The Key to Nicholas Street

by Stanley Ellin

“Yes,” I said. “Anything. But, for God’s sake, Morten, you’re not going to leave her lying there, are you!”

  “No, no,” he said soothingly. “I guess Dr. Greenspan can take care of that now. Meanwhile we’ll go over and see if we can’t get everybody all together.”

  I watched the ambulance pull away, and its going seemed to pull the props of my endurance from under me. The lack of sleep, the tension, the surcharge of emotion in me rose up around me like an anesthetic. I sat in the living room of my home and looked at everyone, and they were all strangers, and everything they said or did was remote. Kate had died—no, now I understood that she had been killed—and Bob Macek did it. Why, I thought with a little surprise, he must have been crazy. And Lucille smiled and smiled on her day of triumph, but wasn’t every day a day of triumph for her?

  That was all it meant to me, really, nothing at all, because it was obscured by the picture of an ambulance rolling away into the bright sunlight of the street, and the empty house it left behind, and the empty studio in Washington Square. And Harry, where there was once Harry and Kate.

  We had met on a day like this, a fine Sunday morning with the breath of early summer in the air, we had our year together, and she died. And what was left to me was a long walk over one of those monstrous plains by Dali where parallel lines meet at infinity. At times I might forget, I might reach out my hand to her and say, “Kate—” but there would be no one to answer, and what I had meant to say would remain unsaid.

  She had been the only one who ever thought that something I might say would be worth listening to.

  PART FOUR

  BETTINA

  CHAPTER ONE

  Back straight, legs together, feet flat on the floor, and hands neatly clasped on the lap.

  Outside in the blazing sunlight that beat down on the porch my mother stood cool and serene and told her neighbors that Kate Ballou had been murdered. Inside, where the light could not force its way through the green blinds at the windows, the room was a cave deep under water. My father and Matt were unreal images in the water, and behind them on the mantelpiece the clock ticked away the minutes and with each tick told me that Kate Ballou was dead, dead, dead.

  And all I could do was sit there, back straight, legs together, feet flat on the floor, and hands clasped neatly on the lap.

  Miss Prim.

  My father had called me that the first time he ever saw me sitting this way, but I hadn’t cared. I was twelve then, and on my way Up the Steps to Beauty if the article I had found in mother’s magazine was to be trusted. And there was a picture on the first page of the article. A beautiful debutante was seated in the prescribed manner, and over her hovered a man. The man. My man, in fact.

  He was tall and slender, and on his patrician features he wore an expression of hopeful adoration that made my stomach tighten despairingly every time I closed my eyes and thought of him. Behind the locked door of my room one night I colored him with my wax crayons. His hair became blond, his face and hands took on a manly tan, and his eyes were chips of flashing blue. That was how I made him, and that was how he came to me when I called.

  At first there had to be dramatic prefaces to his appearance. I was a spy captured by Nazis, and he was the Intelligence man who appeared in trench coat to rescue me. I recklessly tried to swim across the Hudson from below the ferry slip, but I weakened in midstream and was lost until he appeared in trim cabin cruiser and swimming trunks. And then I began to realize that the scenes after his appearance could be made so interesting that the prefaces were really a waste of time.

  Jonathan was his name, and he was with me all through the agony of my futile climb Up the Steps to Beauty. Mother would drag the comb through my hair a dozen times and then say, “I don’t know how we’re ever going to get it to look like anything, Bettina,” or would kneel before me pinning up a new dress and say through the pins in her mouth, “If you only had some kind of figure, Bettina,” until it became clear enough that for this Ugly Duckling there was small chance of a happy ending. It hurt, but there was still Jonathan, and so the dreams took on a new form. I was still Bettina Pickett Ayres, nice, plain Bettina Pickett Ayres, the epitome of everything I loathed in a female, and Jonathan, even my Jonathan, couldn’t recognize his true love in this wretched form. But then the magic key was delivered into my hand—some secret lotion, some strange preparation, the hairdresser with the magician’s hands, the Cinderella gown—and forthwith a new Bettina was born, and Jonathan was hers on the spot.

  I loved him, God, how I loved him, and so, of course, when it came time for the real Bettina to lose her heart to some man it had to be Matt Chaves, who was short, and square, and dark, and violent, and nothing at all that the dream was, and everything that it wasn’t. But Kate Ballou could have been part of the dream, because she had been all I ever wanted to be when I lay awake at night and cried a little.

  I hated her for that, and I hated her even more later on when I knew I was in love with Matt, and knew that every time he saw her I was that much plainer and less attractive to him. When I once got up my courage to tell him that he was furious.

  “I tell you that I love you,” he said. “I want to marry you. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

  It meant everything and nothing. If I only understood, really understood deep down in me, why he loved me, what he saw in marriage to me, it would solve so many things.

  “Like a schoolmarm,” he said. “Two and two must equal four. They can never equal x, and let x go hang.”

  Like a schoolmarm. All those nymphs in novels clawing at satyrs in well-cut afternoon suits and whimpering, “Take me!,” but when I went up to Matt’s room over the ferry house to wait for him while he showered, and he made an entrance, wet-haired and glowing and mother naked, all I could do was gape at him.

  He stood there and grinned maliciously. “Well,” he said, “just as you supposed all along, I’m male.”

  “I didn’t need any reassurance on that,” I managed to say.

  “Truth to tell,” he remarked pleasantly, “this is just a laborsaving device. If you’re as much in the mood for a seduction as I am it would be pretty foolish for me to get dressed, wouldn’t it?”

  There were people’s voices in the street below us, and a smell of tar and oil and river water in the air, and the room was as dismal as a prison cell. I had never imagined it would come about like this, but I was in the mood, all right. Only scared. Scared witless. It was shivering excitement that put enough strength into my fingers for me to find buttons and hooks. A dress. Brassière. Sandals. Panties. And then I should have whimpered, “Take me!” like all the heroines in the books, but I couldn’t.

  “God, you’re lovely,” Matt said, and took a step toward me, and this time it was the fright that went to work. Panties. Sandals. Brassière—damn those hooks and eyes—and dress. And my hair a mess now, everything a mess, and Matt laughing helplessly and saying, “It’s all right, darling. You’re as pure as you ever were. Take my word for it.”

  “Matt, don’t hate me. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t, not right now. If you only won’t hate me.”

  “Darling, I loved you, I am loving you, I will love you—does that register? God, how could I help it after this. If you could have only seen yourself …”

  Like a schoolmarm. Bettina Pickett Ayres. Miss Prim, the schoolmarm.

  Then why did he think he loved me? A long time ago, a hundred years ago, the day he told me he had left New York and was taking that ridiculous job on the ferry, I asked him that for the first time.

  “Because you’re part of my dream.”

  “What dream?”

  “The big one. The one everybody has where he sees himself as he’d like to be. The one that usually makes all the trouble.”

  “Why trouble?”

  “Why? Because if you pick the wrong one, honey, the curse is on you. And of this time and place, meaning right now in the good old U. S. A., somebody is always putting it up to you to pick the wron
g one. Be a Success in Business—Be a Hollywood Star—Write a Best Seller—Marry a Millionaire—they’ve got you cornered, honey. Take a look around you right now. My dollar to any doughnut you want to bet that while we sit here and discourse, Junie sees herself as the star in a super MGM production; her guy, Macek, sees himself out on the mound in the Yankee Stadium pitching a World Series game; your kid brother sees himself waving a baton in front of the New York Philharmonic, and so it goes.”

  “Is that wrong?”

  “Don’t you think that even a donkey with a carrot tied in front of his nose to lead him along is going to be a damned unhappy donkey sooner or later when it strikes him that he isn’t getting any nearer the carrot?”

  “I should think he’d be happy just dreaming about the moment he gets to the carrot, even though he never does.”

  “Then he’d be wrong. Because all the while he’s plodding along nursing that carrot pipe dream he’s passing right by all the good things in the world. Look at that girl donkey over there. She’s got ears a foot long and a million-dollar figure, and she’s smart, too, but he moves right along. Look at that meadow over there. The tastiest grass in the world and beautiful flowers to look at while you eat it. Feel that breeze from over the river. Pine trees and cold running water mixed half and half, and all yours. But not for our donkey. Hell, he couldn’t even tell you where he was if you asked him. All he sees is that carrot six inches from his nose, and if that’s happiness he can have it.”

  I thought of Jonathan, and even though I had never told Matt about him I felt angry and humiliated.

  “And what makes your dream so superior?” I said.

  “The fact that I can take it in my hands and make it real. My dream is just you and me, Betty, and to hell with success and all the trimmings. I don’t care about tomorrow, Betty, there are enough minutes today—any single day—to make it exciting. If I wake up tomorrow and find that I’ve got a whole new day to work on I’m that much ahead of the game. But if I don’t, well, I’ve had today, and that’s what’s important.”

  “The world’s champion hedonist.”

  “Anyhow, a leading contender.”

  “But what happens when you wake up tomorrow—I mean, if you wake up tomorrow, although you make it sound so unlikely—and find a man waiting for the rent?”

  “Look, lady, you’re talking to a character who could write a book about men waiting for the rent. Nine kids in three rooms, and your father is just a dumb Portuguese longshoreman who was out of work half the time because he didn’t believe in paying kickbacks to the racketeers who ran the docks. You live like that, and you find the landlord living right there on the doorstep along with you.

  “I think that was the thing which started me off on my first dream, the cockeyed one. I was going to have money, enough money to buy that house right from under the landlord if I wanted to. I was going to have clothes like the landlord and a car like his. Whatever he ate, I was going to eat, too, and wherever he went for his good times, I was going there. That was the dream, all right; I was going to be one great big success like the landlord, who, now when I look back, turns out to be a shriveled-up little roach who looked as if it would crack his face if he ever tried to laugh.

  “And I damn near made it, too. I was Ned, the reasonably honest newspaper boy, and with pluck and luck wound up right in Mr. Wallace Morrison’s pine-paneled offices. First mate to a tycoon. What more could my little heart have wanted if there was anything in this pipe-dream business?”

  “A good steady job on a broken-down ferryboat at charity wages, no doubt.”

  “As revelation had it, that’s just what I wanted.”

  “Oh, now we’re out of dreams into revelations.”

  “Not revelations. Just Revelation, like the last book of the Bible. You know, thunder, wild cymbals, and then—the light.”

  “And a voice from out of the wilderness. We mustn’t forget that voice.”

  “No, it was a voice from out of the traffic on the northeast corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue, and the first I heard of it it sounded just like the squeal of brakes. The next thing I knew, there I was flat on my back in the gutter, and everybody in New York City standing over me and making appropriate remarks.”

  “Oh, Matt!” I cried, and in that wild instant I had the full whirl of thoughts which had him lying there broken, bleeding, dead, being carried away by an ambulance, the doctor’s mournful shake of the head as I stood there pleading with him, and then myself arguing with my mother that I had every right to attend the funeral, it was my place to be there! “Oh, Matt, you were hit by a car!”

  “But, for God’s sake, Betty, I’m here to tell you about it. You don’t have to look like that.”

  “You might have been killed!”

  “That is not an original thought. You are the twentieth person that has had it about my adventure, and, as a matter of fact, I was the first.”

  “I’m glad you thought enough of me to let me become number twenty. If you hadn’t started on this crazy thing about revelations …”

  “But it isn’t crazy, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I sat there in the gutter, and my rear end hurt, my dignity hurt, and there was a rip in the knee of my pants. And what do you think was the first thing that came to my mind?”

  “I haven’t any idea. I don’t even give a damn as long as you’re not hurt.”

  “The first thing that came to my mind was that I had a rip in the knee of my pants, and that if I walked into Wallace’s office like that he’d be annoyed to death. Not worried, mind you, or amused, or even angry. Just annoyed. Petulance is his forte.”

  “But you could go home and change again and then go to the office.”

  “That was my second thought. I thought, ‘My God, now I’ll have to go home and change and come back to the office late, and he’ll be annoyed at that.’ You see, there wasn’t any getting around it, no matter what happened Wallace was going to be annoyed. Even if I were killed he’d be annoyed because we’re right in the middle of a circulation drive.

  “And then sitting there like that—remember, I was sitting in the gutter at the northeast corner of Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue—I saw the sun shining on all those wonderful buildings, and all those beautiful women with their lovely legs and fine clothes standing there, and heard people talking to one another, and felt the breeze in my face, and I thought to myself, really a little surprised at how obvious it was, ‘Matt Chaves, for one second you were in a place where it is all darkness, and where you would never see Betty again or be close to her, and where you couldn’t ever see, smell, taste, touch, or hear any of the wonderful things back on this side of the Styx. But you have been given another chance, Matt Chaves, so go forth and make the most of it.’”

  “You gave up your job because of that?”

  “After the formalities were over, and a young lady interne with extremely large breasts which I rejoiced to look at in my new-found wisdom had pronounced me fit, I walked directly to Central Park. I saw strange beasts, and I ate a Popsicle. And no matter how I tested my revelation I found it good. The old dream was gone, and Wallace Morrison couldn’t possibly have a place in the new one.”

  “But why? Matt, you knew that if anything could make things easier for us, could smooth the way for us with my mother and father, it was that you had a good job, and could make a nice home. Especially mother …”

  “Especially mother. Betty, didn’t it ever strike you that the dream your mother has for you is the same one she must have had for herself, and that it might prove to be as false for you as it was for her?”

  “All she wants is for me to be happy, Matt; I believe that with all my heart. And you can’t be happy when the man you marry has no stability, no …”

  “But that’s the point, Betty. Don’t you see, your mother’s idea of stability is that you can find it in a bank account, a fine home, social position, and that’s all wrong. That’s what she married for, I’m sure it was, a
nd what happened to it all when your father lost his money? You can’t control material things, there’s always something bigger than you ready to kick it out of your hands, and you’ve always got to sweat with fear about it, too.

  “But if what you share with someone is love, why, it’s all yours to give and take as long as you want to. Isn’t that more solid than even the finest house on Nicholas Street?”

  “Oh, Matt, mother wouldn’t understand that. Nobody on Nicholas Street would ever understand that kind of talk.”

  “Of course not, because they don’t understand what love is! They’re afraid of it. It’s something that costs money, or security, or comfort. It might hurt you. It’s the bad stuff that might wake up that donkey from his dream of that carrot. Beware.”

  “I live on Nicholas Street, Matt.”

  “But you’re different.”

  “Different from any other girl you ever knew?”

  “There weren’t very many, Betty. I suppose I ought to lie like some of those fake Don Juans about all the women in my life, but there were only a couple I knew well, and a couple of others I almost knew well, and that’s about all. And they were all the same in one way. I would meet one, and I would fall in love with her. I mean honest-to-God in love so that it hurt. And she might like me, too, enough so that I could come close to her, but when I would talk to her about how I felt, or even if I showed it in my face, she would start backing away. There’s a certain tricky way girls act at a time like that. They’ll drink with you, talk to you about a million different idiot things, even go to bed with you. But they’re afraid of love, afraid of that feeling in you that tells them this is the real thing. And then they start backing away.

  “After that a man starts changing. He buries that big feeling away in him so that it starts to shrivel up and dry, and the next thing you know he’s as frightened and cynical as any of those girls. When he sees a girl who stirs some feeling in him he sees her only as something to go to bed with. Nothing beyond that.