THE CHILD CAME WHEN due, and though while it was in the womb they had planned to call a girl Electra or Alison, when it was born they named it Mary like almost anyone, soon shortened to Molly, and by the child herself to May. For though each stage of her growth, from breast to cup, from diaper to pot, seemed to last forever, at the same time each passed like the wind, and in no time at all she was speaking, then walking. Heavy at birth, more than nine pounds even in this day of scales on which no midwife weighed her own hand to the extra glorification of the family, her night-cries were strong, but ceased as soon as honored. At birth she had a mark like a red V or Y between nose and upper lip, which deepened when she howled, but was likely to disappear, the doctor said, in the way of most birthmarks along the median line. When it vanished, they were not able to say on which day it had gone. Now and then, the ghost of an allergy, to egg, to wheat, flitted over her pure, classic regime, but was said to be also of a kind that was outgrown. She spoke early, which girls were known to do, but did not walk until fourteen months, which seemed late, until they studied a book and found this to be exactly on line. Aside from the fact that she was beautiful and utterly theirs, she was all median. The child herself had the fat calm of a calyx that opened slowly; to hold her was to be reassured. Good as she was, if she sometimes exhausted them, it was only as the ownership of riches exhausts. For she was their thing, their greatest possession—and expression. She excused everything, from the condition of the house to those states of being which forbore examination. Hands in hers, they were drawn out upon the gentle plateau of the daily, into that great, blending chapter where no sharp events were. And for this, they now could not be blamed.
Even before birth the child had been helpful, as Liz proved to be one of the girls whom pregnancy turned bland and stilled, the hunger for achievement at rest between hands folded on bellies. “Even when I’m asleep now, I’m accomplishing!” she often said to David, laughing at a world in whose eyes anything she did now merited praise. And so now that she could turn to her work as if it were merely avocation, she returned to it. During the months before the studio area, luckily so fresh and bare, must become the nursery, and now that David was working night and day on the film with Barney, the loft became more and more her domain. For the time being, she embarked on a series of studies for the plaster, very large line-drawings of the figure, which both David and the crowd thought showable, plus one practice piece in wood, as yet shown to no one, in which she had tried to learn how to let the grain work for her—an oddly beveled torso posed for her by Sonsie, the girl upstairs.
As she came closer to “term,” the word itself like a darker overtone of the “semester” of schooltime, and so exact a one for this peculiar tableland of pregnancy—at in fact the precise month which the smiling obstetrician called the “impatient” one—she grew bored with the heavy-limbed, loose drawings, ashamed of their lack of neurotic fire. Besides, it was hard to work at anything large across the obstacle of her belly. What was needed was an object no bigger than fancywork. The figurines she did then, either in wax or compounds with a cerous feel to them, surprised her with their expertness, tricks that flowed from her fingers as if in waiting there, directed by some armature within herself. Otherwise, they differed little from the earlier ones, and wander as she tried, the best were always female. Those in wax had also that aura which comes from natural substance only. Clean as she kept her palms, gradually what was pinched and pressed between them took on a color not pink, not amber or gray—until in time it came to seem to her that in both ways, both from within and without, she was working on flesh.
When she was eight months along, the smiling doctor, telling her that she was in every way normal, cautioned her against listening to old wives’ tales on what was awaiting her. The caution came too late; had there ever been a time early enough? She had always despised woman-talk, under which she had classed everything from recipes to that gothic joy with which women explored their insides. With her head, she still did, rejecting it all with the collegiate laugh given by her zoology class to the notion that carrying women frightened by mice would bear children resembling them. But all the time she must have been recording it—to despise. There must never have been a time, from childhood up, when she had not been listening. And now she could no more flounce away from this gossip than she could insert herself into the waistlines of six months ago, even though she knew this to be as temporary as her measurement—girls of today became Dianas again in six months. For the moment, she hung ashamedly on the edge of those communities the women at these times formed even with rivals or with the scorned—she would have done it with Mitzi, had they met.
The talk itself was as silly as ever, dignified in part when its great subject—the enormous thing that only they could do with their bodies—was confirmed by the great presence of some who were doing it, but immediately absurd in proportion to them; for such cockeyed celebrants there was alas no hope. For, though beneath all their duckings, one got an impression that they all saw the same Minotaur at the heart of things, the next moment, young and old had fled from that monster bison-face, in a rush of bric-a-brac. It was no wonder the men laughed. Yet the older women had something they half wished to impart to her—never any definition of what they guarded, just how. It seemed sad to her that this should be the case with those who saw so much—for in her present state, the women seemed to her the only ones who saw. No wonder the men laughed; they had to; they had nothing like. For the first time she began to think of David not as David, her husband, a person, a lover, but—with a divisive line so shadowy that it could scarcely be said to separate—as “men.” Here Sonsie, who had been so able to tell her the score the day she fainted—who always referred to her Joe, in a tone halfway between an awed Germanic “der Voter” and a shrugging Irish “himself,” as Bailey—here, once again, Sonsie helped.
“When I was eight months gone, oh brother,” said Sonsie now. Opposite the wooden torso of herself, for which she had posed kneeling, arms behind her like a bound Joan, she sat now for a twelve-inch doll of herself, knees spread comfortably in the kitchen chair she had brought from upstairs. A six-foot young Goliathess with the fine complexion of the chestnut-haired (on which she put no make-up except a perverse touch of violet eye-shadow worn as usual, above a housedress, as if in careless acknowledgment of some beauty others saw in her)—she was said to resemble old Clea, the famous model whom Liz had once seen at the League in the last days of that ancient nakedness, and once, jogging home on the bus afterwards: a blunted Venus in an apple-woman’s hat, her neck a ruined column in illusion veiling, on her the shadowy, violet impression, not of Renoir himself, by whom she could never have been seen, but of countless imitation Renoirs.
Sonsie, out of Hell’s Kitchen, an alcoholic mother of eight others and a short career at “artist’s balls”—taken from them twelve years ago at eighteen, by the twenty-year-older Bailey, to whom she remained a grateful slave, with the rages of a slave—had another-era look to her also, but only in the imagination of the onlooker, never in her own. If one dressed her up, one saw her perhaps in the gaslight era, an uncertain Lillian Russell in a swooping hat and dogcollar too big for her in all but size, sitting naive as a young lioness and as deadly, perhaps against the beef-red portieres of one of the tough-fancy restaurants where the politicos went to drink beer over white napery—one of them leaning toward her on a thick-knuckled hand with gold wedding ring, just one second before she gashed him with her paw. Sonsie herself never dressed up; as she herself was the first to say, she was a kitchen-wrapper girl at heart. Like many models, she had no personality for beauty, or at least not the right one. Inside her was a woman of no vanity and but one assurance Ninth Avenue had taught her, that physique was to fight with, fist, elbow and heel. Joe was perfect for her—they fought. She saw his hundred bucks a week at the drawing-board as entirely honorable, never allowing him to slip into the sour-Irish failure he craved. When he drank, they rioted. Otherwise they met seldom, at meals or in gigantic meetings-in-bed where only twins were fathered, two sets of them. In the ring of these, she now moved on the other side of things, a lady lion-tamer before whose whip, street-cubs since the age of two, they scattered and returned, to obey without psychic damage, scrub behind-the-ears without cringing, and cleanly adore. She had, naturally, the lightest hand for pastry. Barney, who’d known Joe before, said the two were types really, a pair to every tenement, but to Liz and somewhat less to David, their resounding saga was the real thing—by which they meant whatever least resembled themselves.
She made a wonderful friend, particularly just now, though Liz never thought of it as anyway but forever. Sonsie’s every remark was racy to her, her laughter straight from the navel; yet certain of Liz’s most hand-me-down concepts from school or family life she handled as if these were some kind of precious jewelry from uptown. When she came down in her sports coat and a fresh smear of violet, gave a flying poke at Liz’s belly and said, “Come on, baby, I’ll help carry you, let’s go uptown!” this was not because she was chafing; the domestic day never occurred to her as something to be fled or “filled.” She toured the stores with the gusto of the once deprived, and never bought except from catalogue. And in the studio, she would sit professionally for hours, taking out her pay in the only way she would accept—company. “Just think! We might never have met!” Liz said to her more than once. What fated riches she would have missed, of swapped cups of this for casually keyed confidences of that, of mutually sustaining hoo-hoos up the stairs. “Just think, if I hadn’t come to live here!” An echo always linked itself with this, of something else she was supposed to say, but could not remember. And at these times, Sonsie never answered anyway, except with a smile.
“When I was eight months gone the first twins—” said Sonsie, “I was already fifty pounds over, two-ten. Watch the pressure, the clinic said, but I never felt more fine. And Bailey his usual skinny one-sixty-five, nights we used to the laughing, he couldn’t keep to his side of the bed, he just rolled. His mother was with us at the time, what a sweet, white-haired jealous little old bitch she was. ‘Laugh,’ she says to me one morning. ‘From now on I’m carrying closepins in me apron pocket for you, from now on.’”
“Whatever for?” said Liz. The little seated figurine she held was finished, but something else was needed.
“That’s what I said, what the hell for. ‘To stick between your teeth,’ she says, ‘you get the convulsions. So you won’t bite your tongue.’” Sonsie lit a cigarette, her timeout signal, and the two girls relaxed, at ease like two workmen. Outside, through one of the white, fog-bound end-of-island days, they heard the organ tones of the harbor.
“Cup of tea?”
Sonsie nodded. “Ah well, she’s dead and gone.”
Liz leaned over the tea. A faint, dark zest came from the pot; they both liked it strong. Behind, on the stove, smoke lazed from the kettle. “Eight months gone. I never heard it said that way.”
“My mother. Lord God knows she was, mostly. Not that she ever told me nothing, not even about falling off the roof—I just watched. And would you believe it, when my monthly come on, I was young for it, eleven, wasn’t a thing I didn’t know about babies—except that. Bird’s-eye napkins was what she brought me, like the old-style diapers. You washed them and used them over, if you can imagine. My older sister—one in Watertown I take the children to, she slipped me two bits and told me what to ask for at the drugstore. ‘I’m not going let you do what she made me,’ she said, ‘having it come through on you at school. Having to hide them stiff things in your briefcase, to bring home again.’”
Sonsie brought her tea to the sofa, where she stretched full length, hooking on by one arm. Both of them observed the habits of each other’s houses in silent freemasonry, having a care for the chair that buckled, flipping back the rug that slid. Liz followed her, pulling up one of the new straight chairs in which she sat best now, legs spread. They had bought the Italian ones. “God!” she said. On this subject at least, she felt as learned as any. “How do you suppose they ever managed!” She took an emancipated sip of tea, elbows heavy on the table.
“Everything else, I already knew.” Sonsie blew smoke. “Or I learned.” She chuckled. “One time, I was only eight, my seatmate, an older girl, when she didn’t come back to school another kid whispered me why. ‘Oh honey,’ she said, ‘she fell in.’ And what do you think I said? ‘Down the toilet?’”
Liz laughed cautiously.
“Ah-h, come on, you don’t even know what it means yourself.”
“What?”
“Got caught.”
“Got c—oh of course,” said Liz. “Of course.” She poured them each more tea. “Convulsions,” she said, in an off-hand tone. “Why would she ever think you’d have those!”
“You gain too much weight, there’s a kidney condition could give you them. With me, it wasn’t anything but the twins.” She stubbed out her cigarette, shaking her head at it. A deep ground noise was coming from the harbor now, not foundering but steady, sounding in the floorboards as if something might rise there. “E-clampsia,” she said into it, with a delicately special enunciation, her medical one. The word floated there like an offering. She looked up. “Oh honey, you’re all right, you didn’t put that much on!”
“I was just wishing it was over.”
“Oh—it isn’t so bad. You’ll forget it the next day.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean this.” Liz lifted her arms at her sides, describing their barrel-curves.
“Year from now, you’ll catch yourself wishing you could put it back where you always had it handy. When you really tied down with it.”
Far in the distance, she saw a figure still single, ghost who had nothing in common with the two girls sitting here. The nagging memory now returned in full—of the girl looking up the staircase with its hanging ropes, wondering who would be her friend here, dallying with an impulse to run, resolving to save the memory of it to laugh over with the still unknown—the day she had come here, since buried by the days that were.
“You’re the kind going to have lots of milk, you’ll feed yours. That’s what the nurse in maternity used to say to me, every time she put the breast pump on me. It’s the little ones have it, not the big lunks like you.”
Sonsie had been here, that was all; except for Ivan’s wife, avoided by all, she was the only other woman here. The two other tenants were homosexual pairs known only in passing—two who tripped lyrically down the stairs, ignoring the ropes, and two quiet, sad ones who cocooned their windows as if in hiding and lived behind a barrage of music from which one peeped out looking for the other, like elves behind a waterfall. Meanwhile Sonsie had knocked at her door the very first day, bearing a plate of her pastry and a gift packet of tea. This was the context that had been waiting for her, here. And so Sonsie, with whom she had nothing else in common at all. Even David, at first surprised at their getting thick so quickly, had later been glad of it, now that he was out so much. She stared past her now at that other lone figure—it could not be—who had so little in common with herself. “You don’t mean they actually—you don’t mean it!”
“Don’t I.” The other girl stretched now, flaunting herself against that image in the hospital, her face angry, then suddenly laughed. “Bailey. He come in once before he should of, when they had the pump on the two of us, the woman in the next bed, her and me. He turned green, I swear it, then he backed out. I could hear him making a hullabaloo out in the hall. ‘Whatsa matter with him?’ I said to the nurse when she come to take me off it. ‘He throwing up out there?’ ‘Not on your life!’ she says. ‘He’s laughing. He’s laughing his head off.’”
Sonsie got up and brought the cups to the sink, holding them one after the other under the spigot, musing. “Not that I needed him, to tell me. Not even on the delivery table, when they put your feet in those stirrups, I didn’t feel that way. Nothing else in the whole business made me feel—that lowdown. Only that pump.” She stood there for a moment, head back, shrugging off the thought, then moved past the long worktable where the wax figurine sat patiently in the welter of its own chips and dust of them, and shouldered the chair with her purse hanging on it. “I told the kids—be back at five.”
“Sonsie.”
“Ye-ep?”
“What’s it like? You know. On the table.”
It was the unasked question. They would tell one anything but that—in a complicity as deep, one was never supposed to ask it. “Oh, it’s not so bad,” they said, forestalling it, or “They gave me something, you know—I wasn’t really there.” Or leaning forward, stretching their lips in steel-edged matiness, “You’ll find you can take it, just like the rest of us.” She didn’t give a rap for the pain, nor, she was sure, had they. Still, she leaned forward, with the steady, lucid gaze people fix on the impossible, just as she had leaned in the doctor’s office, when he told her. There was always the chance that they might still tell her the truth—that she was not like the rest.
“Oh—” Sonsie shook her head, sighing. “It—” she said. Her glance fell on the figurine. She put down the chair. Usually she had a bracing lack of interest in what was done of her, never came up to it afterwards as the amateurs did, never touched. Now, her face screwed up, she put out a hand, just above it. The figure sat patiently, as if waiting for final dismissal. “Why hon,” she said, “how did you ever—” Very gently, in spite of herself, she touched it. “How did you know. I had a hat once, just like that. How did you ever know.”
Both girls regarded the small statue in silence.
“I can tell you this—” Sonsie spoke in a whisper. “They he, when they say we don’t remember it.” She put out a hand, in another unwonted gesture. The hand was rescinded. “Why, honey—don’t look at me like that!” said Sonsie. “As if I were your mother.”
At the door, she shrugged, enemy or friend, hefting her chair again. “They say you won’t remember it—they lie.”
That night, undressing herself, Liz stood naked in front of the mirror, a game she sometimes now played. Behind her, David, already lying in bed, must be made to look. She had not yet caught him flinching from it.
She herself could scarcely believe what she saw there; it would be over before she believed it, the brown, secret navel now exposed forward like a rising third nipple, or as if there were about to poke from it the pink organ of a small boy. Under the belly, the skin was gauzy as an old wrist, the veins distended, unearthly blue. Above its curve, still high, her breasts rested, no longer triangular, not yet full. In the mirror, her face, for months a peach-bloom oval, now showed still another alien—the peculiarly socketed “mask of pregnancy,” fallen inward, toward birth, as the aged face falls toward death. She felt herself a confusion of sexes, ages, indeterminate in the many-limbed toils of something antecedent to any.
She turned sideways, examining the line where hip met buttock, testing the skin with her fingers. On each of Sonsie’s hips there were ridges whose glistening snail-tracks were deep enough to follow with the fingertips, traced on that calm Maillol curve like the marks the sea makes, withdrawing from sand. Common enough on women who had carried too heavily, the doctor had told Sonsie, tossing this into Sonsie’s ragbag of tips from seatmate and sister, where it remained as the marks had on her—nameless, commonplace and permanent.
“I’m not carrying—too heavily,” Liz said now. “I should go back to—pretty much the same.”
“Of course you will,” said David.
Oh, he was trying to keep in step with her, but could he have any idea of how far he would have to reach to be where she stood—as she saw herself in the glass—heels dug in, leaning back against the hard, amniotic weight of all that had been thrust upon her? From another orb she regarded him in the glass, lying there feckless behind her, in the simple one-track rhythm of his world, between them, true or false, all the dark, venous coil that now defined her away from him—as if she walked in a magnetic field on which secret facts flew to her, to which he was lead. If I’m late, they’ll “induce” me—castor oil. If the water breaks, it’s a dry birth, girl. Hubble-bubble. The Kaiser was a breech—he had a withered arm. Spring forever, O Republic, from the dust of my bosom. Of course, my hair may fall out afterwards. The look on my face, however, is medically documented. Quite common—but, luckily here—won’t last. I am still Persephone. It’s only a mask.
Oh, she must try to reach him, therefore her nightly game.
“You were absolutely right,” she said, “about Sonsie. We really have almost nothing in common. I just realized it this afternoon.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “I didn’t. What I said was, living so close, maybe you shouldn’t get so—spend so much ti—”
“Well, it’s the “same thing,” she said. “It’s going to be a drag, to break off.”
“You girls have a fight, or something?”
“Of course not. I just realized.” She stared in the mirror, chin lifted. He seemed no nearer. “A girl like her. What do you suppose we could keep on finding to talk about? What do you suppose we do talk about. We girls.”
“Oh—house-stuff. Sex, maybe.”
“Se—!” As with most women, what they did with their men was never mentioned in those terms, between them. “Why, she never mentions it.” Sex was Sonsie’s modesty—theirs. “Nor do I.” It was the one adage in the manual that had not been discussed—“Intercourse should not be engaged in after the seventh month.” She gazed at him now with a remote, calculated pity.
“Us, then.”
“You? Oh—men. Yes—we talk about you, some.” Her smile was almost for Sonsie. The men, never appearing intimately in those conversations either, instead were slid along in their grooves like puppets, moving jerkily in scenes devoted to the habits, care and feeding of, et cetera—never really to them. “What do you talk about, with Barney?”
“Work.”
“See!” she said.
“She’s a good egg,” he said severely. “She may not be in it for brain. But you knew that.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “I know. And she’s not such a dumb bunny. The way she had to grow up, kicked up. By that mother of hers. Why, in a peculiar way I really love her, you know? Not just like.”
“She’s something to look at,” he said. “I wonder if I could catch it on film. Not sexy. She’s like some big, clean—not Venus exactly. But not Diana either.”
“You should see her in the nude,” she said. “She has one of those, almost abstract bodies. Like a good statue. As if it had already been through—you feel a kind of peculiar sympathy—” One hand smoothed her own hip. Suddenly, she wheeled clumsily to face him. “Dave! You don’t think…” Her mouth was open, eyes screwed tight, ready for horror, comically trusting as a young bird’s. The child had not dropped yet, according to Sonsie, yet its weight on her thighs was such that it toppled her forward, unless she kept her hands under it. She held them so, holding her belly like a great football. “Do you think—you think I could be a Lesbian, or something?”
He had just been taking off his glasses. Without any intent of cruelty—in the surprise with which one repeats a habitual gesture—he put them on again. But then he began to laugh. Probably there was a touch of hysterical release from this last month in it, but anyway he couldn’t help it. He rolled over and over with it, pounding the pillow, from which he rose, pointing a weak finger—only to fall back in another paroxysm.
At the core of the eye, lies the retina. Once it is “detached” as they say, even partially, the vision can never be the same. With the inner eye, it is that way also. She saw him there. Oh, she had her humor about her too, somewhere. With her outer eye, she could see well enough how she looked to him, even smile. When she spoke, though, it was from that dark, venous underground, always fresh with milk or blood, that he could never penetrate to, from which she herself had been running intermittently ever since she was thirteen—and to which now, in the full light of day, she was returned.
“Go on, laugh,” she said. “Go on, Pagani. Laugh.”
(They lied of course, when they said she wouldn’t remember it. What she remembered best was her great distance from others who could still suffer shades of feeling, their distance from her, who was all one shade. Later on, when they asked her about it, she lied, and said she didn’t remember it. How speak in the particular, of what should be all—one statement? Still later, when she asked herself, she responded also that she had forgotten. It had been the great obligatory scene of her life—hers—but nothing could make it a unique one. So she lied there, also, and said she did not remember it. It was an old wives’ tale.)
And now that the praeludium was over, with that expected chord which everybody had heard, the days offered themselves to the young Paganis—for what seemed a long time—in a mixed bag containing only many a minor good. Sometimes it was David, man of action, who appeared to be in the forefront of the family, holding aloft its banner, and Elizabeth who was the contemplative; sometimes it was she who set the tone of that psyche all families have—and now and again, walking with that lovely gait the world recognizes, they were one. In olden days, they would have had some actual ikon, household god to which or whom each would have had his and her duties, but here too their heritage, itself a mixture, left them free to—set their own course. Everything now conspired to help them believe they were doing so.
To Elizabeth with the child, crowned by it, life was ravished by circumstance. May, sweet nugget of the same, absorbed the unscheduled daylight hours, or corrected them to one; at night, sometimes carried to parties on her mother’s hip, she often allowed herself to be slipped into a quiet corner with others of her kind. Slowly her possessions entrenched themselves, trusted by her to bear it in upon her hosts that she was not leaving; gradually they learned to let all this creeping art nouveau abide. Meanwhile May, in return, offered them each day her small fistful of events. David from time to time patched together a film of these and sent it off to California, where each installment was extensively reviewed by letter, under the title with which Mr. Pagani had at once dubbed the whole continuity: “May’s Meanwhile.”
As was natural, some portion of her parents’ own almost always adhered to it. The field of dandelions where she was shown, a wandering topknot almost as bright-penny, lay just outside the wood where they went to hunt wood for Elizabeth, where they had found that large bole she would soon be working on. Here was May again, in the secondhand car her father had bought with his own earnings. For though the big opus was not yet done, indeed enlarged itself monthly, two smaller sections of it—one on certain architectural leftovers in the city, and one on its municipal sculpture—had been purchased by a university, share in the payment refused by the already well-heeled Barney, on the true grounds that these ideas had been David’s. More of the same, if he could turn up some, was on order.
Elizabeth, writing the letters that accompanied these installments, found herself a more eager correspondent now. Two addressees were more neutral than one—and she had found her subject, on which all of them could dwell. Under a still of May in the car—for an album which her own mother had started—she inscribed date and anecdote:
“The old bus makes a racket going up hills, probably needs a carbon job. First time out, I made a crack about it. We didn’t take it out again until last Sunday, more than a week later. What was our surprise to hear her say, clear as a bell, what I’d said. “Will this thing exploge?” At two-and-a-half! Can you believe it!”
The senior Paganis could well believe it. Though they had their accounts too, of the sniffles and nap-fevers a child could breed in a wink and a gust of wind, even hearing, safely afterwards, of the midnight croup, when Liz and Sonsie took turns walking the floor with the child upright on a shoulder, or of the time May got into the studio and cut her wrist, on a tool called a riffler that Elizabeth herself had never used—a half-inch more and it would have been the artery—the child of the pictures was the one they most truly believed. To Margot’s anxious query, not of course a suggestion, as to whether the studio could not be locked, she received an airmail answer: It was. She opened it. We’ve taken other precautions now. You really can’t realize I’m a mother now too, can you.
Both knew this equally. On May’s first birthday, when Margot had flown East, ostensibly to re-rent the apartment she still kept on there, the good intentions of each had made for a prepared formality—under which repression one lance from an old attitude had instantly pierced. “I’ve tried,” each said to herself—“she will not accept.” “She will not forbear.” For walk about as they might and did, under an obscurely tender knowledge they increasingly felt themselves to be sharing, in speech they were helpless—birds striking in midair. “May hasn’t yet made her suffer,” the elder thought, and the repetition made her sad. But from these encounters, Elizabeth rose refreshed, a phoenix-girl. If Margot’s presence would not let her be a mother, then she would be a girl again, rediscovering her need, in all this happy humdrum, to rebel and not forbear, even to shut off from May that new fount of knee-high wisdom which May herself had opened in her, and fling up the single hand again—to push against the weave. All this was fine for work—but lasted briefly. So it was not quite possible to say who had conquered whom.
As for David, he had gone to the Coast once since, on the excuse of showing his father sections of the new film, and of course there was never any trouble between those two, though each found the other more reserved. “It must be because he has her now,” David told himself. “Is it because he is beginning to see?” Mr. Pagani asked himself—and trembled against what David might turn and tell him. Meanwhile, the time was approaching when all five must really meet, foolish to delay that pleasure. May was old enough now to see California. California must see May. Jacques (Margot wrote), whose grumbles over his liver all but convinced them that he had one and might make good his eternal threat to take it home to France forever, must see her—they must see him. Mr. Pagani was never the one to press for this—he was the same as always.
This was the real news from the older ones, and the best—that everything was the same. Each side knew the marvel of this, but differently. David no longer worried, or had to remind himself to do so. To the younger lovers, the older couple had been returned to that plateau where all keep their parents; distance made the latter even more safely constant, and they sent no pictures; like all letter-writers who remain faithful but unseen, they did not change.
And this was the sum.
Though the young couple never spoke it aloud, it seemed to both that they now had everything. They saw their way clear to seeing life clear, in just those antitheses they had often glimpsed in the lives of others, and no longer thought of as grooves: the country, the city; leisure, work. On Sunday afternoons, on the last lap of the fifty miles between them and the discovered woods they thought of mystically as theirs, while they mused in the line of traffic that stretched ahead of them to the George Washington Bridge and the city, May nodding in her sling between them or blanketed safe in the back, all fours clutched to her bottle, they often spoke of the logic of someday buying a cottage or camp—terms for what resided in the mind of each as a piece of habitation untethered by price or drains, as mystic a refuge as their forest. They enjoyed a forward sense of this as probable but not yet possible, in the way one savors a night’s anchorage in a place where one would not want to stay forever, taking a double enjoyment in their sense of themselves as being on a temporary plateau but steadily climbing; the angle of incidence that their life was to take, though free and always to be spreading, was set. In time it occurred to them, laughing at themselves incontinently, that they really didn’t have to make these trips on Sunday, like people who worked a week of nine-to-five; thereafter, drawing imperious breaths as they loaded the car, they made it a habit to go on weekdays. After this, whenever they came across similar examples of the freedom which kept them special, they were careful to observe any gestures that went with it, in order to mark the fact that though they lived within the terms of other people, they chose theirs. It was at these times, when people saw them walking with that gait, that they appeared most united—one. Having another child was never voiced even in thought, since their triumvirate was still so ideal—this was one of the terms. But the warmth of people who have everything often overflows into a charitable desire to add to it. So they got a dog. A small tan mongrel, short of leg, long in the tail and utter in faith, it understood them immediately.
The loft was their center; it was their way. As they approached the bridge, in this the third year, the city, hung there on the late blue in its stencils of sunlight, stepped forward to them like their own creation, weighted down at its farther end by that homestead, reached by its ropes, which they had long since come to call—in a gesture forgotten—either the Slip or the Cove. Elsewhere in the city, when they parted from friends or each other, on the steps of the Main Library perhaps, or inside the Modern, meanwhile looking like anybody else—for Elizabeth dressed “uptown” when she went there, and the child was kept a picture by its grandmother—nonchalance thrilled to pleasure as they murmured, “Back at the Slip at six” or “See you kids Thursday, at the Cove.” The wealth of what she had down there often overcame her right in the middle of Lord & Taylor’s; David still saw his own address with awe. Someone told them that it was mentioned in Moby Dick. Though they could not help anticipating the cachet of this at parties, David, always quicker at sensing pomp in himself, usually nullified it—once sending her into stitches by drawling, “Mm-hmmm. That’s where all the young marrieds.” In matter of fact, although, on streets nearby, they once or twice passed couples who resembled themselves enough to merit a second look, no one they knew or had heard of lived within a mile of them—any nearer than the new bohemia of the “East” Village. As they glided down the West Side Highway, under the “Heights” that now belonged to “the Germans” (refugees of thirty years ago, who had nothing to do with the Yorkville of Elizabeth’s parents), past the tired ballpark area of the newest Harlem, they thought of the city, like all New Yorkers, as utterly theirs—Elizabeth for having been born here, and David for having its ichor all the more in the veins because he had come. As evidence of this was the fact that each part of it had for them a social meaning which it took years to know. Impossible for them to live elsewhere than in its context—fish who would die out of these haunts that fed them a unique alga. In its godmotherly waters, even if they personally faulted, the city, friendly old savager of artists, shark-mother, helped them to keep on knowing who they were. This they took for granted.
And impossible to live in it except where they did—now that they had found it. Like any pioneers, they wanted no one else too near them, though there were other areas which by social meaning were right for their friends. On lower Riverside Drive, where the high-windowed towers gave back the gold in blobs and flashes, and one front was caught to a lurid, entire bronze, they exchanged smiles of scorn as they sped by. Here two couples of the crowd had defected to the solid apartments now returning to borderline bourgeois favor—and to all that went with this—baby-carriage mornings for mother, home on the bus for papa, and a half-time maid. Local contexts could not be shrugged off; these molded. If they themselves had not recently become privy to a circle that now seemed home to them, the melting of that first, early crowd would have been more alarming—one pair to the suburbs, two changes of heart (and profession) toward graduate school, two couples last seen grappling with an interest in their commercial jobs. As it was, Elizabeth was often frightened at the thought of it—they had all been so close. David, used to dormitory living, took these severances more stolidly, but she was not sure he saw the real tenor of them—it was not so much that the crowd had melted as the way they had, out of their own intention, back into life at large. Of the originals, only three had remained stalwart, two bachelor painters and a girl doing rather well in off-Broadway theater. They themselves were the sole couple—outside of Beatty and Dil, of course, those two who had moved on to new fringes but still were sometimes to be met and avoided, their experienced hanger’s-on eyes watching, ever more brightly purist, waiting for the Paganis, now that the latter were in the family way, to slide.
Luckily, they themselves could now return the look with some sophistication. The people they saw now, of whom one would never use that adolescent word “crowd”—though they gathered as self-protectively and excluded far more severely—had almost all taken that indefinable step, however small, past intention, into practice. Ah, what a difference, and oh the relief of it, now that they both had done—particularly for Elizabeth. For once David had given up (on which day?) any idea of being a painter, he had stepped forward with the lighthearted confidence of one who pursues his avocation, plus perhaps the confidence of the male—of whom vocation, whatever it may be, is expected. She hadn’t given him a hard time about it, turning it rather more harshly upon herself. For, six months after May’s birth, she still had not started to work again—she was afraid to begin. At times she blamed the school for abetting her too early in her misconception of herself—and saw them all back there, teachers and schoolmates both, expecting things of her, waiting for her to fulfill or fail. Some mornings she was sure she had risen in ardor to a workday that the baby had then eased away from her, piecemeal. Then, slowly it was borne in upon her, like a soundless clap of thunder of which she was not aware until it echoed, that no one (possibly not even David) was really awaiting anything else from her—at least not on the heights of what she demanded of herself. For this, she had no audience. Luckier than David (as some would see it), even in this day and age no other vocation was really expected of her. All her life long she could blame the baby, plead the house.
Strangely enough, once more it was Sonsie who helped her. Even while Sonsie shrank back a trifle, like an alert sponge, before a certain new dryness in Liz, as audience she insisted, she expected, and not for her own vanity. The afternoons went on, less intimate than they had been, teaching Liz something of the help to be drawn from the ignorant, when they admire. When Sonsie left to go “upstate for a time” after a bout with Joe, she brought down a substitute, one of the shy homosexuals who lived in the shrouded loft above the Baileys—who rose at four to cook breakfast for a partner who worked nights, and then was left to himself like a childless wife. A country boy from Georgia, who proved unable to pose but was content to watch her work at something else while he sipped coffee grayed with his tin of “condensed,” he was both fond and deft with children, and liked to sit with May when they went out, exchanging jollities with her until she slept, grateful adjunct of family ways he was not quite loosed from, pleased with his role of senior child.
During this time, Liz worked on studies of the baby in mediums from ink to clay, but the sketches and figures she turned out always kept to a stubborn abstraction, concept babies, genus “infant”—she could never make an identifiable May. She began to tour the museums, their libraries, purchase her books of plates. For the first time, school appeared to her not as a wishing-well or a theater of approval, but as the fountain where the water was. Once a week, she now attended classes in the studio of an old sculptor of Bauhaus days, superannuated but still famous, where she rarely ever saw the master but was exposed to all that really lay before her. To any casual queries as to what she “did,” she could no longer bring herself to say “I’m,” but sometimes, as some half-accidental success quirked from her fingers, she felt an apprehension of joy—she was learning. She was learning of the power to be drawn from her own ignorance. Gathered up, it must be what might make her an artist. It was surely not a power to be wasted on the daily event.
And for closer kinship, they had the cherished company of the people they saw now—whom they were going to see at tonight’s party—who numbered among them several painters who had been shown in groups, the scene-designer and cast of a play shortly to open in an old auditorium in Chelsea, a group of art photographers who were sponsoring a gallery on East Tenth Street, and one whose film short was to be shown next season, at Cannes. Though the entree to this clique had been David’s—whose combination of small works paid for and magnum opus promised had set just the right tone—Liz’s new-found modesty quickly made her the pet of those who had only just acquired their own confidence—and they had no sculptor. And after a while, by a process not unlike the old crowd’s, her familiar presence made her talent assumed. Anyone who was associated with them!—their voices and miens delivered verdicts, exchanged gossip all in the consciousness of who they were; they were the coming ones; they were “next.” Singly none of them could have said how it was achieved. The group had its acknowledged stars; newcomers swiftly learned to live at the same altitude. The effect on a neophyte was just that: first the blood-stir of the sudden climb, then the calm of the view. And in no time, the network of influence, mention, notice—modest as it was—was set going for her. She was encouraged to send work into competition, instructed where.
On opening day of the large, indiscriminate group show where the torso of Sonsie had made its debut, David, escorting the girls to the jammed gallery—two joined storefronts on East Tenth Street—had been lost to them almost at once in the buzz of some confreres from the camera gallery down the line. Liz, fearful of dressing wrong, at the last moment seizing something from a surer time, had worn her wedding dress. Here and there she had seen someone she knew and was nodded to, but everybody had had his back to the work on display, as if by design. Faces were tilted to other faces or bowed deeply into a glass, and one had a constant sense of chins averting, eyes shifting, as if some notable had yet to fill the doorway—or as if the same message for all, from Ganymede the cup-bearer, was still to arrive. She saw all this freshly, now that it was hers. When she saw the torso, she felt her own nakedness. No one was looking at it; no one had ever noticed the lines on its hips except Sonsie, with whom, by this secret, she suddenly felt once more warmly allied. She whispered to her. “I feel as if it’s me,” she said. Sonsie giggled back at her, “Think of how I feel.”
David, just passing, gave them a brotherly leer. “’T’s okay keed,” he said side-of-the-mouth to Sonsie, “they’ll never recognize you. Not in that hat.” The subtlety of this almost overcame them. Stiffening their faces, they gazed devotedly at his back, like younger sisters. Later they saw him leading an unknown man up to that exhibit whose listing Liz for days had carried about with her like water in the ear: Torso, Jacobson, 124. She made Sonsie duck out with her. From the window of an espresso house opposite, they watched the crowd thin while they gorged themselves on cannoli—safe as two housewives conning the passing show from the tearoom at Gimbel’s, delaying their return to the sitter and their collective children. A vengeful delight overtook Liz as she watched people of whom she could have been one now emerging, exposed in the momentary caricatures of leave-taking. At the same time she tasted a present rich as the custard, the rich mixture of the chapter now. “Phonies!” she had said proudly. “What crap!”
Now, outside the building in the Cove—it could have been any day in the week but was Sunday, any day of the last year—they parked the car, went through certain other routine motions, with the silence of sleepwalkers, doomed but serene. She, the child and all the paraphernalia of their day, bottles and baskets and the finds of pinewood or maple to be mused over afterwards, were set down at their door, the child sometimes awake with a cry sent up like a skein of mourning, or on her feet toddling half-forward into sleep again, clutching a drained bunch of flowers. Then David ran to garage the car, which could not be left where it was because of vandals, and was therefore kept, at half the rental of the loft, in the basement of the “development” from which some of the vandals undoubtedly came.
This was a flaw, but like others in the scheme, was no longer regarded. When the loft was entered, if it no longer quite resembled either its exact first self or even their present memory of it when away from it, it now was pliant enough, old enough—as they were—to give way a little, and still stand. In it they no longer felt the presence of that network of intangibles which once had plagued. Its flaws were not to be held against it or even up to the light, any more than the nubbins in cloth of natural fiber were—any more than her own monthly intensities were held against her, or David was held to account for his solitary afternoon walks, on one of which he had now departed. Lightly suspended in the mind of each, what the one did not ask, the other did not notice, no longer was counted against him—it served to keep him separate. Lightly, scarcely yet coddled into being, there was the need for it.
Meanwhile, there were such beauties. As she went about preparing the evening meal, the dog fed, the child beating its spoon on its tray, the word revolved in her mind on a spit of gold and dark manufactured from the autumn effulgence at the windows and the room’s inner shadows, until she had to laugh for it, a riddle to tell him or not to tell him—how is the word “beauty” like a capon basting? In this quiet goodness, for days on end her thoughts gave up their lances, pattering down in a gentle rain of detail. She made toast points, grated cheese, set out capers in a design, a rosette of pimiento, all her senses transliterating; food was affection. The light was cider, as in an old stable, autumn in a bottle, with a dust in it as clean as country ordure, a stone air that filtered up from the marble being filed in the studio below; who would mind this mica air, glitter in corners, dusty pollen of old pianos. It was the fine, hard blue day of the first shiver in the shoulders, the day of the first blanket. The child, fine loin-fruit, was so good; it fed itself, crooning. By the time its father returned, it would be asleep again. She gave it the button-box to play with and sat down, with a shiver of the loins, to brood for him among her happenings, her weave.
On his walk, David as usual went cross-island, on streets narrow enough for the short-girthed carriages of Dutchmen, even, in a forked alley or two, for the long, saturnine ghosts of Indians. A certain habit of thought always accompanied his footsteps, in a way descended, as a man of the present might still flatter himself, from those silent figures whose long, aquiline feet took their intelligences from the ground. As was his habit, he ended up at Trinity churchyard, where he sat on a certain bench against the south wall, from which he could see, over the worn script of the earliest stones, the towering shaft of the Irving Trust.
On weekdays, the place was his seaside, under wave after wave of people. Rarely, he was here on a Sunday. In this deserted, dune air, one could almost hear the centuries architecturally colliding. On the other side of the church, behind the garlanded buttresses at his back, the first quarter of his own had crept for burial, brought up short in one large cenotaph, good as new, that he ignored as he would his own grandparents. On the façade of the Irving Trust, between window and concavity, dirt had washed a secondary streamlining that made the whole building flow upward, in a movement beyond what the builders had planned. At its base, the nubbins of the gravestones were not downed, but seemingly flowed into the ground and up again. Before the small thumb-push of these, the tower flattened and fell back, eternally falling away. Facing this optic, he often thought of his work as the documentation of what was always in the air in every century—of the movement that was not planned.
He thought of his work now with the gratitude of a man who had found it, his narrow escape up into that vital air which both encompassed and played above the dead flat of canvas and book. These days, he and Barney talked of air as if they were technicians of it—as indeed they hoped to be. Many were already talking of the art that way, some doing it—this filming of the images “in the air”—but they usually attached it, if tenuously, to persons, plots. Though he couldn’t always get his intent clear in his own mind as yet, he meant to do this—somehow collectively. He wasn’t sure that his partner saw that. Stretching on his bench, eyeing those stones, he was fairly sure not. Barney, who had been analyzed, wanted to film the conceptions that floated in his air. He had an idea for two sequences on the identity sickness of the age, one on a man who knew who he was but couldn’t get the world to believe it, and one, even more familiarly, of the man who didn’t know who—et cetera.
Well, that was Barney’s air, and who was to say whether another man’s was ever passé? But if Barney ever stopped being a rake, long enough to live with one woman for instance, he might come up against such an intenseness of identity as might give him pause, enough to wonder whether even this age, unless it lost its woman altogether—et cetera. Women had so much of it, this collective identity, that it was a constant trouble to them to get outside it, a question to him whether they ever could. Liz’s best work came from inside it, from what she saw in her own navel—all women’s as much as hers. Women saw with difficulty any movement outside it. When one came up against this intensity of theirs, it was wise to duck out for a bit, else a man would fall back, diminished. It was given only to men, perhaps, to stare at the navel of all the world.
Someday, he would want to duck out from Barney, though such was the debt, neither financial nor tangible, he owed him, that he didn’t see how this was ever to come about. For what he wanted to do was not just to film the maggots in the brain of the age, but to record its floating healths as well—even if he had to document the obvious. Maybe even and only to do so. He’d even thought of doing this historically, for other ages—think of a film The Fifteenth-Century Air. And here Barney, for whom only the present was chic, who was as much a man of it as a robot was, would be altogether out of it. He himself would have to learn so much, would have to brood. He brooded. And now—it was time—he wanted to go home.
Stretching himself, he rose and left without risking a backward glance, always reluctant to leave this seminal place, wondering whether it would be so next time. For if the rumen he chewed there was only graveyard thought of a kind men had been having for hundreds of years, he rather liked fitting into that groove. Far back in the mind, it was a comfort to have some assignation with permanence, at least an attempted one. He had no idea why he did not go home for this sensation, as he would have done in the early days of his marriage, when all the romantic thrust and blaze of things-to-come lay behind his own door. Now the daily, once outside it, lay behind. He was in no sense out of sorts with the warm, tender certainties guarded by that door, but opening it now meant coming out of the heat of things into the cool, into the place where all he loved and would defend was still gathered—but where he no longer possessed his own singleness. Back there, in that still eddy in the streets, was a strangeness in the midst of which he could brood. Sitting on that bench, he saw himself pictorially, an ocean swimmer out beyond the breakers, steady, not lost, his back to the beach that was home, treading water in the regular, pointed rises of the sea. So he had taken to going there now and then, either straight from home or on the way toward it, never telling anyone, always returning to his own door refreshed—as by a swim in that singleness.
When he came home, the bliss of ordinary evening had settled in there also. They ate in quiet. It was not necessary to say aloud that they were not going to the party. It existed tonight so that he and she might draw together against it; this was what friends were finally for. When he took her in his arms, the child, not quite asleep yet, lay looking at them, its eyelids blinking down and opening wide again, like a great doll they had bought themselves. A time would come, they were forward-minded enough to know, when they could no longer reveal themselves so before her, but now they stood there naked, their backs to her. Elizabeth’s hair was long again on her shoulders. In the mirrors of themselves, they saw themselves the same as always. It seemed to them that they had everything. They had not moved an inch.