When we got up to leave, Nancy lingered at the table to put on fresh lipstick. Carol wandered to the newspaper stand beside the front door. Jim and I went together to pay our bills at the counter. As we waited for our change, I said an amiable, pointless “Well?”
“Well what?” Jim said petulantly.
“Well, they’ve met,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “They’ve met.” He grinned and gave his head a little shake. “But Nancy’s just another society girl, old man,” he said. “I had expected something more than that.” He suddenly looked very unhappy, and rather angry, too. I felt the blood rising in my cheeks and knew in a moment that I had turned quite red. Jim was much heavier than I was, and I would have been no match for him in any real fight, but my impulse was to hit him squarely in the face with my open hand. He must have guessed what I had in mind, for with one movement he jerked off his horn-rimmed glasses and jammed them into the pocket of his jacket.
At that moment, the man behind the counter said, “Do you want this change or not, fellows?”
We took our change and then glared at one another again. I had now had time to wonder what had come over Jim. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Carol at the newsstand and took in for the first time, in that quick glance, that she was wearing huaraches and a peasant skirt and blouse, and that what she now had thrown around her shoulders was not a topcoat but a long green cape. “At least,” I said aloud to Jim, “Nancy’s not the usual bohemian. She’s not the run-of-the-mill arty type.”
I fully expected Jim to take a swing at me after that. But, instead, a peculiar expression came over his face and he stood for a moment staring at Carol over there by the newsstand. I recognized the expression as the same one I had seen on his face sometimes in the classroom when his interpretation of a line of poetry had been questioned. He was reconsidering.
When Nancy joined us, Jim spoke to her very politely. But once we were out in the street there was no more conversation between the two couples. We parted at the first street corner, and in parting there was no mention of our joining forces again. That was the last time I ever saw Carol Crawford, and I am sure that Jim and Nancy never met again. At the corner, Nancy and I turned in the direction of her place on 114th Street. We walked for nearly a block without either of us speaking. Then I said, “Since when did you take to wearing a hat everywhere?”
Nancy didn’t answer. When we got to her place, she went upstairs for a few minutes, and it was when she came down again that she told me Lon Havemeyer was going to join us at the Metropolitan. Looking back on it, I feel that it may have been only when I asked that question about her hat that Nancy decided definitely about how much Lon and I were going to be seeing of each other during the next thirty-six hours. It is possible, at least, that she called him on the telephone while she was upstairs.
I DIDN’T know about it then, of course, but the reception that Jim Prewitt found awaiting him that morning had, in a sense, been worse even than mine. I didn’t know about it and Jim didn’t tell me until the following spring, just a few weeks before our graduation from Kenyon. By that time, it all seemed to us like something in the remote past, and Jim made no effort to give me a complete picture of his two days with Carol. The thing he said most about was his reception upon arriving.
He must have arrived at Carol’s apartment, somewhere on Morningside Heights, at almost the same moment that I arrived at Nancy’s place. He was not, however, kept waiting for forty-five minutes. He was met at the door by a man whom he described as a flabby middle-aged man wearing a patch over one eye, a T-shirt, and denim trousers. The man did not introduce himself or ask for Jim’s name. He only jerked his head to one side, to indicate that Jim should come in. Even before the door opened, Jim had heard strains of the Brandenburg Concerto from within. Now, as he stepped into the little entryway, the music seemed almost deafening, and when he was led into the room where the phonograph was playing, he could not resist the impulse to make a wry face and clap his hands over his ears.
But although there were half a dozen people in the room, nobody saw the gesture or the face he made. The man with the patch over his eye had preceded him into the room, and everyone else was sitting with eyes cast down or actually closed. Carol sat on the floor tailor-fashion, with an elbow on each knee and her face in her hands. The man with the patch went to her and touched the sole of one of her huaraches with his foot. When she looked up and saw Jim, she gave him no immediate sign of recognition. First she eyed him from head to foot with an air of disapproval. Jim’s attire that day, unlike my own, was extremely conventional (though I won’t say he ever really looked conventional for a moment). At Kenyon, he was usually the most slovenly and ragged-looking of us all. He really went about in tatters, sometimes even with the soles hanging loose from his shoes. But in his closet, off our room, there were always to be found his “good” shoes, his “good” suit, his “good” coat, his “good” hat, all of which had been purchased for him at Brooks Brothers by his mother. Today he had on his “good” things. Probably it was that that made Carol stare at him as she did. At last she gave him a friendly but slightly casual smile, placed a silencing forefinger over her lips, and motioned for him to come sit down beside her and listen to the deafening tones of the concerto.
While the automatic phonograph was changing records, Carol introduced Jim to the other people in the room. She introduced him and everyone else—men and women alike—by their surnames only: “Prewitt, this is Carlson. Meyer, this is Prewitt.” Everyone nodded, and the music began again at the same volume. After the Bach there was a Mozart symphony. Finally Jim, without warning, seized Carol by the wrist, forcibly led her from the room, and closed the door after them. He was prepared to tell her precisely what he thought of his reception, but he had no chance to. “Listen to me,” Carol began at once—belligerently, threateningly, all but shaking her finger in his face. “I have sold my novel. It was definitely accepted three days ago and is going to be published in the spring. And two sections from it are going to be printed as stories in the Partisan Review.”
From that moment, Jim and Carol were no more alone than Nancy and I were. Nearly everywhere they went, they went with the group that had been in Carol’s apartment that morning. After lunch with us that first noon, they rejoined the same party at someone else’s apartment, down in Greenwich Village. When Jim told me about it, he said he could never be sure whose apartment he was in, for they always behaved just as they did at Carol’s. He said that once or twice he even found himself answering a knock at the door in some strange apartment and jerking his head at whoever stood outside. The man with the patch over his eye turned out to be a musicologist and composer. Two others in the party were writers whose work Jim had read in New Directions anthologies and in various little magazines, but they seemed to have no interest in anything he had to say about what they had written, and he noticed that their favorite way of disparaging any piece of writing was to say it was “so naïve, so undergraduate.” After Jim got our car from the garage late Friday afternoon, they all decided to drive to New Jersey to see some “established writer” over there, but when they arrived at his house the “established writer” would not receive them.
Jim said there were actually a few times when he managed to get Carol away from her friends. But her book—the book that had been accepted by a publisher—was Carol’s Lon Havemeyer, and her book was always with them.
Poor Carol Crawford! How unfair it is to describe her as she was that Thanksgiving weekend in 1939. Ever since she was a little girl on a dairy farm in Wisconsin she had dreamed of becoming a writer and going to live in New York City. She had not merely dreamed of it. She had worked toward it every waking hour of her life, taking jobs after school in the wintertime, and full-time jobs in the summer, always saving the money to put herself through the state university. She had made herself the best student—the prize pupil—in every grade of grammar school and high school. At the university she had mana
ged to win every scholarship in sight. Through all those years she had had but one ambition, and yet I could not have met her at a worse moment in her life. Poor girl, she had just learned that she was a writer.
DRIVING to Boston on Saturday, Jim and I took turns at the wheel again. But now there was no talk about ourselves or about much of anything else. One of us drove while the other slept. Before we reached Boston, in midafternoon, it was snowing again. By night, there was a terrible blizzard in Boston.
As soon as we arrived, Jim’s father announced that he would not hear of our trying to drive back to Kenyon in such weather and in such a car. Mrs. Prewitt got on the telephone and obtained a train schedule that would start us on our way early the next morning and put us in Cleveland sometime the next night. (From Cleveland we would take a bus to Gambier.) After dinner at the Prewitts’ house, I went with Jim over to Cambridge to see some of his prep-school friends who were still at Harvard. The dinner with his parents had been painful enough, since he and I were hardly speaking to each other, but the evening with him and his friends was even worse for me. In the room of one of these friends, they spent the time drinking beer and talking about undergraduate politics at Harvard and about the Shelley Poetry Prize. One of the friends was editor of the Crimson, I believe, and another was editor of the Advocate—or perhaps he was just on the staff. I sat in the corner pretending to read old copies of the Advocate. It was the first time I had been to Boston or to Cambridge, and ordinarily I would have been interested in forming my own impressions of how people like the Prewitts lived and of what Harvard students were like. But, as things were, I only sat cursing the fate that had made it necessary for me to come on to Boston instead of returning directly to Kenyon. That is, my own money having been exhausted, I was dependent upon the money Jim would get from his parents to pay for the return trip.
Shortly before seven o’clock Sunday morning, I followed Jim down two flights of stairs from his room on the third floor of his family’s house. A taxi was waiting for us in the street outside. We were just barely going to make the train. In the hall I shook hands with each of his parents, and he kissed them goodbye. We dashed out the front door and down the steps to the street. Just as we were about to climb into the taxi, Mrs. Prewitt came rushing out, bareheaded and without a wrap, calling to us that we had forgotten to leave the key to the car, which was parked there in front of the house. I dug down into my pocket and pulled out the key along with a pocketful of change. But as I turned back toward Mrs. Prewitt I stumbled on the curb, and the key and the change went flying in every direction and were lost from sight in the deep snow that lay on the ground that morning. Jim and Mrs. Prewitt and I began to search for the key, but Mr. Prewitt called from the doorway that we should go ahead, that we would miss our train. We hopped in the taxi, and it pulled away. When I looked back through the rear window I saw Mrs. Prewitt still searching in the snow and Mr. Prewitt moving slowly down the steps from the house, shaking his head.
ON THE train that morning Jim and I didn’t exchange a word or a glance. We sat in the same coach but in different seats, and we did not go into the diner together for lunch. It wasn’t until almost dinnertime that the coach became so crowded that I had either to share my seat with a stranger or to go and sit beside Jim. The day had been long, I had done all the thinking I wanted to do about the way things had turned out in New York. Further, toward the middle of the afternoon I had begun writing in my notebook, and I now had several pages of uncommonly fine prose fiction, which I did not feel averse to reading aloud to someone.
I sat down beside Jim and noticed at once that his notebook was open, too. On the white, unlined page that lay open in his lap I saw the twenty or thirty lines of verse he had been working on. It was in pencil, quite smudged from many erasures, and was set down in Jim’s own vigorous brand of progressive-school printing.
“What do you have there?” I said indifferently.
“You want to hear it?” he said with equal indifference.
“I guess so,” I said. I glanced over at the poem’s title, which was “For the Schoolboys of Douglass House,” and immediately wished I had not got myself into this. The one thing I didn’t want to hear was a preachment from him on his “mature experience” over the holiday. He began reading, and what he read was very nearly this (I have copied this part of the poem down as it later appeared in Hika, our undergraduate magazine at Kenyon):
Today while we are admissibly ungrown,
Now when we are each half boy, half man,
Let us each contrast himself with himself,
And weighing the halves well,
let us each regard
In what manner he has not become a man.
Today let us expose, and count as good,
What is mature. And childish peccadillos
Let us laugh out of our didactic house—
The rident punishment one with reward
For him bringing lack of manliness to light.
But I could take no more than the first two stanzas. And I knew how to stop him. I touched my hand to his sleeve and whispered, “Shades of W. B. Yeats.” And I commenced reciting,
“Now that we’re almost settled in our house
I’ll name the friends that cannot sup with us
Beside a fire of turf in th’ancient tower . . .”
Before I knew it, Jim had snatched my notebook from my hands, and began reading aloud from it:
“She had told him—Janet Monet had, for some inscrutable reason which she herself could not fathom, and which, had he known—as she so positively and with such likely assurance thought he knew—that if he came on to New York in the weeks ensuing her so unbenign father’s funeral, she could not entertain him alone.”
Then he closed my notebook and returned it to me. “I can put it into rhyme for you, Mr. Henry James,” he said. “It goes like this:
She knew that he knew that
her father was dead,
And she knew that he knew what
a life he had led—”
While he was reciting, with a broad grin on his face and his eyes closed, I left him and went up into the diner to eat dinner. The next time we met was in the smoking compartment, at eight o’clock, an hour before we got into Cleveland.
IT WAS I who wandered into the smoking compartment first. I went there not to smoke, for neither Jim nor I started smoking till after we left college, but in the hope that it might be empty, which, oddly enough, it was at that moment. I sat down by the window, at the end of the long leather seat. But I had scarcely settled myself there and begun staring out into the dark when the green curtain in the doorway was drawn back. I saw the light it let in reflected in the windowpane, and I turned around. Jim was standing in the doorway with the green curtain draped back over his head and shoulders. I don’t know why, but it was only then that I realized that Jim, too, had been jilted. Perhaps it was the expression on his face—an expression of disappointment at not finding the smoking compartment empty, at being deprived of his one last chance for solitude before returning to Douglass House. And now—more than I had all day—I hated the sight of him. My lips parted to speak, but he literally took the sarcastic words out of my mouth.
“Ah, you’ll get over it, little friend,” he said.
Suddenly I was off the leather seat and lunging toward him. And he had snatched off his glasses, with the same swift gesture he had used in the restaurant, and tossed them onto the seat. The train was moving at great speed and must have taken a sharp turn just then. I felt myself thrown forward with more force than I could possibly have mustered in the three or four steps I took. When I hit him, it was not with my fists, or even my open hands, but with my shoulder, as though I were blocking in a game of football. He staggered back through the doorway and into the narrow passage, and for a moment the green curtain separated us. Then he came back. He came at me just as I had come at him, with his arms half folded over his chest. The blow he struck me with his shoulders sent me into
the corner of the leather seat again. But I, too, came back.
Apparently neither of us felt any impulse to strike the other with his fist or to take hold and wrestle. On the contrary, I think we felt a mutual abhorrence and revulsion toward any kind of physical contact between us, and if our fight had taken any other form than the one it did, I think that murder would almost certainly have been committed in the smoking compartment that night. We shoved each other about the little room for nearly half an hour, with ever increasing violence, our purpose always seeming to be to get the other through the narrow doorway and into the passage—out of sight behind the green curtain.
From time to time, after our first exchange of shoves, various would-be smokers appeared in the doorway. But they invariably beat a quick retreat. At last one of them found the conductor and sent him in to stop us. By then it was all over, however. The conductor stood in the doorway a moment before he spoke, and we stared at him from opposite corners of the room. He was an old man with an inquiring and rather friendly expression on his face. He looked like a man who might have fought gamecocks in his day, and I think he must have waited that moment in the doorway in the hope of seeing something of the spectacle that had been described to him. But by then each of us was drenched in sweat, and I know from a later examination of my arms and chest and back that I was covered with bruises.
When the old conductor was satisfied that there was not going to be another rush from either of us, he glanced about the room to see if we had done any damage. We had not even upset the spittoon. Even Jim’s glasses were safe on the leather seat. “If you boys want to stay on this train,” the conductor said finally, “you’ll hightail it back to your places before I pull that emergency cord.”
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 14