EVEN IN May, the wind above the East River was cold and strong. Marshall and his friend Alexander had gone to the Brooklyn Bridge; over their own reddened hands resting like talons on the railing, they looked northward up the great river filled with traffic and refractive waves. The day was blue and busy; tangled in sunlight, snapping flags, and people bobbing up and down long avenues compressed to see; its prospect like the shining side of a cool porcelain vase rich with running colors. The city before him resembled his image of Canton—ships in the harbor and merchants unloading wares at the foot of green hills covered with terraces, gardens, and trees which bent like centenarians.
Upon his return from Jamaica the previous spring, Marshall had found himself in a much-changed Eagle Bay School. The once lighthearted and eccentric students had been transformed by a race for prestigious colleges; they vulgarized their studies by ceaseless competition and flattered the teachers excessively. Marshall refused to participate, and was quickly drawn into an altercation with a bash-faced young biology instructor who made the mistake of grabbing him by the shoulders and pushing him against a wall when Marshall had refused to call him sir. Marshall fought a lively fight, driving the teacher outdoors, across the parking lot, through the nerve garden (worms were bred there for experiments upon their plexii), and backward into the lily pond. After being expelled, Marshall was sent to a private school in Manhattan, where he began to study in earnest. He often took the train upriver to see the Livingstons, to ride through the woods on the black horse, to ski on his old wooden skis down the long windy hill in front of the house. But when he arrived at Eagle Bay he was usually dressed in a dark suit, as if he were much older. Residence in Yorkville changed him as much as had his stay at Rica Vista. He could not go backward, and did not try. Although he had been familiar with the city, and although Eagle Bay was less than 100 miles distant, Marshall felt as if he had in fact been sent to China.
He lived with the family Pascaleo, of which Alexander, his classmate, was the eldest son. Alexa—a radiant beauty—was Alexanders twin sister, and Paolo was the youngest, an eager gardener of seven, who farmed a small plot in the park and brought home vegetables which were stunted, malformed, and delicious. Signora Pascaleo worked as a loan officer in the foreign department of Semple, Peascod, & Bovina; and Signor Pascaleo (an urban historian, expert on Florence) had somehow gotten to be New York City Commissioner of Public Works. Shocked by the sudden appointment (it was in the time of the tall mad mayor), his own family had questioned his suitability to the task. “What do I care?” he had said, shrugging his shoulders. “A sewer is a sewer, a pipe is a pipe, a light is a light.” They had an enormous apartment high above Park Avenue, well, a little off Park Avenue, in Yorkville. They spoke mostly in Italian, and they kept a milk-white goat called Boofin. His hooves and horns were black as jet, because Paolo buffed them with shoe polish until they shined. It was his main delight, and often Marshall came in the door to see the goat perched on a big leather chair, Paolo hard at work shining the hooves. They loved to hear Boofin prance across the hard floors. He sounded like a team of tap dancers. When he got excited and could not restrain himself, it was like hail on a tin roof. He was a frightened, gentle goat. Petrified of dogs, he would not leave the apartment, but spent days staring out the window, his forelegs on the sill.
Marshall and A1 were going to Harvard in the fall, and Alexa was going to the University of Rome. Mainly to her chagrin, her father had persuaded her to attend the semiannual Gotham Ball that June at the Plaza. She was so beautiful—tall and blue-eyed with shining blond hair—that she mainly got her way, and she had resolved upon wearing a black velvet gown and bracelets and necklaces of white gold. Though everyone had been instructed to wear white, she would not. Marshall, Alexa, and A1 didn’t quite fit into that stuff (Marshall certainly didn’t), and they never knew exactly what to do about all the social events to which they were invited because Signor Pascaleo was a commissioner.
While leaning over the rail, Marshall had been telling A1 about Jamaica. In the middle of his narrative he looked north at familiar skies and, even though no clouds were visible, predicted a thunderstorm. A1 did not believe him and made him go on. For an hour they stood on the bridge, Marshall gesticulating and hoarse from a tale in which A1 did not place much trust. No one believed anything Marshall said about Jamaica, but A1 wanted to know what had happened. At the end, when frightening sheets, chains, and bolts of white fire were striking tall buildings to the north and the purple mass of a great Hudson Valley thunderstorm was sweeping ominously southward, Marshall hurried to finish his story, and they sprinted to the Manhattan side, drumming the boards and dodging pear-sized raindrops. A1 pondered the similarity between his family and the Pringles, though he did not think that the Pringles actually existed.
Wet and breathless in the sullied blue of Brooklyn Bridge station, A1 leaned over Marshall and grabbed him by the throat. He was much bigger than Marshall (not difficult) and he throttled him. “If you ever sleep with my sister,” he said, “I’ll kill you.” Until that moment, Marshall had never imagined that he and Alexa could be lovers. She was too fine, too tall, too beautiful, too crazy, and too unpredictable. He had always regarded her as a sister—living in the same house ... and there were other girls ... the hospitality of the family ... honor ... death. But she was alluring and, despite her rebellion and feigned boldness, she was shy and gentle. That, really, was why he had thought of her as so delicately removed. Marshall caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror of a gum machine. Though red from the throttling, he had an open, whimsical look. A subway thundered in, dripping and sooty. They got on, and by the time the door closed a vision of Alexa in all her beauty floated before Marshall’s eyes, and he couldn’t wait for that night’s reading of The Divine Comedy, for he knew that he would share her book.
SIGNOR PASCALEO settled into a pose of religious infallibility. Facing him were his family and Marshall, teamed up in pairs at volumes of Sinclairs dual-language Dante. The Pascaleos had completed the cycle nine times since Alexanders birth, and that June they would finish the Inferno. They read only one canto a week, going over it several times, translating, and discussing. Signor Pascaleo was authority and guide, a digest of all important criticism and an important critic himself. The more he read, the more excited he got, so that often at the end of a canto he paced the room like a spotted beast, arms alternately clenched and flying, a stream of Italian rhetoric issuing from him at such great speed that even his wife could not understand. How difficult it was for Marshall to work his way through the dark and savage wood of those rapidly uttered words.
Signora Pascaleo, whose braided and piled hair made her look like an Austrian basket, sat with Paolo, who, a few months before, had just started to understand vaguely some of the readings, but who squirmed and more often than not fell asleep while leaning against his mother. A1 sat alone or, sometimes, with the goat, who had to be held when Signor Pascaleo became excited. Marshall sat with Alexa. That evening he realized that his enjoyment of the Commedia had not been entirely pure. He was in love with Alexa, but from politeness and civility to his hosts, and from fear, he had hidden it even from himself.
She had magnificent hands. He watched them gracefully embracing the text. On her right wrist were two tortoise-shell bracelets, and she had several small rings of silver and gold. From the corner of his eye he could see that some of her hair, though tied back, fell in delicate wisps about her ears and neck. When she spoke, he felt the process of it throughout her body and his, so close was she. As time wore on he felt a reverberating heat between them, especially if she were to laugh. When in turning pages their hands touched it remained with him long afterward. She looked a little frail and thin, but the sight of her full, stretched jersey reminded him that she was not. A1 had told him of how as a child she had been deathly afraid of everything, of how she (a short fat girl) had stood at the window only a few years before and eaten boxes of chocolates while she watched her girlfriends cavort with boys on the street far below. Then, in a year or two, she had changed. They hoped that she would make good on her splendid transition, and be neither timid nor brash, nor exploitive, nor preyed upon. At the University of Rome she would be very much on her own, a delightful, frightening prospect. She longed for a city of fountains and green grass in January. She wanted to walk like a contessa down the worn and civilized streets, to pass by with a straight stare and high thoughts. She had determined that this city was for her, and though she shuddered in imagining it, the thought of living there alone on one of its hills in temperate Roman colors was as satisfying as a long embrace.
Signor Pascaleo guided them throughout Canto XXVI, the Canto of Ulisse, reading without emotion until suddenly he rose in his chair and the net of his vessels was visible in his hands. Though the storm had passed and it was mild and dry outside in the dark, with the sound only of a few taxis, they felt again the excursive cracks of thunder and lightning which had rolled down from Eagle Bay.
“O frati,” dissi, “che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti all’occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
de’nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente,
non vogliate negar l’esperienza,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gentle.”
Signor Pascaleo felt his youth and history, when he had climbed the mountains north of Salerno and seen it as perfect and as miniature as a town on a postage stamp. The family was riveted, Alexa slightly quivering, the sweep of her shoulders and neck like the flowing main cables of a suspension bridge—in that the curve was perfect and hypnotic. The goat, who had been as immobile as a white stone, pranced up and down sneezing from excitement and had to be held by Al, who calmed him, saying, “Shh, shh, caprone, non c’è niente. ”
Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto;
chè della nova terra un turbo nacque,
e percosse del legno il primo canto.
Tre volte il fè girar con tutte l'acque:
alla quarta levar la poppa in suso
e la prora ire in giù, com’altrui piacque,
infin chè’l mar fu sopra noi richiuso.
Then it was sad, for it was dark and quiet and the boat had gone under even after Ulysses’s great speech urging his crew to try for new lands in the track of the sun, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Signor Pascaleo turned on a light, and remained with his hand on the switch. Signora and Paolo disappeared toward Paolos belated bath. Alexander said, “Let's get outa here and go to a noisy saloon.” Alexa didn’t want to go. “C’mon,” said Al. “C’mon.”
In a place on Second Avenue—Julia’s Cockroach Bar—a piano, a lot of rude bullyboy jostling, and a pint or two of beer made them forget the enjoining paradox which, without plan, had come to light in the reading. Everyone in the bar looked at Alexa, while Marshall and Al discussed their plan to explore beneath the city. In Signor Pascaleo’s office was a set of forty master keys allowing access to every sewer, subway, water, gas, or steam passageway in the city. They were going to borrow the keys and spend a night underground. At night the sewer current was gentle enough to allow passage through all but the swiftest straits—the Fifty-third Street Flume, the West End Avenue Delta, and the great falls under the New York Times (absolutely impassable after lunch). They planned to return the keys by morning. They had already purchased miner's lights, high boots, a good rope, and a crowbar.
Alexa thought the scheme moronic. “The sewers smell disgusting,” she said to her brother. “You would want to walk around in the sewers for fun.”
“The sewers smell better than you do,” Al snapped back. “Did you ever not see a nude mule?”
“How much beer have you had?”
“Half a glass ... see. Did you ever not see a nude mule?”
“Are you crazy?”
“No. Did you ever not see a nude mule?”
“No!”
“You mean you always see a nude mule? Ha!”
“No!”
“You mean yes.”
“Oh, all right. Yes. I did.”
“Did what.”
“Did ever not see a nude mule.”
“When?”
“Most of the time.”
“You have then, I take it, seen a nude mule, on occasion?”
“I’m looking at one right now.”
“Then, did you never not see a nude mule?”
“When?”
“Ever.”
“Sometimes.”
“Not now?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“When?”
“Let me ask you this.”
“Go right ahead.”
“Okay. Who?”
“Marshall, of course, who else?”
“Is that so?” asked Al. Then for half an hour they sat without speaking, while in the rolling bittersweet music Marshall did not realize that in the shorthand of brothers and sisters, Alexa had said that she was in love with him.
The May night was clear and balmy; they walked along the river and watched lighted sparkling bridges, viaducts, elevated roadways, trestles, and barges, which lately had been washed by pure rain. Between the two boys was a glimmering girl, and the skyline was like a great forest of fireflies. As so often is the case, New York could easily have been an idealized picture of itself in a quiet, contemplative future.
Marshall wondered how such great power could be still and mild at times, and thoroughly abrasive and destructive at others. Cellular and divided, the city’s rooms, lights, squares, and streets could in their complexity put to shame the heart of a great electronic machine, or the whirling mosaics of the most colorful mosque. All of it could never be seen, and therein lay its great promise—its swarming variations were as valuable as an ever-receding geographic horizon. Beneficent distance was within, hidden in the turmoil, as if a monster had swallowed nature.
“Let’s drive,” said Al. He loved to drive, and prided himself on his knowledge of the streets, expressways, shortcuts, and detours through lost unknown neighborhoods. At night they often rode around the city, exploring the empty roads.
“Where to?” asked Alexa, as they climbed into the Pascaleos’ vintage Dunderburg.
“How about a bridge tour? I’ll take you over the Verrazano, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Fifty-ninth Street, Triboro, Henry Hudson, and George Washington in less than an hour.”
They put the top down and glided smoothly in the pulsing arteries, achieving precise transitions from one highway to another, taking corners with just the right G, maintaining near constant speed. Marshall and Alexa leaned back and watched the city lights, which seemed clearer and gentler than in winter when they sparkled and cut like diamond grit. Now, there was a fresh wind, and young trees had a chance.
Marshall felt as if he could stay in New York forever. He imagined making his way up the echelons to find ease and power in a high place. He imagined living in a loft south of Houston Street, where artists were beginning to set up studios as they had done long before in Greenwich Village. He imagined entering ward politics with no protection or perspective except what he would get from the heat of his own effort. In summer the streets boiled and the air burnt his eyes, but he could always look down long disappearing avenues to the small blue square of sky at the end waving upward in viscous snakes of air. And if Alexa would return from Rome, or not go at all...
But as they flew across the wide rivers and had laid before them great important views, Marshall felt the draw of other times and other places. His origins seemed as well to pull him from the fine scenes that he often saw, so that within his own life he frequently felt like an observer. However, Alexa was too intoxicating to ignore, and he soon fell back into the mill of his infatuation, eyeing her delightful profile as the three of them did the bridges. The ways to love, it seemed, were as tangled and marvelous as New York’s great network of roads.
ONE EVENING while Signor Pascaleo paced back and forth like a matron glace in a dressing gown, Marshall and A1 were tramping through the vast system of tunnels under Manhattan. They had given up completely on maps, which were about 800 times more complex than subway charts, and had decided just to wander. They entered by the basement of the Yale Club (accessible via an unlocked door in the Hotel Roosevelt tunnel) and quickly found their way to an enormous main through which knee-deep water was rapidly rushing. The conduit was so high that they would not have reached its top even had they jumped. A1 had been right—it didn’t smell, except for a dank odor like that of a sweating rabbit. They had the distinct impression that the water was coming from some specific place and going to yet another place of particular importance. Underground water seems issued from momentous chambers and destined for hidden seas. Actually, or so it was believed, the current came from countless gutters, sluices, and drains, and no Valhalla was at either end. But the rushing suggested a purposefulness that water does not have. They walked in the big tunnel, pushing against the current, and they stopped to rest, peering northward into the darkness, from which emerged a cool wind. Straight down the tunnel was a tiny yellow light. It flickered, and it was moving. “Look,” said Al, “that light is moving toward us.”
“How could it be?” asked Marshall.
“I don’t know. Turn off your lamp.” They switched off their miner's lamps and hid in a recess near an exit ladder. The light was moving toward them.
Marshall broke the silence. “They don’t have night patrols down here, do they?”
“Nope,” said Al, his throat tightening. “My father says that, except for emergencies, no one is ever here at night—no one, for any reason whatsoever.”
“Then what’s that?”
“Maybe it’s debris.”
“Debris? With a light on it?”
“I don’t know what the hell it is; don’t ask me.”
As it drew closer they could see that it was a torch of pitch, burning with black smoke. They heard muffled sounds, words, and wood against wood, and then they saw that the torch was on the prow of a boat, fixed on a metal tripod. The boat itself was long and thin, crudely built of overlapping planks. It had a small sail of coarse, striped wool, and it went faster even than the rapid current. As it swept past them, they were speechless. A dozen bearded men in rags and tattered homespun manned little stunted oars and a seemingly unnecessary rudder. They spoke in a strange guttural language, and they were arguing vehemently. As soon as they had passed, the boat picked up speed and the torch got smaller until it vanished from sight completely.
At first, Marshall and Al remained frozen in place, jaws hanging open. Then Al got angry (he always got angry at things that he could not explain), and he jumped back into the main, sloshing ahead. “Before you ask,” he said angrily, “I don’t know. So don’t ask.”
“It must be beatniks going to the Village,” said Marshall, “or maybe farmers who came from upstate in the aqueduct tunnel.”
Al turned in disgust. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s a bunch of stockbrokers who have found a new way to get to Wall Street.”
“That’s a good theory,” said Marshall, laughing nervously. “Just keep on coming up with theories. It’s the only way I know of dealing with something like this. Use the data that you have. For instance, they were arguing. We know, for example, that they couldn’t have been arguing about which course to take. We know, for example, that—”
“Marshall, forget it. No one would ever believe us anyway.”
They could not see the end of the tunnel—which was many miles long—and they turned into a sizable tributary, slashing an underground mist with the beams of their helmet lights. A little down the road they came to a large platform fifteen feet above them in a high recessed well. Shining their lamps on it, they saw a door with a gleaming lock. A1 leaned against the wall, facing it, and Marshall climbed him until he stood on his shoulders, Marshall’s hands also on the wall. Then Al took both of Marshall’s feet in his hands and backed down until his arms were straight, after which he slowly walked against the wall until he was standing at his full height, arms straight. Marshall was standing on Al’s palms, a platform at least seven feet above the ground. Marshall stretched as much as he could, but his fingers did not quite reach the ledge. “I can’t reach the ledge,” he said. “Can you stretch some more?”
“No,” said Al in a gasp. “When I count three, I’m going to toss you into the air. Jump on three.”
“Wait a minute,” said Marshall.
“One.”
“Wait just a minute,” said Marshall.
"Two."
“Thanks,” said Marshall.
“Three,” and Al threw him as he himself jumped. Marshall’s fingers caught the ledge so slightly that he hesitated in space and then began to fall back. In complete panic he somehow threw his right hand up and caught hold. After pulling himself up, the entire right side of his body and brain contorted in a deadly cramp.
“What are you doing up there?” called out Al from below, where the end of a convention or intermission at the theater had caused the current to swell and rise to his thighs. Marshall hardly had the breath to speak.
“My ribs are scratching my heart,” he scrawled with his voice.
“Your what?”
“My ribs are scratching my heart.”
“Put your hands above your head and crack your knuckles.”
He did this and was able to breathe again, just in time to throw down the rope, for the water was coming close to the top of Al’s boots.
The lock was of stainless steel. They tried several wrong keys, and then began to work systematically through the forty. At twenty-nine the door opened and they stepped through as carefully as turn-of-the-century burglars with sacks and raccoon masks. On the other side was a clean dry tunnel through which ran steam pipes and cables. Spread over the floor were many pieces of zwieback and an occasional baklava. “What are these for?” asked Marshall of Al, who had attended high-level discussions of the sewers.
“Those are here to trap Specials. They’re highly poisonous.”
“Specials?”
“Yeah. That’s what they call a live rat. Rats reproduce when they’re two months old, have about six or eight litters a year of ten to twenty babies a shot. If two of them started in perfect conditions and none of their offspring died of hunger or poison, in a year they could produce five million. My father says that there are at least two rats underground for every person in the city. That’s at least sixteen million. If something happened down here and they all came out at the same time, let’s say in front of Bloomingdale’s, it would be hell on earth.”
“How come we haven’t seen any?” asked Marshall.
“Are you crazy?” asked Al, shining his light on two dozen little ones tucked into a hole in the wall. Marshall knew that they were vile, but somehow he sympathized with them. Everyone in the world tried to kill them, when they wanted only to survive. They carried disease, but not intentionally. All they did was eat garbage, and squeak. Then, one ran up and tried to bite his foot, and he kicked it into the air with hatred and disgust. “That was a Dewey,” said Al, “a live one which attacks. A live one which runs is a knocker. Knocker or Dewey, they’re all Specials.”
“A Beebuckle.”
“A Beebuckle!”
“Yup. I don’t know the origin of the term.”
“I suspect,” said Marshall, “that it’s Irish.”
At the end of the passage was a wall-mounted iron ladder which led up into darkness. They climbed for about ten minutes, until they were so high that they did not hear a penny hit bottom. They thought that they were close to ground level, when suddenly they saw a light from above. Switching off their lamps, they climbed quietly to the grate through which the light was passing. They could not believe what they saw, and they froze to the ladder.
In an enormous room the size of Grand Central Station, hung with draperies and spotlights and potted palms suspended in the air, were hundreds of nude women. Some lay on divans and ate fruit, or read. Some did gymnastics. Some were engaged at archery, while others bathed, worked looms, dived into a great pool of blue water with geysers and fountains spraying about, or played the lute. Others worked at desks, typing and making phone calls, while still others sat in poker games, visors of green their only apparel, the tables surrounded in clouds of smoke. Midgets of all races and colors waited on these women. The midgets were men, dressed in pea-green Department of Sanitation uniforms. A lone black piano player, bathed in spotlights and smoke, played a hypnotizing rondo from high above, and through clouded windows sunlight seemed to be streaming, even though Marshall and Al knew that it was night. The women were mainly beautiful, though some were very ugly, and they seemed extremely busy. Marshall and Al remained there, stunned and panting, until a midget with a tray of time drinks walked toward them and slammed a door on the grate. They could hear crushed ice dropping into glasses, and then a few footsteps. They poked their fingers through the grate, but the door was solid steel. They banged on it. Nothing happened. After a while they descended silently and made their way through the tunnel, in which there were then hundreds and hundreds of Specials, including a Dewey or two which tried to bite their boots.
After climbing through a shiny green ceramic tube they found themselves in Union Square at dawn. Millions of pigeons were strutting about, washing or eating. Marshall and Al peeled off their boots and removed their helmets. “They say,” said Al, “that sewer gas sometimes causes hallucinations.”
“Who’s they?” asked Marshall.
“I don’t know,” said Al, and they began to walk home.
That day they gave up on the sewers and resolved upon bridge climbing. Summer was coming. Alexa was readying for the Gotham Ball and then Rome, and the furiousness and anxiety of her preparations drew the entire family after her. Marshall and Al told of what they had seen. The only one who believed them was Paolo, who, for the first three weeks of June, begged to be taken into the sewer, and then was distracted by the beginning of another dinosaur fad. June was hot, and Marshall took Alexa up to Eagle Bay, where they rode and swam and looked for early raspberries and dived into the fresh rapids of the Croton River. There, overcome by mutual affection, they lay together in protracted kissing as thundering water made them lose track of time.
ALEXA’S ESCORT arrived in patent-leather slippers—she had said that he was a fool. Marshall asked him how he could walk the streets of New York in a tuxedo and ballet shoes. “What happens if you get in a fight?” he added. “How will you protect Alexa? She has a lot of gold and might be a target for muggers. How much money are you carrying, and what’s your intended route?”
“Are you a security consultant?”
“No,” answered Marshall, “but you need one. You’re a robbery about to happen.”
“I think we’ll be all right.”
Marshall followed at a distance. He wished that they would be robbed so that he could save Alexa and be a hero, but they walked straight down Park Avenue and were very safe. It gave him great pleasure to see Alexa fend off the escort’s arm on Sixty-fourth Street and again near the Pulitzer Fountain. Hundreds of finely dressed people were there, some having arrived in Rolls-Royces and some in horse-drawn carriages. Entranced, Marshall followed them in. With great protestation, he had refused Alexa’s invitation, saying that such things were not for him, and that he would never go near a full-dress ball. She had to do it, for political reasons—all the commissioners’ daughters were to be there, and how would it look without public utilities?
He got into the ballroom even though he wore sneakers, khaki pants, and a white shirt. Perhaps because of the spirited dancing and loud rock music, no one had noticed him. He knew that he couldn’t last long, so he walked over to a servant with a platter of champagne glasses and said, “I’ll take that.” The servants wore black pants, and white shirts not unlike Marshall’s. Young people his age took glasses from his tray without even noticing him, as if he were a vending machine or a walking table. A few gave him tender patronizing smiles, which he answered by screwing up his face into the ugliest grimace he could manage. He maneuvered toward Alexa, who, in black velvet and gold, was a dark star in the collusion of music and marble. He was close enough to hear a Greek-looking gentleman at her table deliver a lecture on oil tankers. “Forty oil tankers is better than twenty. But sixty is not better than forty. International tax structure, especially for the Liberian fleets, favors a centralization of tax advantages in a medium-sized company which can write off depreciation as a function of its total operating costs. It is really fascinating, really fascinating. I will now list for you the fifty standard amortization writeoffs common to Panamanian tax shelters. One...”
Alexa drummed her fingers on the rim of her plate. Marshall stood at the edge of the dance floor, looking at her. Suddenly she raised her head and caught his glance. She turned red and flushed as if it were more than it was, as if Marshall had come back from the dead, instead of showing up dressed as a waiter at the Gotham Ball.
Marshall was a spectacle in his khakis and sneakers. An old maître d’ bustled up to him and said in deeply indignant lisps, “ Where are your pants and shoes?” At first Marshall did not hear, so loud was the music and so gorgeous the expression on Alexa’s face. “Where are your pants and shoes?” repeated the maître d’, astounded.
“On my legs and feet, dummy,” replied Marshall, who was then ushered out backward, still looking at Alexa. As he was hustled through the grand pillars he let his tray drop to the floor. Because he was light in coloring and mild in appearance, two waiters tried to beat him up. He made quick work of locking them into a golden sentry booth, through the open top of which he poured a tub of loose dirt. On his way out he grabbed a stuffed lobster from a serving cart, wheeled about, snatched a piece of chocolate cake, and nearly overturned a woman who was making a pompous entry on the Fifth Avenue side. Three doormen tried to capture him, but he sprinted easily up the parkside, with the lobster in his right hand like a baton. Halfway to Yorkville a mounted policeman galloped beside him and said, “What are you doing with that lobster?”
“Treasure hunt,” said Marshall. “Methodist Charities treasure hunt.”
“Good luck,” said the horseman as he veered off.
Alexa returned very late, and he did not see her until the next evening, when, in preparation for dinner, she was sifting confectioner’s sugar over apple pastries. She worked at a counter in the kitchen, and when Marshall came in the first thing she said was, “Who knows, maybe I should go to Radcliffe.” Marshall thought as she operated the sifter.
“Maybe I should go to Rome,” he said.
“Better if it were the former,” said Alexa, turning toward him and putting down the sifter, “although Rome would be interesting for us, I think. But I don’t know if I want to. I’ve been in this apartment all my life, and I’m afraid. Perhaps I should go alone, like Ulisse.”
Always uncomfortable with such questions unless, like a halfwit, he answered them immediately, Marshall was interrupted by Signor Pascaleo, who came in the swinging door. “Ah, torta di mele, ” he said, wishing that he could have a piece. They spoke for a while about Signor Pascaleo’s latest problem and triumph—he had appeared on television during the successful cloture of a burst watermain at Rockefeller Center—when they heard Paolo’s voice moving toward them in breathless panic.
“Papa! Venga, venga!” he shouted. “Boofin il capro!”
All six of them rushed from various rooms to the study, where they saw only white curtains blowing inward in a gentle June evening’s breeze. Paolo went to the window and leaned out dangerously. Signora whipped him back in. When they put their heads out they saw the goat, Arctic white and nearly aglow, poised on the thin ledge. His eyes were intently fixed on a roof terrace across the way, about fifteen feet out and ten feet down. Though some wrought-iron furniture and potted geraniums were dispersed on the tiles, the terrace was mainly open.
The goat had all his feet together on the ledge, and was arched like a lute. It was amazing that he stayed on. The distance that he intended to bridge looked far too wide. Furthermore, he had no practice in jumping and was proceeding solely from imagination and will. They were afraid to coax him back, for fear that he would panic and fall the sixteen stories into the courtyard below. And even though they talked to him, they knew that he really did not know English. He began to lick his lips and quiver. Paolo started to whimper. Signor Pascaleo said, “He’s a goat, Paolo. He knows what he’s doing.”
As they were wondering if he could leap, and if he would live, he leaped outward in a powerful perfectly upright movement and sailed through the air with his four legs straight. He looked like Pegasus, like a cloud, like something which flew, and not at all like a house goat. He landed right in the middle of the terrace. His legs went every which way, he lifted himself up after hitting his chin on the tile, and he began to bleat. Then he stopped bleating and walked over to a geranium, to which he helped himself.
Alexa went to Rome. It seemed to Marshall that not seeing her would be the hardest thing in the world, but when she had to leave, she had to leave. He knew that months and years make little difference, because when finally all goes dark, everything has passed as quickly as sparks. The vision of Alexa remained with him.