Alone in the big apartment she shared with her father, Erika sat on the covered radiator in the living room window and watched the sun set over the Hudson. It had been a long day with nothing to do but look forward to the evening. Now, almost against her will, she thought about Bren. It’s too soon, she told herself sternly. I hardly know him. All we’re going to do is have a neat date, see something I want to see on a fall evening in New York. But in a different part of her mind she already knew that Bren was not just another boy. There had been plenty of those in Philadelphia, where she had lived the stormy, miserable years of her early teens. She smoothed the fur of the plush baby seal she held in her lap, her last stuffed animal, the one she was never going to give up. “Well, Silky, he certainly couldn’t be more different,” she said. “Maybe he’s someone even Dad would approve of, that is, if he’s got pots of money along with good looks and good manners. Ugh. I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
What seemed to Erika to be a long procession of boyfriends filed past in her imagination—older boys mostly, good dancers with cars who took her places she wasn’t allowed to go, handsome, fun-loving, and ultimately disappointing. “I’m getting old, I’m settling down!” she said to the stuffed seal. “What a funny thing to happen in New York, of all places.”
Erika stared at the red ball of the sun, willing it to set, and because it was already so close to the horizon, it seemed to obey her command. Briefly the shore of New Jersey, with its isolated towers, was silhouetted against an orange sky. The river was dark blue watered silk, on which a single white sail skimmed in to harbor at the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin.
Erika felt a growing sensation of warmth in her seat. The radiator was coming on. “It’s going to be cold tonight,” she said, and she jumped up and strode off to her bedroom for a serious consultation with her wardrobe.
The long closet was divided into two distinct collections, one (large) consisting of clothes her father had bought and she refused to wear, the other (small) of her own purchases. Ranks of tweed skirts with matching cashmere sweaters, of silk shirts, tailored slacks, and jersey dresses gave way to a row of more eccentric garments, predominantly black. Already dressed in black jeans and a white, ribbed turtleneck, Erika added a black V-neck sweater that was several sizes too large for her slender frame and stood back to study the effect in the full-length mirror. She pushed the sleeves of the sweater up to her elbows and added a huge, black digital watch to one white-clad wrist.
“Warm enough?” she asked the girl in the mirror. “Well, maybe not.” She reflected that Bren, though clearly a passionate and creative person, might be a slow starter when it came to keeping a person warm, so she pulled out a black gypsy shawl tasseled with jet beads. “Mmmm, festive,” Erika murmured when she had layered the shawl over the sweater. She glanced at her outsized watch, saw that only fifteen minutes remained of the interminable day, and decided to meet Bren in the courtyard.
Bren approached the Apthorp with a quaking heart and cast about for an explanation to banish the tremors that grew with every step he took toward the tall iron gates. Neither his continuing ignorance of the ballet nor the forbidding aspect of Erika’s building seemed enough to cause such turmoil. He refused to recognize his symptoms as the disorder known to all on the brink of an important first date.
The courtyard was filled with autumn dusk, warmed by the glow of the ornamental lamps around the garden and a scatter of lighted windows in the gray walls. It was very quiet. Bren could hear the splash of the fountains, and then he saw Erika by the nearest one, straining her eyes into the gloom. The light picked out her white turtleneck, her small white face and strawberry hair.
“Hey, Bren?” she called softly, as if still unsure who he was, and stood up as he crossed the driveway into the garden. They confronted each other, tongue-tied for a moment.
“What a spooky place,” Bren said at last. “Doesn’t anybody ever come or go?”
“This is just a weird, in-between sort of time,” she said. “Half an hour ago the shrieking of five-year-olds and thunder of tricycles was probably deafening, and any minute now there’ll be beautiful people popping out of all four doors headed for night life—just like us,” she finished with a flashing silver smile.
“I see you’ve given up keeping your mouth shut,” Bren said.
“The vow of silence was just too much. I felt like a cloistered nun.”
“You don’t look like a nun, cloistered or otherwise,” Bren said with an admiring glance at her exotic wrappings. “Have you got enough on? I brought a blanket.”
“Clever you. We’ll bundle,” Erika said. “Do you know what that is?”
“I think so,” Bren said cautiously, and the uneasy, lurching sensations returned.
Erika laughed. “Come on, then, let’s blow this genteel scene and head for the wilds of Central Park.”
Walking with Erika was fun, if rather exhausting. She had a swift, long stride for someone so small, and plenty of breath left over for talk.
“I love New York,” she said, gazing up and down Broadway as they waited for the light. “I’m sorry. I have to learn not to say that. I always think of a little red heart being dropped, plunk, right in the middle of my sentence, knocking out the love’ and sticking in a sort of ‘umph’ in its place. Stupid.”
“Well, it’s good you umph New York, anyway,” Bren said. “Where are you from?”
“Philadelphia. Such boredom you can’t imagine, and we lived in a quiet neighborhood—not even a deli for miles. I took to playing hard-core at volume ten, you know? So the neighbors went up in arms, and Dad threatened to send me away to school, and I said, please do, but nothing came of it except a little temporary excitement. This place is heaven, believe me.”
“I do,” Bren said. “But when you’re here for a while, you start looking for quiet places—like the park. But maybe that’s not your thing—trees and grass and open spaces.”
“Oh, it is!” Erika said. “It’s just respectability I hate. Where do you live?”
“Over there,” Bren said, with a vague gesture to the north. “In a house, but it’s not very respectable. I mean it’s a nice house, but—oh, a little…bizarre,” he finished, wondering why, out of his large vocabulary, he had not been able to dredge up a less intriguing word.
“Bizarre?” Erika said. “How nice. I’ll visit you. Do you have what’s known as an intact family? That always sounds so sort of frozen. Mom and Dad grinning by the car. Boy and girl romping with dog.”
“Not exactly,” Bren said. “Except for the dog, who does romp quite a lot, but only with me. No sister, and my parents are separated. I live with my mother and grandmother and assorted tenants—all female.”
“Nobody stays married anymore,” she said. “It’s such a drag.”
“My parents might get back together,” Bren said. “They seem to want to, but they drive each other crazy. Dad comes to dinner at least once a week, and they make a lot of jokes and flirt with each other, and then he goes home.”
“Don’t complain,” Erika said. They were waiting for the light at Central Park West. Beyond the stream of traffic loomed the dark trees of the park. Bren examined the small face at his shoulder and thought for a moment that it looked immensely sad. “Mom went galloping off to fulfill herself as a woman about ten years ago,” she went on, “and hasn’t been heard from since. But it’s not so bad,” she added, seeing the look on Bren’s face. “A person gets a lot of freedom living with a father—especially a busy, rich father. You get everything you want and the time to enjoy it.”
“Including braces on your teeth?” Bren asked.
“Well, he ran out of ideas temporarily. There have been other, compensating goodies.” (Like a closet full of clothes I never wear, she thought, but the smile she turned on Bren was full of impish glee.)
They crossed into the park and followed the wide, lighted path toward the theater.
“I used to come here every day when I was a little kid,” Bren said, pointing to the playground on their left. “Eli and I would come with one of our mothers or Louise LaReine. She’s a ferocious black woman who lives in our basement apartment and does a few things for Mom instead of paying rent.”
“What a marvelous name,” Erika said. “It sounds more romantic than ferocious. What did she do, spank you when your parents were out? We had a maid who did that—only once, I must admit.”
“Nothing like that.” Bren felt suddenly comfortable with the subject of Louise, as if he could load all the peculiarities of his household onto her broad personality. “Louise is a voodoo woman. She casts spells and goes about muttering dark threats.”
“That sounds delicious, but a funny choice for a nursemaid.”
“Oh, Louise is harmless once you get used to her, and I’ve known her all my life. Besides, my mother is…” Bren found himself again at a loss for the right word.
“Broad-minded?” Erika suggested.
“That’s it. Broad-minded, and not easy to scare the way most mothers are. Eli’s mother used to have a fit when Louise took us to the park, but she couldn’t resist the temptation to get out of doing it herself. She’s a psychologist, and she thought Louise was going to give us all kinds of nightmares and complexes.”
“And did she?”
“Not that I’ve noticed,” Bren said cheerfully.
They crossed the road that cut through the park below the Delacorte Theater and climbed the short hill. Now comes the hard part, Bren thought, as they settled into their seats in the rapidly filling outdoor auditorium.
It turned out that there was no need for learned comments on the art of the dance. Erika was in her element. She gazed happily at the great, semicircular sweep of the stage and the tall lighting towers. “What a beautiful theater,” she said. “You’re so lucky to have grown up close to it.”
Bren, whose visits to the Delacorte had been few, still managed to dredge up some memories from summers past. “I hope they’ll light the castle,” he said, pointing off into the dark. “The Central Park weather station is up there on the cliff across the lake in that imitation castle, so sometimes they light it up for a backdrop.”
“Fabulous. I can’t wait.” Erika wriggled contentedly in her seat, and Bren wondered if she was getting cold. The temperature was certainly dropping as they waited for the ballet to begin, and the blanket still lay rolled in his lap—like a time bomb, he thought, casting a nervous glance at the girl beside him.
Now, slowly, the bleak floodlights faded to darkness, and for a moment they could see a scatter of stars over the dim bulk of the castle. From somewhere a thin, wild melody began to grow—strange and elusive, as if from the void behind the stars.
Then a bright passageway appeared between the trees, and down this corridor of light came three young men at furious speed. They were nearly naked, their bodies sashed with streamers of red cloth. Through the trees and onto the bare stage they came, running and whirling, savage, demonic, as the music rose. Bren felt the hair rise on the back of his neck and forgot to think about what he was seeing. There was no story, or if there was, it was one his bones and blood had known before he was born—one his ancestors had known in the firelight that pushed back the dark at the mouth of the cave.
The music dropped, and he held his breath as the dancers stood arrested far upstage, their backs to the audience, their arms outstretched to the light among the trees. Now there was only the low throb of drums, a pulse of darkness almost below the threshold of hearing. Then, threading its way through the drumbeats, a melody of aching sweetness came, and with it a girl draped in the thin veils of spring. She advanced to the center of the enormous platform and captured its spaces with the movements of her body. To Bren’s mind came the thought of a spell—an intricate fabric of gesture and motion woven in the shimmering emptiness of the stage. If Erika said to herself, Perfection; every move is perfect, every tiny angle of wrist and toe, of neck and shoulder and knee, Bren thought, Magic. Enchantment.
The music changed again, and the young men turned, their ferocity transformed into longing and desire. They swept around the girl in ever-decreasing circles, but when it seemed that at last they must seize her, she broke away with a movement as simple and strong as a gust of wind and left them in a knot of upraised arms, clutching thin air as the light faded around them.
Erika produced an audible sigh in the silence that followed the last low drumbeat. Then everyone was applauding. When it was possible to speak, she said, “You realize you just saw something very special?”
Bren nodded. Even without any standard of comparison, he knew that this was true.
“The rest will be a letdown,” Erika said. “At least I think it has to be, but that gave me goose bumps.”
“Are you cold?” Bren asked, giving the blanket a halfhearted poke.
“That’s not what I meant, but yes. Now that you mention it. Hush. Here they go again.”
As the lights dimmed for the next number, Bren shook out the blanket and tossed half of it over Erika, who pulled it up to her chin and moved closer to him. Any anxiety about his next move was forgotten as he watched the fascinating activities on the stage. The second ballet could not have been more different. A man in what must have been a very flexible business suit entered holding a telephone. Hope, frustration, despair, and finally success were clear in every move as he tried to reach his girlfriend, who now appeared on the opposite side of the stage dressed in a filmy nightgown and also holding a telephone. They danced the stormy progress of their conversation, and the audience laughed delightedly.
A group of spirited folk dances followed. Erika moved closer as the temperature dropped, and Bren put his arm around her. It now seemed the logical thing to do. Before the program was over, his free hand was holding hers, and they were sending each other signals of delight in the performance and in each other’s company.
In the big kitchen on Eighty-fourth Street, Rose washed the dishes from a frugal meal, and Miranda gazed pensively into the dying fire. Shadow paced the floor and whined, his nails clicking on the tiles. Finally he came and laid his head in Miranda’s lap, something he had never done before. “Well, Shadow,” she said. “Are we lonely? Are we jealous, or what?” The dog thumped his tail. “Boys grow up, you know,” Miranda continued. “They even grow away from their dogs. Oh, yes, they do. You’d better believe it.”
“You’re a disgrace,” Rose said. “How you ever managed to send him to camp I’ll never understand.”
“That was different,” Miranda said, “but don’t worry. I’ll be good.”
“You’d better be,” her mother said. “Now go to bed, and I mean to bed. Keep out of your studio or you’ll be interfering before you know what you’re doing.”
“Never. I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll go to bed with a silly book. Come, Shadow. We’ll keep each other company.” Miranda rose and swept out of the kitchen with the disconsolate dog trailing behind her.
In the shadowy courtyard of the Apthorp, Bren and Erika stood holding hands, as they had walking through the park and down Seventy-ninth Street. The curtains were drawn across the few lighted windows, and the doorman dozed in his chair by the gate. Erika shivered in the sharp air, and Bren pulled her close. It was at this moment that he heard his mother call, strongly and unmistakably in the one clear channel of his mind that was always open to her. He stiffened and drew back, and Erika, startled, did the same.
“Oh, damn!” he said. “Damn, damn, damn damn.” At the same time he clutched his head, which was perhaps the best thing he could have done.
“What is it?” Erika begged. “You look terrible.”
“Headache,” Bren mumbled. “Really fierce. I get them sometimes. I’m sorry. It was such a perfect evening.”
“Yes, it was. Totally perfect,” Erika said, but the spell was broken now, and a good three feet separated them. “Are you going to be all right? What do you do for them?”
“I’ve got some pills at home,” Bren lied. “It goes away very fast. Don’t worry. Really. It’s disappearing now.” He took a step forward, but the mood was not to be recaptured.
“Go home,” Erika said. “It might come back. You really had me worried, Bren. Call me tomorrow and tell me how you feel.”
“Don’t mother me!” Bren cried, suddenly furious with the whole world of women. “I’ve got one mother too many now.”
“And that’s a pointless remark, if I ever heard one,” Erika said.
“Yes, it is. I know it is, and I’m sorry. What a disgusting end to a marvelous evening. I’d better go before I make it worse.” He turned and blundered out of the courtyard.
“See you…” Erika said in a small, forlorn voice that trailed away into the now-dreary splashing of the fountains.