Grorley sighed, and walked into the living room. He looked out, across the flowing blackness of the river. There to the south, somewhere in that jittering corona of yellow lights, was the apartment. He shuddered pleasurably, thinking of all the waifs in the world tonight. His own safety was too new for altruism; it was only by a paring of luck as thin as this pane of glass that he was safely here—on the inside, looking out.
Behind him, the tree shone—that trompe-l’oeil triumphant—yearly symbol of how eternally people had to use the spurious to catch at the real. If there was an angel at the top, then here was the devil at its base—that, at this season, anybody who opened his eyes and ears too wide caught the poor fools, caught himself, hard at it. Home is where the heart…the best things in life are…spin it and it says I. L.O.V.E. U.
Grorley reached up absently and took off his hat. This is middle age, he thought. Stand still and hear the sound of it, bonging like carillons, the gathering sound of all the platitudes, sternly coming true.
He looked down at the hat in his hand. It was an able hat; not every hat could cock a snook like that one. From now on, he’d need every ally he could muster. Holding it, he bent down and switched off the tree. He was out of the living room and halfway up the stairs, still holding it, before he turned back. Now the house was entirely dark, but he needed no light other than the last red sputter of rebellion in his heart. He crept down, felt along the wall, clasped a remembered hook. Firmly, he hung his hat in the hall. Then he turned, and went back up the stairs.
The Rabbi’s Daughter
THEY ALL CAME ALONG with Eleanor and her baby in the cab to Grand Central, her father and mother on either side of her, her father holding the wicker bassinet on his carefully creased trousers. Rosalie and Helene, her cousins, smart in their fall ensembles, just right for the tingling October dusk, sat in the two little seats opposite them. Aunt Ruth, Dr. Ruth Brinn, her father’s sister and no kin to the elegant distaff cousins, had insisted on sitting in front with the cabman. Eleanor could see her now, through the glass, in animated talk, her hat tilted piratically on her iron-gray braids.
Leaning forward, Eleanor studied the dim, above-eye-level picture of the driver. A sullen-faced young man, with a lock of black hair belligerent over his familiar nondescript face. “Manny Kaufman.” What did Manny Kaufman think of Dr. Brinn? In ten minutes she would drag his life history from him, answering his unwilling statements with the snapping glance, the terse nods which showed that she got it all, at once, understood him down to the bone. At the end of her cross-questioning she would be quite capable of saying, “Young man, you are too pale! Get another job!”
“I certainly don’t know why you wanted to wear that get-up,” said Eleanor’s mother, as the cab turned off the Drive toward Broadway. “On a train. And with the baby to handle, all alone.” She brushed imaginary dust from her lap, scattering disapproval with it. She had never had to handle her babies alone.
Eleanor bent over the basket before she answered. She was a thin fair girl whom motherhood had hollowed, rather than enhanced. Tucking the bottle-bag further in, feeling the wad of diapers at the bottom, she envied the baby blinking solemnly up at her, safe in its surely serviced world.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It just felt gala. New York-ish. Some people dress down for a trip. Others dress up—like me.” Staring at her own lap, though, at the bronze velveteen which had been her wedding dress, sensing the fur blob of hat insecure on her unprofessionally waved hair, shifting the shoes, faintly scuffed, which had been serving her for best for two years, she felt the sickening qualm, the frightful inner blush of the inappropriately dressed.
In front of her, half-turned toward her, the two cousins swayed neatly in unison, two high-nostriled gazelles, one in black, one in brown, both in pearls, wearing their propriety, their utter rightness, like skin. She had known her own excess when she had dressed for the trip yesterday morning, in the bare rooms, after the van had left, but her suits were worn, stretched with wearing during pregnancy, and nothing went with anything any more. Tired of house dresses, of the spotted habiliments of maternity, depressed with her three months’ solitude in the country waiting out the lease after Dan went on to the new job, she had reached for the wedding clothes, seeing herself cleansed and queenly once more, mysterious traveler whose appearance might signify anything, approaching the pyrrhic towers of New York, its effervescent terminals, with her old brilliance, her old style.
Her father sighed. “Wish that boy could find a job nearer New York.”
“You know an engineer has to go where the plants are,” she said, weary of the old argument. “It’s not like you—with your own business and everything. Don’t you think I’d like…?” She stopped, under Rosalie’s bright, tallying stare.
“I know, I know.” He leaned over the baby, doting.
“What’s your new house like?” said Rosalie.
“You know,” she said gaily, “after all Dan’s letters, I’m not just sure, except that it’s part of a two-family. They divide houses every which way in those towns. He’s written about ‘Bostons,’ and ‘flats,’ and ‘duplexes.’ All I really know is it has automatic heat, thank goodness, and room for the piano.” She clamped her lips suddenly on the hectic, chattering voice. Why had she had to mention the piano, especially since they were just passing Fifty-seventh Street, past Carnegie with all its clustering satellites—the Pharmacy, the Playhouse, the Russian restaurant—and in the distance, the brindled windows of the galleries, the little chiffoned store fronts, spitting garnet and saffron light? All her old life smoked out toward her from these buildings, from this parrot-gay, music-scored street.
“Have you been able to keep up with your piano?” Helene’s head cocked, her eyes screened.
“Not—not recently. But I’m planning a schedule. After we’re settled.” In the baby’s nap time, she thought. When I’m not boiling formulas or wash. In the evenings, while Dan reads, if I’m only—just not too tired. With a constriction, almost of fear, she realized that she and Dan had not even discussed whether the family on the other side of the house would mind the practicing. That’s how far I’ve come away from it, she thought, sickened.
“All that time spent.” Her father stroked his chin with a scraping sound and shook his head, then moved his hand down to brace the basket as the cab swung forward on the green light.
My time, she thought, my life—your money, knowing her unfairness in the same moment, knowing it was only his devotion, wanting the best for her, which deplored. Or, like her mother, did he mourn too the preening pride in the accomplished daughter, the long build-up, Juilliard, the feverish, relative-ridden Sunday afternoon recitals in Stengel’s studio, the program at Town Hall, finally, with her name, no longer Eleanor Goldman, but Elly Gold, truncated hopefully, euphoniously for the professional life to come, that had already begun to be, thereafter, in the first small jobs, warm notices?
As the cab rounded the corner of Fifth, she saw two ballerinas walking together, unmistakable with their dark Psyche knots over their fichus, their sandaled feet angled outwards, the peculiar compensating tilt of their little strutting behinds. In that moment it was as if she had taken them all in at once, seen deep into their lives. There was a studio of them around the hall from Stengel’s, and under the superficial differences the atmosphere in the two studios had been much the same: two tight, concentric worlds whose aficionados bickered and endlessly discussed in their separate argots, whose students, glowing with the serious work of creation, were like trajectories meeting at the burning curve of interest.
She looked at the cousins with a dislike close to envy, because they neither burned nor were consumed. They would never throw down the fixed cards. Conformity would protect them. They would marry for love if they could; if not, they would pick, prudently, a candidate who would never remove them from the life to which they were accustomed. Mentally they would never even leave Eighty-sixth Street, and their homes would be like their
mothers’, like her mother’s, bibelots suave on the coffee tables, bonbon dishes full, but babies postponed until they could afford to have them born at Doctors Hospital. “After all the money Uncle Harry spent on her, too,” they would say later in mutually confirming gossip. For to them she would simply have missed out on the putative glory of the prima donna; that it was the work she missed would be out of their ken.
The cab swung into the line of cars at the side entrance to Grand Central. Eleanor bent over the basket and took out the baby. “You take the basket, Dad.” Then, as if forced by the motion of the cab, she reached over and thrust the bundle of baby onto Helene’s narrow brown crepe lap, and held it there until Helene grasped it diffidently with her suede gloves.
“She isn’t—she won’t wet, will she?” said Helene.
A porter opened the door. Eleanor followed her mother and father out and then reached back into the cab. “I’ll take her now.” She stood there hugging the bundle, feeling it close, a round comforting cyst of love and possession.
Making her way through the snarled mess of traffic on the curb, Aunt Ruth came and stood beside her. “Remember what I told you!” she called to the departing driver, wagging her finger at him.
“What did you tell him?” said Eleanor.
“Hah! What I told him!” Her aunt shrugged, the blunt Russian shrug of inevitability, her shrewd eyes ruminant over the outthrust chin, the spread hands. “Can I fix life? Life in Brooklyn on sixty dollars a week? I’m only a medical doctor!” She pushed her hat forward on her braids. “Here! Give me that baby!” She whipped the baby from Eleanor’s grasp and held it with authority, looking speculatively at Eleanor. “Go on! Walk ahead with them!” She grinned. “Don’t I make a fine nurse? Expensive, too!”
Down at the train, Eleanor stood at the door of the roomette while the other women, jammed inside, divided their ardor for the miniature between the baby and the telescoped comforts of the cubicle. At the end of the corridor, money and a pantomime of cordiality passed between her father and the car porter. Her father came back down the aisle, solid gray man, refuge of childhood, grown shorter than she. She stared down at his shoulder, rigid, her eyes unfocused, restraining herself from laying her head upon it.
“All taken care of,” he said. “He’s got the formula in the icebox and he’ll take care of getting you off in the morning. Wish you could have stayed longer, darling.” He pressed an envelope into her hand. “Buy yourself something. Or the baby.” He patted her shoulder. “No…now never mind now. This is between you and me.”
“Guess we better say good-by, dear,” said her mother, emerging from the roomette with the others. Doors slammed, passengers swirled around them. They kissed in a circle, nibbling and diffident.
Aunt Ruth did not kiss her, but took Eleanor’s hands and looked at her, holding on to them. She felt her aunt’s hands moving softly on her own. The cousins watched brightly.
“What’s this, what’s this?” said her aunt. She raised Eleanor’s hands, first one, then the other, as if weighing them in a scale, rubbed her own strong, diagnostic thumb back and forth over Eleanor’s right hand, looking down at it. They all looked down at it. It was noticeably more spatulate, coarser-skinned than the left, and the middle knuckles were thickened.
“So…,” said her aunt. “So-o…,” and her enveloping stare had in it that warmth, tinged with resignation, which she offered indiscriminately to cabmen, to nieces, to life. “So…, the ‘rabbi’s daughter’ is washing dishes!” And she nodded, in requiem.
“Prescription?” said Eleanor, smiling wryly back.
“No prescription!” said her aunt. “In my office I see hundreds of girls like you. And there is no little pink pill to fit.” She shrugged, and then whirled on the others. “Come. Come on.” They were gone, in a last-minute flurry of ejaculations. As the train began to wheel past the platform, Eleanor caught a blurred glimpse of their faces, her parents and aunt in anxious trio, the two cousins neatly together.
People were still passing by the door of the roomette, and a woman in one group paused to admire the baby, frilly in the delicately lined basket, “Ah, look!” she cooed. “Sweet! How old is she?”
“Three months.”
“It is a she?”
Eleanor nodded.
“Sweet!” the woman said again, shaking her head admiringly, and went on down the aisle. Now the picture was madonna-perfect, Eleanor knew—the harsh, tintype lighting centraled down on her and the child, glowing in the viscous paneling that was grained to look like wood, highlighted in the absurd plush-cum-metal fixtures of this sedulously planned manger. She shut the door.
The baby began to whimper. She made it comfortable for the night, diapering it quickly, clipping the pins in the square folds, raising the joined ankles in a routine that was like a jigging ballet of the fingers. Only after she had made herself ready for the night, hanging the dress quickly behind a curtain, after she had slipped the last prewarmed bottle out of its case and was holding the baby close as it fed, watching the three-cornered pulse of the soft spot winking in and out on the downy head—only then did she let herself look closely at her two hands.
The difference between them was not enough to attract casual notice, but enough, when once pointed out, for anyone to see. She remembered Stengel’s strictures on practicing with the less able left one. “Don’t think you can gloss over, Miss. It shows!” But that the scrubbing hand, the working hand, would really “show” was her first intimation that the daily makeshift could become cumulative, could leave its imprint on the flesh with a crude symbolism as dully real, as conventionally laughable, as the first wrinkle, the first gray hair.
She turned out the light and stared into the rushing dark. The physical change was nothing, she told herself, was easily repaired; what she feared almost to phrase was the death by postponement, the slow uneventful death of impulse. “Hundreds of girls like you,” she thought, fearing for the first time the compromises that could arrive upon one unaware, not in the heroic renunciations, but erosive, gradual, in the slow chip-chipping of circumstance. Outside the window the hills of the Hudson Valley loomed and receded, rose up, piled, and slunk again into foothills. For a long time before she fell asleep she probed the dark for their withdrawing shapes, as if drama and purpose receded with them.
In the morning the porter roused her at six, returning an iced bottle of formula, and one warmed and made ready. She rose with a granular sense of return to the real, which lightened as she attended to the baby and dressed. Energized, she saw herself conquering whatever niche Dan had found for them, revitalizing the unknown house as she had other houses, with all the artifices of her New York chic, squeezing ragouts from the tiny salary spent cagily at the A & P, enjoying the baby instead of seeing her in the groggy focus of a thousand tasks. She saw herself caught up at odd hours in the old exaltation of practice, even if they had to hire a mute piano, line a room with cork. Nothing was impossible to the young, bogey-dispersing morning.
The station ran past the window, such a long one, sliding through the greasy lemon-colored lights, that she was almost afraid they were not going to stop, or that it was the wrong one, until she saw Dan’s instantly known contour, jointed, thin, and his face, raised anxiously to the train windows with the vulnerability of people who do not know they are observed. She saw him for a minute as other passengers, brushing their teeth hastily in the washrooms, might look out and see him, a young man, interesting because he was alone on the platform, a nice young man in a thick jacket and heavy work pants, with a face full of willingness and anticipation. Who would get off for him?
As she waited in the jumble of baggage at the car’s end, she warned herself that emotion was forever contriving toward moments which, when achieved, were not single and high as they ought to have been, but often splintered slowly—just walked away on the little centrifugal feet of detail. She remembered how she had mulled before their wedding night, how she had been unable to see beyond the single devou
ring picture of their two figures turning, turning toward one another. It had all happened, it had all been there, but memory could not recall it so, retaining instead, with the pedantic fidelity of some poet whose interminable listings recorded obliquely the face of the beloved but never invoked it, a whole rosary of irrelevancies, in the telling of which the two figures merged and were lost. Again she had the sense of life pushing her on by minute, imperceptible steps whose trend would not be discerned until it was too late, as the tide might encroach upon the late swimmer, making a sea of the sand he left behind.
“Dan!” she called. “Dan!”
He ran toward her. She wanted to run too, to leap out of the hemming baggage and fall against him, rejoined. Instead, she and the bags and the basket were jockeyed off the platform by the obsequious porter, and she found herself on the gray boards of the station, her feet still rocking with the leftover rhythm of the train, holding the basket clumsily between her and Dan, while the train washed off hoarsely behind them. He took the basket from her, set it down, and they clung and kissed, but in all that ragged movement, the moment subdivided and dispersed.
“Good Lord, how big she is!” he said, poking at the baby with a shy, awkward hand.
“Mmm. Tremendous!” They laughed together, looking down.
“Your shoes—what on earth?” she said. They were huge, laced to the ankle, the square tips inches high, like blocks of wood on the narrow clerkly feet she remembered.
“Safety shoes. You have to wear them around a foundry. Pretty handy if a casting drops on your toe.”
“Very swagger.” She smiled up at him, her throat full of all there was to tell—how, in the country, she had spoken to no one but the groceryman for so long that she had begun to monologue to the baby; how she had built up the first furnace fire piece by piece, crouching before it in awe and a sort of pride, hoping, as she shifted the damper chains, that she was pulling the right one; how the boy who was to mow the lawn had never come, and how at last she had taken a scythe to the knee-deep, insistent grass and then grimly, jaggedly, had mown. But now, seeing his face dented with fatigue, she saw too his grilling neophyte’s day at the foundry, the evenings when he must have dragged hopefully through ads and houses, subjecting his worn wallet and male ingenuousness to the soiled witcheries of how many landlords, of how many narrow-faced householders tipping back in their porch chairs, patting tenderly at their bellies, who would suck at their teeth and look him over. “You permanent here, mister?” Ashamed of her city-bred heroisms, she said nothing.
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