“Can I help?” Steve said.
She shook her head quite violently. When she had piled up the saucers she took them out to the kitchen. She stayed out there quite a while. He could hear the water running into the sink, but there was no clatter of dishes. After a time, he followed her.
She was standing at the sink. She hadn’t even put the pile of saucers down yet, she was holding them in front of her in a careless, relaxed way, as if she couldn’t decide whether they were worth washing or whether she should simply let them drop. She hadn’t heard him come in because the water was making so much noise. Feeling like an intruder, he turned and went back to the parlor and picked up a magazine. When she returned she found him slouched in a chair reading and smoking, with one leg dangling over the arm of the chair.
She smiled at him, and he noticed that she had put on fresh makeup.
“I thought I’d better wash up the dishes,” she said. “They’re easier to do if you do them right away.”
“Are they?” He closed the magazine and let it slide to the floor. It had hardly landed before she was across the room and kneeling to pick it up. Her hair looked very clean and shiny and smelled faintly of flowers. He reached out and touched it. It felt soft but not so soft as he remembered a woman’s hair should feel. (He hadn’t touched a girl since he’d gone into the hospital and seen some of the V.D. cases.)
But still, soft enough, so he patted it. Good, kind, clean, sweet Beatrice, he thought.
She seemed annoyed by his touch. She rose briskly and slammed the magazine back on the table.
“Well, Bea,” he said. “How’s business?”
“Oh, fine.” She sat down opposite him, smoothing her dress carefully over her knees. “Same as usual.”
“I thought the old bas— tyrant would have made you vice president by this time.”
“It’s all right. You can say bastard as long as mother’s not around.”
They both laughed, but he knew he had offended her by changing the word to “tyrant.” It was like moving her back a generation.
She said crisply, “Remember the cartoon in Esquire years ago? ‘I may be an old maid, but I’m not a fussy old maid.’ Well, that’s me.”
She apparently expected him to say something reassuring about her age, but he couldn’t think of anything except a flat, “You’re not old,” so he kept quiet. He wondered why women became sensitive about their age after twenty-five, especially unmarried women like Beatrice. There were no special virtues or privileges attached to being twenty-five. Everyone who was thirty had been twenty-five for exactly one year. Women had so many queer emotional attitudes about unimportant matters. Here was Beatrice, with a good job, a house, the best of clothes and nice legs . . .
He looked again and thought, very nice legs. But the fact remained that they were attached to Beatrice.
“What are you frowning about?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just wondering what’s happened to Aunt Vi.”
“She’s probably arguing with Mrs. Henderson. She usually is. It’s her way of getting a kick out of life.”
“She’s quite a girl.”
He stifled a yawn and Beatrice said immediately, “Can I mix you a drink or something?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got to be going in a few minutes.”
“You just got here. It’s not even dark yet.”
“I go to bed pretty early.”
“We’ve hardly talked—or anything . . . But of course you need your rest, don’t you?”
The light in the room was quite dim and he couldn’t see her very well, but he had the impression she was smiling again. He wondered whether her smile was a nervous tic; when she couldn’t think of anything to do she smiled instead of lighting a cigarette or something like other people.
“You’re thinner,” she said.
He moved restlessly in the chair. “Oh, am I?”
“Mother and I were thinking if you—wanted to stay here, we have an extra bedroom and we wouldn’t bother you, and you’d get the right kind of food . . .”
She spoke very coldly, as if she were trying to make it clear that they didn’t give a damn if he starved, but they didn’t want to waste that extra bedroom.
“That’s awfully nice of you,” he said.
“We just thought, if you wanted to, you might as well stay here.”
“It’s swell of you . . .”
“Of course, it’s pretty far out, isn’t it, and you wouldn’t find it very interesting, living with two older women.”
“It isn’t that,” he said, not realizing until the words were out that he had refused her offer, and that she had known he was going to.
“It was mother’s idea,” she said. “She thought you might want a little home life since you’ve been away so long.” She got up and switched on a lamp, averting her face from the splash of light. “But I told her, if Steve wanted home life, he’d want his own, he’d get married. What ever happened to Martha?”
He had the impression from her careful, measured tones that she’d been waiting all the time to ask him about Martha.
“She got married,” he said.
“Oh. I hadn’t heard. I’m sorry.”
He laughed suddenly, and the noise seemed to jar the room. “There’s a home life for you. You can measure it by the ton. Maybe you know her husband. His name’s Charles Pearson.”
“I’ve heard of him. He has something to do with a trust company.”
“I didn’t know that. Oh, Lord.” He began laughing again. He didn’t know why, and neither did Beatrice.
She said anxiously, “I’d really like to mix you a drink.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“We’ve got Scotch and brandy.”
“Scotch.”
He went out into the kitchen with her and watched her while she mixed his drink. She had remembered exactly the way he liked it, with water and a twist of lemon peel. She fixed one for herself, too, though he knew she didn’t enjoy drinking and was doing it only to please him. He felt very grateful to Beatrice. When she handed him the glass, he said, “You’re a very nice girl, Bea.”
“I’ve been called that before. It’s an apology, not a compliment. What’ll we drink to?”
“How about to trust companies?”
“All right.”
Their glasses touched and he said, “As soon as I left, she must have figured me for a dead pigeon, and dead pigeons don’t do anybody any good. There never was one yet who had anything to do with a trust company.”
“I only met her a few times, but she didn’t strike me as being like that.”
“Well, I’m not trying to be fair to her. Why in hell should I?”
“She struck me,” Beatrice said, staring into her glass, “as being crazy about you. Why didn’t you get married?”
“We were engaged. I gave her a ring but she gave it back to me. She wanted to get married right away. I didn’t. I thought we were too young, and it was too risky.”
“She didn’t think so.”
“With Martha, it was a question of now or never. When I went away I told her I’d be back. She didn’t answer any of my letters.”
“Perhaps she understood you better than you understand yourself. You’re one of these men with a congenital fear of being—hooked.” She made the word sound obscene. “And now, of course, you can’t bear it to come back and find her happily married.”
“I’m bearing it fine,” he said flatly.
He finished off his drink and Beatrice, without asking, made him another.
“We don’t really have to stand around the kitchen,” she said. “Let’s go in and be comfortable.”
In the parlor she sat down again on the chesterfield and this time he sat beside her. She seemed embarrassed and kept pulling at the hem of her skirt as if she were ha
lf-afraid he would see her knees and half-afraid he wouldn’t. It was partly this gesture and partly the Scotch and his gratitude to her that made him intensely aware of her beside him, not as his cousin Beatrice, but as an anonymous female, warm, soft, comforting, smelling of flowers.
Without any intention other than to preserve this pleasant anonymity, he reached across her and turned off the lamp. Beatrice drew in her breath as if she were going to object, but she didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure that she had moved, but he thought for an instant her body had come up to meet his as he reached across her. The idea excited him and he had to sit up straight and cross his legs because he was afraid his aunt might pop in suddenly. His aunt probably wouldn’t understand that he had no designs on Beatrice at all. It was just pleasant to be sitting so close to a woman and not have to be afraid of catching something if he kissed her.
“Nice here in the dark, isn’t it?” he said.
She stirred and sighed, “Yes.”
Quite naturally he put his arm around her and drew her head down to his shoulder. “I feel very, very good,” he said. “I feel like singing or quoting poetry or doing all the talking I couldn’t do in front of those people.”
“Go ahead.”
“Whenever I feel good, I want to make noises. I’m a very noisy guy.”
“Are you?” she said in a faraway, contented voice.
He turned his head and talked with his mouth against her hair. “You’re a very quiet girl.”
He must have been crazy to think Beatrice’s hair wasn’t soft. It was like cornsilk, or like the down on a baby duck. He had been given a real stuffed baby duck when he was a child, and for months he couldn’t bear to look at it. It disturbed him and he used to dream of it. In the dreams he himself was the one who’d killed the duck, and sometimes he woke up crying bitterly because he’d hurt the helpless thing; but other times he would feel triumphant and strong, contemptuous of the duck’s weakness and quite glad that he’d killed it. After a while he got used to the duck and didn’t feel anything about it, one way or the other.
He didn’t know why he had to remember the thing now, or why remembering it made him feel suddenly savage and enraged at Beatrice.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, and pushed her head back as if he wanted to break her neck. He kissed her hard on the mouth. She put her hands on his shoulders and tried to thrust him away but the gesture only excited him more. In a moment she stopped struggling and fell sidewise. She lay in his arms completely motionless. Slowly he drew his mouth away. His eyes strained through the darkness trying to see her face, trying to make out whether this soft, limp, helpless thing was still breathing or whether he’d killed it.
“Get up,” he said brutally. “I didn’t hurt you. I didn’t do anything to you.” She didn’t answer, and he said, “For Christ’s sake, all I did was kiss you. You’ve been kissed before.”
She seemed to begin to breathe again, quite suddenly. It was just plain breathing, in and out, but the sound was sharp and sweet to him, and a little sad.
“Bea? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, of course not.”
“I’m awfully glad.”
“You didn’t hurt me.”
He couldn’t tell anything from her voice. She might have been smiling or weeping or inviting him to kiss her again, or all three, but he no longer cared. He wanted only to get out of the house and never come back.
He got off the chesterfield and began awkwardly to straighten his clothes. His mouth felt wet and sticky and he wiped it off with his handkerchief.
“Steve . . .” Beatrice said. “Steve . . .”
“Mind if I turn on the light?”
“Why—why, no, of course not.”
He clicked the lamp on and looked at his watch first. “Gosh, it’s after ten.”
Beatrice was sitting up very straight, smiling again, and tugging at her skirt. Her hair was mussed and there was a rakish red mustache of lipstick on her upper lip.
“After ten,” she said. “Is it really?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t seem that late, does it?”
“No, it certainly doesn’t.” She put one hand nervously up to her face as if she wanted to hide it from him. “It seems—more like eight.”
“Yeah. Bea, I—I wanted to say I’m sorry. You know how it is.”
“Certainly I do.” Her smile was getting brighter and brighter. He couldn’t bear to look at her.
He said, “Thanks a lot for everything. And say goodbye to Aunt Vi for me.”
“Certainly I will.”
He was so anxious to get out of the house that he was slightly sick in the stomach, but he forced down his impatience and held out his hand to her. “Well, Bea, it’s been swell seeing you again.”
They shook hands, very heartily.
Beatrice rose and turned on the veranda light for him and told him to be sure and come again. She shut the door behind him, gently.
He didn’t know why a sense of guilt impelled him to stop at the bottom of the veranda steps and look in at her through the parlor window to see if she was all right. She was standing in the center of the room, just the way he’d seen her stand at the kitchen sink, still and relaxed, as if she had some immediate, but trivial, problem to resolve.
He walked away from the house. Though he moved fast his feet made hardly any noise against the sidewalk. He passed a couple of girls who stared at him curiously, and he realized that he was walking furtively, not on his tiptoes exactly, but with the heels of his shoes barely touching the sidewalk, like a man making a quiet getaway.
7
He went to bed expecting to dream of the duck again. But when he woke up he couldn’t remember that he had dreamed. He knew only that he was glad to be awake, as if he had spent the night wandering, lost, through dark windowless places.
It wasn’t eight o’clock yet and normally he would have stayed in bed a couple of hours longer, thinking, dozing off now and then. But this morning he felt a sense of urgency. He must find a place to live. He had been home over a week now and he wasn’t the newly returned veteran anymore—there were lots of them newer than he was. He wasn’t a transient anymore either, he was here to stay, and a hotel room was no place to stay in. Everything about the hotel emphasized his own insecurity. It was a permanent, unchangeable backdrop for a thousand shifting scenes and faces.
In the mornings, especially, the place affected him. The chairs were lined up in the lobby, empty and imperturbable, neither dreading nor anticipating the hundred shapes and sizes that would descend on them during the day. The writing desks had been dusted and furnished with new paper and envelopes and a clean blotter. Yesterday’s blots, yesterday’s scribbled intimacies, lay forgotten in a rubbish can. The potted palms that flanked the marble pillars seemed never to need water, and never to grow or wither, as if they had some secret source of life.
Steve passed through the lobby as quickly as he could and handed in his key at the desk.
“Good morning, Mr. Ferris,” the desk clerk said.
“Good morning. Any mail for me?”
“The mail won’t be in for an hour yet.”
“Thanks.”
“Comes in around nine or a little after.”
“Yes, thanks,” Steve said. He knew this couldn’t be the same desk clerk who’d been on duty late the night before, that there must be a succession of clerks. But he couldn’t distinguish one from the other, they were as alike as the pillars in the lobby. It was as if they had acquired, through association, some of the permanent quality of the furnishings and of the building itself. They seemed impervious to wear and dirt, beyond nourishment like the palm trees, resilient like the chairs.
The desk clerk reached behind the counter and brought out a sign which said
Mr. Humphreys. He dusted it off with his handk
erchief and placed it unobtrusively on the counter. There was a faintly sly air about this maneuver, as if Mr. Humphreys had known all along what Steve was thinking, and was now showing him how terribly easy it was to have an identity, after all; you just put up a sign.
“Is there anything you want, Mr. Ferris?”
“No, thanks. I was just wondering where to have breakfast.”
“I always go to Childs’.”
“You do?” He couldn’t help sounding a little surprised.
“For butter cakes. Butter cakes are my weakness.”
“I’ll have to try them,” Steve said. He had the feeling that Mr. Humphreys was deliberately setting out to dispel any illusions about himself. Having provided himself with an identity, he now strengthened it with a weakness.
“They’re practically indigestible. Sometimes I feel awful all day,” Mr. Humphreys said, with the merry air of a happy drunk confessing that liquor was killing him. “But they’re dandy while they’re going down.”
“Well, I’ll have to try them,” Steve said again. “See you later, if I’m still alive.”
Mr. Humphreys’s gentle laugh slid after him across the lobby.
Out in the street he stopped to buy a paper, then walked down a couple of blocks to the nearest Childs’ and ordered butter cakes. While he was waiting, he opened the paper at
the classified ads. He was excited at the prospect of finding a place to live, a small, furnished apartment not too far out, with a kitchen, so he could throw a party if he felt like it. After he was settled he’d start on his book. The important thing was to get used to the idea that
he was home, this was his town, and he was going to stay in it.
There was nearly a whole column of ads, Wanted to Rent. They started out with “Two hundred dollars reward for information leading to the rental of a five-room apartment or house,” and ended up with, “Service wife with small baby desperately needs place to live.” In between, there were six reward ads and a couple of whimsical ones, but most of them were just straight, like the service wife’s. Squeezed in at the bottom of the column were two apartments for rent, one-and-one-half rooms out in Strongville and an artist’s studio in the Village, which had to be seen to be appreciated and could be appreciated only by those able to pay $500 a month.
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