MATTHEW WOKE UP AS if a fire alarm had shot off at his ear. It had happened every night for the ten nights since she had told him. Each time he heard a voice jeering, her voice, often his own, sometimes an unknown’s, but always taunting and raucous.
“That’s right, buddy, always blame the other person.” This time it was his own voice, needling, insulting, Here he was blaming Dori for this ripping tearing clawing of his entrails, as if she had planned this butchery of jealousy, had planned it weeks before she knew he existed, had begun to plan it with Jesskin years before.
But he could not stop his anger. Hour after hour he could not; try as he would to return to thought and clarity, he could not. There was no way. He would have to forget it, forget her. He would have to get over her, never see her again, rid himself of her once and for all.
For almost a week he knew that this was what he had to do. It was a nightmare matched by the alternative nightmare of continuing with her. See her again? Love her again? Glory in her body?
He shook with fury at his own fury; he should not have let himself fall into this pit, should have stayed remote, a man having an affair with a damn sexy responsive appealing female, but nothing more, as with all the other affairs. He had instead let this become different, let his whole being become fettered and tethered by need, by love, by some positive sense that here again was the thing he had never thought to know again.
Pain, goddam it, pain and grief and suffering always, when you had done nothing to deserve it, when you knew yourself free of causing it. Every damn life anywhere had its damnable quota of it, not to be exorcised, only to be endured.
Like one of the split-second images flashed across a movie screen, he remembered his mother holding a tiny Hildy, looking down at her, sitting alone there looking down at her first grandchild.
Jesus, why now? Why see that lonely posture now, springing into reality again? Over the years at mad irrelevant intervals, that image would suddenly stand before him again, clear, silent, there. He would flinch and it would go, but for an instant it was there. His mother who had never hurt him had hurt him indeed in the end.
And now Dori, whose gleaming slender body possessed his mind and filled his memory. She was no longer his, basically she had never been his, not even that first time on the red sofa.
Be fair, be fair. That first time she didn’t know herself. You came down from Boston with one determination, admit it, you couldn’t wait, you wanted her then, that night, she did hesitate, you felt it and spoke of it to her and nobly offered to wait if she wasn’t as uninvolved as she had thought. But this was what was holding her back, and you gave her as much chance as a snowball, so now you’re blaming her for going ahead. You knew all along you wouldn’t let her fight you off on that damn red sofa. You knew it then and you know it now, you always have made love to the women you wanted to make love to, you always make them want you to, and now—goddam it, damn it, damn it, damn this for happening.
He would call her when he got this into some sort of shape. That’s what he had said, thinking that if only he could get off by himself, away from the sight of her, the God-given processes of reason and enlightenment would come into play and help him accept this as another one of life’s problems, to be handled, absorbed, reconciled to, like a verdict gone against you, like Johnny’s suspension from school. But he didn’t really believe it.
I’m not a diminisher by nature. He had written that to her in his first letter, faintly enamored of the sound of it, but meaning it, feeling sure of himself with her, sure of them together. Now he was truly diminished, withdrawn, dry with coldness and fevered at the same time, half of himself gone dead and still.
The word diminished infuriated him. Abruptly he got up from bed, slid his feet into his slippers, nearly gasping at the first sting of their frozen leather, and went into the kitchen. Night after night he had done this also; twice Joan had waked too, to admonish him not to be too concerned, about Johnny or even about Hildy’s sudden demands for a bigger allowance when her next birthday came. “It’s more than that,” he had said, but when she had looked attentive, interested, he had quickly added, “You know how things stick in your mind and won’t come unstuck.”
Now he waited for a moment to be sure she did not wake and follow. From the icebox he got half a glass of milk, took it into the living room, and then he unlocked his briefcase. In an inner compartment was the letter that had come yesterday morning at the office. He had read it a dozen times already:
DEAR MATTHEW,
I would give anything not to have started with you without telling you first that Dr. Jesskin had just begun tests and that I would not know for sure until Thursday. I cannot, even now, be sorry about it, but I am wretched about you.
Always, D.
A dozen times, too, he had tried to answer it, but he would write, “Dear Dori,” and then his pen would go still. He would look at the phone but wonder what possibly to say. The specific idea of going to see her, of talking to her, of trying to put into words—he could do nothing. He needed more time. He could not think of these new complexities. Never had his own life been so filled with complexities: Johnny, the Benting case, the sudden vision of Hildy as a sixteen-year-old and all at once not a child any more. Maybe later on, the time would come when he was calm enough again to see this about Dori in an acceptable light. But not now.
He tore her note across and then again across. He looked about for a place to throw the scraps, then aligned them, put them back into his briefcase, and locked it once more.
On the fifteenth, Dori told Tad Jonas she was quitting to try herself at free-lancing. She would of course stay as long as he needed her, but because there was one piece with an early deadline, she would appreciate it if she could pull out pretty soon. Jonas said, “Anytime, cookie, I knew it was coming,” and she left the office for the last time.
She had heard nothing from Matthew.
The one note she had written him was short, almost too short by the time she got through tearing sentences from it. She had sent it to his office, marked Personal, wondering how sacred that word on an envelope was in his secretary’s opinion. The very next morning she had waited for the mail; he had not answered it. Nor the morning after, nor the morning after.
It’s a fascinating time to be alive anyway, she told herself, not only because of being pregnant and watching it happen, but because of a million things outside me. There was hideous news or wonderful news every day: hideous, like the indictment that week of Dr. Spock and the four others, with trial to come in April or May; wonderful, like the story from South Africa about transplanting the heart of a man newly dead into the body of that dying dentist. Her own blood had pumped in some wild hope at this bizarre story; a new world was opening for the future, with new chances, new possibles. Maybe by the time any 1968 baby grew up, there would be a hundred such miracles, a cure for cancer found, the end of pain, the end of war.
The end of pain? Not since the despairing days just after Tony’s departure had she felt this gnawing sensation of emptiness, and this seemed sharper now, more unremitting. Or was that because you could only remember past pain, never reinvoke it? Every moment of thought now said Matthew, the soft hush at the core of his name like a brush across her heart. Never before had she heard the sound made on the ear by Matthew’s name; now she heard it constantly, and constantly it brought with it its cousin sounds, breath, death, ethic, ethical. Ethic, ethical—what was right here, what wrong?
She had foreseen that he might leave her when he knew but she had never believed in it. She had been vain, loving his praise of her body, wondering only whether that would lessen, and by how much. She had told Cele what Dr. Jesskin had said about sex and pregnancy and Cele had said, “Oh, yes, right up to maybe the last few weeks.” There was a special quality, Cele had told her, a new intensity. But Cele was remembering herself and Marshall as a young couple; it had been “their” pregnancy and had made them both happy.
That flash of eagerness in Matthew’s first question, “Darling, are you pregnant now?”—she had not imagined it, and now it was too poignant to bear. If she had been able to let him think it was “their” pregnancy, that instinctive eagerness might have expanded and grown, thrusting, strong enough to endure through all the clutch and twist of problems that would face him because of it. He would never leave Hildy and Johnny; his devotion to them was an absolute. But he would have become involved too with this child, would never have walked out this way, would not now be silent and absent and lost.
But oh God, I couldn’t. I couldn’t He to him and pretend and go on letting him think, and then go through with the terrible lie about a premature baby in July.
There were women who could and she marveled at them and also despised them. She half envied them their shrewdness and ability to manage life and she also detested them for it. She herself had had no choice. Her options had lain only in method, and there she had proved a failure.
She could not sleep. At each shrill ring of the telephone she told herself it would not be Matthew, but when it was not she had to force her “hello” to sound normal. Irrationally, she summoned telephone repairmen to muffle the ring, but the new sound was no less rasping. The doorbell, the morning mail, a florist’s delivery boy in the elevator—each became a hazard to be met and overcome. Within hours of mailing her letter to him she began rewriting it in her mind, adding phrases she had not thought of in time, letting herself argue with him, plead, even at last accuse him. Don’t let us make all the young mistakes? But at the first real difficulty, Matthew, you cut away in a rage like a boy of twenty, ignore a decent letter or throw it into the nearest trash basket.
Rebuttal at once, defense of him; perhaps he needed silence and absence to regroup his forces, to rearrange his life with Joan—
Come on, cut that out, she thought, the one damn thing you’re never going to do is to think about any future with Matthew. You can love him or hate him, see him or not see him, fight or make up, but the one thing you are never going to do is to think about being married to him.
She felt better. Vaguely she was reminded of something else that had once comforted her, but she could not catch hold of what it had been. It had come at some other time when she was becoming overemotional, and she had seen then that she need not give in to it.
Weekends were easier; she had never seen him on Saturdays or Sundays. On the third Sunday of his absence she turned determinedly to the voluminous real estate ads in the paper. Houses—Manhattan, Houses—Brooklyn, Houses—Queens, page after page of houses for sale, for rent, everything houses. Also apartments: Furnished, Unfurnished, Six Rooms, Four Rooms, Two Rooms, Apartments Wanted, Apartments to Share. At last she came to Furnished Rooms, East Side, West Side. There were only a few of each, and most of these in hotels, hotels with unknown names in side streets, but all belonging to the same family of third-rateness. Hotels were out anyway; she had to do without even a shabby lobby, without a front desk and elevator man.
That meant a room in a brownstone. In half an hour she had underlined half a dozen. One was in the Bronx, on West 253rd Street, and she wondered if it were near Bronx Park; another was rather close, on West Ninety-fifth, definitely near Central Park; another was in a remodeled brownstone in the old Chelsea district. That was too close to the Village. If she could find something near one of the great parks, she could do her brisk three miles in the early morning or evening; she was free of the usual fears and alarms about the dangers of the streets and the parks. She had always been a lone walker in the city, and not once had she encountered anything more suspect than a weaving drunk.
She reread the ad about the place on West Ninety-fifth. It was not a furnished room but a “2 rm studio, gd. fl, all new furn,” and suddenly she thought, On the ground floor I’d never have to meet people on the stairs. The $180 rent astonished her but she stared at the telephone number which served as signature to the ad and almost without volition dialed it.
A foreign voice answered, perhaps Italian, perhaps Spanish, but there was no difficulty in understanding. Yes, just renovated, repainted, new icebox, new bed, new everything, very big studio room and kitchen. No roaches. Nobody had lived there since the new furniture. All first time for the new tenant.
“When could I see it?”
“Anytime. Ring the super’s bell.”
“I’ll be there in about a half hour.”
“What name, please?”
She hesitated. She had been choosing and discarding names for so long and now suddenly she had to decide. “Grange,” she said. “Mrs. Grange—I’ll be there right away.”
“If it’s rented, don’t blame me. First come, first served.”
“I’ll hurry.” She dressed quickly, a spurt of new interest lifting her spirits. The time ahead is still good, she thought, nothing can change that. How strange that she could feel, at the core of surrounding pain and loss, this persistent quiet rightness. It was almost as if she were, somewhere, still happy.
As the taxi turned off Central Park West into Ninety-fifth, she looked out in anticipation. The street looked bare and almost clean; with the temperature below twenty, the bareness was not surprising. In summer there would be ear-piercing children screaming to each other as they played, music blaring from open windows, jammed traffic, the usual hullabaloo of city streets in hot weather. But by then, with only days to go, why should she mind anything?
Dori stopped in front of the house. Its brick front was already shabby, mean, its windows dirty against an assortment of lace curtains, chintz curtains, drawn shades. Two great garbage cans stood at the curb where the taxi stopped, lidded and faintly odoriferous, a pair of horrid welcomers. She ignored them and went into the small vestibule where an astonishing expanse of brass letterboxes stretched across one wall. She counted sixteen and thought, At these rents, people room together. She pressed the bell over the typed card, Steffani, SUPER, and at once the foreign voice of the telephone queried through the round grating in the brass: “Who is it?” And she made herself wait a second, rehearsing, before she said, “Mrs. Grange.”
A moment later the landlady appeared and without a word of greeting led the way to a door at the rear of the hallway. “Everything new,” she said as she opened it, and as Dori went by her a chill of disappointment seized her. It was a large room, with low ceilings and two windows on a cement-paved backyard; it might once have been the kitchen of the house, as at Cele’s, and the floor was covered with yellow-and-brown linoleum as if it were still a kitchen. But it was furnished like a studio bedroom-living room in the drab good taste of a bargain furniture store. A stiff squared-off sofa that the landlady proclaimed “a convertible, a double,” was flanked by a pair of ladderback chairs in a shiny veneer, obviously new, and there was a corner table, also shiny new. Where a fireplace might have been was one armchair near a home-made platform of wood, oblong, twelve inches from the floor, empty, devoid of meaning until the landlady said, “For the television.”
“And is there an outlet for an air conditioner?”
“Don’t need no special outlet.” Mrs. Steffani gave her a closer look, a scrutiny as if to make some judgment. A television set was expected, but not an air conditioner? By what yardstick? This was no slum neighborhood; actually it was a rather pretty street with several other remodeled houses, and she certainly would not be the only tenant on the block with an air conditioner. Then why that second look as if she had asked for a private garage?
Mrs. Steffani led her to the kitchen, a sliver of a room, also facing the cemented yard, and then to another sliver, the bathroom, the walls of both a staring dead white. Here too was the same unused look, with no fingerprint, no frayed edge, no smudge.
“Did you just paint it?”
Mrs. Steffani nodded. “All the furniture new, every stick. Look here, this new stove and icebox. Brand-new.”
“Lovely,” Dori said, going back to the big room. But how ugly, she thought; I’d simply die in such an ugly place.
Behind her Mrs. Steffani said, “You want it? Or you don’t want it? The lease is one year. First and last month in advance.”
“I won’t need it for a whole year. My husband—”
“A year’s lease. Here, nothing by the month. You want your husband to see? Okay. It could be rented the next twenty minutes. First come—”
“Yes, I know.” She cast one last glance around as if trying to decide. “I’ll let you know. I have one other place to see.”
At once Mrs. Steffani dropped any show of interest, going back into the hallway, Dori dismissed and forgotten even as she passed by her to the front door. Out in the street she paused, relieved to be away from the unspoken pressure she had felt inside. A hundred and eighty a month for that? Because it was remodeled and not subject to rent control! This dreadful housing shortage let such rents happen. But a year’s lease would run over two thousand. Unthinkable to start off that way. She certainly could find something that cost less.
In the bus uptown to her next address she reminded herself that there was still no great rush; she could look again next Sunday and the next. But the moment she arrived at the furnished room on West 253rd, she was nervous. A smell of mildew and frying fat rushed out at her, filthy walls appalled her and she fled, suddenly exhausted, her one thought to go home. But she did not go home. By bus, subway, taxi, she continued on the rounds of her addresses, from one impossible to another.
Her nervousness deepened. Suppose that a place like Mrs. Steffani’s really was unique, and that after a few more Sundays when there was no more time for being choosy, suppose that then she could find nothing but the ones with frying fat and filth?
Suddenly the “just renovated, everything new, no roaches” seemed a treasure she had wholly underestimated. Suddenly the linoleum on the floor, the varnish, the bargain-basement taste seemed admirable, utterly desirable. Quiet, clean, a few of her own things strewn about—why had she ever left this paragon of a place for somebody else to snatch up? Perhaps after July she could sublease it—better not raise that question now. She hailed a taxi.
“Is it rented?” she asked over the brass announcer in the hall, and then said, “Wonderful,” at Mrs. Steffani’s reply.
Mrs. Steffani demanded a deposit until the lease was ready tomorrow or Tuesday. “Check or cash, twenty-five down.”
Dori opened her purse. But I can’t write a check signed Grange, she thought, and nearly said so out loud. “Here’s the cash,” she said. “May I have a receipt?”
For the first time Dori felt optimistic. Tomorrow she would find a bank in the neighborhood and open an account in the name of Dorothy Grange. A bank account under an assumed name. She might move in right away, this week, the moment the lease was signed and a telephone connected. There would be a sense here of a new start, of getting down to it, of cutting all the trains of thought to the past. Here if the phone rang, she wouldn’t leap for it as if it might be Matthew. He would not even know her number.
Four evenings later, she glanced around her bedroom, disheveled as it was with its still-open suitcases and a dozen odds and ends. The telephone rang and a voice said, “Towson, home from the wars.”
“Dick! When did you get in?”
“Yesterday, and does this city look good.”
“You’ve been gone, let’s see, three whole months. Your pieces have been great.”
“Thanks. I just heard you’d copped out on your paper. Is that true?”
“Tell me I’m crazy. I’m going to free-lance.”
“Why didn’t you drop me a line about it? I’d have told you then.”
“I should have written.” She added quickly, “But I’ve thought of you lots.”
“I’ll bet”
“I really have.”
“When do I get to see you? How about a drink tomorrow around five?”
“I can’t, Dick, I’m sorry.”
“Then when? How about after dinner? Have you a date tomorrow night?”
“I can’t think. Wait a minute.” Automatically she turned toward her calendar as if she really were looking for a free afternoon or evening in a crowded life. But her eyes were closed. Automatically too, as she did so many times every single day, she tightened her muscles over her stomach, feeling the good tautness, releasing, tightening, knowing that now even when they were tight there was no bland flat planes any longer. “Dick, could I give you a raincheck?” she said at last. “I’m sort of swamped with things right now.”
For a moment there was no answer. Then he said, “Well, okay, if that’s the way it is.” His voice brightened as he added, “Have fun, whatever.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Think of me.”
“Oh I will.” Suddenly she laughed a little. “I truly will.”
So are decisions made, she thought as she hung up. It’s as if your active mind had nothing to do, as if you just put the problem into the miracle-computer of your unconscious, fed it in, left it there through all the mysterious whirrings and clackings and tumblings, and then as if there came, at the proper time, the desired output, your decision, firm, clear, authoritative.
Input and output, technology’s new words for a process as old as man, as old as conscience. How could it possibly be right to tell Dick Towson that I am going to have a baby that he unwittingly sired? To what end? To make him feel guilty? Responsible for its support? Honor-bound to get a divorce and make an honest woman out of me? I am an honest woman.
And suppose he did, what about that other honest woman, his wife?
She left the telephone and returned to her packing. She was moving in the morning, and Cele had been over all day to help. Clothes were easy; two suitcases were ample. There had been a problem about the pots and pans and dishes and books she wanted, because cartons or a barrel would scarcely go with her official story to the building, that she was off on a world cruise by plane and ship for ten weeks, but Cele had solved it by lending her a huge plaid carryall that concealed awkward shapes. Cele was known to the doorman; she would be coming over every few days to pick up her mail.
“A hard and fast itinerary is out,” Dori had explained. “It’s a crazy kind of trip with a crazy schedule.”
“I wouldn’t mind taking a trip like that myself, Mrs. Gray.”
“I’m dying to get started, Bill.” It would be the longest ten weeks on record. The stretchingest, she thought, and smiled.
Now she checked once more to see that she had overlooked nothing. She glanced longingly at her record player; it was a fine true system and she wanted it with her. But one didn’t take hi-fi equipment on world cruises and Cele was going to lend her one of Marshall’s the moment she was installed. Into the carryall she had slid half a dozen records; now, almost as a final rite, she added her set of the four she had hunted down so happily to give to Matthew at Christmas.
The packing had tired her but she was too keyed up to consider sleep and she made one last tour around each of her four rooms, in one last search for some forgotten object she would sorely miss. This was what made packing difficult, the selecting and choosing, this I must take, that I needn’t, yes, but I might need it. Now, looking down at the mahogany stand near her desk where there reposed in all its grand solidity her vast unabridged Webster’s, she hesitated once more. Cele had ridiculed her for considering it an essential on West Ninety-fifth Street, and she had yielded. “But don’t I deserve one or two fetishisms?” and Cele had raucously declaimed in an exaggerated Jewish accent, “Fetishisms yet! On a world cruise she needs a hundred-pound dictionary, plus whatever else she’s carrying.”
They had laughed and now Dori smiled, remembering. Cele was that rarest of creatures, a friend who was there when help was needed. She would be there in the morning for the actual move; she would do the unpacking at the new place, she would do the first marketing for her, stow supplies in cupboards and cabinets. “Sugar and soap flakes and canned goods weigh tons, Dori—you can do nice things like fruit and steak.”
This final rambling search for any forgotten object was oddly pleasing. Closing her apartment, locking the door behind her, and leaving everything behind was soothing, as if she were leaving her pain about Matthew there too.
She glanced at the silent telephone. After tomorrow if he should try to call her, it would ring and ring and ring. That maddening secret sound of a telephone ringing on and on and on, giving no reason for its futility, offering only a “no comment” to the caller—a sudden sympathy for Matthew awoke in her, quenched by an ironic query somewhere: “And what makes you think he’ll be calling?”
She had vetoed the frugal step of stopping service for half a year just to preserve that “no comment” and prevent the singsong revelation that service has been temporarily discontinued. Frugality could be costly on the scale of real values; she had already begun another list of majors and minors headed “Possible Tattlers.”
Had she overlooked any? Her suitcases were monogrammed TVG, as were the towels and napkins and few pieces of silverware she was taking, two knives, two forks, two soupspoons, four teaspoons; it would take more than a Mrs. Steffani to prove that those initials had ever stood for anything other than Dorothy V. Grange, though she might, in a brilliant moment, pause over the T. The dozen or so books she had to have with her were not so perfect, for in them all had once been written either T. Gray or Dori Gray or D.V. Gray, this from a school-bred ritual of writing her name inside the front cover of any book or notebook or exercise book she had ever acquired, but she had methodically inked them all out and written Grange in, instead, using various pencils, pens and marking crayons to avoid obvious similarity.
Her new checkbook on a big neighborhood bank on Columbus Avenue would be the only one kept in the shiny new desk, her real checkbook for her “real bank” being stored in one of her suitcases, always locked. Deposits in her Grange bank, as she thought of it, would never be her own checks, signed Gray, drawn on her real bank. She would write out her real checks to either Cele or Gene and get their checks in return to be deposited or mailed to her Grange bank. She would even have to pay her hospital bills by Grange checks.
When she had first realized that she could not use her Blue Cross hospital insurance, she had been worried, but it was a brief worry vanquished by the reality that nowhere on any public record in any bank, store, organization, nowhere on any punch card of any computer, could the connection between Gray and Grange ever be set forth for even impersonal eyes to see. Except in that one ultimate document of adoption which, she knew somehow, was to be held in camera forever by the courts and the laws of the land.
But for the rest, it was to be Gray and Grange. It was all legal; her newspaper years told her that. You could take any pseudonym you wanted, any pen name, any stage name, do anything in that name and still be legal—unless you planned to commit a crime or did commit a crime. All she planned to commit, she thought cheerfully, was one small baby.
She had overlooked nothing. If Mrs. Steffani and her passkey ever did enter the apartment while she was out, she would find not one detail that could point to any tenant except Dorothy V. Grange. And if she should overhear Gene or Cele call her Dori or Dorr—who said that every Dorothy had to be nicknamed Dot?
Only once so far had she made a slip that might have raised a question. For a moment only, at the signing of the lease, there was the fleeting pause over a question not properly answered, and it had gone by quickly enough to be nothing.
“Your husband to sign here,” Mrs. Steffani had said, accepting the first and last month’s rent and pointing to a dotted line on the document.
“He’s in the Air Force,” she had replied, a split second late. “I’ll sign.”
Mrs. Steffani looked uncertain. Then she shrugged, accepted her copy of the lease and departed. Dori had intended to say that he was in the Air Force and off on duty in Vietnam, and how awful that he had to be away at such a time, but her half answer, sufficing, taught her something: the less you explain the more real it sounds. She had determined to be frugal with her words.
At last she undressed and went to bed. As the light went out, she thought of Matthew. Why had he done this? She had imagined every kind of reaction from him, but this continuing silence, this continuing absence, with never an answer to her letter—this she had not foreseen.
I can’t be sorry about it, she repeated silently, remembering the words she had written, but I am wretched about you. Wretched. What a word, what a cheating, mealymouthed, uncomplaining word. I resent the way you’ve taken this is what she had really meant, I’m shocked by it, and frightened too. I am forty and this may be my last passionate love, I will not be a girl any more, I will be a woman with a child, and you loved me, and now you stay away and say nothing, not a word, just this silence and absence and more silence and more absence.
I’m not wretched; I’m sore and insulted and let down. Not sore meaning riled, but sore, full of ache and hurt and woundedness. And you—what about your insight and care for other people and all the fine things I thought you stood for?—that you do stand for if it comes to a law case?
But this was sarcasm, hitting out, hitting back. Suddenly the thought of tomorrow was no longer a soothing thought; it became a desperate longing for the new beginning in the linoleum-floored room across the park.
From the beginning she liked it. It was a different world but she liked it for being different. She did not feel removed from regret or pain about Matthew but she did feel somehow insulated as by a protective cooling layer. It was more than that, she thought after a few days in her new place; here she felt encapsulated somehow, the cocoon again and safe. I am creating my own womb for me to curl up inside, that’s what I’m doing. There was a harmony in the notion; she let herself think about it.
She had Cele for dinner the first night and Gene the second. She had always liked cooking and now she gave herself to all the lengthier processes of it, ignoring the shortcuts she used to stoop to in the press of time, the pre-prepared seasoning, the pre-chopped chives, the canned and frozen and freeze-dried everythings. She never felt too tired to market and cook, she even liked washing up afterward and doing the daily housework. She had promised Cele that she would exchange her weekly cleaning woman for a daily part-time maid “later when I’m a big hulk,” but for now she could manage very well alone and for some obscure reason needed to. It was part of the different world she had come to.
Not physically different so much; there were just as many streets like this half-tended, half-neglected one over on the East Side, if you walked away from Fifth and Madison and Park over to Lexington and Third and Second, just as many there where the snow still stood blocked and solid and graying in the gutters. In fact this new street of hers, this West Ninety-fifth, was rather handsome, certainly the near-the-park half of it which included her house. The old apartment houses on the corner gave way on each side to a quartet not of brownstones but of white stone houses, pale and clean as if they had been newly sandblasted. There were signs of remodeling, but fortunately the old bay windows on their upper floors and their mansard roofs were unchanged, and on one or two there were wrought-iron picket fences around the step-down areas at the kitchen entrances, with window boxes or privet hedges dusted with snow. At the street level all doors and windows were barred with iron grillwork, but brass knobs and number plates and bells gleamed from faithful polishing.
Off to the west at the Columbus Avenue end of the long block, a modern apartment house was nearing completion. It promised to be attractive, with its tan brick and white stone walls, its picture windows and terraces, and she was relieved to hear that it wouldn’t be ready for tenants until the end of the year. This, and some other new or nearly new buildings sticking up out of the rubbish of old tenements up and down Columbus Avenue—why had she not noticed them when she came to answer the ad?—all these new buildings, tagged “middle-income housing,” all looked inviting. She’d better keep an eye out for friends and acquaintances after all
Walking, marketing, going to Broadway to a movie, she kept a particular watch on passing faces. In an old fur coat lent her by Cele, needlessly ample thus far, and from under the flopping brim of a dated felt sports hat, she looked out at all approaching people, ready to cross the street at the first sight of anybody familiar. The faces too were different from the faces of home across the park; there were many dark faces here but so were there on Madison and Park. But over there they were the faces of delivery boys and maids whereas over here they were of people living in the neighborhood, mothers with small children, school kids tearing along with their books or on skates or sleds, old people. There still were more whites here than blacks and Puerto Ricans, but for the first time in all her life she was living in a really integrated neighborhood. Better than talking about it, she thought vaguely, not stopping to inquire what she meant. It all added to the sense of difference, of actually being a traveler, as if the lies about the crazy world cruise were in part true and she were far from home and greedy for new sights and new experiences.
When she said “home,” she never thought of the linoleum-floored studio room she now lived in. Home still meant the apartment she had locked up and left, still meant her books, her music, her desk, her dear familiar paintings and furniture and colors. But soon she came to see, embarrassingly enough, that home also meant certain other things which brainwashed you with a subtle sense of privilege and upper-classness.
At home you mailed a letter right up on your own floor, going down a carpeted hallway in your dressing gown to the brass chute ten steps from your own front door; here you dressed and went outdoors to the corner mailbox, and if it was late at night you didn’t go at all until next morning because of the horrendous tales you were always hearing about crime in the streets. At home you ordered food from the grocer and butcher by phone and had it delivered, the tomatoes, the perfect pears, the apples, the lettuce wrapped separately in glossy white paper before being put in the carton, to isolate and protect it; here you went out yourself in good weather or foul, to the stores on Columbus, saw all your vegetables and fruit dumped into one great brown bag, and were careful not to choose too heavy a load to carry. At home there was always the doorman to tell you the weather or whistle up a cab; here there was the bolted door and the announcer beside it and the peephole through the door and the latch chain always slid into the groove before you opened more than an inch to anyone whose voice or face you did not know.
And yet day by day she liked it more, liked it for being different. In daylight hours at least she disregarded the horrendous tales and walked freely in the nearly deserted park, striding out as she had been ordered to do, feeling immune to danger as if nobody ever could possibly hurt her.
And then one Sunday morning in early February, she suddenly found herself shaken by something else she had heard horrendous tales about. In the twenty days that she had been walking in the park, she had always turned south, instinctively turning toward the skyline which stood clear and sharp and beautiful at its southern rim. She would walk hard, as Dr. Jesskin had ordered, following the winding, dipping, curving walks to the old casino near Sixty-seventh, and then with more than half her mileage accounted for, leave the curving route within the park and return outside on the special pavement of Central Park West, six-sided stone plaques cemented together, like gears meshed one to the next. In bitter weather, with the temperature in the twenties or below, these daily three miles were test enough of her will and stamina, but there was a sense of accomplishment afterward as well as a glowing well-being. So far she had had not a minute of illness; early in the fourth month it was still too early for any discomfort of bulk.
On this particular Sunday morning she idly turned north instead of south when she entered the park, her back to the skyline, nothing ahead but winter-stripped trees on mildly rolling hills and the sky itself. It was an easy sky, a blue sky, wind-cleansed of soot and haze and lowering gray. It filled her with longing for spring and then summer, for trees leafing gently and then richly, for shade arching again over green park benches, for movement and sound everywhere instead of this sparse winter stillness and emptiness.
Because it was the weekend, with the roadway closed to automobiles, she walked in the road itself, long cleared of the last snow which still lay patchily on the ground and pedestrian paths. An occasional cyclist, dressed like a skier against the cold, came whistling by, and on the shallow slopes still under snow, a few children were tumbling around on sleds or skis.
She had gone in at Ninety-sixth as she always did and soon found that there were more people about than she had at first thought. Off at her right lay a vast playing field that she had never in all her years as a New Yorker seen before; there was a game in progress, voices rose shrill and bright, largely in Spanish, and she wondered if today were some Puerto Rican holiday or field day. The roadway led up a sharp hill and then down; she glanced occasionally at the aluminum light poles, each marked with numerals and letters to guide police or repairmen or park maintenance men to a specific site. The playing field ended at about 100th Street. She had worked out the system of the poles for herself in the first days of her walking; W 9601 meant that it was the first pole inside the park at West Ninety-sixth Street; if it had read E 7202 it would have meant the second pole inside at the East Seventy-second Street entrance, and M 6703 would have meant the Mall around Sixty-seventh, the third pole in a cluster of half a dozen.
This small decoding for herself had given her a spasm of childlike pleasure; every day she found some new small pleasure in the park, always with a thready surprise stitching along her senses, for she had always lived near it and had assumed that there was nothing about it that was new or unexpected. Now she was seeing things one did not see from taxis racing against the lights to get you to a theater or concert, and up here to the north and west it was like finding a new park entirely. Here were playgrounds she had never seen, playing fields she had never seen; there ahead now, down far below in a great hollow, was the first shine of the new skating rink she had heard about in the past year or two but had never seen.
Dori heard voices, sharp young voices, gleeful, laughing over nothing, the climbing shouts of children at play. It was a large rink, and crowded, somewhere music was playing, and she thought of the older rink down at the other end of the park near Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth, where she herself had so often skated. Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates; there was always something shining and lovely about gleaming ice and twinkling blades, red scarves and mittens, eyes aglow, ruddy faces whipped by the wind. She was being sentimental and knew it and did not chide herself.
The roadway curved sharply and as she came around a bend she was suddenly close enough to the rink to see it not as panorama but as a specific scene. There was something strange about it, and she did not know at once what it was. She looked beyond the roadway toward the rusty old tenements fringing the far border of the park and even without consulting the nearest aluminum pole she suddenly realized that she was approaching the northern boundary of Central Park at 110th Street. Harlem. The skyline here was Harlem. And then suddenly she knew what was strange about this skating rink on this shining blue morning.
All the faces were dark. All the children were Negro or Puerto Rican. Perhaps one child was white, perhaps two, out of the hundreds down below the rising ground where she stood, but it was a whole world of brown and tan and black young faces.
De facto segregation. Once somebody had asked her what, exactly, de facto segregation meant and she had thought it a stupid unwilling question, as if anybody could possibly not understand what de facto segregation was. Now suddenly she thought, If you were here this minute you’d never have to ask that question again.
She shuddered. Those Spanish voices back at the playing field weren’t celebrating some fete day, they were there because that was about where it started, in the Nineties on the West Side, and she had passed it by without thinking. All over the rest of the park these past twenty days, wherever she had passed some group of kids out with a teacher for athletics, she had seen how many faces were dark, except when the group wore the blazers or uniforms of some private school, when the faces were nearly always white with only a few black—as tokens? She had always known all about the city’s population, had always assumed there could be no surprises.
But this was a surprise. This was solid and ugly and she wanted to turn quickly away and would not let herself. She walked closer, listening now as well as watching, hearing the young shouting voices, hearing the excited cries and laughter, seeing the little playing animals on the ice who did not even know that on this lovely sunny Sunday morning there was something hideous in their shining skating rink.
“Can’t we have one hour without that damn music?” Matthew demanded.
“Why of course,” Joan said. “I didn’t realize you minded.”
“This whole damn weekend we haven’t had five minutes without it.”
“You might have said so before you got this worked up about it.”
Both children stared at him as their mother left the table and went out to the record player. There was the crisp click of a switch and a declining wail as the turntable came to a stop. The mournful sound told the story, for normally Joan pampered the machine and would have lifted the tone arm properly, and pressed the stop button only when the needle was safely disengaged. Now she did not even wait for the record to stop; she went out of the kitchen and down the hall to her own room.
Matthew grunted. It had been a foul weekend all round, foul roaring wind and rain, the children indoors, the house roaring with their voices, their intermittent spats, their incessant motion. When he was a boy and landlocked by weather, he had had none of the noisemakers that were the appurtenances of today, no transistor radio, no television, no stereo; he had doubtless been a nuisance in whatever ways children can be nuisances to their parents, but he had no recollection of incessant noise accompanying every activity. I used to read, he thought, everybody used to read.
Hildy rose from the table, her face wearing the injured look that told him she found life hard to bear in this household. She started from the room and he said, “What about the dishes?” She turned back, still injured, not answering but beginning to clear the table. “I’ll dry,” Johnny said, and disappeared. With the new semester he was reinstated at school, impenitent, still saying that basketball and hockey made him puke. The school had “compromised” by capitulating. He would do shop and painting, favorites both, instead of sports.
Matthew watched his daughter as she moved between the table and the kitchen. She was wearing a skirt so short that it barely cleared her tiny buttocks, and again it startled him that he lived in an age that permitted its young girls such flagrant narcissism. For he was sure that the ever-briefer skirts of Hildy and her friends revealed not only their desire to attract boys but their own enormous self-approval; they knew very well how delectable their slim young thighs could be to the male eye, the young male eyes of their sixteen-year-old admirers as well as the startled eyes of their fathers and uncles and other supposedly immune observers. But they also found them rather delectable themselves, when they gazed into shopwindows or long mirrors.
Next week, on the first of March, Hildy would be sixteen; recently she had put a definable distance between herself and her parents, natural enough, not meant to be hostile, not meant to be troubling. Yet to him it announced a milestone. She was grown up. In an earlier age, sixteen would have been merely another stage in the gradual process of becoming an adult, but in the rushing years of the late nineteen-sixties, the message to most parents was “I’m an adult now.” In Hildy it had come abruptly; last year she was still his loving little girl, now she was at best an amiable relative, at worst a cool remarker of his faults and frailties and a cooler critic of his decisions.
Alienation. The word was all over the place, already a nonce word, a slogan, a piece of verbal claptrap uttered so easily and so often it had forfeited its original force. Blacks and whites, alienated; doves and hawks, alienated; young and old, alienated. It was a kind of shorthand no longer fully decipherable by people who sought meaning underneath the hooks and curves and dots and squiggles.
It was a world in turmoil and here he was, alienated right out of it. His turmoil was his alone; he seethed in it; it seethed in him; he could not control it and rejoin that other world, those other turmoils, could not get back to living as he was living before—before—
Damn it, he had ordered his mind not to do this, and his mind kept doing it anyhow. Before Dori, before wreckage, before catastrophe. He was pierced with longing for that flashing of happiness in the first instant of her telling him, before he caught what she really meant, and he was pierced too with desire, not sexual desire but a desire as poignant, to be back before this had happened, back there somewhere with her before, before, while there was still time for them. This backward-longing was something he had never known before, a something not in the schedules and manifests of life as he knew it.
Last night he had spent two hours drinking with Jack Henning and Jack had finally said, “What’s eating you, for God’s sake?” To his own complete astonishment, he had told him to go to hell. But then, in a few brusque sentences he had told Jack about Dori, not naming her, told it harshly, the essentials only, of their affair, of her swift importance to him, of her sudden announcement that she was already pregnant when they met, and that he had found himself staggered in a way he had never known before.
Jack had been staggered too. “You offered to help her.” It was a simple statement, bearing no question mark.
“She wasn’t looking for help.” He had then summed up her history of doctors and tests and waiting, and had ended, “so help was the last thing she wanted. She was happy about it.” He had seen Jack’s eyes fill with some new expression that he meant to query him about, but in another minute Jack was ordering more drinks for them both and the moment passed.
Later, alone and in a half-drunk reverie, he had thought, Alienation, that’s it. Dori and I are alienated—what a farce of a word. Distance from, distance between, separation and silence, that is alienation. We are alienated one from the other.
The phrase still haunted him, even now, weeks later. It was feeble and false, but it was also true. Why? Why did it remain true? Over and over he had assured himself that this was no typical male jealousy but something else, yet he could not find what that something else was. Over and over, like a scientist, like a detective, like a trial lawyer preparing for court, he had searched through the whole body of evidence for the one clue that had evaded him, and each time he wound up defeated. If she had lied to him about her life these past years—but she had told him all he needed to know about herself and men, more than he had told her in return. He hadn’t felt a qualm about those infrequent and apparently none-too-meaningful affairs of hers, had known she was just getting over one. He had wasted no time thinking of them, any more than if she had told him about her first kiss, though he had not let himself visualize her responsiveness to anyone else, knowing as he did that if it were required of him that he answer yes or no as to whether sex had moved her, he would have had to say, Yes, always. It never was possible to think of her as unmoved about sex, cool, remote, contained about sex. One of the holds she had on you was the depth of her response, the readiness, the complexity, like your own, the totality of drive toward the top of it and then the totality of the moment itself.
Remembering was still a savagery, and then fury that she should have—
Should have what? He still could not state it, this crime he charged her with. If he once could frame it in the containing rim of words and phrases, he might at last manage it, accept it, view it as reality and then come to terms with it. But he could get no closer than his own certainty that what looked like an onslaught of male jealousy was more complicated.
He still did not know what it was. And until he did, he was immobilized.