“Buddy—” Maeve said. “She lost.”
“It was the house that got all her impertinence, Maeve—didn’t you see?”
Reeves’d been angry for sure to find herself here, and went for the house instead of them. “Boy—” she’d said to him as he passed her the first plate of his own hors d’oeuvre—(out of boredom, and some interest in the company, any company on the long Sunday, he’d become adept at getting tins open and their contents into praisedly weird combos)—“boy, what is that awful thing over there—a girandole?”
He knew she shouldn’t speak that way to him, and stared at her until she dropped her eyes and asked him, in her Nantucket voice, where he was at school. “Ah yes, that’s the one people move in for.” But she seemed to calm herself again, now that he had made her realize he was a child, and asked him if he played that nice old upright piano.
“No, my father used to. It’s the only thing here that’s really ours.” Which since all this lot had been acquired at Bloomingdale’s, was what he felt. He’d made her one more polite offer of his tray, pretending meanwhile that he was at diplomatic reception—at school his class was doing careers and he had chosen as his project Ambassador—and had moved on. He’d just been considering whether the tray wasn’t a flaw in his role, when the coach and his friend came up. “How’d you get the name Bunty?” they said in chorus. Rehearsed it maybe, the way Buddy could sometimes be heard in low-voiced shaving monologue, speaking to the trade. Did his mother’s guests all look so uneasy because they were here, or because they were themselves?
“It’s a Little League connosh … connotation,” Bunt said, in character, then ambled into the kitchen, where he dumped tray and responsibility, walked on down the hall as a third secretary of the legation, and landed on his bed, kicking up his heels in a high mystic glee which had to be shared. His wealth of gathering experience dazzled him, but at the same time he had to confirm the world with his own kind, even if all he said when Witty came to the phone was “How’s tricks?” Lately, though they were still close, Witkower had taken to girls, advising “Get onto it, Bronstein,” and Bunty, since his thirteenth birthday, had taken one to the Modern several times. Tonight, Wit had said “Jesus, what a weekend!” the minute he picked up, giving Bunt scarcely time to recall the barrier which had been crossed. “Jesus, am I glad you called.”
They were deep in Wit’s story when his parents, showing Mrs. Reeves the house, had knocked at his open door. “Hold it Wit—” he’d said. “Here’s folks.”
With what had happened to Witkower, this bathroom corner to which he’d retreated once the party was over, was likely to be his closest crony for sometime. It had a chair whose marine-blue fur—matched to the Anchors Aweigh bedroom pattern his father called “Macy’s-by-the-sea”—had worn off comfortably under his bottom, and the paint above the tiles was solid with the pinups of a lifetime; he even studied here. Until now he’d also valued it for the voices on the other side of the wall. Though he felt guilty when they talked about him, the natural opacity of parents was such that without this extra he would never have understood them. Tonight, hearing them really fight for the first time, even then raising issues more than voices, he caught onto why they spent so much time together in there. Though they must have heard him wash and flush his toilet when he remembered to, since he had no one to talk with it was the one place in the house where they felt soundproof from him.
“Yes, the house got it. But it won’t always, Buddy. You’ll see.”
He knew that voice, excited with its own despair. Nothing in the stores, for tonight.
“You’ll see. By next year.”
“Not next year, Maeve.”
“You moved the office,” his mother said.
He began to study a break in the tiles near his right foot. With his left eye closed, it looked like a lion’s head. With his right, the rhomboid pattern itself pushed forward. With both eyes open, it was only a floor. Pretty soon he could expect to forget Wit’s face. The features, that is. Now and then—as had happened for a while with Ike, who was now only a name and a feeling—he could also expect the whole face to flash back.
“Moved the—is that all it means to you? I changed my whole—life. Papa, he would’ve done handsprings all the way from Maiden Lane to the docks. And you don’t even come downtown to see.”
“Because I’m your wife, not your father. Where I live is here.”
“Where you live—” Quentin said. “Who knows? When you can let that woman say that to you. And let it pass.”
Entering his room talking, Mrs. Reeves had posed there, once again herself as when she had first met them. He’d hung up the phone, whispering Wit a quick goodbye. Maybe they’d see each other again, probably not.
“Good grief,” Mrs. Reeves had said, surveying his blue cork bunk with the hawsered bedspread—real rope—and himself, miserably back of the foc’sle wheel where the phone was. “Good grief, what do people imagine children think!”
He hadn’t ever considered. What people could think, had thought about Witkower, was what interested him. What they thought about everything.
“Your wife says you’re looking for a co-op, Mr. Bronstein. If you’re new here, you’ll find some of the older ones further over our way have a nice country feeling.”
What children could see was that she’d had a drink or two.
Fingering her pearls, she held them draped at her shoulder. “I must say, these furnished flats are the very worst.”
He’d looked up then, at Maeve. Buddy was watching her. Neither had laughed, as expected.
No sweat. “Nobody pays us to laugh,” Witty had hummed at their last movie together—the same song he was always on. Witkower had been caught on a sofa with a girl, and was being transferred to a Catholic school. A preppy one, out-of-town. What his folks took most serious, Witty had said, was that when they’d gone on about making the girl pregnant, he’d told them he’d used something. “Well, nobody pays us to laugh,” Wit said on the phone. “‘No-ho-body pays us to cry-y.’”
What Bunt wanted to ask, he couldn’t—had Wit been wearing his ivory cross at the time, or hadn’t he? But neither Witty nor he would ever call back anyway. Wit had joined the lost ones who never wailed but were an increasing, silent panel in the back of his mind. They never wailed because they didn’t know they were lost.
“Why did you lie to her Maeve? In front of your own son.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You didn’t deny.”
“In front of you, you mean. You’re just sore because she thought you were new. When your father came here in nineteen-oh five.”
Buddy gave a laugh. “Everybody’s always new in New York. But maybe you have to be born here to know.”
After a pause, Buddy said “You won’t come downtown? You could have a lot of range these days. Partners even. In a way.”
“Ah Buddy. Hon, listen. I know you mean well. And I know you don’t mean it for real—don’t I know how you operate? No. Listen. There’s a kind of girl lives around here. Within about twenty blocks. Not the younger ones. The young married ones. Cool … you can spot them anywhere. Not always the society ones. Not dumb. Busy, too. But their position in life is very clear. Their men make the waves downtown. They float along with them … I want to be one of those. Ten years on.”
“You wanted to be, Maeve. At our age, nobody floats.”
He’d grown sleepy and had pulled out his math homework. He was good at it; Buddy had helped him to be. Math was like the dream behind the money, his father said. He’d about finished one set of problems when Maeve said, “Maybe … the country, Buddy? Not too far up for you. But where it’s friendlier because everybody is new. And I’ll get somebody to help me fix up the house. Because I tend to overdo. You know that.” The way she spoke, so earnest and down-to-earth, she must have cried. “You’ll be proud of it. You can bring people up for weekends. You’re better at that too. Not from the office maybe. But from New York.”
> He waited for Bud’s answer.
“I don’t know, Maeve. Horses? Golf? You have to have an interest anywhere you are. Make connections. Or it can be deadly there too.”
“Not Westchester. Maybe the Sound. A Nantuckety little house.” She giggled.
“And you have just the handbag for it. No, not this year. After that, I’m with you. But not yet.”
“You might even commute to lower Manhattan by boat. I’ve heard of that.”
“Couple of my—new associates—do it,” Quentin said. “It is healthy.”
Bunty sat up. His father loved water, the bigness he said it gave to a house, or a man. Or to a family in view of it. Or to a city. Back in Amenia he had talked of it. “Funny,” he’d said to Bunty, “how mountains can make for mean minds. No wonder your mother wanted out.”
“And for Bunty. Buddy. The teens are bad here.”
He let his books slide, half hoping they’d hear. Didn’t they know what the teeners up there in places like that were like now? Bored to murder, without the streets, Witty’d said; he knew all kinds of stories from the Catholic network. How one group of kids had regularly vandalized the houses of certain sodality women they’d had a hate on. How the Fathers had turned up a Manson-type black-Mass group just in time, in Garden City—and how the young faith in Fort Lee might as well be in flames. For every pair of parents that moved their ten-year-olds out, Witty’d said, there’d soon be twice as many moving their fifteen-year-olds back. Outside their own school, PS 6, Wit’d pointed out some of these older ones calling for their younger sisters and brothers—jocks and girls in purposely debased clothing—dirty jeans below, on top angoras and custom leather—who all drove clamped to their little cars, as if driving snowmobiles. Why Wit should think a bad scene was more sacrilegious when it took place in woods and leaves, he couldn’t say—except for the cows, maybe. There was a girl in their own grade who pushed dope, and a boy who stole for it. What Wit had done, his parents should give thanks, it was so clean.
“We could send him off to school,” Quentin said. “I’ve been thinking of it. Not that it isn’t the same for them everywhere these days.”
“In the right town, we wouldn’t have to send him away. With the right school. Oh Buddy, forget the co-op. Let me start to look. Why should just Bunty go away; maybe the city’s killing all of us. Oh Buddy … Quentin … let me look.”
Bunty stood up. Rootlets in his chest, just healing, had been torn again. If some doctor had asked “Do you love it here?” he’d be cagey. But the streets were mysterious. The flanks of buildings—his eye sometimes leaned on them. Cronies had been. And were possible. No, no, we won’t go.
He began beating on the wall to the rhythm of it. Let them kick their sadness by themselves. Home’s their concentration camp. Where they send you away, for their sins. He began bawling. “No, No. Nobody pays me to laugh. Nobody pays me to cry.” He couldn’t remember the last line until much later. Why should we be staying folks?—for your bye-and-bye.
They rushed in—through the wall, it seemed to him. He was inviolate in his own childhood—where they could be heard. They would never hear him.
“Not away from the city, Maeve,” Buddy said, holding him in his arms. “Away from us.”
ON THE MONDAY, A year or so later, when they were to move to the Park Avenue place, he was in the lobby at eight AM, sent to wait for the vans; the substitute day man had fouled up the intercom. Shannon, for some reason, wasn’t due until noon. After several vans had come from the various thrift shops and Salvation Army—to whom Maeve was giving everything but their personals, he sat on, waiting to say goodbye to Shannon. During the year, this place had become a co-op too. With bright new oriental rugs, a new super who oiled the walnut paneling, and two-thirds new tenants who breezed into their ownership like pioneers. His father agreed the place had picked up wonderfully, but confided to him that it wouldn’t be nearly as good a buy as the one they were going to—not when you came to sell.
Before nine o’clock, at least four boys his own age came down with their dogs. Two gave him an interested look when they came back—if Shannon had been there, introductions would have been made. In any case, all the kids here would be going to his old school probably, and under a different calendar from his. Through “influence” which Buddy had suddenly pulled out of a hat, against his own principle of never mixing “downtown” and home, Bunty had been admitted to the Lycée, where he would go until he went away to a school in Massachusetts that was holding a place for him. This had been the bargain offered him for their not moving out. He hadn’t understood what had scared them so, but since any choices he would’ve made had retreated into the past, he acceded silently—which worried them more.
The Lycée was cliquey, though the girls were friendlier. He’d already taken a girl named Paulina Vespasi—whose father was an Ambassador, and her sidekick Dolly Something, to the Museum of the City of New York. This had come about because of the only Italian he knew, which he had blurted out in the class in dictée, where he was very behind. The endlessly linguistic air of the school miffed him anyway. “Altro che!” he had muttered to himself. “Altro che!” and she had turned round delightedly. “Come?”
At Montecatini, where the doctor had sent his father again, he had met three boys: Perrin, from Manchester, England, Emilio from Siena, and Frank Massler, from Princeton, New Jersey, USA. As an old hand, he was modestly able to show them all the paths and haunts that were useful to the healthier young. “Oh, any place you been twice,” he said. But it made an emotion. Hotel life, with its known hours and meeting-places, had quickly made them intimates; then the spa had been enveloped for days in scarves of mist and fizzy rain that sent the four of them into huddles, games, doodling on the hotel piano until they were stopped, conspiracies, a few fool tricks on the concierge that he still chortled over—and close talk. Emilio, son of a professore and English speaking, had shared his Vespa with them, as well as deadpan tales of his family life, which appeared to take place around an enormous soup plate, or else in the bed where his parents made babies so noisily they always woke the latest one. “But I forgive them everything, for making me a Sienese.” Perrin, a thin, glassy-looking boy, was rude to Bunty and Frank in a dirty way that glinted through his stiff manners, but they left him alone, since he and his mother, who was really ill, were here on a shoestring, and he was so knowing about all the monuments they cooked up trips to. Bunty and Frank—a shy boy, good at math also—were required to be authorities on America. Perrin taught all three how to make brass rubbings; it was Emilio who noticed that Bronstein’s were the best. At home, buildings new or old were spoken of either as acquisitions or as enemies in a kind of soft war. Here, he and they took to one another, his eyes glossing past people to return to their stony flanks. Nothing since the cows had so affected him.
On the last dusk over there, after scavenging all day for the puny wood and stealing some, they had made a bonfire near a lake. “A tarn,” Perrin said in his competent voice, “anything smelly as this is a tarn.” He had brought chocolate. Emilio was chef. “The Americans catch the rabbits, but don’t know how to skin them.” Everything Emilio said sounded like a proverb. High up, above the brittly leaves that shone without light-source from the gloomy cloud-castles piling in on their spot of fire, a ruined donjon clung to a crag. His chest stretched with yearning—how could he yearn so to be where he was? Everything was so solid. Perrin, cleaning up the last of the stew in his famished way, said “Why don’t you two—would you teach us, Emilio and me—one of your American Indian dances?” They saw with dismay that he wasn’t being dirty. For days, (while his mother coughed up what Frank, whose father was a doctor, said must be “the last positive TB sputum in civilized Europe, and that’s a national health service for you!”) Perrin, who had seen all the American movies, had been deep in the Leatherstocking Tales.
Emilio had clapped a hand over his own telltale mouth. Wrinkling his forehead like a saint’s, he had signaled the two o
thers what they must do. Solemnly, Frank and Bunty had begun doing it, hop-hop into the war-dance, bending low into their knees, Ugh! Ugh! They pranced high with the tomahawk, making the ulla-ulla whoop, palms batted against lips—“Wah-h-h.” Emilio had joined in, then at last, Perrin. Fallen flat on their backs in a circle, toes in, they lay for awhile looking up, without laughing. On the trail down, he saw that the back of the donjon held a line of wash.
Next morning burst through the clouds. “Bright as a berry,” Buddy said leaning out a window, his face chastened and thinner. “What a shame, just when we’re leaving,” Maeve said, slamming it rhythmically into her packing-hand. But Bunty, on his two feet, slouched inside the narrow doorframe with his feet on one side and his shoulders braced against the other, kept on reading a Wall Street Journal he had filched from their room-neighbor’s trashbasket; he had ways of dealing with these things now, and had already left.
In the lobby by now, only older people were taking their dogs out. When the new day-man finally called out, “Waitin’ for anythin’, kid?”, and told, answered, “Shannon won’t be in today, called in sick”, he rose to his feet and height—almost five eleven now—and dealt. Rise to the feet, avoid all corners at these times, lean forward—project! Already, at the Lycée, he was projecting forward to a Cheshire Academy he figured to spend only a year in before going to a larger school he had better try for if he was going to Yale to be an architect. His allegiance was all to schools now; he liked to think of that line-up awaiting him. “Tell Shannon goodbye, … and a penny from Eagle Eye.” He was about to hand over the coin he had been palming since he got down here, then thought better of it. A ten-dollar goldpiece he had got from his grandfather, on Abe’s eightieth birthday and his eighth—perhaps he’d better send it, or stop by. He knew he would never stop by.
Outside, he paused, wondering whether Maeve had unwontedly said “Take a cab, we’ll meet you there,” because Park Avenue required his arriving in that style, then decided it was only her drama-of-the-day and started walking the seventeen blocks down. Just then another van drew up. Couldn’t be for the Bronsteins. It was. “Half a van-load, including a piano,” the boss mover said. It was the van for the personals. “Grand or upright,” the driver said.
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