There were probably five or six photographs, but there seemed to be more. One was a decorated 82nd Airborne man who looked impressive, but another was a member of service and support personnel—a “Blue-Star Commando”—and Colby had learned to express a veiled disdain for those people.
“Well, but what does that matter?” she inquired. “I don’t care what he ‘did’ or didn’t ‘do’ in the war; what’s that got to do with anything?”
“Okay; I guess you’re right,” he said while she was putting the wallet away, and he watched her closely. “But look: are you in love with any of these guys?”
“Oh, well, certainly, I suppose so,” she said. “But then, that’s easy, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Being in love with someone, if he’s nice and you like him.”
And that gave him much to think about, all the next day.
The following night, when he’d been asked to “come up for supper or something,” he gravely inspected her white, ill-furnished apartment and met her roommate, whose name was Irene. She looked to be in her middle thirties, and it was clear from her every glance and smile that she enjoyed sharing a place with someone so much younger. She made Colby uneasy at once by telling him what a “nice-looking boy” he was; then she hovered and fussed over Marcia’s fixing the drinks, which were a cheap brand of American blended whiskey and soda, with no ice.
The supper turned out to be even more perfunctory than he’d imagined—a casserole of Spam and sliced potatoes and powdered milk—and while they were still at the table Irene laughed heartily at something Colby said, something he hadn’t meant to be all that funny. Recovering, her eyes shining, she turned to Marcia and said, “Oh, he’s sweet, your brother, isn’t he—and d’you know something? I think you’re right about him. I think he is a virgin.”
There are various ways of enduring acute embarrassment: Colby might have hung his blushing head, or he might have stuck a cigarette in his lips and lighted it, squinting, looking up at the woman with still-narrowed eyes and saying, “What makes you think that?” but what he did instead was burst out laughing. And he went on laughing and laughing long after the time for showing what a preposterous assumption they had made; he was helpless in his chair; he couldn’t stop.
“… Irene!” Marcia was saying, and she was blushing too. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—I never said that.”
“Oh, well, sorry; sorry; my fault,” Irene said, but there was still a sparkle in her eye across the messy table when he pulled himself together at last, feeling a little sick.
Marcia’s train would leave at nine, from some station far in the north of London, so she had to hurry. “Look, Paul,” she said over the hasty packing of her suitcase, “there’s really no need for you to come along all that way; I’ll just run up there by myself.”
But he insisted—he wanted to get away from Irene—and so they rode nervously together, without speaking, on the Underground. But they got off at the wrong stop—“Jesus, that was foolish,” she said; “now we’ll have to walk”—and when they were walking they began to talk again.
“I’ll never know what possessed Irene to say such a silly thing,” she said.
“That’s okay. Forget it.”
“Because I only said you seemed very young. Was that such a terrible thing to say?”
“I guess not.”
“I mean who ever minded being young, for God’s sake—isn’t that what everyone wants to be?”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, you guess not and you guess so. Well, it’s true—everyone does want to be young. I’m eighteen now, and sometimes I wish I were sixteen again.”
“Why?”
“Oh, so I could do things a little more intelligently, I suppose; try not to go chasing after uniforms quite so much—British or American; I don’t know.”
So she had been laid at sixteen, either by some plucky little RAF pilot or some slavering American, and probably by several of both.
He was tired of walking and of carrying the suitcase; it took an effort of will to remind himself that he was an infantry soldier. Then she said, “Oh, look: we’ve made it!” and they ran the last fifty yards into the railroad station and across its echoing marble floor. But her train had gone, and there wasn’t another one due to leave for an hour. They sat uncomfortably on an old bench for a while; then they went out to the street again to get the fresh air.
She took the suitcase from him, placed it against the base of a lamppost and seated herself prettily on it, crossing her nice legs. Her knees were nice too. She looked thoroughly composed. She would leave tonight knowing he was a virgin—she would know it forever, whether she ever saw him again or not.
“Paul?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Look, I was only sort of teasing you about those boys in the photographs—I don’t know why I did that, except to be silly.”
“Okay. I knew you were teasing.” But it was a relief to hear her say it, even so.
“They were just boys I met when I used to go to the Red Cross dances at Rainbow Corner. None of them ever really did propose to me except Chet, and that was only a kidding-around sort of thing because he said I was pretty. If I ever took him up on it he’d die.”
“Okay.”
“And it was silly just now to tell you about chasing uniforms when I was sixteen—God, I was terrified of boys at sixteen. Have you any idea what it is that makes people of our age want to claim more knowledge of—of sex and so forth than they really have?”
“No. No, I don’t.” He was beginning to like her more and more, but he was afraid that if he let her go on she would soon insist she was a virgin too, to make him feel better; that would almost certainly be a condescending lie, and so would only make him feel worse.
“Because I mean we have our whole lives,” she said, “isn’t that right? Take you: you’ll be going home soon and going to college and there’ll be girls coming in and out of your life for years; then eventually you’ll fall in love with someone, and isn’t that what makes the world go around?”
She was being kind to him; he didn’t know whether to be grateful or to sink even further into wretchedness.
“And then me, well I’m in love with someone now,” she said, and this time there appeared to be no teasing in her face. “I’ve wanted to tell you about him ever since we met, but there hasn’t been time. He’s the man I’m going up to spend the week with in Blackpool. His name is Ralph Kovacks and he’s twenty-three. He was a waist-gunner on a B-17 but he only flew thirteen missions because his nerves fell apart and he’s been in and out of hospitals ever since. He’s sort of small and funny-looking and all he wants to do is sit around in his underwear reading great books, and he’s going to be a philosopher and I’ve sort of come to think I can’t live without him. I may not go to the States at all next year; I may go to Heidelberg because that’s where Ralph wants to go; the whole question is whether or not he’ll let me stay with him.”
“Oh,” Colby said. “I see.”
“What d’you mean, you ‘see’? You really aren’t much of a conversationalist, you know that? You ‘see.’ What can you possibly ‘see’ from what little I’ve told you? Jesus, how can you see anything at all with those big, round, virginal eyes of yours?”
He was walking away from her, head down, because there seemed nothing else to do, but he hadn’t gone far before she came running after him, her little high-heeled shoes clicking on the sidewalk. “Oh, Paul, don’t go away,” she called. “Come back; please come back. I’m terribly sorry.”
So they went back together to where the suitcase stood against the lamppost, but this time she didn’t sit down. “I’m terribly sorry,” she said again. “And look, don’t come to the train with me; I want to say goodbye here. Only, listen. Listen. I know you’ll be all right. We’ll both be all right. It’s awfully important to believe that. Well; God bless.”
“Okay, and you too,” he said. “You too
, Marcia.”
Then her arms went up and around his neck and the whole slender weight of her was pressed against him for a moment, and in a voice broken with tears she said, “Oh, my brother.”
He walked a great distance alone after that, and there wasn’t anything devil-may-care about it. The heels of his boots came down in a calm, regular cadence, and his face was set in the look of a practical young man with a few things on his mind. Tomorrow he would telephone his mother and say he’d been called back to France, “for duty,” a phrase she would neither understand nor ever question; then all that would be finished. And with seven days left in this vast, intricate, English-speaking place, there was every reason to expect he would have a girl.
Regards at Home
“WELL, I KNOW it seems funny,” the young man said, getting up from his drawing board, “but I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced. My name’s Dan Rosenthal.” He was tall and heavy, and his face suggested the pain of shyness.
“Bill Grove,” I told him as we shook hands, and then we could both pretend to settle down. We had just been hired at Remington Rand and assigned to share a glassed-in cubicle in the bright, murmurous maze of the eleventh floor; this was in the spring of 1949, in New York.
Dan Rosenthal’s job was to design and illustrate the company’s “external house organ,” a slick and unreadable monthly magazine called Systems; mine was to write and edit the copy for it. He seemed able to talk and listen while executing even the subtlest parts of his work, and I soon fell to neglecting mine for hours and days at a time, so there began an almost steady flow of conversation over the small space between his immaculate drawing board and the ever-more dismaying clutter of my desk.
I was twenty-three that year; Dan was a year or so older, and there was a gruff, rumbling gentleness in his voice that seemed to promise he would always be good company. He lived with his parents and his younger brother in Brooklyn, “just around the corner from Coney Island, if that gives you a picture,” and he was a recent graduate of the art school at Cooper Union—a school that charges no tuition but is famous for being highly selective. I’d heard that only one out of ten applicants is accepted there; when I asked him if that was true he said he didn’t know.
“So where’d you go to school, Bill?” he asked, and that was always an awkward question.
I had come out of the Army with the wealth of the GI Bill of Rights at my disposal, but hadn’t taken advantage of it—and I will never wholly understand why. It was partly fear: I’d done poorly in high school, the Army had assessed my IQ at 109, and I didn’t want the risk of further failure. And it was partly arrogance: I planned to become a professional writer as soon as possible, and that made four years of college seem a wasteful delay. There was a third factor too—one that took too much explaining for comfort, but could in a greatly simplified form be easier to tell than all the fear-and-arrogance stuff—and this had become the reply I gave most often on being asked why I hadn’t gone to college. “Well,” I would say, “I had my mother to take care of.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Dan Rosenthal said, looking concerned. “I mean, it’s too bad you had to miss out on college.” He seemed to be thinking it over for a while, trailing a delicate paintbrush back and forth under the clean scent of banana oil that always hung in his side of the cubicle. Then he said, “Still, if the GI Bill gives allotments for dependent wives and children, how come they wouldn’t do it for a dependent mother?”
That was something I had never looked into; worse, it was something that had never occurred to me. But whatever lame and evasive reply I made didn’t matter much because he had already moved on to find another marshy place in the dark field of my autobiography.
“And you’re married now?” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, so who’s taking care of Mother? You still doing that too?”
“No, she’s—well, she’s pretty much back on her feet now,” I said, and that was a lie.
I knew he wouldn’t press me on it, and he didn’t. Office friendships don’t work that way. But I knew too, as I fingered nervously through the Systems copy, that I had better watch my mouth around Dan Rosenthal from now on.
* * *
My mother, who had lived on alimony payments as long as I could remember, had been left with nothing after my father died in 1942. At first she’d taken a few harsh and degrading jobs—working in a lens-grinding shop, working in the cheap loft factories that make department-store mannequins—but work like that was pitifully wrong for a bewildered, rapidly aging, often hysterical woman who had always considered herself a sculptor with at least as much intensity as I brought to the notion of myself as a writer. During my time in the Army she had collected something from her status as a “Class A Dependent,” but it couldn’t have been much. For a while she lived with my older sister and her family in the Long Island suburbs, but the clash of personalities in that unhappy house soon brought her back to New York—and to me. My sister wrote me a letter about it, as if it were too delicate a matter for discussion on the phone, explaining that her husband’s “views” on sharing his home with in-laws were “sound in theory, though terribly difficult in practice,” and saying she was sure I would understand.
That was how it started. My mother and I lived on what little I earned at apprentice jobs, first on a trade journal and later as a rewrite man for the United Press, and we shared an apartment she had found on Hudson Street. Except for a nagging sense that this wasn’t a very adventurous or attractive way for a young man to live, I was comfortable there at first. We got along surprisingly well; but then, we always had.
All through childhood I had admired the way she made light of money troubles—that, perhaps even more than the art she doggedly aspired to or the love she so frequently invoked, was what had made her uncommon and fine for me. If we were occasionally evicted from our rented homes, if we seldom had presentable clothes and sometimes went hungry for two or three days while waiting for my father’s monthly check, those hardships only enhanced the sweet poignance of her reading Great Expectations aloud to my sister and me in her bed. She was a free spirit. We were free spirits, and only a world composed of creditors or of “people like your father” could fail to appreciate the romance of our lives.
Now, she often assured me that this new arrangement was only temporary—she would surely find some way to get “back on her feet” in no time at all—but as the months wore on she made no effort, or any reasonable plans, and so I began to lose patience. This wasn’t making any sense. I didn’t want to listen to her torrential talk anymore or join in her laughter; I thought she was drinking too much; I found her childish and irresponsible—two of my father’s words—and I didn’t even want to look at her: small and hunched in tasteful clothes that were never quite clean, with sparse, wild, yellow-gray hair and a soft mouth set in the shape either of petulance or of hilarity.
Her teeth had been bad for years. They were unsightly, and they’d begun to hurt. I took her to the Northern Dispensary, an antique little triangular brick landmark of the Village that was said to be the oldest free dental clinic in New York. A pleasant young dentist examined her and told us that all her teeth would have to be removed.
“Oh, no,” she cried.
The work couldn’t be done here in the clinic, he explained, but if she came to his private office in Queens he would do it there, equip her with dentures, and charge us only half his normal fee because she was a clinic patient.
It was a deal. We took a train out to Jamaica and I sat with her through it all, hearing her grunt and shudder with the shock of each extraction, watching the dentist drop one ugly old tooth after another onto his little porcelain tray. It made my toes clench and my scalp prickle; it was a terrible but oddly satisfying thing to watch. There, I thought as each tooth fell bloody on the tray. There … there … there. How could she make a romance out of this? Maybe now, at last, she would come to terms with reality.
All the way
home that afternoon, with the lower half of her face so fallen-in that she wouldn’t let anyone see it, she rode staring out the train window and pressed a wad of Kleenex to her mouth. She seemed utterly defeated. That night, when worse pain set in, she thrashed and moaned in her bed and pleaded with me for a drink.
“Well, I don’t think that’s too good an idea,” I told her. “I mean alcohol warms your blood, and when you’re bleeding, you see, it’ll only make it worse.”
“Call him up,” she commanded. “Call what’s-his-name, the dentist. Get the Queens information operator. I don’t care what time it is. I’m dying. Do you understand me? I’m dying.”
And I obeyed her. “I’m sorry to bother you at home, Doctor,” I began, “but the thing is I wondered if it would be all right for my mother to have something to drink.”
“Oh, certainly,” he said. “Fluids are the best thing. Fruit juices, iced tea, any of the popular sodas and soft drinks; that’ll be fine.”
“No, I meant—you know—whiskey. Alcohol.”
“Oh.” And he explained, tactfully, that alcohol would not be advisable at all.
In the end I gave her a couple of drinks anyway and had three or four myself, standing alone and slumped at the window in a melodramatic posture of despair. I thought I would never get out of that place alive.
After she got her new teeth, and after the first discomfort of wearing them was over, she seemed to shed twenty years. She smiled and laughed frequently and spent a lot of time at the mirror. But she was afraid everyone would know they were false teeth, and that made her shy.
“Can you hear me clacking when I talk?” she would ask me.
“No.”
“Well, I can hear it. And do you see this awful little crease under my nose, where they fit in? Is that very noticeable?”
“No, of course not. Nobody’s going to notice that.”
In her days as a sculptor she had joined three art organizations that required the paying of dues: the National Sculpture Society, the National Association of Women Artists, and something called Pen and Brush, which was a local Village women’s club—a relic, I think, of the old, old Village of smocks and incense and monogrammed Egyptian cigarettes and Edna St. Vincent Millay. At my urging she had reluctantly agreed to let her dues lapse at the two uptown enterprises, but she clung to Pen and Brush because it was “socially” important for her.
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