the housekeeper had appeared in her sitting-room, red-faced, almost in tears, with the tale that Miss Let.i.tia was bothering the houseman again.

After the housekeeper had been rea.s.sured, halted just short of a bosomy, sisterly commiseration Mrs. Whyte could not have tolerated either as a woman or as an employer, Let.i.tia's mother sat over her dilemma for a long time, contemplating the pitiful mauraudings of her innocent. Then, with one of those masterly inspirations which had made her such a jewel among committeewomen, she had riffled hastily through her correspondence for the letter from the Hall. The school, she recalled, was situated in fox-hunting country; its girls spent a good part of their time in riding clothes. And Let.i.tia could ride, had even appeared un.o.btrusively, years ago, at one or two shows, in the children's cla.s.s. She had proved unequal to jumping, or anything fancy; she required a gentle mount, but she loved horses, and she could ride. Her sole other talent, that for "art work," would certainly find a place in the rudimentary cla.s.ses of such a school, or else one of those special arrangements, of which she had already had so many in her life, could always be made. And what better place for protection, for segregation without emphasis, than a girls' school, especially one where, its highest aim being to equip its young ladies with all the attractions and accoutrements of the belle, the value of protection was understood better than any other?

Therefore, on the list of the influential few who had rallied to the support of the Hall, none had rallied harder than Mrs. Whyte. And at the end of that summer six years before, the newspaper of the little Hudson River town where the Whytes had their bracketed gothic summer place, had reported: "Mr. and Mrs. Reese Reynolds Whyte and their daughter, Miss Let.i.tia Reynolds Whyte, have left for an extended motor tour of the South, their destination Hyacinth Hall, the well-known finis.h.i.+ng school, where Miss Whyte will enroll as an art student. Accompanying them is their house guest, Dame Alice Mellish, formerly honored by His Majesty, the King of England, for her studies in Anglo-American semantics."

It had been a queer entourage which had descended upon the school in those last deciduous days of summer. The few teachers and students already there, waiting out the close, inert days before the beginning of the term, were energized and impressed by the visitors, whose confident eccentricity had as surely betokened superiority. Flanked by Mrs. Whyte, a type instantly recognizable and acceptable, and by Dame Alice, whose skirts were uneven to the point of vagary, but whose t.i.tle had preceded her through the school like an odor, had come Let.i.tia, not so instantly recognizable, but soon to be. And wheeled out, in dark finale, from the capacious back of the car, had come the chair bearing Mr. Whyte, a beautifully groomed old man in lawyer's black and a stiff collar, his very clean hands nerveless on his knees, the fixed upward twist of one side of his mouth lending him a demeanor of unchangeable pleasure. He did not talk, and apparently could not, but his lack, appearing at the end of life rather than at the beginning, was an honorable one which needed not to be hidden, and he was wheeled in and out of every conversation. From time to time, the chauffeur who attended him leaned over and removed or replaced the silky black beaver hat on the silver head at the proper intervals, and this, seeming to be done according to some prescribed rhythm of etiquette, not only lent the old man a verisimilitude of activity, but created, also, an atmosphere of the most recherche good taste. And when Mrs. Whyte, pointing her arches carefully before her, trailing the confused and conquered Miss Rosanna behind her, had clacked down the marble steps of the main building, she had sailed right up to the wheel chair, which had not attempted the steps, as to a reviewing stand, and with nods and becks and the most wreathed of smiles, had apparently recounted the whole transaction to the unchangeable benevolence of Father.

The Whytes did not stay the night at the school. They departed that same evening, leaving behind them a legend, that had faded, and Let.i.tia, who had stayed the same.

So it was that Let.i.tia, entering her hot, still room on this particular day, entered the only permanent room in the dormitory, a room from which she yearned, each expectant June, to be delivered, and to which she was, each disappointed June, remanded. Most of the other rooms had a littered, bird-of-pa.s.sage look which suggested that the girl in each was only sojourning on her way to wider fields which Let.i.tia, while she craved them, could not have described. Let.i.tia's room, however, had the same supervised neatness as her person, and with its pictures of her family hanging on the wall in circular silver frames, its chiming clock near the bed, and its large calendar with the block numbers marked off crosswise, looked as if it had long ago made its concessions to forever. During one or two of the early years, the accident of a friendly girl neighbor next door had permitted the unlocking of the connecting door between the rooms, as was done everywhere else in the school, but with the coming of Willa Mae, all this had changed, and little by little, Let.i.tia's almost tolerated, almost earned place in the humming, cozy undercurrents of the dormitory, had slipped away.

"Honestly, Mum," Willa had reported at home, "it would give you the creeps! Really it would!" And at the very next Parents' Day, Mrs. Fordyce, not having trusted herself among the delicacies of correspondence, had actually broached the subject, gaspingly, to Miss Rosanna, but had found her, under her cloud of faltering rea.s.surances, unexpectedly immovable. For the special arrangement for Let.i.tia was large.

Nevertheless, the last four years had come to have a painful weight of their own, had come to be known, in her sharded thoughts, as "the locked-door years." But now, as she closed the door behind her, excitement twitched at her mouth, gave almost a complexity to the clear gla.s.s of her eyes. For a minute she stood in the room like a stranger to it, as if waiting for someone to tell her what to do next. Then she went to the dresser and pulled out a drawer. Behind a pile of tailored slips, all alike, which she moved to one side with patient tidiness, she found what she wanted. With a crow of pleasure, she drew out the sequinned cap and held it in her hand. Straightening up, she walked over to the window, hung the cap on the hooked ornament at the end of the window-shade cord, and stood there dazzled, watching it.

Until now, there had been no occasion important enough for it since the fiasco of its first wearing. Early in her first year at the school Let.i.tia had been permitted to attend the initial one of the highly chaperoned dances which occurred there several times a year in co-operation with a nearby military academy. Halfway through the evening, an affrighted young man, flying incontinently from the coat room, and an incredulous wave of gossip, rippling through the dancers, had made it all too apparent that either Mrs. Whyte's strictures to Miss Rosanna had been too reserved, or Miss Rosanna's interpretation of them insufficiently literal. Ever since then, on such evenings, Let.i.tia, accompanied by Delia, had been sent to the movies in Minetteville, where they stayed right through the double feature, and often even sat over a sundae at Whalen's afterwards, although Delia, admitted there in her capacity as duenna, never ate anything, but sat stiffly, referring quietly from time to time to the watch the Whytes had sent her after the first year.

Now, twisting and turning with a purposeful motion of its own, the cap dangled and reversed itself, glittering in the sun. A prism of light, deflected from it, kindled the silver frames of the pictures, where they hung on the wall, disregarded by Let.i.tia's glance, as their originals hung, neglected, in the dusty galleries of her remembrance. Twice a year she saw her family briefly, but so briefly, so remotely across the hedge to another world, that they had all but receded into symbols of that larger existence into which one was accepted, to which one acceded only after the mystical rite of graduation.

All the signposts, all the clues, had brought Let.i.tia around to this conclusion, and helped by circ.u.mstance, to her contrivance for escape. On the door of Papa Davis' office, a yellowed card, pinned to the aged door frame, said in gothicked lettering: "Walter Wallace Davis. Professor, Emeritus," and only yesterday, straying in there in answer to his eager, scooping glance, she had stopped to peer closer, almost professionally, at the lettering on the card, and with a delaying finger on the last queer word, had asked its meaning. Papa Davis had risen from his armchair and bent closer to her over the card, as if he too had had to ponder its meaning. Then, tossing back his head so that she had seen the waggle-tuft of beard on his chin pointing straight out, he had laughed in his neighing voice.

"Graduated!" he had said, smiling at her, nodding like a pendulum. "It means 'graduated,'" he had added, frowning. "Leaving a place forever." In the silence that fell between them he had kept on speculatively nodding. He had stretched an arm past her, then, to grasp the door, had leaned out to stare fretfully up and down the empty corridor, and stepping back into the room, had softly closed the door and locked it.

Even when he had come closer, very close, she had been unalarmed. Each year the school put on a Roman Festival, and Papa Davis had been present at rehearsals to hear the Latin declamations, and pa.s.s on the authenticity of the home-draped togas. If she had seen the girls exploding into silent laughter in a corner, if she had heard one whispering to another "Papa Davis has to feel you to see if you're Roman!" it had meant to her, perhaps, one more cryptic notion of authority, or perhaps nothing at all. And so, if at first she had watched his overtures with a docility heightened only with curiosity, then later she had received them with eager warmth, even though he was nothing like the young men to whom she had once put out a questing hand. For the force of his words, just said, hung around him like a clue, a means to an end. Then, too, she had heard him say so often in his peevish, solitary voice, that the school was his real, his only home, and this, interpreted as a complaint, had harped on a reality she understood, which made them kin. And finally, gazing up at him from the cracked leather davenport, she had seen that, with his avid lip drawn back over the long yellow teeth, he had looked unintimidating, familiar, like an old, begging horse.

Now she lifted the cap away from the window, twirled it several times over in her fingers, and walked over to the mirror. With a single uncalculated movement she put the cap on her head and looked into the mirror with a pleased smile. Then she walked over to her desk. Strewn over its surface were a number of small white cards, discarded trial copies of that final, faultless one she had put in the school mail-box.

Still holding the sparkling cap awkwardly to her head with one hand, she bent over the desk and picked up one of the cards. Beautifully printed and shaded in India ink, it seemed unmarred, and in truth, working delightedly all that morning over her inscriptions, she had been almost reluctant to settle on one as perfect enough for her vivid purpose. She had copied the first word secretly from the slip on Willa Mae's desk. Her own name she knew how to do. The last of the legend she had transcribed lovingly from the yellowed card rifled from Professor Davis' office door. Only, here, with this last, making a single change which for her amounted to an act of creation, almost of intelligence, she had inverted the sequence, so that the little card she held in her hand now, copy of that still more perfect one she had slipped into the box, read: "Engaged. Professor Walter Wallace Davis. And Let.i.tia Reynolds Whyte, Emeritus."

The Seacoast of Bohemia.

THROUGH THE CARNIVAL LOOPS of the beginning of the bridge the cars, s.h.i.+ning suddenly, crept slowly on their way to Manhattan. Back of their packed lines, the dark smear of Jersey, p.r.i.c.ked with itinerant sparkles, gained mystery as it was left behind, but never enough to challenge the great swag of coastline that hung on the blackness opposite.

In front of Sam Boardman's car the lines inched forward and stopped.

"Look at that!" he said. He leaned on his motionless wheel and stared south. "Will you look at that!"

Bee's nearer earring, tiny, hard and excellent, flexed with light.

"There she is," he said. "Just past your earring. One of the wonders of the world. If I live to be a hundred, I'll never get tired of it."

Or of knowing I have a piece of it, he thought. The city was his hero, the only one he had ever had or would have. Born into it, funneled through its schools and its cynical, enchanting streets, he was still as tranced by it as all the boys and girls from out of town who ate it up with their eyes and hearts and were themselves eaten in the hunt for a piece of it. There it was, he thought, the seacoast of Bohemia, moving always a little forward as you went toward it, so that even now, when he saw his listing in the telephone directory, Samuel Boardman atty 351 5 Av, Residence 75 Cent Pk W, he could hardly believe that he was an accredited citizen of the mirage.

"Give thanks you don't have to look at it from Englewood," she said. She lit a cigarette and blew vigorously on her furs. "How Irv and Dolly-of all people. ..."

Because of the kids, he thought, as they moved forward a few feet. We know d.a.m.n well it was because of the kids. All the New Yorkers who grew up there as tough as weeds were convincing themselves that their children couldn't have sound teeth or sound psyches unless they moved them to the country. Perhaps it was the last gesture, the final axing of the c.o.c.ktail hour and the theater-ticket agency, by those who didn't want to stay in town unless they could go on being on the town. Or perhaps it was decentralization-not of cities, but the last, the final decentralization-of the ego. At least they said it was because of the kids, and you didn't say this aloud to a woman who had been trying to have one for ten years. You took pleasure, instead, in the quietly serviced apartment with the expansible dining nook and the contractible servant; and you were careful to voice this on occasion, perhaps at the little evening ritual when you were proffered the faultless drink from the crumbless table, and you reached around to pat the behind, flat as a ghost's, of the woman who had not let herself go.

Ahead of him, the lines melted slightly; he eased into a better lane and picked up some speed as they neared the city side. Through the surge of Irv's after-dinner highb.a.l.l.s, he s.h.i.+ed away from the image of Bee, her platformed shoes tucked stiffly to one side on the toy-strewn rug, her blond wool lap held politely defenseless against the sticky advances of Irv's twins. After all, there was a certain phoniness in the people who tweeded up and donned couturier brogues just because they were visiting the country; Bee's bravura Sat.u.r.day night chic was more honest. And she had patted the twins' round fists and held on to them, if a little away from the lap, and had referred to herself as Aunt Bee.

"Talk about wonders," she said. "To see Irv and Dolly Miller knee-deep in paint and dirt is one of them. Two months out of Sutton Place. And that gem of an apartment."

"You realize they're the fourth in a year?" he said. "The Kaufmans, in Stamford. Bill and Chick, in Roslyn. And the Baileys, in Pound Ridge."

"Oh, it's the same difference," she said. "A perpetual stew of wallpapering."

He slowed up for the traffic on the New York side. It was true, he thought; it was about the same difference. Country coy, all of them, as soon as they hit a mortgage-they made a morality of acreage and a virtue of inconvenience. In Stamford and Roslyn the "doing it over" might be less obsessively home-grown, perhaps, and at the Baileys' there would be brandy instead of highb.a.l.l.s after dinner-the gla.s.ses thinning appropriately with the neighborhoods, all along the way.

Even in the city though, the conversations of their friends were more and more loaded with the impedimenta of the parent. "That's just like my Bobby" and "If you can just remember it's a phase" floated above the bridge tables, and when the men coagulated in a corner afterward, even there, the inverted boasting of the successful male was likely to be expressed in terms of what it had been necessary to pay the orthodontist. When he and Bee met downtown for dinner these days, it was more and more often in a foursome with some couple older than they, some pair admiringly ticked off by others as "so devoted to one another" or "very close"-with only the faintest of innuendoes that this might be because there had been nothing else to come between.

Of a sudden, he turned away from the entrance to the express highway and wheeled up the entrance marked LOCAL TRAFFIC.

"Aren't you going down the highway?"

"Just thought I'd like to go by the old neighborhood."

In front of them, Broadway jigged like a peddler's market. Tonight, Sat.u.r.day, it would be streaming with the hot, seeking current of young couples walking hand in hand, as Bee and he had once done, picking their futures on the cheap from the gla.s.sed-in cornucopias of the stores. He felt an immediate throb of intimacy with these buildings, their fronts pocked with bright store-cubicles, their gray, nameless stone comfortably sooted over with living. From the ocher and malachite entrance of the building where Bee and he lived now, one walked, every pore revealed, into a fluorescent sea of light tolerable only to those who had in some manner arrived-the man jingling pocket change he would never dream of counting, the woman swinging lightly from her shoulders the stole of success. Most of the houses here would have small, bleared hallways with an alcove under the stairs, and on each of the five or six flights above there would be a landing where a boy and a girl, scuffling apart or leaning together, could smell, from their paint-rank corner, the indescribable attar of what might be.

He touched the hydromatic foot pedal as they reached a stop light.

"Not bad for a couple of kids from around here," he said, slapping his free hand on the duvetyn seat.

"Not bad." She smiled up at him eagerly, two lines on either side of her mouth slightly frogging her cheeks. Her almost gross hunger for compliment always touched him nevertheless; she seemed to need to ama.s.s his every approving remark-either personal or marginal-as evidence that their life together was what he wanted it to be. He watched her as she looked out the window and squinted slightly for lack of the gla.s.ses she would never wear except at home. If you had put the Bee of tonight in a red dress with too much braid on it and had subst.i.tuted a hairdresser's springy weekend curls for her present casually planed coiffure, she would be very like the girl who had ridden uptown from City College with him, with whom he had walked these streets on countless Sat.u.r.day nights. Still, with the years, a woman had a choice of either spreading or withering, and behind her quick, compulsive smile he sometimes caught a glimpse of what she might be at fifty. It was less frightening to see only age in the face of someone you loved, than to see the kind of aging it could be. He saw her at fifty-one of those women like shrunken nymphs, all slenderness and simulacrum from the rear, who, turning, met your glance with faces like crushed valentines.

"Where on earth are you going?" she asked.

They had left the vivid, delicatessen reek of the main street, and were traveling slowly down a street that dead-ended on the Harlem River. He stopped the car on a street with a few furtive secondhand stores on the west and a murky fuzz of unregenerated park on the east. None of it had changed with the years.

"There's High Bridge," he said. "And there's the water tower." He was only half aware of her moving sharply to the far end of the seat.

He could just see the water tower, a dun cylinder that had never been much more than a neighborhood mark in the city's proliferating stone. There it was though, a dingy minaret above the brush of the park. Any one of a number of paths led to its base, at the foot of which Bee and he had slept together one night, the first time for each, the only time before they had married. He could scarcely remember the innocence of that urban hedgerow lovemaking. Its details were lost forever, buried under hundreds of superimposed nights in bed. What he remembered was the imperative sense of "now," which had been shuffled off somewhere along the way. And he remembered the city, a.s.sisting like a third presence-the river steaming softly behind them in the mosquito-bitten night, and the occasional start of the tugs.

It was early November now, but the air had a delayed softness, the doomed, uneasy gentleness of fall. He put a hand on her lap and found her gloved hand.

"Want to take a walk?"

"No."

"Just for a minute. There's an entrance down there."

"Don't be silly."

"Come on."

"Sam ... you tight?"

"Look," he said, "I meant a walk." He pressed her glove back on her lap and left it there.

Two capped men pa.s.sed by, looking sideways at the car from vaguely identical foreign faces, and continued down the block, their feet slapping echoes on the dead street.

She watched them through her window, huddling into her furs. "I want to go home."

"You didn't used to be afraid of-neighborhoods," he said.

She sat still for a minute. "Took you twelve years. To throw that at me."