Robert was a perennial taker of courses—one of those non-matriculated students of indefinable age and income, some of whom pursued, with monkish zeal and no apparent regard for time, this or that freakishly peripheral research project of their own conception, and others of whom, like Robert, seemed to derive a Ponce de León sustenance from the young. Robert himself, a large man of between forty and fifty, whose small features were somewhat cramped together in a wide face, never seemed bothered by his own lack of direction, implying rather that this was really the catholic approach of the “whole man,” alongside of which the serious pursuit of a degree was somehow foolish, possibly vulgar. Rumor connected him with a rich Boston family that had remittanced him at least as far as New York, but he never spoke about himself, although he was extraordinarily alert to gossip. Whatever income he had he supplemented by renting his extra room to a series of young men students. The one opulence among his dun-colored, perhaps consciously Spartan effects was a really fine record-player, which he kept going at all hours with selections from his massive collection. Occasionally he annotated the music, or the advance-copy novel that lay on his table, with foreign-language tags drawn from the wide, if obscure, latitudes of his travels, and it was his magic talent for assuming that his young friends, too, had known, had experienced, that, more than anything, kept them enthralled.
“Fabelhaft! Isn’t it?” he would say of the Mozart. “Remember how they did it that last time at Salzburg!” and they would all sit there, included, belonging, headily remembering the Salzburg to which they had never been. Or he would pick up the novel and lay it down again. “La plume de mon oncle, I’m afraid. La plume de mon oncle Gide. Eheu, poor Gide!”—and they would each make note of the fact that one need not read that particular book, that even, possibly, it was no longer necessary to read Gide.
PETER parked the car and walked into the entrance of Robert’s apartment house, smiling to himself, lightened by the prospect of company. After all, he had been weaned on the salon talk of such circles; these self-fancying little bohemias at least made him feel at home. And Robert was cleverer than most—it was amusing to watch him. For just as soon as his satellites thought themselves secure on the promontory of some “trend” he had pointed out to them, they would find that he had deserted them, had gone on to another trend, another eminence, from which he beckoned, cocksure and just faintly malicious. He harmed no one permanently. And if he concealed some skeleton of a weakness, some closeted Difference with the Authorities, he kept it decently interred.
As Peter stood in the dark, soiled hallway and rang the bell of Robert’s apartment, he found himself as suddenly depressed again, unaccountably reminded of his mother. There were so many of them, and they affected you so, these charmers who, if they could not offer you the large strength, could still atone for the lack with so many small decencies. It was admirable, surely, the way they managed this. And surely, after all, they harmed no one.
Robert opened the door. “Why, hello— Why, hello, Peter!” He seemed surprised, almost relieved. “Greetings!” he added, in a voice whose boom was more in the manner than the substance. “Come in, Pietro, come in!” He wore white linen shorts, a zebra-striped beach shirt, and huaraches, in which he moved easily, leading the way down the dark hall of the apartment, past the two bedrooms, into the living room. All of the apartment was on a court, but on the top floor, so it received a medium, dingy light from above. The living room, long and pleasant, with an old white mantel, a gas log, and many books, always came as a surprise after the rest of the place, and at any time of day Robert kept a few lamps lit, which rouged the room with an evening excitement.
As they entered, Robert reached over in passing and turned on the record-player. Music filled the room, muted but insistent, as if he wanted it to patch up some lull he had left behind. Two young men sat in front of the dead gas log. Between them was a table littered with maps, an open atlas, travel folders, glass beer steins. Vince, the current roomer, had his head on his clenched fists. The other man, a stranger, indolently raised a dark, handsome head as they entered.
“Vince!” Robert spoke sharply. “You know Peter Birge. And this is Mario Osti. Peter Birge.”
The dark young man nodded and smiled, lounging in his chair. Vince nodded. His red-rimmed eyes looked beyond Peter into some distance he seemed to prefer.
“God, isn’t it but hot!” Robert said. “I’ll get you a beer.” He bent over Mario with an inquiring look, a caressing hand on the empty glass in front of him.
Mario stretched back on the chair, smiled upward at Robert, and shook his head sleepily. “Only makes me hotter.” He yawned, spread his arms languorously, and let them fall. He had the animal self-possession of the very handsome; it was almost a shock to hear him speak.
Robert bustled off to the kitchen.
“Robert!” Vince called, in his light, pouting voice. “Get me a drink. Not a beer. A drink.” He scratched at the blond stubble on his cheek with a nervous, pointed nail. On his round head and retroussé face, the stubble produced the illusion of a desiccated baby, until, looking closer, one imagined that he might never have been one, but might have been spawned at the age he was, to mummify perhaps but not to grow. He wore white shorts exactly like Robert’s, and his blue-and-white striped shirt was a smaller version of Robert’s brown-and-white, so that the two of them made an ensemble, like the twin outfits the children wore on the beach at Rye.
“You know I don’t keep whiskey here.” Robert held three steins deftly balanced, his heavy hips neatly avoiding the small tables which scattered the room. “You’ve had enough, wherever you got it.” It was true, Peter remembered, that Robert was fonder of drinks with a flutter of ceremony about them—café brûlé perhaps, or, in the spring, a Maibowle, over which he could chant the triumphant details of his pursuit of the necessary woodruff. But actually one tippled here on the exhilarating effect of wearing one’s newest façade, in the fit company of others similarly attired.
Peter picked up his stein. “You and Vince all set for Morocco, I gather.”
“Morocco?” Robert took a long pull at his beer. “No. No, that’s been changed. I forgot you hadn’t been around. Mario’s been brushing up my Italian. He and I are off for Rome the day after tomorrow.”
The last record on the changer ended in an archaic battery of horns. In the silence while Robert slid on a new batch of records, Peter heard Vince’s nail scrape, scrape along his cheek. Still leaning back, Mario shaped smoke with his lips. Large and facilely drawn, they looked, more than anything, accessible—to a stream of smoke, of food, to another mouth, to any plum that might drop.
“You going to study over there?” Peter said to him.
“Paint.” Mario shaped and let drift another corolla of smoke.
“No,” Robert said, clicking on the record arm. “I’m afraid Africa’s démodé.” A harpsichord began to play, its dwarf notes hollow and perfect. Robert raised his voice a shade above the music. “Full of fashion photographers. And little come-lately writers.” He sucked in his cheeks and made a face. “Trying out their passions under the beeg, bad sun.”
“Eheu, poor Africa?” said Peter.
Robert laughed. Vince stared at him out of wizened eyes. Not drink, so much, after all, Peter decided, looking professionally at the mottled cherub face before he realized that he was comparing it with another face, but lately left. He looked away.
“Weren’t you going over, Peter?” Robert leaned against the machine.
“Not this year.” Carefully Peter kept out of his voice the knell the words made in his mind. In Greenwich, there were many graveled walks, unshrubbed except for the nurses who dotted them, silent and attitudinized as trees. “Isn’t that Landowska playing?”
“Hmm. Nice and cooling on a hot day. Or a fevered brow.” Robert fiddled with the volume control. The music became louder, then lowered. “Vince wrote a poem about that once. About the Mozart, really, wasn’t it, Vince? ‘A lovely clock between ourselve
s and time.’” He enunciated daintily, pushing the words away from him with his tongue.
“Turn it off!” Vince stood up, his small fists clenched, hanging at his sides.
“No, let her finish.” Robert turned deliberately and closed the lid of the machine, so that the faint hiss of the needle vanished from the frail, metronomic notes. He smiled. “What a time-obsessed crowd writers are. Now Mario doesn’t have to bother with that dimension.”
“Not unless I paint portraits,” Mario said. His parted lips exposed his teeth, like some white, unexpected flint of intelligence.
“Dolce far niente,” Robert said softly. He repeated the phrase dreamily, so that half-known Italian words—“loggia,” the “Ponte Vecchio,” the “Lungarno”—imprinted themselves one by one on Peter’s mind, and he saw the two of them, Mario and Roberto now, already in the frayed-gold light of Florence, in the umber dusk of half-imagined towns.
A word, muffled, came out of Vince’s throat. He lunged for the record-player. Robert seized his wrist and held it down on the lid. They were locked that way, staring at each other, when the doorbell rang.
“That must be Susan,” Robert said. He released Vince and looked down, watching the blood return to his fingers, flexing his palm.
With a second choked sound, Vince flung out his fist in an awkward attempt at a punch. It grazed Robert’s cheek, clawing downward. A thin line of red appeared on Robert’s cheek. Fist to mouth, Vince stood a moment; then he rushed from the room. They heard the nearer bedroom door slam and the lock click. The bell rang again, a short, hesitant burr.
Robert clapped his hand to his cheek, shrugged, and left the room.
Mario got up out of his chair for the first time. “Aren’t you going to ask who Susan is?”
“Should I?” Peter leaned away from the face bent confidentially near, curly with glee.
“His daughter,” Mario whispered. “He said he was expecting his daughter. Can you imagine? Robert!”
Peter moved farther away from the mobile, pressing face and, standing at the window, studied gritty details of the courtyard. A vertical line of lighted windows, each with a glimpse of stair, marked the hallways on each of the five floors. Most of the other windows were dim and closed, or opened just a few inches above their white ledges, and the yard was quiet. People would be away or out in the sun, or in their brighter front rooms dressing for dinner, all of them avoiding this dark shaft that connected the backs of their lives. Or, here and there, was there someone sitting in the fading light, someone lying on a bed with his face pressed to a pillow? The window a few feet to the right, around the corner of the court, must be the window of the room into which Vince had gone. There was no light in it.
Robert returned, a Kleenex held against his cheek. With him was a pretty, ruffle-headed girl in a navy-blue dress with a red arrow at each shoulder. He switched on another lamp. For the next arrival, Peter thought, surely he will tug back a velvet curtain or break out with a heraldic flourish of drums, recorded by Red Seal. Or perhaps the musty wardrobe was opening at last and was this the skeleton—this girl who had just shaken hands with Mario, and now extended her hand toward Peter, tentatively, timidly, as if she did not habitually shake hands but today would observe every custom she could.
“How do you do?”
“How do you do?” Peter said. The hand he held for a moment was small and childish, the nails unpainted, but the rest of her was very correct for the eye of the beholder, like the young models one sees in magazines, sitting or standing against a column, always in three-quarter view, so that the picture, the ensemble, will not be marred by the human glance. Mario took from her a red dressing case that she held in her free hand, bent to pick up a pair of white gloves that she had dropped, and returned them with an avid interest which overbalanced, like a waiter’s gallantry. She sat down, brushing at the gloves.
“The train was awfully dusty—and crowded.” She smiled tightly at Robert, looked hastily and obliquely at each of the other two, and bent over the gloves, brushing earnestly, stopping as if someone had said something, and, when no one did, brushing again.
“Well, well, well,” Robert said. His manners, always good, were never so to the point of clichés, which would be for him what nervous gaffes were for other people. He coughed, rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand, looked at the hand, and stuffed the Kleenex into the pocket of his shorts. “How was camp?”
Mario’s eyebrows went up. The girl was twenty, surely, Peter thought.
“All right,” she said. She gave Robert the stiff smile again and looked down into her lap. “I like helping children. They can use it.” Her hands folded on top of the gloves, then inched under and hid beneath them.
“Susan’s been counseling at a camp which broke up early because of a polio scare,” Robert said as he sat down. “She’s going to use Vince’s room while I’m away, until college opens.”
“Oh—” She looked up at Peter. “Then you aren’t Vince?”
“No. I just dropped in. I’m Peter Birge.”
She gave him a neat nod of acknowledgment. “I’m glad, because I certainly wouldn’t want to inconvenience—”
“Did you get hold of your mother in Reno?” Robert asked quickly.
“Not yet. But she couldn’t break up her residence term anyway. And Arthur must have closed up the house here. The phone was disconnected.”
“Arthur’s Susan’s stepfather,” Robert explained with a little laugh. “Number three, I think. Or is it four, Sue?”
Without moving, she seemed to retreat, so that again there was nothing left for the observer except the girl against the column, any one of a dozen with the short, anonymous nose, the capped hair, the foot arched in the trim shoe, and half an iris glossed with an expertly aimed photoflood. “Three,” she said. Then one of the hidden hands stole out from under the gloves, and she began to munch evenly on a fingernail.
“Heavens, you haven’t still got that habit!” Robert said.
“What a heavy papa you make, Roberto,” Mario said.
She flushed, and put the hand back in her lap, tucking the fingers under. She looked from Peter to Mario and back again. “Then you’re not Vince,” she said. “I didn’t think you were.”
The darkness increased around the lamps. Behind Peter, the court had become brisk with lights, windows sliding up, and the sound of taps running.
“Guess Vince fell asleep. I’d better get him up and send him on his way.” Robert shrugged, and rose.
“Oh, don’t! I wouldn’t want to be an inconvenience,” the girl said, with a polite terror which suggested she might often have been one.
“On the contrary.” Robert spread his palms, with a smile, and walked down the hall. They heard him knocking on a door, then his indistinct voice.
In the triangular silence, Mario stepped past Peter and slid the window up softly. He leaned out to listen, peering sidewise at the window to the right. As he was pulling himself back in, he looked down. His hands stiffened on the ledge. Very slowly he pulled himself all the way in and stood up. Behind him a tin ventilator clattered inward and fell to the floor. In the shadowy lamplight his too classic face was like marble which moved numbly. He swayed a little, as if with vertigo.
“I’d better get out of here!”
They heard his heavy breath as he dashed from the room. The slam of the outer door blended with Robert’s battering, louder now, on the door down the hall.
“What’s down there?” She was beside Peter, otherwise he could not have heard her. They took hands, like strangers met on a narrow footbridge or on one of those steep places where people cling together more for anchorage against their own impulse than for balance. Carefully they leaned out over the sill. Yes—it was down there, the shirt, zebra-striped, just decipherable on the merged shadow of the courtyard below.
Carefully, as if they were made of eggshell, as if by some guarded movement they could still rescue themselves from disaster, they drew back and straightened
up. Robert, his face askew with the impossible question, was behind them.
AFTER this, there was the hubbub—the ambulance from St. Luke’s, the prowl car, the two detectives from the precinct station house, and finally the “super,” a vague man with the grub pallor and shamble of those who live in basements. He pawed over the keys on the thong around his wrist and, after several tries, opened the bedroom door. It was a quiet, unviolent room with a tossed bed and an open window, with a stagy significance acquired only momentarily in the minds of those who gathered in a group at its door.
MUCH later, after midnight, Peter and Susan sat in the bald glare of an all-night restaurant. With hysterical eagerness, Robert had gone on to the station house with the two detectives to register the salient facts, to help ferret out the relatives in Ohio, to arrange, in fact, anything that might still be arrangeable about Vince. Almost without noticing, he had acquiesced in Peter’s proposal to look after Susan. Susan herself, after silently watching the gratuitous burbling of her father, as if it were a phenomenon she could neither believe nor leave, had followed Peter without comment. At his suggestion, they had stopped off at the restaurant on their way to her stepfather’s house, for which she had a key.
“Thanks. I was starved.” She leaned back and pushed at the short bang of hair on her forehead.
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 33