by Irwin Shaw
“Miss Plowman,” he said, “would you like a drink?”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t drink.”
And he went off into a corner to ponder this and discover whether this was good or bad, hopeful or not.
“Miss Plowman,” he said, later, “have you known Roger long?”
“Oh, yes. Nearly a year.”
Nearly a year! No hope, no hope.
“He’s told me a lot about you.” The direct, dark gaze, the soft, definite voice.
“What did he say?” How lame, how hungry, how hopeless.
“He likes you very much …”
Treachery, treachery … Friend who snatched the lost waif among the library shelves, who fed and sheltered and loved … Friend now, all thoughtless and laughing, at the center of the bright group, fingering the piano lightly, singing in the pleasant, intelligent voice, “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho …”
“He said,” once more the troubling, dangerous voice …“He said, when you finally woke up you would be a wonderful man …”
Ah, worse and worse, the thief armed with his friend’s guarantee, the adulterer given the key to the wife’s apartment by the trusting husband.
Noah stared blankly and wearily at the girl. Unreasonably, he hated her. At eight that evening he had been a happy man, secure and hopeful, with friend and home and job, with the past clean behind him, the future shining ahead. At nine he was a bleeding fugitive in an endless swamp, with the dogs baying at him, and a roster of crimes dark against his name on the books of the country. And she was the cause of it, sitting there, demure, falsely candid, pretending she had done nothing, knew nothing, sensed nothing. A little, unpretentious, rock-farm hill girl, who probably sat on her boss’s knee in the office of the printing-machinery factory near Canal Street, to take dictation.
“… and the walls came tumbling down …” Roger’s voice and the strong chords of the old piano against the wall filled the room.
Noah stared wildly away from the girl. There were six other girls in the room, young, with fair complexions and glowing hair, with soft bodies and sweet, attentive voices … They had been brought here for him to choose from and they had smiled at him, full of kindness and invitation. And now, for all of him, they might as well have been six tailor’s dummies in a closed store, six numbers on a page, six doorknobs. It could only happen to him, he thought. It was the pattern of his life, grotesque, savagely humorous, essentially tragic.
No, he thought, I will put this away from me. If it shatters me, if I collapse from it, if I never touch a woman as long as I live. But he could not bear to be in the same room with her. He went over to the closet in which his clothes hung side by side with Roger’s, and got his hat. He would go out and walk around until the party had broken up, the merrymakers dispersed, the piano silent, the girl safe with her aunt beyond the bridge in Brooklyn. His hat was next to Roger’s on the shelf and he looked with guilt and tenderness at the rakishly creased old brown felt. Luckily, most of the guests were grouped around the piano and he got to the door unobserved; he would make up some excuse for Roger later. But the girl saw him. She was sitting talking to one of the other girls, facing the door, and an expression of quiet inquiry came into her face as she looked at Noah, standing at the door, taking one last, despairing look at her. She stood up and walked over to him. The rustle of her dress was like artillery in his ears.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“We … we …” he stuttered, hating himself for the ineptness of his tongue. “We need some more soda, and I’m going out to get it”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“No!” he wanted to shout. “Stay where you are! Don’t move!” But he remained silent and watched her get her coat and a plain, rather unbecoming hat, that made tidal waves of pity and tenderness for her youth and her poverty sweep him convulsively. She went to Roger, sitting at the piano, and leaned over, holding his shoulder, to whisper into his ear. Now, Noah thought, blackly, now it will all be known, now it is over, and he nearly plunged out into the night. But Roger turned and smiled at him, waving with one hand, while still playing the bass with the other. The girl came across the room with her unpretentious walk.
“I told Roger,” she said.
Told Roger! Told him what? Told him to beware strangers? Told him to pity no one, told him to be generous never, to cut down love in his heart like weed in a garden?
“You’d better take your coat,” the girl said. “It was raining when we came.”
Stiffly, silently, Noah went over and got his coat. The girl waited at the door and they closed it behind them in the dark hall. The singing and the laughter within sounded far away and forbidden to them as they walked slowly, close together, down the steps to the wet street outside.
“Which way is it?” she asked, as they stood irresolutely with the front door of the house closed behind them.
“Which way is what?” Noah asked, dazedly.
“The soda. The place where you can buy the soda?”
“Oh …” Noah looked distractedly up and down the gleaming pavements. “Oh. That. I don’t know. Anyway,” he said, “we don’t need soda.”
“I thought you said …”
“It was an excuse. I was getting tired of the party. Very tired. Parties bore me.” Even as he spoke, he listened to his voice and was elated at the real timbre of sophistication and weariness with frivolous social affairs that he heard there. That was the way to handle this matter, he decided. With urbanity. Be cool, polite, slightly amused with this little girl …
“I thought that was a very nice party,” the girl said, seriously.
“Was it?” Noah asked offhandedly. “I hadn’t noticed.” That was it, he told himself, gloomily pleased, that was the attack. Remote, slightly vague, like an English baron after an evening’s drinking, frigidly polite. It would serve a double purpose. It would keep him from betraying his friend, even by so much as a word. And also, and he felt a delicious thrill of guilty promise at the thought, it would impress this simple little Brooklyn secretary with his rare and superior qualities.
“Sorry,” he said, “if I got you down here in the rain under false pretenses.”
The girl looked around her. “It’s not raining,” she said, practically.
“Ah.” Noah regarded the weather for the first time. “Ah, so it is.” There was something baffling about the grammar here, but the tone still was right, he felt.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
He shrugged. It was the first time he had ever shrugged in his whole life. “Don’t know,” he said. “Take a stroll.” Even his vocabulary suddenly took on a Galsworthian cast. “Often do. In the middle of the night. Very peaceful, walking along through the deserted streets.”
“It’s only eleven o’clock now,” the girl said.
“So it is,” he said. He would have to be careful not to say that again. “If you want to go back to the party …”.
The girl hesitated. A horn blew out on the misty river and the sound, low and trembling, went to the core of Noah’s bones.
“No,” she said, “I’ll take a walk with you.”
They walked side by side, without touching, down to the tree-bordered avenue that ran high above the river. The Hudson, smelling of spring and its burden of salt that had swept up from the ocean on the afternoon’s tide, slipped darkly past the misty shores. Far north was the string of soaring lights that was the bridge to Jersey and across the river the Palisades loomed like a castle. There were no other strollers. Occasionally a car rushed by, its tires whining on the pavement, making the night and the river and themselves moving slowly along under the budding branches of the glistening trees, extraordinary and mysterious.
They walked in silence alongside the flowing river, their footsteps lonely and brave. Three minutes, Noah thought, looking at his shoes, four minutes, five minutes, without talking. He began to grow desperate. There was a sinful
intimacy about their silence, an almost tangible longing and tenderness about the echoing sound of their footsteps and the quiet intake of their breath, and the elaborate precautions not to touch each other with shoulder or elbow or hand as they went downhill along the uneven pavement. Silence became the enemy, the betrayer. Another moment of it, he felt, and the quiet girl walking slyly and knowingly beside him, would understand everything, as though he had mounted the balustrade that divided street from river and there made an hour-long speech on the subject of love.
“New York City,” he said hoarsely, “must be quite frightening to a girl from the country.”
“No,” she said, “it isn’t.”
“The truth is,” he went on, desperately, “that it is highly overrated. It puts on a big act of being sophisticated and cosmopolitan, but at heart it’s unalterably provincial.” He smiled, delighted with the “unalterably.”
“I don’t think so,” the girl said.
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s provincial. Anyway, not after Vermont.”
“Oh …” He laughed patronizingly. “Vermont.”
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“Chicago,” he said, “Los Angeles, San Francisco … All over.” He waved vaguely, with a debonair intimation that these were merely the first names that came to mind and that if he had gone through the whole list, Paris, Budapest and Vienna would certainly have been on it.
“I must say, though,” he went on, “that New York has beautiful women. A little flashy, but very attractive.” Here he thought with satisfaction, looking at her anxiously, here we have struck the right note. “American women, of course,” he said, “are best when they’re young. After that …” Once more he tried to shrug and once more he achieved it. “For myself,” he said, “I prefer the slightly older Continental type. They are at their best when American women are bridge-playing harpies with spread behinds.” He glanced at her a little nervously. But the girl’s expression hadn’t changed. She had broken off a twig from a bush and was absently running it along the stone fence, as though she were pondering what he had just said. “And by that time, too, a Continental woman has learned how to handle men …” He thought back hurriedly about the foreign women he had known. There was that drunk in the bar the night his father died. It was quite possible that she was Polish. Poland was not a terribly romantic place, but it was on the Continent all right.
“How does a Continental woman learn how to handle men?” the girl asked.
“She learns how to submit,” he said. “The women I know say I have a feudal attitude …” Oh, friend, friend at the piano, forgive me for this theft tonight, I will make it up some other time …
After that it flowed freely. “Art,” he said. “Art? I can’t stand the modern notion that art is mysterious and the artist an irresponsible child.”
“Marriage?” he said. “Marriage? Marriage is a desperate admission on the part of the human race that men and women do not know how to live in the same world with each other.”
“The theatre,” he said, “the American theatre? It has a certain lively, childish quality, but as for taking it seriously as an art form in the twentieth century …” He laughed loftily. “Give me Disney.”
After awhile they looked around them and discovered that they had walked thirty-four blocks along the dark sliding river and that it had begun to rain again and that it was very late. Standing close to the girl, cupping a match to keep out the wind so that they could see what time it was on his wrist watch, with the small fragrance of the girl’s hair mingling with the smell of the river in his nostrils, Noah suddenly decided to be silent. This was too painful, this wild flood of nonsensical talk, this performance of the jaundiced young blood dilettante and connoisseur.
“It’s late,” he said abruptly, “we’d better go back to the party.”
But he couldn’t resist the gesture of hailing a taxi that was cruising slowly past them. It was the first time he had taken a taxi in New York and he stumbled over the little let-down chairs, but he felt elegant and master of himself and social life as he sat far away from the girl on the back seat. She sat quietly in the corner. Noah sensed that he had made a strong impression on her and he gave the driver a quarter tip although the entire fare had only been sixty cents.
Once more they stood at the closed door of the house in which he lived. They looked up. The lights were out and no sound of conversation, music or laughter came from behind the closed windows.
“It’s over,” he said, his heart sinking with the realization that Roger would now be certain he had stolen his girl. “Nobody’s there.”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it?” the girl said placidly.
“What’ll we do?” Noah felt trapped.
“I guess you’ll have to take me home,” the girl said.
Brooklyn, Noah thought, heavily. Hours there and hours back, and Roger waiting accusingly in the dawn light in the rumpled room where late the party had been so merry, waiting with the curt, betrayed, final dismissal on his lips. The night had started out so wonderfully, so hopefully. He remembered the moment when he had been alone in the apartment waiting for the guests, before Roger had arrived. He remembered the warm expectancy with which he had inspected the shabby, shelf-lined room that had seemed at that moment so friendly and promising.
“Can’t you go home alone?” he asked bleakly. He hated her standing there, pretty, a little drab, with the rain wilting on her hair and her clothes.
“Don’t you dare talk like that,” she said. Her voice was sharp and commanding. “I’m not going home alone. Come on.”
Noah sighed. Now, aside from everything else, the girl was angry at him.
“Don’t sigh like that,” she said crisply. “Like a henpecked husband.”
What’s happened, Noah thought dazedly, how did I get here, how did this girl get the right to talk to me this way?…
“I’m going,” she said, and turned with definiteness and started off toward the subway. He watched her for a moment, baffled, then hurried after her.
The trains were dank and smelly with the ghost of the rain that the riders brought in with them from the streets above. There was a taste of iron in the unchanging air and the bosomy girls who advertised toothpaste and laxatives and brassieres on the garish cards seemed foolish and improbable in the light of the dusty lamps. The other passengers in the cars, returning from unknown labors and unimaginable assignations, swayed on the stained yellow seats.
The girl sat tight-lipped and silent. When they had to change trains at a station she merely stood with unbending disapproval and walked out onto the platform, leaving Noah to shuffle lamely after her.
They had to change again and again, and wait interminably for new connections on the almost deserted platforms, with the water from the rain and leaking mains dripping down the graying tiles and rusted iron of the tunnels. This girl, Noah thought with dull hostility, this girl must live at the end of the city, five hundred yards past the ultimate foot of track, out among the dump heaps and cemeteries. Brooklyn, Brooklyn, how long was Brooklyn, stretched in the sleeping night from the East River to Gravesend Bay, from the oily waters of Greenpoint to the garbage scows of Canarsie. Brooklyn, like Venice, was clasped in the waters of the sea, but its Grand Canal was the Fourth Avenue Local.
How demanding and certain of herself this girl was, thought Noah, glaring at her, to drag a man she had just met so far and so long through the clanging, sorrowful labyrinth of the Borough’s mournful underground. His luck, he thought, with a prescient, murky vision of himself, night after night on these grim platforms, night after night among the late-riding charladies and burglars and drunken merchant seamen who made up the subway dawn passenger lists, his luck, with one million women living within a radius of fifty blocks of him, to be committed to a sharp-tempered, unrelenting girl, who made her home at the dreary other end of the largest city known to man.
Leander, he thought, swam the Hellespo
nt for another girl; but he did not have to take her home later in the evening, nor did he have to wait twenty-five minutes among the trash baskets and the signs that warned against spitting and smoking on DeKalb Avenue.
Finally, they got off at a station and the girl led him up the steps to the streets above.
“At last,” he said, the first words he had spoken in an hour. “I thought we were down there for the summer season.”
The girl stopped at the corner. “Now,” she said coldly, “we take the street car.”
“Oh, God!” Noah said. Then he began to laugh. His laughter sounded mad and empty across the trolley tracks, among the shabby store fronts and dingy brownstone walls.
“If you’re going to be so unpleasant,” the girl said, “you can leave me here.”
“I have come this far,” Noah said, with literary gravity. “I will go the whole way.”
He stopped laughing and stood beside her, silent under the lamppost, with the raw wind smashing against them in rough wet gusts, the wind that had come across the Atlantic beaches and the polluted harbors, across the million acres of semidetached houses, across the brick and wood wastes of Flatbush and Bensonhurst, across the sleeping, tortured souls of millions of their fellowmen, who in their uneasy voyage through life had found no gentler place to lay their heads.
A quarter of an hour later the trolley car rumbled toward them, a clanking eye of light in the distance. There were only three other passengers, dozing unhappily on the wood seats, and Noah sat formally beside the girl, feeling, in the lighted car, creaking along the dark streets, like a man on a raft, wrecked with strangers, relics of a poor ship that had foundered on a cold run among northern islands. The girl sat primly, staring straight ahead, her hands crossed in her lap, and Noah felt as though he did not know her at all, as though if he ventured to speak to her she would cry out for a policeman and demand to be protected against him.