Witold, shortened to Witty, had also just moved in from Central Park West. Their rooms had been bigger up there, too, and though their present decor was nothing like the Bronsteins’, or the maid’s either, but crabbedly middle-Europe on both counts, the food for alternate homework visits was good and plentiful, in that style. There was the same sense too of a current flowing through the house upgrade. And about to dislodge it, though at the Zitkower’s the brains were differently divided. Witty’s father, second-in-command of a restaurant and also a wine authority, was already talking of an apartment with a real dining-room, in a tone Bunt recognized. Obscure, and reaching. And sad.
“You’ll get it,” Bunt said. Aloud. Surprising himself.
“What are you, a magician?” Mr. Zitkower—“Zit”—said.
“Nah, just an authority on real estate,” Witty had been to Bunt’s room and knew he always saved over the Sunday section and read the listings with a mixture of anticipation and gloom.
Mrs. Zit, an interpreter for the UN, was the brainy side, though she spoke suddenly from behind her book—and clearly not for the first time, of “moving out.” The suburbs.
“I won’t go,” Witty said. “The kids coming in from there are impossible. And you should see the Catholics.” He wore a large ivory cross, hung on a wire which induced a rash on his neck but which he wouldn’t change, and had just initiated the school to the skinhead style of hair. The cross was a put-on; he was a regressed choir-boy. Not at all bookish, but the Jesuits had given him a good, firm way with the studying. And he was an only. An only child. Bunt’s tries with those who weren’t had never been quite as comfortable. And one with the daring—Bunt’s mouth had fallen open—to say what he just had. Though the Bronsteins never poached socially on the families of boys he brought home, and Bunt was grateful for it, he now wondered if he mightn’t introduce to them the Zitkowers, perhaps invite them to one of Maeve’s “do’s” as she was now calling them, or get his parents invited to the Z’s Sunday open-house. He saw himself and Witty on the sidelines, picking it all up, Witty’s head shifting side to side like a sparrow’s and not only from the eczema—and his own eagle-sight. Then, at the appropriate time, they could discuss and define this current that was in their families, this energetic sadness that was so much the same.
At this time, he had about accepted, out of the mouths of his parents, that New York was to blame. These days, a Saturday mood overtook Maeve that both the Quentins—Buddy and Bunt—recognized. This would come on after the football scores, or mid-way through the opera, before evening, and always when his parents had no evening date. The weekend shopping had been done, that morning at the latest. But there would still be time to buy something. Or to see the streets. Or to meet somebody they might know. Or to acquire somebody they knew slightly, to know better.
“Look, I feel New Yorky,” his mother would cry. “Let’s go to Sherry’s before it closes. Or to Charles’s. Let’s go get some gormay.” On the way out she would swing her basket almost vertically. “Watch it, Maeve, you’ll crown me,” his father would say, but he always went amicably, more recently shooting a look at Bunt which thrilled him. Now and then his father said “I’ll go for you, or Bunt will. What’s your need?” Running to check her make-up she batted a hand at him.
Say one thing, he remembered those walks, most of them cold ones. Their summers went another way, he to camps, they to trips, in a set-up which did have a kind of boring permanence. On the walks their family connection became clearer, almost stately. Just at that hour they could saunter, wistful but comfy. Triviality swayed in the air, all the nice kinds—smoke rounding from lips, wind in skirts, and block after block a peculiar under-rhythm like a smile stretching and waning, as people toddled to the plateglass, worshipful, and receded warmer than they had been. It was holy to shop. Yet if he ever had his own sadness it might begin on these walks.
Home lingered at the other end of the snail-trail they had left behind them, getting to be a bright, jazzy place with known corners to be knuckled into and settled on, knee-lift chairs for Buddy’s business-wracked bones, and the hot dinner left early by the help, for Maeve to queen over in her housecoat of the week. Away from it now, home was boring to remember, with an edge of pain in that—but the kind of place he must be grateful for. To be so, he had only to remind himself of certain school sermons and movies. Usually he bent his head into his chest, closed his eyes wherever he was and said sternly within his mind-cage: Concentration Camp. And it was true that the street, buzzing familiarly at all hours under the same mysterious sky, made him want to flail his arms and streak off—to be lonely and somewhere homebent at the same time.
“Beautiful,” Buddy said. “Look at it. And that. Maeve, did you see it? Her.” A couple had just passed, done up for the evening.
“Did you see him?”
They flirted, to show him they were wedded for life.
“There’s that model I was telling you about.” They stopped in front of a Jag he would swop any day for a Honda. “Lefthand drive though. But that’s the color.”
“Bronze … I’ve been thinking of a pair of bronze shoes but I wouldn’t know where to. Kid. Custom-made I’d have to, probably.”
He swung between their errands, long since able to tell which could or would harden into fact, and which would remain to travel ahead of them.
“What a night it is,” his father said tenderly. When Buddy blessed the weather, he felt happy; the weather could be anything. Most people were the other way round, but his father could see an environment, gauge it and maybe get it, before it saw him. “But it’s been a week. I’ll be glad to stay home.”
His mother was looking in a shop window full of towels Buddy thought he’d seen somewhere. “Yes, I bought some. Italian—aren’t they great? But that bathroom gets seamier and seamier. Still, where we are, we have two finally.”
“Oh not finally. Not for you, Maeve. And I’m with you. But not this year. The office is moving up. And I may have something there that’ll surprise you. Then … we might even look for a co-op.” He caught Bunt’s arm and swung along with him.
A pang went through him, that he might ever want to dwarf the world like them.
He still didn’t like his new room; the corners were not the same. Witty’s room had stayed the same wherever; he said their whole place, full of ikons, samovars and embroidered stuff, always did, no matter how they enlarged it. Maybe it was because they were Catholic. Maeve was, but it wasn’t the same. She and his father had offered him the choice: Be like she’d been, or a Jew like Buddy had. He had no reason to; it was all in the past for them. “But maybe you’d like it,” he’d said, thinking of the sadness. “Church.” They had crowed at him. He always earned credit for smartness the wrong way.
Now he put his head down and said some words to his ungrateful self.
“What’s that you’re saying?” his father said as they swung into Charles & Co. “K-k-k-what?”
“Nothing.” It was his old stutter. K-k-k. “C-c-c co-op.”
Maeve’s basket filled slowly with stuff they would never use except maybe the biscuits; she always bought one of anything she didn’t know.
“Calamari,” Buddy said. “We’ll never use it. That’s squid.”
“When I was a kid on the farm, my mother bought artichokes because we couldn’t grow them, and made us eat them. So when we grew up, we’d know how.”
“Why she won’t come down—” Buddy said. “She could have them every night.”
And Maeve said as usual “It’s not the artichokes.”
They had gone through all this before. Groceries seemed to bring it out in her. When Maeve’s father died, they had finally visited the farm in Amenia, New York. A stark white house, and the great swelling road, blond-green with spring then, rising to where the Berkshires cracked wide.
“God, what a generous countryside that was.”
Buddy meant that the people were meancolored, which he and Bunty had confided to each othe
r—gray and blue tints to their skins, as if they’d never been farmers at all. Diet, his father said, but it was plain that he too was depressed by what he saw. Mr. MacNeil, the grandfather never yet seen, was a peanuty corpse with a floss of white on top, and a mick mouth which Maeve’s and his own were said to resemble. They were not like any Irish Buddy had even seen—no drinks, for one thing. Bunty, on whom great hope had been placed—“Be sure to say Granma MacNeil”—had not been a success—even his red hair and Maeve’s was a throwback, Mrs. MacNeil said, none of theirs.
This did fascinate him. “Don’t you own your own throwbacks?”
She had a triangular jaw like a cat’s, a heart probably of cat-size also, and a set of thin coin-silver spoons, much valued, and often described by his mother. He had tried to steal a spoon for her. “What are you doing, Jew-brat?” After the visit, the three of them had driven straight north, through the blue gap in the mountains, to a Treadway Inn where they stopped for the night, and he saw his parents drunk for the only time. They were drunk at each other. “Don’t you dare send her money, Buddy,” Maeve had said. “To have it thrown back to you. That I’m living like she wanted me to, with you. Don’t you ever dare.”
Sometimes he had a fantasy of summer there, the blackberry brambles fruited now, and the warm, consoling flanks of cows.
“You could send her the calamari,” he said now. “Your whole gormay shelf.” Which Maeve catalogued carefully, studying the labels, then left.
Maeve choked. Buddy’s face, never too small for affection, smiled lopsided. Like the cow, against whose side Bunty had put his own shamed head, he had consoled.
Though Buddy’s parents were dead, and a successful brother and sister lived in California—visits mutually planned but never yet made—he still scattered money constantly through remnant Brooklyn cousins, and was always invited to all weddings and bar mitzvahs, buying Bunty a yarmulka for the first of those, and touting the warm family life they would find there. Now and then a cousin dropped by apologetically; Manhattan did not appeal to them. “‘With a store like A&S,’” Buddy quoted, “‘who needs a Korvette’s? Waddya need all the push?’ They must be the last hold-outs in Flatbush. And now maybe they have the Korvette’s.”
In Charles’s that afternoon, a woman standing near smiled at Maeve. “Scrimshaw. Your bag.” She had short white hair, blue-chip eyes, and a tweedy air of well-being. “Nantucket?”
Maeve nodded down at the small straw bag with the bone plaque on its lid, scratched with a picture of a whale. Easter before last, when they had been up there for a couple of weeks, Maeve had spied certain women carrying them like badges—permanent residents, she said, not tourists like them. When the shop-owner, pleading a long waiting list, had refused them, Buddy had ferreted out the carver, who had some old work—not for sale. There had been correspondence. The carver’s name became a household one. “Eighteen months and three hundred smackers,” Buddy had said, opening the package. “But here you are, Maeve, here’s your fishingcreel.”
“I have one, of course, but nothing so fine … Wherever? … Excuse me, I’m Elinor Reeves, we live in the old Berry house … Don’t think we’ve met up there.”
“No, we haven’t been for some years,” Maeve said. “We go to Italy now.”
They had gone to an Italian spa for Buddy’s relaxation—“Wuddya know, I have a liver now,” his father said joking—for three weeks last spring.
“I wanted to order one for mother. Hers fell overboard. Our sloop. But the ones the shop gets are nothing like hers was. Or like this.”
“If you know the carver,” Maeve said. “Sometimes he’ll do a little better for you. I’m afraid I can’t think of the name just now. But I have it at home.”
Buddy gave a snuffle, covered by the handkerchief he took without hurry from his breastpocket. He got away with a lot of such hamming, Bunty now observed, because of his gestures being in a small radius.
“Oh, would you? May I call? Or my secretary. I’m just catching a plane.”
“I’ll phone you, Mrs. Reeves.” Maeve had on the mick charm-smile Bunty formally denied himself if he thought of it. “I know who you are.”
“Oh … thank you very much.”
“I heard you at the club. Quite a few of our friends are your wellwishers.” She introduced Buddy. “Maybe you’d like to join us to meet them some Wednesday afternoon at our home. Maybe a week from next.”
“Wednesday … now let’s see—”
“Any Wednesday,” Maeve said. “It’s my afternoon.”
When the woman left, Buddy said, “Since when?”
“Since now.” Maeve giggled.
“What club?”
“The precinct one. A girl I met at the PTA goes to it. I meant to.”
“Aha. That Mrs. Reeves. Maeve I have to hand it to you. She’ll have to come.”
“Why?” Bunty said.
“She’s running for Assembly,” his father said. “But why Wednesday?”
“They have a house in Delaware. They fly down every weekend, I hear. In a private plane. She often stops in here before.”
“Why, Maeve.”
“Then they must use the stuff she buys,” he said.
“Shut up, Bunt,” his father said. On the way out, he added “I won’t be sore though, giving up those Sundays. Looking forward to enjoying my posture chair.”
“Not giving them up.” Maeve pushed forward into the wind like a masthead.
Buddy groaned. “That ragtail and bobtail.”
“It’ll get better. You’ll see.”
“Cocktails. When Bunty and I are practically the only males.”
“Bring some from the office.”
These days, at any mention of the office, where his mother never went now even with him, his father turned vague. “Changes are being made. Maybe later on, Maeve. Not just now.” He turned full at her though, so she could see his smile. “Anyhow, you sure learn quick.”
“People have to go somewhere on Sunday. Even wanted people. I came from a small town. I know.”
“Maeve …” Buddy said. “Want to go to a show tonight? I’ve got an in with that ticket broker at the Waldorf. We could.”
When his mother’s face broke open like that he could see why Witty had called her a sparkle-plenty dame, and had approved her legs. She shifted her head then, slightly toward himself.
“Bunty, you’re old enough to stay alone,” his father said. “Aren’t you?”
“Sure.” He straightened up and made his heels ring. We can’t embarrass him much longer with a sitter, Buddy had said to her in the bathroom sometime back. The two bathrooms, his and theirs, were end to end, and the old building not as soundproof as Maeve made out; what he heard there would have been useful found goods, except that the Bunty discussed there seemed not himself but a kind of mule-stupid dollbaby he scarcely recognized.
“Maybe I’ll call Witkower.” He would never. He would hanker to, but never trust himself near the phone, to cross the weekend barrier. Four times a night, some schooldays, but tonight, what Witty would think? Foreigners—they probably had a huge family intimacy going.
Home came quickly. The street was never that mysterious, going back. He stood in the foyer his mother had set up with a mirror, chest and chair, though not the same ones, and tried to remember the last foyer. He already knew what it was like to be alone here—they’d forgotten they had already left him, once. Now and then it was a little scary, if you had one of those moments when you looked at your hands, saw your feet, shifted awareness with a jolt, realizing for an eerie minute that you were—yourself. And the place was not consoling.
Maeve was marking the calendar by the phone. “Wednesday,” she muttered.
Buddy smiled at him. “Your mother’s the smartest little secretary a man ever had.” He seemed dimmer, Quentin again.
“I’m not sure I don’t think Witty is too old for you,” Maeve said, turning suddenly. He had a feeling she might grab him, the bathroom Bunty, and wh
ip him off to a department store. She was always Maeve. Buddy was Quentin also; he would never make Bunt his pawn. He had said Bunt was old enough. Funny though, how they never saw the real things were where you had to have your alternatives. It was possible to think them shabby. But he would never be ashamed of them.
“That Mrs. Reeves,” he said. “Her mother must be a million years old.”
He could always break them up. That cheered him.
Already he had begun to feel himself the guardian of the real things—though he didn’t yet know what these were.
MRS. REEVES WAS UNABLE after all to come to them on the Wednesday arranged for her—on what he heard the gathered women tell one another was a perfectly good excuse. But one Sunday weeks later, met by the Bronsteins, who were laden with last-minute cocktail items, she had surprisingly come back with them. It was a dark day, perhaps no planes were flying, her unsuccessful campaign was over, and as Bunty was helping fix the hors d’oeuvre, he heard his parents say there were rumors her husband had asked for a divorce. Certainly she had appeared alternately gay and distracted in a halting way, and wanting to be near any transient warmth, even theirs—as if she might be having one of those moments when she knew she was herself. In the intervening weeks he himself had grown used to these; his parents went out many weekend nights now, and he never called Wit.
As their lone guest at first, Mrs. Reeves had been calmed by their devoted cocktail attentions, later greeting civilly each of the “the week’s pickups,” as Buddy called them—the man from the Arthur Murray dance studio—in whose group Maeve had once been, the Bronsteins’ dentist’s assistant and her new fiancé, also one of Bunt’s teachers and the reedy vocal coach who lived with his spaniel-faced friend on the ground-floor.
“Oh yes,” Bunt heard Buddy say later that night, on the other side of the bathroom wall. “She treated us all with the consideration of a candidate.”
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