The absolute specifics of this lengthy awkward speech, with its implication that he had not been quite straight with her, caused in him more than a little distress. In the fine trust of their long relationship, they had never before become postured in such a mutually demeaning way: he, to explain; she, to be explained to. But what other course was there than to explain? “The date of the meeting was changed,” he said, “and it’s been even more of a whirlwind trip than I’d anticipated. No chance at all to call you—”
“Oh,” she broke in, “I didn’t mean—you mustn’t think—” Her face mirrored his own distress. “It’s seeing you here and so unexpectedly that’s unhinged me. Airports are—” She fumbled, then concluded “—so disorienting.”
“Yes,” he said, “they are.”
All passengers holding tickets on Flight Thirty-two to New York should now begin to board the plane.
The broadcast announcement saved them.
He took her hand. “I’ll call you very soon,” he said.
“Please do,” she said. “And please excuse me, Mr. Shurtliff, for being so—so distracted.”
“Don’t give it a thought,” he said.
He turned to Miss Phelps; lowered his head; raised it; a sort of bow. Then he strode off.
His assigned seat on the plane was on the starboard side, forward, in the second row next to the window. The day was fair, the flight flawless. The plane landed at LaGuardia ten minutes ahead of schedule. When it came to a full stop, he stood up and faced aft, looking for her. She was seven rows back. She saw him, and waved, and stayed where she was. Other passengers trailed past her.
“Hello, yet again.”
He would always wonder at his lack of surprise that she (had) waited for him. And equally unsurprised that she so easily accepted his presence directly behind her as they proceeded down the plane’s narrow aisle toward its rear exit, and that when they got to the exit, she allowed him to go before her so that he might hand her down the steps of the steep steel staircase, aircraft to ground, and that once on the ground they continued on together to where they would reclaim their suitcases. All in silence. Until, arrived at the flight’s designated luggage belt, he put to her his first question: “Do you live in New York or are you just visiting?”
“Oh, I’m a long-time New Yorker.”
“I’m on my way to becoming one.” And, as they waited for their suitcases to turn up on the moving belt, he asked his second question: “Is someone meeting you?”
“No.”
“Then let’s go into town in the same cab.”
“That might inconvenience you—”
“That’s not possible—”
“I live on East End Avenue between Seventy-ninth and Eightieth Streets. Where do you live?”
“On Fifth Avenue, at Seventy-third Street…Ah, there’s my suitcase.”
“And there’s mine…. Don’t. You’ve your own to carry. And your briefcase.”
“None of them are heavy.”
In the close confinement of the taxi’s back seat, she sat in a calm of her own making (or so he described it to himself). She seemed miles away. They were in the crawling thick of rush-hour traffic. “I hope you’re not in a hurry,” he said. “Once we cross the Triborough Bridge, I think the traffic will clear a bit.”
“Zee told me you’re a lawyer.”
“Yes, I am. Zee? Miss Sly you mean—”
“Yes.”
“You’ve known her a long time?”
She glanced at him, and smiled. “All my life. She’s my godmother. I’ve always called her ‘Zee.’”
“You couldn’t have managed ‘Zenobia’ when you were a child.”
“Then, or now,” she laughed. “‘Zenobia’ is such a formidable name. Too unusual really.”
“There’s not very much that’s usual about her.”
“No,” she said. “No, there isn’t.”
She looked again out the cab’s window at the farther view of the urban landscape. Finally he said: “After she introduced us, she didn’t seem quite herself.”
“‘Unhinged.’ Wasn’t that her word? What I believe is that she wanted to pay equal attention to both of us and that she sort of went to pieces when she found she couldn’t. As you undoubtedly know, there’s no one on earth who’s better intentioned than she is…. There’s my river.”
The East River, seen now below them as they traversed the long high span of the Triborough Bridge and moved, faster then, onto the East Side Drive, the dark river now off to their left, bordering the road. He wondered if she had used the river as a means of not talking further about Miss Sly. “Do you have a view of the river from your apartment?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s a great distraction. I like to watch the boats, and I like the rhythm of the tidal changes…. Your view must be of Central Park. That would be a distraction too.”
“We ought to tell the driver your exact address.”
Which was 25 East End Avenue.
They were soon there. He got out of the cab; she quickly followed. The doorman came running.
“Welcome back, Miss Phelps.”
“Thank you, Roy.”
The cabbie opened the taxi’s trunk. Her suitcase was on top of his. It was as the cabbie lifted it out—then—that he noticed, goldenly etched in the leather above the suitcase’s handle, the three initials S.K.P. And then, facing her, ignoring the cabbie’s and the doorman’s presence, then—having in his mind put it all together—then, that he hazarded: “The Steeplechase.’”
She showed immense surprise. “Zee!” she said. “She gave you a copy!”
“It’s a terrific story,” he said, conscious of a rush of color reddening his cheeks. Then, of a sudden, still looking at her: “Who’s Dobson?”
“A fiction,” she answered.
“I was afraid he might be a husband.”
“No.”
The doorman had walked away with her suitcase into the building. The cabbie had reseated himself, waiting, inside the taxi—
She said: “Thank you for the ride—”
“If I were to call you, would you have dinner with me?”
“Yes, Mr. Shurtliff, I would.”
“Morgan,” he supplied.
“Sylvia,” she offered. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Thus it began.
For two days he kept himself from calling her. Until Saturday afternoon. When she answered the phone, her voice sounded remote. He identified himself and immediately said: “I fear I’m interrupting your work.”
“You are, but it’s a welcome interruption.”
“I won’t let it become a lengthy one. When may we meet for dinner?”
“My date book’s in the other room. Hang on.” And in a moment: “I’m back, date book and all. Back in the real world. When the phone rang, I was interrogating a story character, trying to get him to confide his first name to me. Do you like your first name?”
(What an odd turn.) “Yes, I think so,” he said. “Yes.”
“I wish I liked mine more than I do. I wouldn’t have chosen it for myself—”
“It seems a fine name to me. What’s your problem with it?”
“Its sound. It sounds misty, undecided, not—”
His laughter checked her. “This is one of the most unexpected conversations I’ve ever had.”
“But innocent,” she said. (The qualifier even more unexpected, he thought.) “I’m free next Friday evening.”
Almost a week away. He had hoped it would be sooner, but did not say so. “That’s perfect. I’ll pick you up at seven, if that’s all right.”
“Friday at seven. Thank you, Morgan. Good-bye until then.”
“Good-bye, Sylvia.”
Monday, October 19, 1959
Dear Miss Sly,
Only to report that all is well here and to tell you that I look forward to seeing you in mid-November, at which time you might give me a sketch of Hannah? I’ll call you well in advance of
the time I’ll be in Cleveland. I think of you and, as always, I miss you.
M.S.
No mention of their encounter at the airport five days ago. No mention of Sylvia Phelps. Just a short note of the usual kind he regularly wrote to her.
A raw bitter night leaning toward winter. Rain. A gale wind.
He would always remember the date: Friday, October 23, 1959.
When the cab stopped in front of her building, he saw her standing just inside the building’s glass double-door. “Wait,” he told the driver. “We’ll be going on from here to the Plaza Hotel.”
He was out of the cab in an instant.
They met half-way under the strung length of the building’s awning, the rain pelting down on the overhead canvas—he with his hat off, held in his left hand, she with the wind ballooning out her black cape, revealing its crimson lining, her hair blown too, covering half her face. “I love this kind of wild weather” was the first thing she said. Then: “Hello again, Morgan.”
“Hello again, Sylvia.”
Quick then, into the cab.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked. “Is my hair a mess?”
“To the Edwardian Room at the Plaza. No, your hair’s not a mess.” It had fallen back in place—her hair—thick and softly straight, and in the cab’s dim interior light, bronze-hued, framing her face.
“It’s one of my favorite places.”
“I’m glad.”
From East End Avenue, the cabbie crossed on Seventy-ninth Street to Fifth Avenue. On one side of the avenue were the lighted cliff-fronts of apartment buildings. Stretching off on the avenue’s other side was Central Park. In the wind, the branches of the park’s great trees were bending and twisting. Torn from the tree’s limbs, the last of the autumn leaves were flying in all directions. As they neared Seventy-third Street he said: “This is my neighborhood,” and, “There’s my building.”
“How high up are you?”
“The twelfth floor.”
“Way up above the trees,” she murmured.
“Yes.”
Their table in the Edwardian Room was next to the parkside windows. Outside, outdoors, the weather continued to riot. But inside, indoors, conditions were velvet. Conversation between them was easy. One of them would talk, the other would listen. Shot arrow, receiving target. Then a reversal. She fascinated: her fast, supple mind, her free and rich imagination that could give lyrical birth to angels or in a switch cause dragons, spitting fire, to appear. All through dinner he was aware of adventure, of a personal excitement that made him within himself, to himself, feel new, like a first-time traveler…. There was for him only one yore disturbing moment. It happened as they were finishing dessert. All in an instant, the weather dramatically worsened. The rain turned spate; the wind flung it solid against the window. Wham. Wham. The window (seemed) to quake, its great pane of glass to tremble; to go on trembling. She put down her spoon and placed her hand on the window, flat against it, articulate, and held it there…. It must have been the sight of her feminine hand, the sight of it as she held it like that, volunteered against the weather’s violence, that brought back the fracturing memory of being in the shell of the lifeboat tossed by the storm that had conjured Death and caused the captain’s steadying hands on the tiller to blister and to bleed—this memory that sent his hand at once toward hers, at once to draw her hand away from the window, to protect it—but the gesture just in time arrested, his hand not quite on hers: “It’ll get cold,” he said, husky.
She removed it from the window.
A brief silence then between them, dispelled by her with: “When we leave here, I’d enjoy giving you a nightcap at my house. If that appeals.”
“It does. Very much. The problem will be to get a cab.”
“Oh, we will,” she calmly replied.
The door to her apartment, when unlocked, swung back into a lighted entry hall (darkness beyond) with a closet on the left (she hung up his coat and her cape) and on the right another door, slightly ajar, pointed out by her with the Britishly identifying word: “A ‘loo.’ I’ll turn on some lights in the living room. I’ll see you presently.”
He entered the living room a few moments later, attracted to its location (at the end of the entry hall) by the promised lamplight. She was there before him, waiting, standing by the room’s eastern bank of windows. He looked first at her, then around, and again around, prolonging an appreciative take of the whole room; then said of it: “Wonderful.”
Books lined its north wall, floor to ceiling. Mid-point of this wall was a deep, multi-pillowed couch, a tall lamp beside it; draped over the couch’s back, a colorful, embroidered Kashmir shawl, and in front of the couch, a large, square, japanned table, books and a collection of glimpsed objects atop it. The long span of the room’s south wall was broken by two doors. One of the doors was open, exposing a lighted corridor leading to—what other wonders? Seen through the half-closed other door, a small pantry (kitchen beyond it). Between the two doors was a handsome dining table set about with four matched Adam chairs. In the rest of the room’s space were inviting groupings of padded stools and small, nested tables and comfortable other chairs. An aesthetically ordered, peaceful, peaceful room. Still in a large way taking it in, he said again: “Wonderful.” At her beckoning, he walked forward to the bank of windows and stood beside her, close, and looked then down—down through the rain-drenched rays of esplanade lights onto the river—onto its turbulent rollings of white-capped waves, the tide running contrary to the wind, so spray erupting in spouts up, the gunning rain though strafing the spouts back—looking with her down on the tempest’s wildings—
“—but I promised you a drink,” she said, and turned away.
By which spoken words she concluded a sentence whose unspoken beginning he did not trust himself to guess.
“Brandy? Scotch? Bourbon?”
“Scotch, please,” he said. “No ice. A splash of tap water.”
“While I’m getting it, here’s something that will interest you.”
From a near-by table she picked up and handed him a framed photograph, quite large, of a group of girls standing erectly, importantly, on the steps of a solemn building, six girls on the bottom step, five on the middle step, four on the top step—all dressed alike in turn-of-the-century ankle-length black skirts and high-collared, long-sleeved white blouses. All were shod in black shoes. Each held a bouquet of flowers (springtime blooms, he thought). He went to the couch and sat down and by the tall lamp’s stronger light, studied the picture: the maidens’ faces. In the front row, Miss Sly! Young, proud Zenobia, with waist-long hair and a young earnest brow and young earnest eyes staring straight out of the picture, straight into the future—
Sylvia then, standing over him: “You did find her—” and, to his nod: “It’s an affecting picture, isn’t it. All those yesteryear girls.” She put his drink on the table, then seated herself beside him on the couch. “That girl”—pointing to the girl whose left arm touched Miss Sly’s right arm—“is—was my mother at age seventeen, the same age as Zee.” The photograph’s year (she next told him) was 1907; June, its month. A graduation photograph: the girls “products” of—Miss Choate’s School for Cultivated Presbyterian Females. (She smiled when she stated the school’s full name.) Over the two years her mother and Miss Sly attended Miss Choate’s school—“being finished”—they became friends. “Dear friends,” she said, employing the tender word of the photograph’s bygone era. “My mother was an only child and so was Zee, so their friendship was of a sisterly kind. That magnitude of affinity. Zee was with my mother when she died. Which says it all, doesn’t it…. My mother died four years ago. January seventeenth, 1955, to be precise. She’d been ailing for a while, but she kept from me that she was direly ill. I’d spent Christmas with her. Zee was there too—”
“Where was there?”
“Cincinnati. That’s where my mother lived the last ten years of her life. It’s an interesting city.”
/> “I agree,” he said. “I know it fairly well because I have cousins there.” Then: “Did your mother ever live with you here? In this apartment, I mean. I ask because it has such a long-time lived-in feel to it.”
“I think it must be the old furniture—all inherited—that gives it that feel, because I’ve only had the place for three years. I bought it after my mother died, with some of the money she left me. That’s the irony, that by dying she provided me with a whole different life than the one I’d led for years—teaching English literature at a private school here in New York. The money made it possible for me to move from a tiny apartment to this one, and to quit teaching and begin really to write. To have the necessary time to write. That’s how I’ve come to be, to the extent I am, S. K. P. Dobson.” (She smiled. A slight, swift smile.) “I’m talking a lot…. It’s the storm, I guess.”
“The storm and my curiosity,” he said. “If I ask too many questions, or wrong ones, I’m sure you’ll balk.”
She laughed. “You’re right. I’m very capable of balking.”
What else, that first evening, either by means of his questions or her profferings, did he learn about her?
—That her mother’s maiden name was Keith (baptismal name, Ella), hence the K. in S. K. P. Dobson. (In his mind, Dobson was parenthetical.)
—That her father, Edgar Niles Phelps, had died in 1943 at age fifty-four—that he’d been an investment banker—
—That (and her face lit up when she told him—this): that two months ago she had completed “three novella-length tales”—that the tales—“will be out, Morgan, published in about nine months’ time. I signed the publisher’s contract two weeks ago. I’m still over the moon with joy.”
“God, that’s wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Wonderful. I can’t wait to read the stories.”
Matters of Chance Page 45