The music teacher made a flip remark. They all laughed and began again. Their number was added to continually as the door opened and let in the sounds from the hall. Soon there were no more vacant chairs; the latecomers had to stand. The snow was now noticeably heavier, and the singing had more volume. Though they were at some pains to convey, by their remarks to one another and their easy laughter, that this was not an occasion to be taken seriously, nevertheless the fact that they were here was proof of the contrary: they all had offices where they should have been and salaries they were not at this moment doing anything to earn. Twenty-seven men with, at first glance, a look of sameness about them, a round, composite, youngish, unrevealing, New York face. Under closer inspection, this broke down. Not all the eyes were blue, nor were the fathers all in their middle and late thirties. The thin-faced man at the end of the second row could not have been a broker or a lawyer or in advertising. The man next to him had survived incarceration in a Nazi prison camp. There was one Negro. Here and there a head that was not thickly covered with hair. Their speaking voices varied, but not so much as they conceivably might have—no Texas drawl, for instance. And all the fingernails were clean, all the shoes were shined, all the linen was fresh.
Each time they went over the hymn it was better. They clearly needed more rehearsing, but the music teacher glanced nervously at the clock and said, “And now ‘In dulci lubilo.’”
Those who had forgotten their Latin, or never had any, eavesdropped on those who knew how the words should be pronounced. The tune was powerful and swept everything before it, and in a flush of pleasure they finished together, on the beat, loudly, making the room echo. They had forgotten about the telephone messages piling up on their desks beside the unopened mail. They were enjoying themselves. They could have gone on singing for another hour. Instead, they had to get up and file out of the room and crowd into the elevators.
In spite of new costumes, new scenery, different music, and—naturally—a different cast, the Christmas play was always the same. Mary and Joseph proceeded to Bethlehem, where the inns were full, and found shelter in the merest suggestion of a stable. An immature angel announced to very unlikely shepherds the appearance of the Star. Wise Men came and knelt before the plastic Babe in Mary’s arms. And then the finale: the Threes singing and dancing with heavenly joy.
“How did it sound?” George asked, in the crowd on the stairs.
“Fine,” Iris said.
“Really? It didn’t seem to me—maybe because we were under the balcony—it didn’t seem as if we were making any sound at all.”
“No, it was plenty loud enough. What was so nice was the two kinds of voices.”
“High and low, you mean?”
“The fathers sounded like bears. Adorable.”
IN THEORY, since it was the middle of the night, it was dark, but not the total suffocating darkness of a cloudy night in the country. The city, as usual, gave off light—enough so that you could see the island in the middle of the river, and the three bridges, and the outlines of the little houses on East End Avenue and the big apartment buildings on Eighty-sixth Street, and the trees and shrubs and lampposts and comfort station in the park. Also a woman standing by the railing of the river walk.
There was no wind. The river was flowing north and the air smelled of snow, which melted the moment it touched any solid object, and became the shine on iron balustrades and on the bark of trees.
The woman had been standing there a long time, looking out over the water, when she began awkwardly to pull herself up and over the curved iron spikes that were designed, by their size and shape, to prevent people from throwing themselves into the river. In this instance they were not enough. But it took some doing. There was a long tear in the woman’s coat and she was gasping for breath as she let herself go backward into space.
THE sun enters Aquarius January 20th and remains until February 18th. “An extremely good friend can today put into motion some operation that will be most helpful to your best interest, or else introduce you to some influential person. Go out socially in the evening on a grand scale. Be charming.”
THE cocktail party was in a penthouse. The elevator opened directly into the foyer of the apartment. And the woman he was talking to—or rather, who was talking to him—was dressed all in shades of brown.
“I tried to get you last summer,” she said, “but your wife said you were busy that day.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ll try you again.”
“Please do,” somebody said for him, using his mouth and tongue and vocal cords—because it was the last thing in the world he wanted, to drive halfway across Long Island to a lunch party. “We hardly ever go anywhere,” he himself said, but too late, after the damage had been done.
His mind wandered for an instant as he took in—not the room, for he was facing the wrong way, but a small corner of it. And in that instant he lost the thread of the story she was telling him. She had taken her shoe off in a movie theatre and put her purse down beside it, and the next thing he knew they refused to do anything, even after she had explained what happened and that she must get in. Who “they” were, get in where, he patiently waited to find out, while politely sharing her indignation.
“But imagine!” she exclaimed. “They said, ‘How valuable was the ring?’” He shook his head, commiserating with her.
“I suppose if it hadn’t been worth a certain amount,” she went on, “they wouldn’t have done a thing about it.”
The police, surely, he thought. Having thought at first it was the manager of the movie theatre she was talking about.
“And while they were jimmying the door open, people were walking by, and nobody showed the slightest concern. Or interest.”
So it wasn’t the police. But who was it, then? He never found out, because they were joined by another woman, who smiled at him in such a way as to suggest that they knew each other. But though he searched his mind and her face—the plucked eyebrows, the reserved expression in the middle-aged eyes—and considered her tweed suit and her diamond pin and her square figure, he could not imagine who she was. Suppose somebody—suppose Iris came up and he had to introduce her?
The purse was recovered, with the valuable ring still in it, and he found himself talking about something that had occupied his thoughts lately. And in his effort to say what he meant, he failed to notice what happened to the first woman. Suddenly she was not there. Somebody must have carried her off, right in front of his unseeing eyes.
“. . . but it isn’t really distinguishable from what goes on in dreams,” he said to the woman who seemed to know him and to assume that he knew her. “People you have known for twenty or thirty years, you suddenly discover you didn’t really know how they felt about you, and in fact you don’t know how anybody feels about anything—only what they say they feel. And suppose that isn’t true at all? You decide that it is better to act as if it is true. And so does everybody else. But it is a kind of myth you are living in, wide awake, with your eyes open, in broad daylight.”
He realized that the conversation had become not only personal but intimate. But it was too late to back out now.
To his surprise she seemed to understand, to have felt what he had felt. “And one chooses,” she said, “between this myth and that.”
“Exactly! If you live in the city and are bringing up children, you decide that this thing is not safe—and so you don’t let them do it—and that thing is safe. When, actually, neither one is safe and everything is equally dangerous. But for the sake of convenience—”
“And also so that you won’t go out of your mind,” she said.
“And so you won’t go out of your mind,” he agreed. “Well,” he said after a moment, “that makes two of us who are thinking about it.”
“In one way or another, people live by myths,” she said.
He racked his brain for something further to say on this or any other subject.
Glancing arou
nd at the windows, which went from floor to ceiling, the woman in the tweed suit said, “These vistas you have here.”
He then looked and saw black night, with lighted buildings far below and many blocks away. “From our living room,” he said, “you can see all the way to the North Pole.”
“We live close to the ground,” she said.
But where? Cambridge? Princeton? Philadelphia?
“In the human scale,” he said. “Like London and Paris. Once, on a beautiful spring day, four of us—we’d been having lunch with a visiting Englishman who was interested in architecture—went searching for the sky. Up one street and down the next.”
She smiled.
“We had to look for it, the sky is so far away in New York.”
They stood nursing their drinks, and a woman came up to them who seemed to know her intimately, and the two women started talking and he turned away.
ON HER way into the school building, Laurie joined the flood from the school bus, and cried, “Hi, Janet . . . Hi, Connie . . . Hi, Elizabeth . . .” and seemed to be enveloped by her schoolmates, until suddenly, each girl having turned to some other girl, Laurie is left standing alone, her expression unchanged, still welcoming, but nobody having responded. If you collect reasons, this is the reason she behaved so badly at lunch, was impertinent to her mother, and hit her little sister.
HE WOKE with a mild pain in his stomach. It was high up, like an ulcer pain, and he lay there worrying about it. When he heard the sound of shattered glass, his half-awake, oversensible mind supplied both the explanation and the details: two men, putting a large framed picture into the trunk compartment of a parked car, had dropped it, breaking the glass. Too bad . . . . And with that thought he drifted gently off to sleep.
In the morning he looked out of the bedroom window and saw three squad cars in front of the drugstore. The window of the drugstore had a big star-shaped hole in it, and several policemen were standing around looking at the broken glass on the sidewalk.
THE sneeze was perfectly audible through two closed doors. He turned to Iris with a look of inquiry.
“Who sneezed? Was that you, Laurie?” she called.
“That was Cindy,” Laurie said.
In principle, Iris would have liked to bring them up in a Spartan fashion, but both children caught cold easily and their colds were prolonged, and recurring, and overlapping, and endless. Whether they should or shouldn’t be kept home from school took on the unsolvability of a moral dilemma—which George’s worrying disposition did nothing to alleviate. The sound of a child coughing deep in the chest in the middle of the night would make him leap up out of a sound sleep.
She blamed herself when the children came down with a cold, and she blamed them. Possibly, also, the school was to blame, since the children played on the roof, twelve stories above the street, and up there the winds were often much rawer, and teachers cannot, of course, spend all their time going around buttoning up the coats of little girls who have got too hot from running.
She went and stood in the doorway of Cindy’s room. “No sneezing,” she said.
Sneeze, sneeze, sneeze.
“Cindy, if you are catching another cold, I’m going to shoot myself,” Iris said, and gave her two baby-aspirin tablets to chew, and some Vitamin C drops, and put an extra blanket on her bed, and didn’t open the window, and in the morning Cindy’s nose was running.
“Shall I keep her home from school?” Iris asked, at the breakfast table.
Instead of answering, George got up and looked at the weather thermometer outside the west window of their bedroom. “Twenty-seven,” he said, when he came back. But he still didn’t answer her question. He was afraid to answer it, lest it be the wrong answer, and she blame him. Actually, there was no answer that was the right answer: They had tried sending Cindy to school and they had tried not sending her. This time, Iris kept her home from school—not because she thought it was going to make any difference but so the pediatrician, Dr. de Santillo, wouldn’t blame her. Not that he ever said anything. And Cindy got to play with Laurie’s things all morning. She played with Laurie’s paper dolls until she was tired, and left them all over the floor, and then she colored in Laurie’s coloring book, and Puppy chewed up one of the crayons but not one of Laurie’s favorites—not the pink or the blue—and then Cindy rearranged the furniture in Laurie’s doll house so it was much nicer, and then she lined up all Laurie’s dolls in a row on her bed and played school. And when it was time for Laurie to come home from school she went out to the kitchen and played with the egg-beater. Laurie came in, letting the front door slam behind her, and dropped her mittens in the hall and her coat on the living-room rug and her knitted cap on top of her coat, and started for her room, and it sounded as if she had hurt herself. Iris came running. What a noise Laurie made. And stamping her foot, Cindy noted disapprovingly. And tears.
“Stop screaming and tell me what’s the matter!” Iris said.
“Cindy, I hate you!” Laurie said. “I hate you, I hate you!”
Horrible old Laurie . . . .
But in the morning when they first woke up it was different. She heard Laurie in the bathroom, and then she heard Laurie go back to her room. Lying in bed, Cindy couldn’t suck her thumb because she couldn’t breathe through her nose, so she got up and went into Laurie’s room (entirely forgetting that her mother had said that in the morning she was to stay out of Laurie’s room because she had a cold) and got in Laurie’s bed and said, “Read, read.” Laurie read her the story of “The Tinder Box,” which has three dogs in it—a dog with eyes as big as saucers, and a dog with eyes as big as millwheels, and a third dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower of Copenhagen.
TAP, tap, tap on the bedroom door brought him entirely awake. “What’s Laurie been reading to her?” he asked, turning over in bed. That meant it was Iris’s turn to get up. While she was pulling herself together, they heard tap, tap, tap again. The bed heaved.
“What’s Laurie been reading to you?” she asked as she and Cindy went off down the hall together. When she came back into the bedroom, the light was on and he was standing in front of his dresser, with the top drawer open, searching for Gelusil tablets.
“Trouble?” she said.
STANDING in the doorway of Cindy’s room, in her blue dressing gown, with her hairbrush in her hand, Iris said, “Who sneezed? Was that you, Cindy?”
“That was Laurie,” Cindy said.
So after that Laurie got to stay home from school too.
“I saw Phyllis Simpson in Gristede’s supermarket,” Iris said. “Their cook committed suicide.”
“How?”
“She threw herself in the river.”
“No!”
“They think she must have done it sometime during the night, but they don’t know exactly when. They just came down to breakfast and she wasn’t there. They’re still upset about it.”
“When did it happen?”
“About a month ago. Her body was found way down the river.”
“What a pity. She was a nice woman.”
“You remember her?”
“Certainly. She always waved to the children when I used to walk them to school. She waved to me too, sometimes. From the kitchen window. What made her do such a thing?”
“They have no idea.”
“She was a big woman,” he said. “It must have been hard for her to pull herself up over that railing. It’s quite high. No note or anything?”
“No.”
“Terrible.”
ONST. Valentine’s Day, the young woman who lived on tea and cigarettes and was given to burning herself on the gas stove eloped to California with her mother, and now there was no one in the kitchen. From time to time, the employment agency went through the formality of sending someone for Iris to interview—though actually it was the other way round. And either the apartment was too large or they didn’t care to work for a family with children or they were not accustomed to doing the cooking as wel
l as the other housework. Sometimes they didn’t give any reason at all.
A young woman from Haiti, who didn’t speak English, was willing to give the job a try. It turned out that she had never seen a carpet sweeper before, and she asked for her money at the end of the day.
WALKING the dog at seven-fifteen on a winter morning, he suddenly stopped and said to himself, “Oh God, somebody’s been murdered!” On the high stone stoop of one of the little houses on East End Avenue facing the park. Somebody in a long red coat. By the curve of the hip he could tell it was a woman, and with his heart racing he considered what he ought to do. From where he stood on the sidewalk he couldn’t see the upper part of her body. One foot—the bare heel and the strap of her shoe—was sticking out from under the hem of the coat. If she’d been murdered, wouldn’t she be sprawled out in an awkward position instead of curled up and lying on her side as though she was in bed asleep? He looked up at the house. Had they locked her out? After a scene? Or she could have come home in the middle of the night and discovered that she’d forgotten to take her key. But in that case she’d have spent the night in a hotel or with a friend. Or called an all-night locksmith.
He went up three steps without managing to see any more than he had already. The parapet offered some shelter from the wind, but even so, how could she sleep on the cold stone, with nothing over her?
“Can I help you?”
His voice sounded strange and hollow. There was no answer. The red coat did not stir. Then he saw the canvas bag crammed with the fruit of her night’s scavenging, and backed down the steps.
NOW it was his turn. The sore throat was gone in the morning, but it came back during the day, and when he sat down to dinner he pulled the extension out at his end and moved his mat, silver, and glass farther away from the rest of them.
“If you aren’t sneezing, I don’t think you need to be in Isolation Corner,” Iris said, but he stayed there anyway. His colds were prolonged and made worse by his efforts to treat them; made worse still by his trying occasionally to disregard them, as he saw other people doing. In the end he went through box after box of Kleenex, his nose white with Noxzema, his eyelids inflamed, like a man in a subway poster advertising a cold remedy that, as it turned out, did not work for him. And finally he took to his bed, with a transistor radio for amusement and company. In his childhood, being sick resulted in agreeable pampering, and now that he was grown he preferred to be both parties to this pleasure. No one could make him as comfortable as he could make himself, and Iris had all but given up trying.
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 55