THREE

And what about the cause of it all? What about the lovely Nausicaa, my seashore girl, who unwittingly presented me with such problems and solutions, all in one handy package?

I sat on the windowsill of my room, my back against the windowframe, my feet braced against the opposite frame, and I smoked and watched the night depart from Brooklyn while I considered her. Now there was a dawn freshness in the air, the faintest stirring of breeze, and if I was not properly grateful for it, it was because I was an old hand at the game and not to be fooled. When I went into the yard in the late afternoon it would be murderously hot again, and my gratitude was reserved for the knowledge that the 181 was finished, that there would be no jobs in the holes below where airblowers drew out smoke but where only reeking heat rushed in to replace it.

Meanwhile the night departed. The blackness around me became less black. The patches of gray in the garden below became gray flower beds, then flowers colored red, yellow, and blue. The factory wall at the end of the garden became a factory wall, then a dim panorama of countryside, then a blue river flowing through green countryside under a blue sky with marshmallow clouds in it. Inside the room objects took form. A closet door behind which were lacy dresses and high-heeled shoes. A dresser on which stood an economy-sized jar of cold cream, no larger than a hogshead but not much smaller. And surrounding the jar a litter of lipstick cases, a dozen or more of them, and tiny tubes and jars of eye makeup and brushes to go with them, and a sprinkling of hairpins, heavier than any others I had ever seen. And most important of all there was a large comb and a stiff hairbrush, the twins to the set in her room. She combed and brushed her hair endlessly, undoing it and letting it spill, coal black, an ebony waterfall, to her waist, combing it through and then brushing it in a sort of trance, each stroke lifting the roundness of a breast and pressing it tight against the bodice of her dress so that the nipple was sharply outlined there, a delicious sight to see.

And on the floor beside the dresser was her stack of movie magazines, all of them except the newest one on top limp and shabby from reading and rereading, all of them making it clear that you can give three cheers for Hamlet, but what the public wants is Him and Her and what they happen to be doing off screen while the fireworks burst in Technicolor over the Mediterranean.

So I lived in her presence yet not in it, wived but not wed, empty with the need for her but aware that there was no way of fulfilling that need save by mounting one trophy on the wall, the yellow-tusked head of Avery. And who was she to do this to me? And what was she, this sole entelechy of my own private universe, its meaning and function?

When Oxley Wesson, one memorable night in the Village, popped that who are you, what are you at her, she had said politely, “I’m Barbara-Jean. I’m a friend of Egan’s,” and when he had said, “Is that all?” she had smiled at him, stunning him with the smile, and had said, “Well, it’s enough to start with, isn’t it?”

Fair enough. To start with, she had a name, and, as it happened, not even one I found pleasing. It was the hyphen did it. There is something too magnolia-scented about hyphenated names like that, something about them of the crinolined miss with corkscrew curls jumping up and down and clapping her hands gaily as the ole massuh rides up to the plantation. The name Barbara alone was not bad; Varvara would have come much closer to the actuality, if, as I liked to imagine, Circassian beauties were sometimes named Varvara. Not that I had ever seen a Circassian beauty or ever expected to. All I knew was that Barbara looked like one.

Her age in proportion to mine had long ago been ordained as perfect by no less authorities than the brothers in Iobacchoi. In solemn bull session convened, they sat before the fireplace and discussed women. “You know, the French have a formula. They say the right age for the woman you marry is half yours plus seven. It sounds logical, doesn’t it? I mean, when you think it over.”

Crop-headed men gravely smoking pipes under the crossed initiation paddles, and oh, how gently those paddles had dealt with Ben Gennaro when he was made a brother. “Wait a second, let me figure it out—say, it does make sense. What do you think, Ingle?” “Well, the French always seem to know what they’re talking about in that area. What do you think, Egan?” I voted for it, we all voted for it, we all knew damn well that when it came to that area the French knew what they were talking about. Maybe they did. Barbara was not quite of age to vote yet, but she was half my age plus seven, and I had no complaints to make.

Name, age, and what comes next on any document? A document, say, like a wedding license? Address, of course. Ordinarily there’s no question about it, but there was one here. If Egan didn’t make the right moves, the address was likely to be Voorhees Number 7 somewhere out on Long Island Sound. If, however, he did what had to be done, the address would be of his own choosing. Meanwhile it was three doors away from his in Ethel Waterhouse’s palace of wonders and didn’t matter too much, because here it was the landlady that mattered. Her orange hair was more orange than ever, she had added another chin to the original series, her cigarette holder seemed to grow a little longer and more wobbly each year, but she ran a free and easy place, did Ethel. She had no room in her heart for young marrieds, but young lovers she understood, especially if she was paid a fair price for her understanding. She was as merrily venal as a politician, cackled loudly as an old hen when she took what I paid her to mother my mistress and to be like the three wise monkeys in all regards. She knew her value, and she collected to the last penny for it.

So much for the address, so much for the vital statistics which are, in truth, the least vital part of any woman. She is, when it comes to statistics, a changeable creature. She marries and changes her name and address. She grows older and changes her age. Daily she changes the shape and color of her eyes and lips. Occasionally she changes the color of her hair. She changes her clothing, not like a man who emerges in the new clothing the same man, but like someone possessed of magic so that there is always a different woman in the different clothing, a woman for every occasion, a woman for every hour if needs be. So, of course, her statistics at any given time are as meaningless as the stage sets they carted out of the theater yesterday when the play closed.

Then what of the immutable Barbara, the inward Barbara, the Barbara I wanted?

For one thing, she was an inveterate liar—no, call it romancer—but was so transparent about it, so inept at it, that it was always easy to separate the romance from the reality. We made an Othello and Desdemona in reverse. I loved her for the dangers she had passed, and she loved me that I did pity them. Wide-eyed, I marveled at her castles in the air, passionate lovers rebuffed, adventures on the high seas, and all the stuff of Hollywood dreams. All her dreams were written, directed, and produced by Hollywood, and yet, I sometimes wondered, what did Helen dream about while old Menelaus snored by her side during the long Spartan nights? And what, in the end, did she happily do about it?

But my own Helen must be the subject here; she started wars as well as any, and Noel Claiborne could testify to that. And apart from warmongering and lying, she was, among other things, a conscienceless beggar, a charming panhandler of small change. Fine ladies practice that vice with less aplomb than she. They say: “Do you have some change for the cigarette machine?” and they blush and lower their eyelids, ashamed, not of begging, but of the smallness of the gratuity they demand. They are used to getting a great deal. They lose poise when asking for a pittance.

Barbara did not. She had gotten nothing before; she was delighted with very little now. And when she discovered that this was one slot machine that always came up with a winner she played it steadily. “I need a dime,” she would say hopefully; or sometimes daringly, “I need fifty cents,” naming any amount that came into her head but never more than fifty cents which must have seemed like the far limits of wealth to her. Only once did she thank me for giving, and that in her own way. She languorously draped her arms over my shoulders, and rubbed the edge of the coin along the nape of my neck, and sighed, “I wish Avery was just like you. Oh, I wish he was,” bringing me close and holding me off at the same time, a trick she worked on me with uncanny skill again and again.

It took me a while to discover what she was doing with that small, steady trickle of silver, and when I did, it hurt like a bad comedy. Part of it went, I already knew, for ice cream, plain chocolate ice cream which she could eat with rapture any hour of the day or night, and of such vices are dreamers made. But another part of it was being hoarded, and that was what hurt. I was waiting alone in her room one day when I decided to inspect the mink coat hanging there in a plastic sheath, and see what telltale label might make Avery a liar and possibly a thief. There was no such label, but in running my hand over the coat I discovered the hoard in its pocket. Nickels, dimes, a few quarters, enough possibly to buy ten dishes of ice cream or ten movie magazines, stored there against the coming years. And, with a certain cruel justice, stored in the same useless, imbecilic item of conspicuous consumption that had bought and paid for her in the first place, and by the most direct route brought her to beggary.

I was angry about that, but when I tried to make her understand how I felt about the coat she refused to listen. Or, one stormy session, was suddenly caught up in a tearful rage. It was the only topic that could goad her to such a rage. Not even my cruelest teasing about her movie magazines could do it, and there were times when even I knew that the teasing had gotten out of hand.

Yet, on reflection, it was not hard to see why she should draw the distinction she did, why the coat should be meaningful to her where the movie magazines, despite her devotion to them, were really not. And it had nothing to do with comparative cash values. What it had to do with was her perception of reality. The coat was hers, she owned it, so it was real. Beyond that reality were the unrealities she read about and saw pictured in her magazines, the glossy one-dimensional people themselves and the glossy possessions they were surrounded with. Those things were all in the big showcase. They were to be looked at, talked about, admired, but, after all, they weren’t yours so they weren’t real. It is a sort of hard peasant-minded adaptability to a hard life which shapes that kind of thinking, and she was as much the peasant as any girl behind an ox-drawn plow in some forgotten country of Europe. What is yours is yours, they know, to be spent, used, or hoarded as you will. To Barbara the coat was real, the pittance of money hidden in it was real, Avery was real, and I was real. It made a small, well-defined island surrounded by a sea of dreams. And you could swim in that sea now and then, but you could never live in it.

The more I thought about it the more I came to see that here and only here was the key to understanding who she was and what she was. She was the eternal peasant. Awkwardly devious, a grasper at small things whose value she could comprehend, sexually strait-laced, ignorant, innocent, totally herself and natural, her horizon only as far away as she could stretch her hand, she was the peasant as the Mia Gennaro I had once known, daughter of peasants, had never been and could never be. She was, in fact, the complete antithesis to that Mia Gennaro, the answer to her.

What did someone like this have to offer you? Herself. Only herself, entirely herself. Not to say I love you while studying her own image in the mirror over your shoulder, but, while lying on the bed beside you at midday, modestly garbed, talking of this and that, to suddenly roll over on you in wild impulse, her body sprawled on yours in a shuddering, feverish ecstasy, her mouth on yours, sucking, biting, devouring the moment. Not to make every occasion when you went out together a test of your ability to amuse her, but an experience to be tasted, savored, drunk to the bottom. Wherever we went, whatever company we shared, she did that.

That itself, of course, was made easy for her by the impact she had on company, an impact she must have been aware of. What happened to people when she was in the room reminded me of what happened to them in the apartment of a City College instructor I knew, a middle-aged worshiper of the Ashcan School of art and its later adherents. He had come into a small bequest when his father died, a few thousand dollars at most, and one day, flushed with his wealth, he had walked into a 57th Street gallery merely to look around, and an hour later had walked out, a pauper again, but the horror-stricken and rapturous possessor of a fine Reginald Marsh. The thing about pictures hung in a gallery or museum is that they always seem smaller than they really are, and the Marsh hung on the wall of a cramped uptown apartment was overwhelming. It was a Rockaway Beach scene, and, while almost a monochrome, it loomed over everything else in the room, the host of half-naked sun bathers in it writhing, pushing, and panting with life. It was impossible in that room to keep your eyes off the picture or concentrate fully on whatever was going on around you, no matter how you tried.

That was the effect Barbara had on company. She had little to say, her presence was what she offered, but it was enough. Without knowing it, she provided me with a fine chance to observe the many small, clumsy ways in which a man tries to conceal an overpowering interest in a woman who is already marked taken. He becomes terribly interested in another woman, but manages to maneuver her so that he can see past her. He makes polite conversation with the real object of his interest but laughs too loudly at her responses, becomes ponderous discussing the weather, becomes unexpectedly arch, twinkles, strains, strains at the leash, but knows I am there, and strains to no avail. I was the possessor. I was the one to display the treasure or remove it, to do with it as I would. That is what a man must feel, and what man does not want to feel it?

So I thought my way deep into my woman, and at the other end of the garden a lance of sunlight struck the edge of the factory roof and dissolved and flowed along it, the color of molten steel. That was the way I had seen the sunrise this past Sunday morning, watching it paint the flat, futuristic roof of a rundown motel, while I waited in the car for her. She had come out with me to the car, but had suddenly stopped, said, “Wait a minute,” and run back into the room, and I had waited and waited as a proper escort will until finally I went into the room to see what was going on, and saw through the open door of the bathroom that she was on her knees over the bathtub furiously scrubbing the bedsheet between her hands. I went into the bathroom, but she was blind, deaf, and dumb to me, the hot water spurting into the tub, the steam rising from it, the beads of sweat rolling down her face, and the bloodstains on the sheet pale now, almost invisible, while she still scrubbed away at them with agonized concentration.

I turned the water off, pulled the handful of sheet from her and let the whole thing fall into the tub. “You don’t have to do their laundry for them,” I said. “Do you think this is the first time they’ve seen honeymoon sheets? Come on if you’re coming,” forgetting for the moment that if it wasn’t the first time for them, it was for her, and that there may be no more finicking maiden than the newly deflowered maiden.

The trouble was that I had sound reasons for my mood then, reasons stemming, let us say, from good intentions and bad execution. It was the bad execution that unsettled me. I had guilefully prepared my trap like a master, baited her into it like Don Juan himself, and then at the moment of truth in that creaking bed, at the moment when I discovered the incredible truth about her, I seemed to fly apart in all directions, wildly taking what was mine and just as wildly trying to reject it, not man, proud man, when I had most need to be, but only the angry ape. The brutal ape. That was the role I had been sure Avery had already relegated to himself, and to suddenly find that I was playing it came as quite a shock.

On the other hand, what is there for any woman the first time except the painful confirmation of certain intriguing rumors? No use boggling at that; it’s the way nature wants it. The one great danger in the system shows itself only when the woman happens to be as totally innocent as Barbara. Then she may judge her man entirely by that first time, may have heard that there was more, much more, to it than he offered her, and lay the blame for failure on him alone. Not her fault really when she has no gauge to measure by, no one except the condemned lover, to assure her that mutual performance improves with practice and why believe him? There is much to be said for encountering virginity if you are prepared for it. If you are not, it may lead to ineptitude enough to make the angry ape out of any man.

Some of that anger, the part of it closest to the surface, evaporated on the drive back to New York. The weather was lovely, the lady at my side even more so and obviously straining hard to be amicable, and while I may have played the game badly I had certainly won it, so why, I asked myself, remain unjustly angry? But enough of the anger—and this must have been the part of it that was rooted deep in my vanity—remained to keep me away from Barbara since I had let her out of the car and seen her run up the steps of the house. She had not come to me, I had not gone to her and would not until I could go and stay as one who had every right to, not always running, like the other man in some inane farce, at the sound of the husband’s footsteps.

Still, that did not deprive me of the privilege of thinking about her, and so I sat on the windowsill, lighting one cigarette from another, thinking about her in a way I had never dared think about Mia Gennaro. Analyzing her critically as I should have analyzed Mia and never permitted myself to. Mia had caught me too young, had Lorna Dooned me to distraction, and any time during our torpid romance that I had caught myself thinking critical thoughts about her I had hastily buried them deep and covered them over.

But I was considerably older now. At least old enough to know that a man who is preparing to make a large emotional investment had damn well better look into the nature of the investment before he makes payment in full. And emotional investment was the right way to put it in this case. It was not the same kind of love I had felt for Mia; it had its heights and depths, but they were not the Himalayan heights and depths that a young ass goes exploring in his first love. It was more pastoral than that; perhaps the kind of scene the bridegroom enters once the honeymoon is over.

Yes, I decided, that was it; I had very much the bridegroom’s feelings. The pride of possession, the sense of proprietorship confirmed, the urgent desire to take full charge. The last thing I would have thought of in connection with Mia was of running a School for Wives; it happened to be the first thing I thought of when I found Barbara. She was the beautiful epitome of ignorance, but perfectly willing to be teased, cajoled, or bribed into learning. She had, she swore to me, completed high school, and the only thing that prevented that from seeming altogether unlikely was that along the way her fancy must have been caught by the inspired teacher who introduced her to Don Quixote. The book had come alive for her, she knew it too well to be lying about it, and I knew her too well to think she had met it outside a schoolroom.

But beyond that she was fallow ground, and I started in very soon to cultivate it by making her partner to my own tastes. She was wary about this at first, but once she learned that her opinions would be accepted with respect she came along willingly enough, was a good listener and viewer, and offered those opinions without inhibition. Only in company was she shy about speaking up, and there was nothing I could do to break down that reserve in any gathering of my familiars. Still, as I knew, the School for Wives had not been in session very long.

But all in good time, no need for Barbara to become Aspasia overnight, the next moves were mine to make alone. The brave banner I had flown for six years had to come down, the drums had to sound retreat, and the first to hear them had to be my uncle Charles. The chances of my re-entering the world of the Egans and Asquiths and Claibornes without his help were too slight to bother about. I needed a job—nicely executive even at its most junior level, fairly well-paying, and full of promise—and it was my uncle who could open the right doors. How he would feel about this after I had unceremoniously booted him out of my life three years before I did not know. What I was betting on was that he would relish playing benefactor to my Prodigal Nephew too much to resist doing so. If not—well, sufficient unto the day …

I put all this to myself very lightly. I smiled a wry smile thinking, lo, how the mighty are fallen, but I knew that if it were not for Barbara I would never have the courage to sound retreat. In fact, if it were not for her I would never have heard the first far-off signal for it myself. That was before the reunion when I told her about it and about the University and she had said with an enchanting and honest puzzlement, “I thought college people were all doctors and lawyers and running companies. How come you went there and you only work in a shipyard?”

“Because I’m a failure,” I had said, saying it with all the courageous humor of someone who knows he is not really a failure, and then feeling a chill suddenly hit me, feeling all the multitude of Egans in me looking at me with eyebrows cocked and lips curled, so that I hastily put the whole matter aside.

But it couldn’t remain there forever, not with Barbara herself at stake, which meant that she was the problem and the solution, the cause and the effect, all in one. And at the very least she was what I had gotten out of the past six years, a comforting thought, since no one can cut that much time out of his life without wanting something to show for it. Now I had someone who needed me every bit as much as I needed her, and there are many men who can quite accurately think of themselves as successes, but who have never found that much for themselves and never would. My uncle Charles, for example.

I waited until nine o’clock before going downstairs to call him. The phone was near the front of the downstairs hallway, not far from Ethel Waterhouse’s door, probably installed there at her request so that she could hear everybody’s business. It had been so long since I had called my uncle’s number that I had forgotten it, and I made quite a project of looking it up in the phone book there, steeling myself for the ordeal ahead. I found it and wrote it down on the cover of the phone book among the dozens of numbers already there. A few of them were mine, and I thought with a sinking heart how much pleasanter it would be to call any of them but the one I had to call.

I had still not picked up the phone when Ethel’s door opened surreptitiously, a well-oiled door which opened without sound, and then my landlady’s head poked through it. “Oh, it’s you,” said Ethel. “Well, I’m glad about that, Mr. Egan. Saves me a walk upstairs. Come on in for a minute.”

I went in, only too glad to put off the phone call even for a minute. Ethel closed the door behind me and looked at me over her glasses.

“You know what happened to Barbara?” she said.

“Yes, I heard about it.”

“Did you ever know anybody like that in your life? Takes a beating from a man and don’t want to do a thing about it. I told her. I said to her, so help me God, she don’t call the cops next time, I’ll do it myself. The old bastard. Locks her up like that and only lays for her to have a good time so he can beat her up. Who does he think he is?”

“I know all about it,” I said. “I told her long ago to call me if he got rough with her.”

“Well, if you leave it up to her she won’t call anybody. But that ain’t what I’m getting at. Do you know about the phone call she got?”

“Phone call?”

“I thought you didn’t know,” said Ethel triumphantly. “Well, this’ll show you what she’s up against, all right. Last night I get a call here, says it’s one of Avery’s friends and he wants to talk to Mrs. Avery. So I very nicely ask about what, and he says about her getting in trouble account of Avery. So I haul ass up to Barbara, but she won’t talk to him, which is the smartest thing she’s done since she landed here. How do you like that? It ain’t bad enough Avery’s on her, but he’s got to put his rummy friends up to this kind of trick. You know, like watchdogs. They’ll take care of her for him when he’s not around.”

“Did he give you his name? Did he tell you where he could be found?”

“Yes, it’s right there on the phone-book cover up in the right-hand corner. Samuel Fisher and it’s over in Manhattan.” Her eyes were alight with interest. “You gonna go over there and straighten him out? He’s got it coming to him, trying to scare the poor kid like that.”

“I’ll straighten him out,” I assured her, and I gave her a dollar which disappeared as soon as it was displayed, gone to that fold or crease of her where so many of my dollars had gone since Barbara’s coming. “And don’t tell Barbara I know about this. I’ll take care of it by myself.”

When I went out to the phone this time, it was no longer unwillingly. I found the name and address where Ethel had said they would be, tore that corner of the cover off and put it in my pocket. Then I dialed my uncle’s number.

It was the housekeeper who answered, as I had suspected it would be, and although I could hear her brogue thickening as her temper rose I was adamant about not giving my name. If I did, I knew, it could very well end matters then and there, and I was taking no chances.

“Just tell him that it’s important,” I said. “He’ll know who it is when he gets on the phone.”

I didn’t really believe that, but to my surprise he did. Yes, he said, he would be home to me if I wanted to drop in. Tomorrow afternoon—about noon? That would be all right. Yes, he was quite well; he hoped I was well, too. All in all, it was hard to tell if he was being his old cool and courteous Asquith self or a little more cool and courteous than usual. The one encouraging sign had been that he recognized my voice, I was still not a complete stranger to him. As the conversation drew to its formal close I could not resist asking him about that, which, in its way, was a sort of small flattery that could do me no harm.

He laughed. At least the sound that came through to me was the Asquith version of a laugh. Then he said, “Of course, I knew who it was at once, Daniel. The voice was the voice of Esau.”

Whatever else he may have been, he was no fool.