III

Though his luggage was already at the station, having been taken down the evening before when he picked up his reservation, and he had no other thing to carry but the book in his pocket, John Grandin decided at the last moment to take a cab, feeling already a holiday mood and anxious to induce as quickly as possible the sense of lightheartedness and irresponsibility befitting a vacation; almost (for cabs were not his habit) a reaching for recklessness and luxury. Yes, “luxury” in the Elizabethan usage too, he told himself, welcoming the thought; an indulging of the senses. Civilians had been asked not to use taxis except in emergencies and ordinarily he observed these conditions, just as he and his wife conscientiously observed all the wartime regulations. But this was an occasion, and different. He waved no to the bus about to pull in at the curb, and hailed a cab.

The day had begun hot. It was June 25, 1943—full summer, with a real summer haze lying over the city, though the season was not yet a week old. He sank back in the taxi as if already in a deck chair and told the driver Grand Central. With a racing of the motor, the cab pulled away from 116th and the Drive.

It was a vacation well earned, much needed, long looked-­forward-­to, and all the more precious because it was to be short. Other men in the English Department were to be off till September but he had signed up for summer school again, and not entirely because he liked teaching: there was a shortage of men during the war and he had volunteered to help out. As the cab swung down Riverside Drive in the early damp June morning, with the buildings across the river already trembling in waves of heat, the one troubling thought in John Grandin’s mind was that he must be back in two weeks.

The thought did not bother him long; for meanwhile there was to be the holiday with his wife, their first together in some time, away from the children, in a seaside place they had never visited before. Ethel had left a week earlier to take the children to her parents’ home in Maine and was to meet him this afternoon at Woods Hole, where they would board the boat to Nantucket—to arrive at Sconset, the hotel folder assured them, in time for dinner. For the duration, Dune House could not send a car; the island bus would meet them at the pier.

“For the duration”—it had a finality, a suggestion of everlastingness, out of all proportion to its literal sense; and the worst of it was, no one needed to complete the phrase. What it referred to was universally understood—as if, in these changing times, only one thing had “duration.”

It was the second summer of the war, for other countries the fourth (the seventh for still others): it lived with one now. Sheltered civilian though he was, he felt it keenly, and was increasingly fretted by tiny, irrational, but disturbing obsessions he could not shake, petty irritations of which he was ashamed, in view of the realer upheavals abroad. All life was changing alarmingly fast, including one’s very vocabulary. A blouse was not a man’s shirt or a woman’s waist but the jacket of a uniform; a battle was no longer an engagement between two armies met in the field but the overrunning, by land and sea and air, of whole nations, so that one spoke of the Battle of France or the Battle of Italy—not, as in the old days, the battle of provincial localities such as Soissons­ or the Marne; and terms like for the duration had come to be part of daily speech, so familiar as almost to have lost their original meaning. Added to this was the encroachment of the war on the classroom, in the form of more and more students in uniform or fewer and fewer boys. John Grandin looked out from under the gaily striped awning of the open cab, its scalloped edges flapping noisily in the hot breeze, and willfully did not see the line of destroyers idling on the Hudson, the ugly transports and freighters riding high in the water, awaiting the portentous cargoes that were to be taken, under armed convoy, to secret foreign ports. He saw, but did not think of them. Instead he thought of the Nantucket steamer and wondered what it would be like . . . A man with an accordion would come round, there would be shoeshine boys, pennants would fly and hats would blow away. . . .

. . . And Ethel would be dressed attractively and sensibly in a fall suit, against the possible chill of the ocean breeze, with no flapping taffeta or whipping silk; and later, on the island itself, in a linen shirt and skirt, scorning the halters and shorts, the slacks and dungarees, that other women affected at vacation resorts. During the trip over, she would speak of the boys or question him about the apartment, characteristically avoiding any mention of what would be uppermost in her mind: their holiday together.

The book was crowding his pocket. He pulled it out. Apprehensive that he might leave it on the seat and forget it, he kept it in his hand. Instinctively, from old habit, he held the book upside down, its cover and title against him, so that no one might see what he was reading when he should walk through the station. Why he did this, he could not have said. He would have done the same had it been a popular novel, the diary of a war correspondent, or a learned work on philosophy or metaphysics.

The taxi was moving through Columbus Circle. The city air was close and thick, heavy with damp. What it needed was an island breeze, Grandin thought: Manhattan was hardly one’s idea of an island. The motorman of the old-­fashioned trolley that rumbled noisily along beside the taxi wore a blue shirt, and his back was black with sweat. Scarcely a man was to be seen in the street with a coat on. Several persons had already lined up at the ticket window of a movie. Imagine going to the movies so early in the morning, he reflected, or in the daytime at all; but of course all they wanted was to get inside, out of the heat, in a place that was air cooled.

The choice had been either two weeks at this time—the last in June, the first in July—or three full weeks later on, between the closing of summer school and the start of the fall semester; but after they consulted the calendar, there had really been no choice at all. A full moon was due a few days hence; it was this which had decided his wife, and himself as well.

Had it been a mistake? Because he did not like to be ruled by such things, he thought with some distaste of the sentimental notion which had done him out of a longer holiday later. But anxious to please, anxious to make her happy (which of course meant his own happiness too), he had gladly given in to his wife. Ethel must have a full moon. Like a romantic schoolgirl she believed that a vacation was not a vacation without a moon; and though she did not express the idea in words, he recognized that her anxiety to be in Nantucket when the moon was full implied a compliment to their relationship, a tacit but perhaps wishful declaration that they were still lovers.

The driver turned down Broadway. He was driving fast, but the air that rushed through the open taxi was no breeze at all. The cavern of the street was like a vacuum, breathless; the flags hanging everywhere were as lifeless as if struck in metal; in another hour the asphalt at the crosswalks would begin softly to give underfoot, showing the print of one’s sole, so that the pedestrian would be all but obliged to hurry to the safety of the curb, lest he leave his shoe behind in the hot grip of the muck.

The past week alone, without Ethel, had been a dismal and restless period. Ordinarily they spent scarcely a dozen evenings together a month. With nothing to do—with the certainty that he would soon be at his books—she went to bed early, to doze off over a magazine, while he sat up. Half an hour later he would hear the splashing thump as the magazine slid from the bed, and Ethel, aroused, would turn off her light for the night. Left to himself, with no possibility of interruption now that his wife and children were asleep, he was content to sit in his study midnight after midnight, poring over the delights that would never be exhausted, never begin to be rediscovered or examined enough, no matter how long his days should last. (Though he had smiled at the picture, how well he had understood the man shown in a recent New Yorker drawing who, while referring to an open volume, composed a letter which began: “I’m afraid Professor Witherspoon has erred in his quotation of Verlaine. That line, if memory serves, goes rather like this . . .”) These nights of reading and study were perhaps his moments of greatest happiness, tinged though they were with an anxiety to get the utmost out of the hurrying hours. At such times he had a prescience of the shortness of life and grudged the hours for sleep. But with Ethel away, even though he had been ignoring her for so long, he had oddly not known what to do with himself; something was lacking, the quiet rooms were too quiet, he was not comfortable there alone. There was no point in going out for an evening walk; the Drive was crowded with sailors and girls and he would only be depressed by the meaningless love-making unrestrained everywhere—a natural accompaniment of the war, of course, but he wanted no part of it, wanted not even to see it. To his surprise he discovered that, though home, he was homesick; ruefully he remembered that during the week just ended he had telephoned Maine five times. True, he had waited till evening when the rates were lower, but it was an expense he could ill afford—besides being, again, an infringement of wartime regulations. Why had he called and what had he got out of it? What had they talked about? What, for that matter, did they ever talk about? It had been a need for communication merely; but the language they were accustomed to using between them, if language it could be called, was not the means for communicating anything.

. . . In moments of time-­out such as this, he was given to intense and searching introspection (so far as he understood or was able), honest with himself and willing to face unflattering facts. . . . How much was their marriage founded on habit, how much on love? But how much difference did it make?—Or if love, what kind? Of Ethel there had never been any doubt from the beginning; she was the woman with human needs and human gifts, giving and needing love as the heart gives and needs blood or the lungs air. He had fallen in love with her ten years ago, and though he loved her still, he had always had other interests as well, interests which, the older he grew, were inclined more and more to absorb him entirely, so that he couldn’t honestly say whom or what he had ever been able to give himself up to more wholeheartedly than to his work. He had been a good husband to Ethel, faithful and loyal, but his was a life of the mind. He was glad and lucky to be loved, it was what he needed and wanted, but he looked forward to the time when their marriage would become habit even more. Middle age was so much easier than youth; life was more peaceful and better ordered; there were fewer interruptions to his increasingly consuming interests, less effort between him and his wife, almost no need to “keep up.” Perhaps time had shown their marriage not to be the ideal promised and expected when they had been bridegroom and bride, but who could say it was less sound or secure than most? That this was nothing to pride himself on, however, he was only too well aware. One can take small credit for contentment.

But as he recalled the almost childlike pleasure with which Ethel had made preparations for the holiday, his heart was touched and a wave of tenderness such as he had not experienced in many weeks swept over him. How could he have gone so long taking their relationship for granted, doing nothing about it, allowing Ethel to wait—and wait—for whatever halfhearted attentions he had time or thought to give? He had fallen into the habit of neglect, the only sin. In working too hard or studying too late, he had lost all track of what they meant to one another. With a sense of relief and gratitude he realized how the vacation was well timed for them both. Nothing so rekindled their interest in each other or renewed the novelty of a love long-­accustomed-­to as separation, a change of scene, a chance stay in a hotel room, or a visit to just such a holiday place as they would arrive at tonight. Away from home and the children, the two of them alone together in a strange place, the promise of a full moon—it would be like being young again, and he could again be the kind of husband that made Ethel a happy wife.

The taxi had turned off Broadway and was heading east as if toward home—toward Nantucket and a moon and reunion with Ethel. . . . And now unaccountably it occurred to him, by an act of perception more emotional than mental, that it was he who had chosen these two weeks in preference to the longer holiday later without a moon. As if in secret league with his wife, he it was who wanted, who was banking on, the full moon. Aware of a sense of guilt because the intensity and absorption of his studies too often excluded other pleasures, he welcomed (if the truth were known) any stimulus to love. A hotel room, particularly in a summer resort, could be virtually an invitation to erotism, not the less so when a man’s companion was his wife. The atmosphere or evidence of strangers in the room before them, the absence of the children and home responsibilities, the locked door, the sense of others sleeping or making love in the adjacent rooms, the automatic scrutiny of the desk clerk which debated whether they were or were not married, the speculating eyes that followed them out of the dining room or the understanding glances of those in the parlor-­lobby when they said goodnight and ascended the stairs, had their stimulating effect. Or was all this imagined on his part—the trappings of philandery, promiscuity, the traveling salesman, the unfaithful, or the young unmarried? Whatever it was, imagined or not, it added a pleasant zest to stopping in a hotel, and he went back to his original thought: A hotel room with the white night outside, the moonlight laying across the bed a white blanket alive and luminous with their own movements; or a beach bathed in the dazzling white haze of the moon, the surf prismatic with tumbling cascades of glass; perhaps a silent honeymoon couple lying somewhere near by in the sand; and he and Ethel— The cab had stopped.

“Sorry, Mac.” The driver turned his head. “Can’t go on, for a minute. Got much time?”

John Grandin leaned forward. “What’s the holdup?”

“That.” The driver pointed; and he saw what had halted them.

The taxi had stopped on East 44th, no more than a short block from Grand Central but on the wrong side of Madison. Up the avenue from the south, stretched out till it disappeared over the small rise of ground that was Murray Hill whence it came, moved a strange parade of oddly assorted men, two abreast, ambling along the sidewalk in a formless double column which cut off, for the moment, all east- and westbound traffic. He glanced at his watch. “Do you think they’ll take long?”

The driver shrugged. “No telling. Sometimes they’re quarter of an hour or more.”

It was eight-­twenty-­five. The Cape Codder left in twenty minutes. He may well have had plenty of time but he liked being early. Besides, he had to get his bags from the checkroom. “Perhaps I’d better—”

“Sure, you better walk. Only a step from here, anyway.”

“Thanks.” Grandin paid, tipped, and left the cab.

He did not mind having to walk the rest of the way. It was, as the driver had said, only a step. What he minded was the interruption; particularly the nature of it. It threw him off.

With other pedestrians, a few of whom now and again left off watching and broke through the marching barrier as if they had no time for this sort of thing and must be about their business, he stood on the sidewalk and watched the parade. He wanted badly to dart or step quickly between the advancing pairs and so be on his way, but he could not bring himself to do it.

It was not a parade in any formal sense. The men were not marching in correct formation along the street but rather shuffled or ambled up the sidewalk in a long straggling group, barely keeping double file. They were men and boys of many ages. Some were in shirtsleeves, some wore sweaters in spite of the heat, a few were well dressed; they carried proper suitcases, or rolls of clothing, or paper bags; and it was clear to even the most casual observer that these men were on their way to the Induction Center on Lexington Avenue—that for them, in short, this was The Day.

It was a sight so discomforting that John Grandin found himself embarrassed. Nor was he the only one. Others in the crowd around him watched the procession with an awkward expression which plainly said they would rather not have seen it. There was a strange silence in the street as the men passed along. Only the very young, only boys and young girls, greeted the draftees with smiles, laughter, or the catchphrases of the hour. The laughter rang hollowly in Grandin’s ears. He felt an impulse to plunge through the double column and get on, get away, get out of here—but he stood rooted to the sidewalk, touched with a melancholy respect.

How different this seemed from other wars, other years. He remembered the gaiety of embarking soldiers in the past, the excitement and emotion of the frankly adoring crowd, the wave of solidarity that went out from everyone, till the cheering throng and the departing soldiers themselves were one great loving people, united in a wave of mass affection which for the moment was stronger, more enveloping, than any other emotion in life. It was not so here. There was a look of sheepishness on the faces of the crowd. An embarrassment and faint shame had fallen over the entire street.

Most touching of all was the appearance of the men themselves. It struck straight to his heart, it troubled and upset him. They were sheepish too, and silent. They straggled along hangdog and silly; they stared at the sidewalk in a ludicrous grin, or straight ahead, unseeingly, with jaw set; and occasionally one or two would send a bold defiant glance directly into the eyes of a bystander, as if to say, Go ahead, laugh. And it was by no means comforting to think that in a very few weeks all this would be different, the men would be changed, they would become proud and disciplined and alike, they would fit and belong together so that, in the mass, one could scarcely tell them apart, their native individuality, good or bad, lost in the necessary great machine of which they were to become each a resigned anonymous cog. John Grandin felt so uneasy that he could watch them no longer; and when the final pair of draftees had at last straggled by, he broke into a run toward Grand Central as if he barely had time to catch the last train on the timetable, the last to anywhere.