BEVERLY TINKER HANDED the letter to her husband as he came through the door of their apartment on Riverside Drive in New York City. He took it eagerly, sure it was from their son, Daniel, in his senior year at the University of Wisconsin.
“It’s not from Danny,” she said. “It’s your Boston friend.” He thought she sounded derisive. In the near darkness of the small foyer, she stood unmoving, blocking his way to the living room.
“Are we to receive letters from Daniel only?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
Gerald hung his coat on a wire hanger and pushed it into the coat-crowded hall closet. Then turning to her, he asked, “What’s the matter? Does it strike you as odd—an old friend writing to me?”
“Old friend—you haven’t seen him since you were twelve.”
“Next time I’m in Boston, I’ll call up a girl I knew when I was twelve.”
“Fine.”
He leaned against the closet door and stared at her.
“Fine,” he repeated. “Just fine. Why are you behaving like I called up a woman instead of aging Jack Crowder?”
She suddenly clasped her hands. “I don’t understand why you can’t go to a movie or read a book when you go on these trips,” she said. “It’s the picture of you I have—sitting on the edge of a hotel bed, idly dialing the phone because you’ve idly recalled someone from your past. But you’ve always been that way. Walking the streets all night rather than spend even three minutes just sitting down, alone.”
“I haven’t always been any way. If you’d been with me, I wouldn’t have even thought of calling Jack.”
“That’s exactly what I mean!”
“He wasn’t in! All I did was leave a message I’d called.”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“I’m going out!” he shouted, opening the closet door and dragging his coat from the hanger.
“Where?” she asked. She bent to turn on a small lamp on the foyer table.
“To find that old gang of mine,” he replied angrily. They fell silent. He stood there holding his coat, thinking how burdensome they could be to each other sometimes—just burdens, nothing else.
“What’s the matter?” he asked in a subdued voice. “You didn’t even say hello to me.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied. “Hello.”
He hung his coat up again. Then he held out the letter to her.
“No. I don’t want to read it,” she said. Her anger had gone, and he knew she wouldn’t take the letter now because she was mortified by her own behavior.
After dinner, Gerald set his portable typewriter on the coffee table in the living room and opened Jack’s letter. The small distinct handwriting struck him as somewhat inhuman. He picked up the first sheet.
“Dear Gerald,” it began. “When I have finished my day’s work I grow aware of a painful silence. I begin to listen to my own small noises. I cap my pen, shut a drawer, drop a paper clip which I don’t trouble to find, move an ashtray or two. I’ve done the reading, gone over notes, marked papers. I pick up a journal, hoping to find some item that might have escaped me the first time around. I chew my eyeglass stems as I walk from the windows which front Beacon Street to the rear wall of the room. I am carrying the journal which I’ve rolled into a tube. The paper is slick and expensive. The pages are filled with the dissembled panic of professors who are writing, writing, all over this country and saying nothing at all. I suppose I have to eat soon. I’m not hungry. What I’m thinking about is the untracked snow lying upon the slope behind the house I lived in as a boy. I inhale deeply as though I were outside on a clear cold day instead of inside this room with its close smell of my life.
“It’s not people I remember. Only places. How I miss my senses! And I’m confounded by this thing in me that continues to live, to gather impressions, to crave, if infrequently, its supper. Do you ever wonder about the past? I mean—regard it with wonder? Do you like your work? How is your life?”
Gerald put down the page and began to type.
“You ask me if I like my work,” he wrote. “To be frank, I don’t think about it. It’s what I do. Fund-raising has its tedium, although I do get an occasional trip from it. But doesn’t everything have tedium. I seem to have a flair for what I do. My family often suggests they could use my talent on the homefront. Ha-ha. Still, we manage. Of course, I think about things, too. But there’s no point in brooding, is there? Although at our age, I suppose we’re more susceptible to it. After all, the choices we have thin out, don’t they? Incidentally, you don’t mention a family. Have you one? Children?”
He considered the last few sentences. They were too personal: they might provoke intimate revelations he had no interest in.
When Jack’s first letter followed his Boston trip by a few days, he had been surprised. He hadn’t been sure Jack would remember him, much less track down his address and start writing to him. When Gerald had discovered his phone number in the Boston directory and dialed it, he had found that Jack was living in a residential club. He had been relieved Jack wasn’t in. The impulse to call him had been fleeting.
Jack had been “grieved” to miss his call, he had written in his first long letter. It included a lengthy description of Jack’s vacation in Greece last summer. Gerald had skipped most of that. The word “grieved” made him uneasy. He felt obliged to reply. He had written a brief note, asking Jack if he ever saw any of their old classmates from the Boston school they had both gone to. About himself, he wrote only that he had one son who was in college, that he enjoyed living in New York and that he raised funds for an adoption agency.
And now this second letter had arrived from Jack with its intimacies and speculations. He picked up the last of the sheets and read it through.
“Yesterday,” Jack had written, “I left my office to go to my sophomore class. On the way there, I forgot completely what I had intended to lecture on. Forgot everything! Even where I was! I felt faint and I stretched out my hands to support myself on the walls of the corridor. Of course I couldn’t reach them both at once so I bobbled from side to side. I was staggering along in this fashion when I met the chairman of my department on his way home, as I learned later, because of a viral attack. He held up his briefcase in such a way that I couldn’t get past him. He seemed enraged! I couldn’t explain why I was feeling the walls like a giant fly. I couldn’t speak at all! I lowered my arms. He lowered his briefcase, and we went our separate ways. I recalled what I was to lecture on, and he, I suppose, went home. It was an intense confrontation. Why was he so angry? How can I explain my muteness? Shouldn’t I write him a note?”
Jack had ended the letter then with only his name. Irritably, Gerald struck at the keys of his typewriter.
“Jack,” he wrote, “you must not get so stuck in incidents that mean nothing. We all have these flurries of confusion. One must simply stick to one’s purpose. The obvious explanation for the situation you described is that your chairman was ill and wanted to get home in a hurry. Can you have forgotten that your arms were stretched out as though to prevent him from passing you? Think how it may have appeared to him. I’m making more of this trivial incident than it merits only in order to suggest that what was so strange about it was that a simple explanation didn’t occur to you instantly.”
Gerald took the page out of the machine and inked out the questions about Jack’s family life. He inserted another page.
“That’s a long letter,” observed his wife who put a cup of tea for him on the table.
“It’s double-spaced,” he said.
As children, Jack and he had been more or less friendly in school. They had often gone to the movies on Saturday afternoons when Gerald had enough money to pay for his ticket. Gerald had sometimes visited Jack’s house.
Jack’s family had been well-off. He had lived in a big house with white clapboard siding. At the front there was a well-tended lawn with hedges and flowering shrubs, and in the back, a narrow meadow on the slope of a hill where the family kept a saddle horse which Gerald had been told he couldn’t ride. Recollecting now his fear of animals in those days, he laughed to think how humiliated he’d been by Mrs. Crowder’s admonition concerning that lousy horse. He wouldn’t have ridden a saddled rabbit in those days.
Gerald’s family had lived in the more deteriorated half of a two-family dwelling. Because the walls had been thin, Gerald in remembering the house was not sure he was recalling his parents’ quarrels or the neighbors’.
He began a new sentence.
“After all,” he wrote, “your life can’t have been so tough. I recall your house quite well. You had a window seat in your bedroom and a horse of your own in a meadow.”
He read over what he had written, noting that his last sentences were inconsonant with what had preceded them. He was suddenly bored.
Beverly called him to come to the bedroom and watch television. A comedian they both liked was defending ethnic humor on a panel discussion. He didn’t write anymore that evening.
The next morning before leaving for his office, he finished the letter hurriedly. He wrote:
“Work piles up at this time of year. Our spring drive is on. You can imagine how little time I have for such relaxations as writing to an old acquaintance. It was nice to hear from you.”
He mailed the letter in the apartment house slot and forgot about it. A reply came within a few days. Beverly had left it on his plate as though it was his dinner.
“I managed to decipher your inked out lines,” it began. “I was most interested in what you would cross out. But somewhat disappointed at your question. I have had several families. I have three children. I’m alone now.
“About the incident with my chairman. I want to tell you that it’s the instant explanation you suggest that I want to resist. All my life, I’ve rushed to explain things within the second, like an addict grabbing up a narcotic. My two divorces for instance.”
“All his life,” Gerald said aloud. “For God’s sake . . . all anyone’s life . . .” He looked up and across the table at Beverly. “He irritates me,” he said.
“After that letter arrived this morning,” she began, “I found the other two on your night table. I read them.”
“You did?” he asked, surprised. “I thought I’d thrown them out. I can see myself throwing them in the garbage.”
“Why don’t you do that now? Throw them all out?”
“Yes . . . but I’ll finish this one. Then I’ll put a stop to the whole thing.”
After supper, Gerald went back to Jack’s letter.
“I fear you think I’m looking for a companion in misery. I’m not,” the letter continued. “It’s because we are, as you said, old acquaintances, that I write you now. My friends and I are used to each other. There’s something else, too. You’re the only person I know from my true past, my childhood. Perhaps that’s the main thing. When I found your message here at my club, my heart began to pound! It was nearly like the excitement of hope. I don’t know what about. But there it is. And I can’t tell my friends I don’t understand anything. Money, for example. Sex. Death. What is goodness?
“One of my students came to my office to tell me she was in love with me and couldn’t concentrate on the course work. She said my face was so interesting. Interesting! I insisted she turn in her overdue term paper. She burst into tears. Later, I was so distressed, I cancelled a dinner engagement and went home and made myself sick drinking brandy.
“I’ve been trying to finish a piece on Andrew Marvell. It’s simply not worth finishing. I thought of having the girl transferred to another section. Maybe I should suggest marriage to her, steal her away from the young men. That girl shouldn’t be in college. She wants to live! Do you remember what that means to an eighteen-year-old?
“Are you well-off? What’s your wife like? Have you had just one wife?”
Gerald put down the letter. “He’s insulting,” he said. “He knew how to be patronizing when he was a kid.”
“I wonder why you called him in the first place,” Beverly said. Gerald was bothered by a note of sadness in her voice. It was as though some sorrow from an unknown source were reaching out to touch them both.
Later on, he replied to Jack’s letter.
“Jack, you are too self-involved. Don’t you realize I might find some of your questions offensive? Why the hell did you end up living alone in some crummy residential club? You write as though a decent place to live is nothing. Did you ever trouble yourself to come to my house when we were kids? No. You knew you had everything. What are you complaining about? What’s wrong with being a teacher? You think you’ve been singled out for special suffering? Look around you! Why should that girl care about Beowulf, or whatever dead stuff she’s supposed to read in your course? You’re damned right, she wants to live!”
That night Gerald lay awake in the dark, his hands clasped behind his neck, staring up at the ceiling. He tried to recall with great particularity what Jack had looked like. It had been over thirty-five years since they had last seen each other. All he could recall was a round face and pale eyes above the collar of a navy blue coat. The only detail that occurred to him was the way the coat buttons were so tightly sewn on. His own jacket was always scarred by the jagged tears where his buttons had been.
An answer came by return mail. Gerald opened the letter with dread. “Yes!” Jack began without his usual greeting. “That’s what I wanted! What a good letter! Now I’m beginning to remember you. And other things. Who was it made you wear those black stockings? I especially noticed them when you bent over to make a snowball. I think I must have made some snotty remark about them because it seems to me you got very angry. Do you recall? The sky was nearly black, probably January. The snow had been on the ground for days. We were in the schoolyard. The janitor had scattered cinders all around. You and I were the only children there. You were shivering. Those bitter cold days! Do you remember Miss Hamilton who taught 3rd grade? Do you remember Janet Lee who had little breasts when all the rest of us could hardly tell male from female? Janet wore a locket. By the way, I don’t teach Beowulf. I’m really glad we’re making this connection. It helps me to think.”
“He’s going to drive me crazy,” said Gerald. Beverly was standing in front of him, her coat on, ready to leave for the theater.
“We’ll be late,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. Why don’t you sit down here next to me? Do we have to go see that play? Couldn’t we give away the tickets?”
“You mustn’t let him do this to us,” she said. “Don’t answer him anymore.”
When they got home that night, Gerald wrote his son a long letter. He described the house he had lived in as a child, and the quarrels he had heard on both sides of the thin walls. He described Janet Lee whom, up to now, he had long forgotten. He even remembered whose picture Janet had carried in her locket—a baby snapshot of herself. He didn’t write to Jack.
Several weeks passed with no word from Boston. Then a postcard arrived. It read: “I’ll be in New York the evening of April 23rd. I have to give a lecture. Hope you can spare me an hour. I’ll be returning to Boston on the last shuttle so it will be the briefest of visits.”
“I won’t see him,” said Gerald.
“What are you going to do?” Beverly asked. “Tomorrow is the twenty-third.”
“He did it on purpose, not giving me time to write him back.”
“You can phone,” she said.
“I won’t do it,” he said loudly. “I won’t let him make me do anything. He takes his chances. It’s his lookout. He should have called me, after all.”
“But if he’s coming all this way . . .”
“Bev, you’re so contrary. He’s coming to the city to give a lecture. These professors and their lectures . . .”
She looked baffled.
Gerald watched a late movie on television. He was thinking about what he was going to do, and he felt badly about it. But he knew himself. He didn’t want to see Jack and he wasn’t going to. What was significant about his first twelve years was that he had survived them. He didn’t need anyone from that time of his life to remind him of what it had been like.
The following evening, they left a note scotch-taped to the front door saying they had a sudden emergency and had had to go out. Beverly hesitated as they stood in the hall, waiting for the elevator, then she asked Gerald if they couldn’t expand the note somewhat. It looked so scant.
“It doesn’t matter what I write,” Gerald said. “He’ll get the point.”
“I feel sorry for him,” she said softly.
“Don’t,” he said, and gripped her arm strongly as the elevator door opened.
They stayed out until one in the morning. For an hour after the movie they had seen, they sat in a coffee shop on 57th Street, sharing a pastry, looking through the paperback books they had bought in a nearby store. Then they walked home through a light rain.
Jack’s answer had been slipped under the door. Gerald picked it up but didn’t look at it. Then, as Beverly stood in front of the dresser mirror removing hairpins, he read it.
“I’m sorry,” it began. “But I see. I understand. After all, what did we have in common except blind hopes?” It was signed with the initial J as though, Gerald thought, he had been too disheartened to write out his name.
“Well, what do you think?” he asked, handing Beverly the note. He glimpsed on its back the message he had left for Jack. The brief sentence, the word emergency, looked stern and powerful to him.
“It’ll be finished now, I guess,” she said.
“We didn’t have anything in common,” Gerald said. “Not one thing!” His voice grew louder. “Blind hopes . . . a rich little bastard like that with his buttons sewed on for life!”
He bent suddenly to untie his shoelaces. The muscles of his back tightened. Instead of the lisle hose he was wearing, he felt once again around his ankles the wet thickness of black wool stockings, and in his empty hands, he felt the hard, cinder-packed snow as he shaped it with his freezing palms. Raising his head quickly to sight the boy walking away from him in a navy blue coat, he brought his arm up in an arc and threw the snowball past his wife standing there in front of her mirror, staring at him, past the beige walls of the bedroom, at the retreating back, seeing just beyond it the dark winter sky, and joyously breathing in a great draught of the cinder-smelling arctic air, as the boy he struck so unerringly cried out in pain.