“It’s not that, Lennie, don’t be stupid. When something half-convinces you against your will you can’t stand it. She’s just … well, as you say, confused … but it’s not the South. There’s nothing intellectual troubling her. She’s young yet. It’s something else the matter.”
“She’s weird——”
“Oh, dry up.”
“Are you getting yourself in love—?”
“Maybe.”
“You are, aren’t you, sonny?”
“Maybe I am.”
Harry didn’t know why he wanted so much for his friend to like Peyton, except that—unsure himself of the reason for his sudden, violent attraction and still bewildered by her—he felt an obscure need for Lennie’s moral support. Lennie was a shrewd one and although it was his own love that was blossoming, and not Lennie’s, he wanted Lennie to back him in his own shaky conviction: she’s really not weird, Lennie, there’s nothing screwy about her, she’s just—well, as you say … confused.
But Lennie came to like her, too, even to love her after a fashion, and finally, when the marriage was breaking up, to agonize over her almost as much as Harry. It had been Lennie, rather than himself, who had noticed the change in her after the first few weeks of their “co’tin’,” as Peyton put it. It had been Lennie who had said, “She’s changed, son; she’s really right nice,” using Peyton’s accent; “I do believe you’re doing good things for her. Watch out, though; she’s the dependent kind.” It had been Lennie who had noticed how little Peyton needed to drink now (though Peyton had made the shy admission, too: “You don’t drink like that when you’re happy,” she said, kissing Harry on the nose). It had been Lennie who had seen the sudden bad turn for the worse when they came back from the wedding, who told Harry two years later) “Those first six months before you got married were the best you two ever had.” Lennie had been the one who drove Peyton over to Newark, to a special psychiatrist he knew; when that didn’t last a month, when, right afterward, she went off for a week to Darien with a mystery writer, it had been Lennie who had comforted Harry in his suffering, saying, 441 know you love her, son. Quit talking about nymphomaniacs. That’s why you got to go back anyway and stick with her and show her that you’re not her father, but just you that love her, son, just you.” It had been Lennie who—when Peyton, after Harry left her again in desperation, came to Cornelia Street after him, drunk, hysterical and crying about drowning—slapped her across the face to calm her, then surrounded her with his good arm, kissing her like a brother, saying, “Now you just calm down, baby, and take a look at that guy. Can’t you see he’s crazy about you? He won’t let you drown. You just take it easy.” Now finally it was Lennie to whom he had gone in grief, to help fetch her back from the island.
The undertaker was fat and dark, an Italian named Mazzetti, whom Harry, not knowing any other, had found on Bleecker Street. When he spoke he was inclined toward obsequiousness, and he had fat, lewd lips, but for the most part he kept mercifully silent. It was a hot August morning, the drive up along the river and into the Bronx seemed interminable. The three of them rode in the wide front seat. Lennie knew just what to say, and when.
“You’re not going down to Virginia?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“You know why.”
“Yes. I wouldn’t think you’d want to have anything more to do with them.”
On the ferry over to the island there was another hearse, driven by a portly Negro in cutaways, who grinned suavely at Mazzetti and doffed his Homburg in a sort of professional salute. He was accompanied by a young girl, a mulatto; she ogled them coyly from the front seat. Mazzetti made no sign of recognition. “They’re always after insurance,” he explained sardonically. “Which wunna you gen’lemen,” he added, “will kindly identify the remains?”
“I will,” said Lennie quickly.
Thank you, Lennie, Harry thought, for he couldn’t bear to see that beauty dead.
In the field it was sweltering, swarming with gnats. A cloud of dust rose up through the heat. Three prisoners went to work on one of the graves. Harry saw the corner of a coffin and, without knowing why, could tell that it was Peyton’s. He turned away. Lennie put his hand on Harry’s shoulder.
“Buck up, son,” he said.
“If I’d just known what was going on inside her. Why? Why?”
“Sh-h-h, take it easy.”
“I could have stopped her.”
“Cut out that talk.”
Harry walked alone over to one of the other graves. More than anything at all he wanted to keep from thinking of Peyton and so, dazed suddenly by the heat and the horror of the place, he stood sweating and watched two prisoners, supervised by the Negro in the Homburg, disinter a coffin. A prison guard stood by, a pinched little Irishman with a bandanna around his neck, and a sawed-off shotgun.
“It’s a terrible place,” Harry said.
“I been out here for twenty years.”
“God. You like it?”
“It’s my job.”
“It must be sad.”
“Yes. Sometimes it is. It’s the little boxes, the babies, that get me.”
“I could have stopped her.”
There was a sudden cry from the opposite side of the pit. Another coffin was open and the colored girl peered down into it, her eyes goggling. “God in heaven,” she squealed, in a clear Brooklyn accent, “doesn’t he look terrible!”
Harry turned away, his stomach heaving. He bent over and looked down toward his shadow, regarding the earth, weeds, a cloud of gnats. No, he thought, I just don’t know whose fault it is.
Lennie squeezed him gently on the arm. “It’s her, son,” he said.
Oh that my words were now written oh that they were printed in a book. That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever. For I know that my redeemer liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth and though worms destroy this body yet in my flesh shall I
Shall I
Oh my flesh!
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, strong is your hold O love.)
“I don’t have enough time.”
I looked up from where I was lying, staring right into his eyes; he had eyes like coughdrops, the amber kind, and little blue freckles in the white part. “I don’t have enough time, Tony,” I said. “That’s O.K., Peyton, I got lots of time,” he said. “Besides I can’t,” I kept saying, “we can’t do it today.” Besides, I was thinking I’d still been dreaming. The clock said 2 :25; the dots on it were as green as cats’ eyes, even in the sunlight which slanted down through the blinds. He was standing there waiting, saying nothing, but I went on thinking, trying to think, because of the dreams: how many hours have I slept? I tried to subtract 2:20 from 3:00 but it wouldn’t go, twelve hours and a half or eleven, well, it didn’t matter. The dots were green and luminescent, shining like my conscience, though Harry said once I was sadly lacking in conscience, he said, “You have no moral censor,” and I kept looking at them, not looking at Tony, listening to the whir inside. Once I’d had a dream: I was inside a clock. Perfect, complete, perpetual, I revolved about on the mainspring forever drowsing, watching the jewels and the rubies, the mechanism clicking ceaselessly, all the screws and parts as big as my head, indestructible, shining, my own invention. Thus would I sleep forever, yet not really sleep, but remain only half-aware of time and enclosed by it as in a womb of brass, revolving on that spring like a dead horse on a merry-go-round. I could hear Tony taking off his shirt. “I been sweating,” he said, “I took a bath while you was sleeping,” something about how a milk route is rough work, always that. “I’m tired,” he said, but … “if a man don’t get his lovin’ he’ll get sick.” I was trying to recover my dream. I was stuck to the sheets from sweating; I stirred a little, my pajama pants made a little sucking noise where the sweat came through, the sheets all wet and wrinkled beneath. Outside against the afternoon two pigeons came floa
ting by, braking the air, landed on the ledge outside to send up a cloud of feathers and dust from their old droppings. There was noise below on the avenue, a bus, trucks, a subway train somewhere far below, rattling the walls. I tried to recover my dream and soon the smell came up, faint and blue from the bus, of gasoline. Then it was like this, I remembered: Harry was the man with the mask, rattling a garbage bucket. This was on the rocks in the park where we used to go walking, and I was below, looking upward. I said, “Harry, you come on down from there this instant!” but he took off his mask and turned his back so I couldn’t see him, threw something—old newspapers, soup cans, a dead sparrow—into the bucket, shouting, “No, darling, no, darling, I can’t!” A cop came up then, I know it was a cop, but the rest I disremember, as Ella used to say; he chased us off from the rocks, smiling, a happy Irishman, and then I couldn’t find Harry. There were woods somewhere and the smell of ferns; I was lying with someone near a river, I don’t know who, some woman dressed in a mother hubbard and sunbonnet like the grandmother I never saw, Bunny’s grandmother; she was knitting a quilt, singing songs from Stephen Foster, saying, “Don’t you fret, Peyton honey,” and then the cop came up again and chased us away. We ran like birds and Grandmother ran like a penguin, waddling; she was crippled, Bunny told me once. She was a Byrd and very wealthy, but Grandfather spent all the money because he had no mind for figures. I watched the light come in through the slats; a drop of sweat rolled off my brow, then I could taste it. I didn’t move, watching the pigeons stir and rustle on the ledge outside, sending up dust and feathers; they rumbled inside like fools, clucking away, and I could concentrate on what they were saying, I could make them say anything: mostly “How do you do, how do you do, how do you do,” and then I’d make my mind click, like you do when you know the sun’s in the west but imagine that outside on the street it’s morning; I’d make my mind click like that and the pigeons would say, “Look at the fool, look at the fool,” or “Wanna big screw, wanna big screw,” like Tony sometimes. His belt buckle clinked behind me, the same one I knew he always had on—A.C.—Anthony Cecchino, my Tony. A woman came out across the avenue, waving a mop on the fire escape; I watched the dust fly up; an air current caught it, scraps of paper and gobbets of lint, bore it higher and higher against the skyline, against a cloud dozing peacefully in the sky like a huge white rabbit. Bunny always used to whistle through his teeth when we were playing croquet, and sort of waggle his head seriously but there was a light in his eyes; with three beers he could play better, he always said, and would pat me on the tail when I went through two wickets. The dust disappeared, leaving blue sky, and the rabbit became a duck with feathers drifting off its back. There was a duck in the dream, too, either big or small, floating somewhere on that river, some kind of bird. I could feel myself smiling. Bunny always said that his grandmother took snuff; it was all right for ladies to do that then, she stuck it under her lip and during Lent she ate like a pig, but she gave up snuff. She was a dear woman, he always said, and I always knew it and held up the mezzotint to the light and kissed it once it was so beautiful; she was dressed in lace and I could imagine the snuff beneath her lip and there was a dear loving look in her eye as if, when you climbed into her lap, she would hold you and tell you stories about little girls in the War between the States and rock you to sleep. Tony was humming something. I turned my head, watching him naked in the middle of the floor. He turned, too, sideways, hands on his hips. He said, “Look, baby,” but I didn’t look, turned away, and watched the white fluffy duck fade against the sky, become something else—by the mass, said Polonius, like a camel, backed like a weasel, but very like a whale. Tony said, “All for you, baby.” I said, “Yes, but I can’t” and he said, “Why?” and then I rose up on my elbows, feeling the sweat suddenly cool against my back. “I just can’t,” I said, “I can’t, Tony,” and then I felt it: the cramp exploding in my womb as if everything inside of me, heart, liver and lights, had been squeezed aside and I was all agonizing womb, crying aloud, gasping like a fish. “What’s the matter?” he said. He came near me. I wondered if I was bleeding yet. “No,” I said. He said, “You done it last time. What’s the matter?” I sank back again, watching the clock: 2: 30,it said, and I could hear the almost silent whir, see the words BENRUS Swiss movement, U.S.A., in a crescent around its rim. I said, “No” again, with a thought for the clock: inside, it would be filled with clean chrome, springs and cogs all working quietly; in there I could creep and sprawl along the mainspring, borne round and round through the darkness, hear the click and whir, my only light a pinpoint where the alarm button comes through, shining down on the jewels and rubies like a shaft in a cathedral. A cockroach ran along the windowsill, wiggling its antennae. It stopped and I moved a little, then it went down a crack. Tony saw it, too; he ran his hand through the bluish hair on his chest. “Cockroaches,” he said, “I hate cockroaches. Why don’t you put powder down? I hate cockroaches.” I could feel another cramp coming on; it was not there yet, resting superimposed on the nausea I had like a big hand with claws ready to strike. Then it struck; I was all womb again, gasping silently. I lay quiet, watching Tony run his hand through his chest hair, scratching himself; then the claw retreated, went away. “Get me my pills,” I said. “What pills?” “Pills for this pain,” I said, “they’re in the top drawer.” I lay trying to get my breath; there were dots on my eyes like drifting sparks projected on a screen: on the other side of the screen Tony fumbled through the drawer, hair on his tail, small red pimples, hair on his shoulders too. He came back with the pills and a glass of water. I took them and lay back again. He unbuttoned my pajama top and put his hand in on my breast. The sparks still Boated on the screen. There were tiny, opaque spots, too, of water; these shifted always outside of my vision, along with the sparks: I couldn’t concentrate on them long; instead I watched the rooftop across the avenue where a man shook a stick at pigeons. They seemed to rove around the blue like a flurry of slate-colored leaves, noiselessly with flecks of light against their wings: I became afraid of something, I wanted to go to the bathroom and get sick because of the fear, but Tony put his hand between my legs and played with me: it hurt and I felt the cramp coming but it didn’t come, and I thought of all the Byrds I’d seen: there was a one-eyed condor they had stuffed in Lynchburg that had lice in its feathers and Dickie Boy said, Look at the final irony, he that preyed nobly in the Andes is preyed upon by Virginia vermin, which was real insight for Dickie Boy, and then there was an ostrich we saw in the zoo in Washington that stuck its head in the sand and then its tail feathers went straight out like an Indian warbonnet. He said, “Come on baby, take ’em off,” and I said, “No, I can’t, Tony, I just can’t,” and he said, “Why?” again. “Because it hurts me!” I said loudly and he bent down with a smile and kissed me; I closed my eyes, I wouldn’t open my teeth and his tongue went shooting off into the side of my cheek. “No,” I said, “no,” but when I said it his tongue went in: he smelled of milk. He couldn’t get it off, he always said, even with all his baths: now so close he smelled like a dairy or a nursery or a soda fountain where they haven’t been clean, milk enveloping me like the heat. I was sweating now. The kiss would be long, I knew, with the tongue like that and the constant smell of milk; I thought of Byrds. Grandmother was from Lynchburg, too; she had the face of an angel, Bunny used to say;he said she used to make hermits and call him Bunny so when I heard him tell it I started to call him Bunny, too: how lovely and exciting, I thought, to be your father’s grandmother and have him climb up on your knee, pink-faced like he is now, I guess: I wondered if that lock of hair was there then, silver as cigarette ash, dangling: but Tony ran his hand up my side, milky hands. The tickle they made ached and didn’t tickle; I had a fever, maybe my skin was yellow, I thought, like the time I had jaundice, for the fever was the same and Tony’s hand ached and didn’t tickle. I felt his tongue now, the slick underpart and the strip of flesh beneath, loose like the comb of a rooster; so I let him: I told Tony once he was
like Pride, like Ovid’s flea: he could creep into every corner of a wench, sit on her brow like a periwig, kiss her lips like, what was it? Feathers, birds. Fie, what a scent is here! I remembered that part, but he didn’t understand it, or that I meant milk. He stopped kissing me, looking down at me, his eyes amber as coughdrops, freckled blue. Once I cried when Harry took me to the river and said that I was fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. “Come on now, goddammit,” Tony said. He took off my pants, lifting me underneath. I thought of feathers, birds, and when he went in it hurt, but no more than the other pain quiescent in me now like the claw of some bird waiting: I put my arms around him, feeling the hair. I could hear the clock whir so near me it brushed against my ear: tick-tick-tick, that minute hand making its perfect orbit in space, bearing us like freight through the sky, Harry and I sprawled along the springs and drowsing there to yawn and stretch and turn and watch the revolving diamonds, rubies red as blood from the cut throat of a pigeon, set perfect and complete among the precisely ordered, divinely ticking wheels. Sheltered from the sky like drowning, only better: the sun within submarine, aqueous, touching the polished steel with glints and flickers of eternal noonday light; so we’d have our sun among the springs and our love forever. When it was over, I was weeping. “What’s the matter, baby?” he said. “Nothing,” I said. “Well, quit it,” he said, “you’d think we didn’t know each other. You gonna say, ‘But I don’t know you very well’? Is that what you’re gonna say?” “I don’t know you very well,” I said. He said, “Oh, for Christ sakes, you gimme the creeps. You’re about as much fun as a stick.” I turned over on my side and watched the clock, not crying anymore. I heard Tony running water, washing himself, humming again, and I tried to remember how long I had known him, a month maybe, a week, it was hard to say: only the first time there had been something about the incinerator in the hall, and then we drank beer, talking about birds, and when I woke up I was feeling the nest on his shoulder, where hair. Birds, I mean; there was something confusing going on, I knew that. I pulled the alarm button up and looked down into the hole, but all I could see was one small white band of metal: that would be the dome where light seeped in: outside, the hands, the luminous dots—all these would be my conscience, and Harry and I would be hidden from that, thank God. Lenin said there was no God, and Stalin said collectivization + electrification = Soviet power, all working like a clock, tick-tock, and when Albert Berger said that, his eyes watered as if he’d been gassed and there was no God, he’d say, save Him in the spirit of the creatively evolved, in the electrons of a radar screen or in the molecules of DDT. Yes, Harry said, but DDT is death, God is life-force, love, whatever you will, but not death. And how do you know, said Albert Berger, and I said—remembering something I do not know, I was drunk I guess, with what Harry always called an alcoholic, facetious desire to shock—I said For now is Christ risen from the dead, the first fruits of them that sleep. Too loudly, the wise, quizzical, psychoanalyzed faces turning toward me from the floor, the martinis in mid-air pale as mountain water, all quiet, puzzled, expectant, and I said it again: The first fruits of them that sleep! and slipped off the couch to bruise my behind. I don’t know why I did it. I thought of Carey Carr. Outside the pigeons chuckled and rustled, throats swelling like bladders, iridescent, throbbing; if you cut them with a knife the blood would rush out; Dickie Boy couldn’t ever get big after the first time, he was afraid and sometimes he’d sob he was so frustrated, his bird was so small and futile, but he had warm hands and when we lay down in the darkness I felt his ribs. Tony walked across the floor, I couldn’t see him but he had his shorts on; he always did, with a bottle of beer. “What are you lookin’ at the clock for?” he said. “You give me the creeps.” I heard myself answering him. Strange. To answer like that, I thought: the voice disembodied, directionless, coming from nowhere, spoken to the pigeons or the whole wide blue air: “I am having communion with dead spirits.” I could hear the clock whirring against my ear, perfect and ordered and eternal. “Ah, you funny kid. Come on, honey, give us a loving kiss.” He pressed the beer bottle against my spine, I should have known: it went through me like a blade, only the blade was made of ice and it routed out that horrible claw: the cramp came groaning up through my womb and I cried out loud. “Oh Christ!” “Aw, baby, I didn’t mean to.” I lay back holding my belly, kneading the skin, wishing more than anything on earth for a hot-water bottle enormous and limber, as big as the room and so hot it would scald the flesh, and I was about to ask Tony—but I remembered, the bottle I had was busted. “Just get me a hot towel,” I said, “please, Tony, get it for me.” “I’m sorry, baby,” he said, leaning over; in the hair on his chest there was lint and one of my hairs, long and brown: I saw these as he bent over me, and the Christopher medal, dangling, trembling at the end of tiny golden links: the baby half-strangling the Christ-Carrier with His small brazen arms, the sea and the wind and the darkness—Travel Safely. Jesus Saviour Pilot Me. The pain retreated once more toward the skin, tenderly, mercifully, and I thought: it’s a wonder our insides aren’t all destroyed. “That’s all right now,” I said. “I’m gain’ next door,” he said then, “I gotta get some sleep. We’ll stay up all night tonight, huh?” “If you want to, Tony,” I said. He kissed me on the cheek, lifting my breast up in his hand. I could smell the milk again, rancid and sour; then he stood erect, singing, “Saturday night is the happiest night of the week. Soo-o they say …” “Just let me rest for a while,” I said. “O.K., baby.” I don’t know when he left, that part is hard to remember; the door clicked sometime and I was alone sweating, sprawled out, listening to the whir of the clock. I lay there for a long while, listening; a fly buzzed somewhere in the room, heavy as slumber, stopped buzzing when it landed.. I could see it in my mind: blown in off the fruitstands its feet sticky with oil from bananas, a long proboscis which moved in and out like a pump, legs hairy as a mink and strewn with microbes; I had left an orange on the table and I wondered if the fly was there sniffing around. In my clock Harry and I would be safe from flies forever; they’d drum about overhead blackening the sky, trying to get in, poking their noses through the skylight; we’d see the bearded prisms of their faces, the scowls: we’d be secure forever, guarded by chrome and immutable timeless steel. Something came down from above, a Wrigley wrapper fallen from heaven: it joined a bunch of dust, whirled away across the street, over the housetops. I rose up on my elbows, thinking, listening to the tiny whir of the clock. A subway train roared out of the South, went below somewhere shaking the building, was gone. I tried to think. There were birds in my mind, landbound birds whirling about, dodos and penguins and cassowaries, ostriches befouling their lovely black plumes, and these seemed mixed up with Bunny. Maturity and age aside and after all you are beyond the age of discretion, he’d said; at twenty-two a young lady should know her own mind, the letter went (or did I remember rightly?), maturity and age aside, my lovely one, you must try to settle this thing with Harry, as a lawyer I can tell you one thing, as a father another—let me tell you as the latter: having suffered heartbreaks enough for ten men I can assure you that the love which you know in your heart to be true is worth every struggle, though I’m a fine one to talk, stranded as I am now as it were upon a drifting raft from which the dear remembered shores of an earlier, better love seem to recede ever more ceaselessly into the mists of time. And I’ve tried to be good, but I just don’t know, I just don’t know: when I lay down in Darien with Earl Sanders he had a drink in his hand, and I shouted, “No, no, I’m a good girl, I was brought up right,” sounding like a child, but not knowing what else to say. On his shoulders there were liver-colored spots the size of silver dollars and I wept like a baby thinking: if Harry saw me, thinking of St. Catherine, of Orestes and Iphigenia and her knife: my life hath known no father, she screamed, any road to any end may Tun, and outside cars went serenely on the gravel springtime roads and I could hear children call beneath the trees. I pushed the alarm button down and sat
up on the side of the bed. The pigeons fluttered off in a cloud of dust and feathers. I thought of Bunny’s letter and then of a letter I had written him: but I’d sent it home instead of the club, I remembered, and why? That scared me, but I thought about it anyway; perhaps she’d send it on to him, and then again perhaps she wouldn’t. Then I forgot about it. I walked naked to the stove and put water on for coffee. Things were better now for a minute, I sat down on a chair by the stove and watched steam rise from the saucepan, thinking things were better. Dormant, cautious, watchful, like that condor with one waking eye, the pain left me alone inside, lying somewhere beyond my womb; the pills held it off, and I put my brow in my hand and closed my eyes, listening to the hiss of the gas. There were moas now, and emus, big birds with arched gobbling necks and skin beneath their legs, as big as stilts, and prissed around in the sand, yet these, along with all the other ones, stood flightless in my mind, and noiseless, leaving me alone: I felt better. I put some Nescafé in a cup and poured water over it and sat down again. It was almost three. A subway rumbled underneath, I turned on the radio: this bomb they dropped yesterday, the man said, is big, 20,000 tons, 100,000 lives, which would save Dickie Boy, way out in the Philippines with his landing boat. Dickie Boy had a sweet lovely face but his mind was a sheet of paper upon which no thoughtful word had been written, and he couldn’t get it up, but it was so beautiful on the river and I wondered if I hadn’t been wrong: something flowers like time in my soul and I would be a child again and have Dickie Boy lead me along the beach and pick up shells; on the Rappahannock the dawn came up as red, and I remembered I was bleeding and I went into the bathroom and fixed myself. It was my last one. I scrubbed my face and brushed my lovely hair, for I must be pretty for Harry: he would have scolded me for forgetting. “You are always out of things, darling,” he’d say. “What’s the matter, don’t you think of tomorrow at all?” Or, “Come on now, I’m not nagging at you, but is it too much to ask, too much to ask, that you clean beneath the bed?” Or, “They say that jealousy is the meanest of emotions but what the hell was the big idea tonight?” That hurt the most and I thought damn Harry, damn him, and I stopped brushing my hair, for I was angry, I would not go, in spite of all the resolutions I made last night. I thought you just come back to me, but here: reason came on like a light in my mind, there was a flutter of wings, the birds fled across the sand, swiftly as a gale toward the horizon, and I smiled at myself in the mirror, feeling clean for a moment, and well. “It was always you,” he said, “who complained so bitterly before we got married. About this and that. About my neglect of you and the way I ignored you, none of which—” and he smacked his hand with his fist—“I’ve ever done. Now this. Who’s degenerating now? Who’s gone off the deep end?” That hurt the most—then—when he said it, because he was right, but he didn’t know about my plan for the clock, I couldn’t tell him—then—I didn’t want to, I was mad because he was right and when I lay down in Darien with Earl Sanders I was beneath him, sweating in the afternoon; I could see light through the fake chateau windows, a green million leaves, and I bit him on the ear pretending it was Harry I hated, until he shrieked: I liked that because it was Harry I bit. When it was over he turned on the Philharmonic; then I could hear the children call beneath the trees and I thought of Mozart dying in the rain. I put the brush back in the cabinet, Harry would think I was pretty. But I knew I must try not to think of Earl Sanders: that made me feel sad, and confused about Harry; besides, the birds came back and things shadowed over some—it seemed that a lot of light went away from the day and the birds came in a scamper across the darkening sand, surrounded me once more, in the bathroom, behind the confusing mirror. I turned out the light and got dressed, backwards: I should have waited until afterwards to comb my hair. My coffee was cool but I drank it anyway, and ate a doughnut. Grandmother made doughnuts, too, Bunny said: I should have dearly loved to see her and to crawl up into her lap. Then I washed the cup and the two saucers; Harry would like it, when we came back tonight, for everything to be clean: I’d show him. I went around straightening things, dusting the bookcase and the books and the shelves. He’d taken all of his paintings except one, of me. Green-eyed, beautiful, in the style of Renoir—but better, he’d said. That was two years ago. I dusted it carefully, looking at my eyes: they were tender, like I was then, I guess, and he hadn’t taken it because he didn’t want to remember me as I was: too goddam painful, he said, to see something all vivid on the canvas when you know it still lives, somewhere apart from you now, all lost and destroyed. I tried to explain to him about the clock: didn’t he see? But he said I was drunk and depraved. “I’ve tried my best to help you, Peyton, but I can’t do any more.” I watched my eyes, light went down across them like morning. I rubbed them with the rag and the dust came off clean. Nagasaki, the man said and he spoke of mushrooms and Mr. Truman: there were atoms in the air everywhere, he said, and he explained, but I couldn’t make much sense. My eyes came off clean, globed from the atoms falling slow or swift, I remembered, I see the suns, I see the systems lift their forms. Lucretius had a heart as big as all outdoors said Harry, but he, too—empires, lands and seas—he too, like these, went soaring back to the eternal drift. I knew I had to get out of there; it was hot, I could feel sweat rolling down my back. I cleaned out the ashtrays with a paper napkin and stacked them up neatly in the sink. Far below in the airshaft a voice rose, round and Sicilian, female, thick as juice from a tangerine: “Vi-to!” To-to, the echo went, up through the barred windows, past the crevices and the cool, soot-stained brick, the cracked, frosted bathroom windows, the drainpipes and the radio wires and the walls. “Vi-to!” It became still, a truck passed outside; I wondered who Vito was. I threw the doughnut wrapper in the garbage bucket, turned the radio up; sinfonie conzertante, like something ordered and proper and of another earth, morns by men unseen and a far fantastic dawn, but not very clear: there were Negroes on another station, remote, faint and blurred between the fantastic flutes and oboes and the ascending strings: “Heal dem, Jesus, heal dem!” and distant hallelujahs bare and absolute as a nigger church stuck out in a sunlit shabby grove. “Heal dem, Jesus!” I turned the radio off; I had a sign or something, and with all my sleep I was tired; the pain stirred, came up in my womb, but it was not much of a cramp. The place looked clean, and this would please Harry. I went to the door, but I remembered: I went back to the windowsill and got the clock. I cupped my palms around it, looking at the dots and hands, which shone with a clear green light in the darkness: we have not been brought up right, I thought, peering down into the alarm hole: there in the sunny grotto we could coast among the bolts and springs and ordered, ticking wheels, riveted to peace forever. Harry would like to know: rubies he’d love and cherish, in that light they’d glow like the red hats of Breughel dancers. I could hear the serene and steady whir, held it closer to my ear for the ticking, an unfitful, accomplished harmony—perfect, ordered, whole. Then I took the clock and stuffed it in my handbag. I opened the door and went out into the hall: there was a smell here of something cooking, spaghetti and heavy garlic, but a shadow passed over the day again, a tin can clattered down the airshaft, and darkness ran down the walls like a thicket of vines: I watched my hands darken and I trembled a little, thinking of home, yet I knew that this I must try not to think about too. I closed the door, heard a rustling: they followed me, I believe, the flightless birds that I couldn’t see, with a feathered rustling and sedate, unblinking eyes: here they came across the sands, peaceful and without menace, ruffling their silent plumes: I wanted to cry. This mustn’t. Yet I walked down the stairs, thinking not of home but of Grandmother again: she had snuff beneath her lip. “You gotta pay da rent?” said Mrs. Marsicano at the bottom of the stairs. “I will, Mrs. Marsicano,” I said. I smiled at her. She had a mustache and two moles, and she smelled sour and rank, like raw, faintly tainted veal. “I’m going to get Mr. Miller right now. We’ll be back tonight. He’s coming back to live in the apartment and he’ll pay——??
? But she said, “You tella me these things alla time. What I got to believe? Mr. Miller he been gone fa two months. You all the time say he’s gonna pay. How do I know? The check you gimme she bounce, you owe me one hundred and eighty dolla——” “We’ll pay you,” I said, still smiling at her. “Don’t you worry, Mrs. Marsicano, I’ll make that check good——” But “Ah, you makea me sick,” she said and turned to waddle away, scratching her arms, and her dog, a black mongrel with red-rimmed eyes, lifted its leg up and watered the stairs. I heard her tramp down the hall, saw her disappear into the darkness, the dog scuttling after. She was right and I knew it and the birds rustled somewhere in the hall: I listened for their noise but Harry would take care of me, I knew. I couldn’t think for a minute, thinking that the bank was full of money, my money, but then I remembered: all that which Bunny sent me on my birthday I’d spent, and I remembered the phonograph I had bought, and all the records, and the Benrus clock, my womb all jeweled and safe; it cost $39.95. Too much for a clock but I just knew it had to be a good one, and pretty, with fine turning hands: somewhere in the play someone said the bawdy hand of the hour is on the prick of noon. I peeked into my handbag; Harry’s was just right. Once he asked me who took my maidenhead and I said a bicycle seat named Dickie Boy: when we lay down that afternoon I heard Papageno singing in my sleep and I dreamed of dancers on a green fantastic lawn and sand and pyramids; it was the first time I ever dreamed of birds, they came sedately across the sand, and when we woke up Dickie Boy couldn’t get in. I looked; my clock was safe. I walked on down the hall and onto the sidewalk. A great wave of heat smoldered up from the concrete: you could see it smoky and transparent against the tenement walls and it pasted the dress against my back with sweat. Charles Marsicano was an imbecile and he looked at me with empty brown imbecile eyes and with sweat on his face like a layer of grease. Always his lips were open, they became chapped and peeling, and he spoke: “Where ya goin’, Peyton?” “I’m going up to Cornelia Street, Charles,” I said. “What for, Peyton?” “To get Harry,” I said. “Wan’ me to take your garbage down, Peyton?” “No, thank you, Charles,” I said, “wait till Monday.” “O.K., Peyton.” I left him standing on the stoop, sweating in the heat and the sun, working a yo-yo. He had eyes just like Maudie’s, and Dr. Strassman in Newark said, “Be calm. Be calm. That’s what we’re supposed to work out together.” But, “I don’t think I like you,” I said. The place was just like I imagined, antiseptic, therapeutic, clean, with metal venetian blinds, and Dr. Strassman’s nose was red from a cold. “But you see, I think I’m more intelligent than you,” I said. “Perhaps so, but certainly less stable,” he said. “Perhaps so,” I said, “but certainly more aware of the reason for my trouble.” “Perhaps so.” “Perhaps so.” But we went on for a while, and he said, “I wish you wouldn’t quit. I wish you’d have more patience——” and then I forget what he said, he was stupid and ignorant, wouldn’t he like to know about my clock, but he did say that: it’s not any guilt you feel about your sister, it’s something else and apart from that. When I let Maudie fall I saw the bruise come greenish blue with tiny broken veins, but she didn’t cry much. Once Bunny and I went for a walk with Maudie and we got into an argument about birds: it was a thrush, I told him, and he said a mockingbird: it was dead and its eyes were closed, a boy had shot it with a BB gun and Maudie picked it up and stroked its wings. Strassman said I was confused and insincere; you are dangerously abstracted but what was this about birds? He was interested; I wouldn’t tell him. I walked up the avenue; shadows slanted eastward from the buildings and within these shadows I walked, holding the clock and bag close to my breast. “Did you hear about the bomb?” some boy said, and he ran off shrieking into a cafe where the old Italian, palsied and pale, sold lemon ice. We drank espresso in there each Sunday night; there was no clock then, or need for one: the walls were bare, the chairs were made of wire, and Harry spoke Dante in English: now hearken how much love did honor her (looking into my eyes) I myself saw him in his proper form, bending over the motionless, sweet dead, and often gazing into heaven for there the love now sits which (when her life was warm) dwelt with the joyful beauty that is fled. Blessed Beatrice. And I said, “A prophecy?” And he took my hand and the Italian came up to wipe off the spilled espresso with a palsied hand, and Harry said, “You will never die, you are the love that moves the sun and other stars.” I thought of death and slumber, and I took my hand away from his and thought I heard behind the walls the serene, peaceful rustling of flightless wings. Why did Harry come to say I couldn’t love? He should know about my clock; I walked into the awninged shadow of the cafe and took it out of my handbag, holding it up in the light. “Why you lookin’ at that clock?” said the little boy. His face was potty with soot, streaked with moist yellow from the lemon ice. “Because I just bought it,” I said, “and it’s beautiful.” “How much did it cost ya?” “Thirty-nine ninety-five,” I said, “federal tax included.” “Where’d ya get it?” he asked. “At Macy’s,” I said. “My ma——” he said, but I wasn’t listening: the light didn’t seem to come properly through the hole. Perhaps it would get dark after all in there, like day and night, the alternating light and blackness: we’d see dusk and dawning, too, sprawled out drowsing on the springs, darkness blacker than the blackest carbon around us, and stir and dream and touch hands across the constant, clicking, oscillating wheels. At night there’d be no light; because of this the flutter of the wheels would seem louder, more comforting, lulling us to sleep: the dawn would fill it with red sunlight and an azure sky and Harry would kiss me awake. Maybe we’d have babies there: he said, “In your state you not only don’t want the natural things in life; you deny them completely. All right then, we won’t have children,” but I thought I was anyway and when I went to that doctor on Sutton Place he stuck a tube with a warm light up inside me. He was a Hungarian, and when I squirmed because the tube made me feel hot he said, “Does it teekle? Dot’s allride, only pwobing,” and he probed some more and I got so hot I could hardly stand it, looking at the powdered Hungarian face and flicking mustache and insolent, thoroughbred flesh: then the birds all rustled in the sand, their legs unhinged, necks craning, round, unblinking, incurious eyes and I lay down somewhere in the desert topography of my mind, only it was his couch, and he was holding my hand while I trembled in dread and guilt, and said, “Dot’s allride, dawn be ashamed, it’s a naughty leetle instrument.” I put the clock back in my bag, horizontal now, beneath a green silk handkerchief. From under the subway grating came a puff of smoke, sulphurous, scorched, inexplicable. I thought: Something is dying. And I watched the smoke come up and the little boy scuttled away through the fumes, dropping ice behind him in a lemon spatter. Far off some chimes tolled, reminding me of home, but I knew I must never think of that. I walked on up the avenue, looking downward and scuffing my heels, in a way thinking of nothing—this was very hard. There were seagulls in the air, and through the heat, the smell of sea; I saw the gulls winging southward toward the river: one had a fish in its mouth which fell; the gulls flew on. I was thirsty and I thought of going into a bar: then I was more than thirsty and I knew that I would dearly love to drink more than one. Even though: if I drink more than one I will be drowning again, here in the heat, and the heat and what I’ve drunk will not sweep over me thunderously, like a seawave, but will immerse me gently, dreadfully into the drowning day, like an octopus in a tank. So I thought very strongly I must not, I must not, to avoid the drowning feeling and also because of Harry: he must see me as I am, sober, gay, respectable and lovely. And I must not, I thought, passing the theater: inside 20° cooler, said a blue banner with icebergs, while the cashier, cozy in her air-conditioned box office, gazed at the heat in a chilled reverie, like an orchid inside a florist’s icebox. I must not, but the sign said BAR and I pulled open the door. Two colored boys came out carrying a wooden plank; I could hear hammering inside and I passed the colored boys, stepping aside: “Dat man he always want me to go runnin’ around in de mi
dday sun,” said one: he had a smile and a mustache, the color of his skin. I could smell him, sour like wild onions growing in the shade: I wanted to touch him. She always said I must never call them ladies, but women, and when Bunny and I drove the laundry over to La Ruth’s, chickens pecked around in the twilight dust and I smelled that smell inside, looking at the chromos: they had blue skin, I thought how strange they’d have pictures taken. The door swung back, another one opened, and I was in the bar, not 20° cooler but 30° or 40°, and I sneezed, the sweat fading off my back. The bar was almost empty. I shivered in the cold, sneezed again, and the bartender, with a trout’s face, said nothing, wiping the bar. “A dry martini, please,” I said. I sat down on a red leather stool, which wobbled. They were hammering in the rear somewhere; I could smell gin. The radio was on about the bomb but I didn’t listen, thought they’d play music maybe Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde, when the voice goes up and up tragically as a night without stars: thus Harry and I—and I felt the clock in my purse, ran over its form in my lap touching, with my fingers, the necessary buttons and levers to operate. And I thought: Could we not get one wound up forever? Suppose as we soared dozing across the springs the wheels, the cogs and levers, all these should give way, run down; then our womb would fall, we’d hear the fatal quiet, the dreadful flutter and lurch earthward instead of the fine ascent. Then I looked at my face in the quivering martini, and then a soldier came up and sat down beside me: no drowning, I thought, that was for the old days. And he said, “Ain’t I seen you around here before? Don’t you live near Prince? I think I seen you around here before.” He was dark and handsome but when he opened his mouth his teeth were rotten and he smelled of garlic: I was trying to think, I didn’t answer, looking at him in the mirror. The first sip made something happen: it rose up in my womb. When I was a little girl I thought it was diarrhea and she said read that in the Kotex box. Then I went out and sat on the porch with Maudie and looked at the bay, thinking about dying. He said: “Ain’t I seen you around?” I turned and said, “Yes, I live right down the avenue.” “Where you from? You sound like you came from down South. I was stationed at Fort Bragg. That’s in North Carolina.” “No,” I said, “I’m English. I’m from the southern part of England. Dorset, to be exact.” “You sound like you had one of those accents. Just a little bit.” He put his hand on the bar; he had dirt under his nails, I wondered how he could be in the Army with such teeth. I said, “No, it’s an English accent.” “You cold?” he said, “you’re shiverin’. You want to wear my jacket?” “No thank you,” I said, “I’m perfectly comfortable.” I drank more of the martini, feeling water come up beyond my eyes: no, I thought, no. “Ain’t I seen you around with Tony wat’s his name? Cecchino? Me and Tony went to P.S. 2——” But I said, “No,” turning to him, “no,” I said, “I don’t know any Tony Cecchino. I’m just a stranger. I’m from Dorset in England and I’m visiting with my aunt and uncle the Lacorazzas.” “You don’t look Italian,” he said. “You look more like you was from Ireland maybe or Germany.” “I’m from Tuscany,” I said, “they have light complexions there. I was from Perugia and then when I was four my parents moved to Dorset in England.” “Perugia ain’t in Tuscany,” he said, “besides Lacorazza, that’s Sicilian.” “Oh, pooh,” I said, turning away, “the little you know.” He put his hand on mine, but I drew it away. “Don’t gimme a tough time, baby,” he said nicely, “ain’t I really seen you with Tony Cecchino? You know Tony.” But that seemed to be all again: the water came up, and a rustle of wings. For a moment I couldn’t think. What? And when? Perhaps he could see my fingers shake and God, I thought, don’t let me suffer so: they came so serenely across the darkening sand, my poor wingless ones; how could they bear to ruin this day? They rustled behind the walls, staid and unhurried, with plumes useless as hair. I trembled, thinking no, no and there were words unsaid which I’d tried not to say or think all day: and will he not come again? and will he not come again? no, no, he is dead. There was confusion. But all I could say was, “No. No Tony. I don’t know any Tony.” But Bunny wasn’t dead! A rustle of wingless feathers, flightless wings, they all pranced staidly through the gathering dusk: “How can you be this way, Peyton?” he’d said to me. “Don’t you see what you’re doing to us? Don’t you see? What do you want me to do? I’m not your handmaiden. This is co-operation, not your dependence versus my so-called stalwart, solacing strength. Sometimes I think you’re as nutty as the so-called fruitcake.” What did I mean by saying he goosed that girl, that’s what he said. And I just couldn’t bear it, having first this: at Albert Berger’s we were drunk and I felt drowning in the summer night, and Albert Berger snuffled, wiping his glasses, saying Ernst Haeckel, have you never read him, pretty one; beside him Spencer is an ass, a coward and a midget: who else but old Ernst knew the absolute—God is a prayer automaton, a gaseous vertebrate? I felt drowning underneath the heat and gin, yet there were chimes inside my brain and I remembered: how long, Lord, wilt Thou hide Thyself forever, shall Thy wrath burn like fire? “Remember,” I said to Albert Berger, “how short my time is.” And got up and walked through the room smoky and submarine with chattering, eyeglassed faces, to find Harry. He was kissing a refugee girl in the kitchen; her name was Marta Epstein and he had his hand on her tail and I hated all Jews. And he said Forgive. Forgive me, he said. On his knees he said it, but the chimes were still in my brain and I was drowning and I knew something was wrong on earth. Something in me that was wrong refused to forgive, and I thought forever; I said, “You did it while I was drowning, that’s what makes it so awful. I’ll never forgive you.” And I was drowning; the heat that summer was hotter even than this one, and it came up to my neck: I could have died when I saw his hand on her tail, yet not to forgive—was this not worse? He said finally, “Things that shatter you like that, well, they aren’t the things at all, it’s in you, if you hold such bitter vengeance.” And I knew he was right—“one defection so small,” as he put it—it should never have hurt so much. He was right and I hated him for his rightness; how I used it inside as a bludgeon, not to wound him so much as myself: his hands played out against her shiny black satin ass, I could see the hair on his knuckles sprung out tense like whiskers on a butterfly, and those fingers lay on my mind night and day. If I just hadn’t been drowning I wouldn’t have hated, I would have forgiven, but the heat and the gin: later I even kissed a sleepy-looking drunk while Harry watched, though he was queer, I think; we both were blind from drinking and I stuck my tongue in his mouth, I think. That was what had me in the bar—not Marta Epstein but the drowning. I couldn’t think and the soldier said, “What’s the matter, baby?” but the feathers were rustling once more, and the long feet scuffing the sand placidly, carelessly: I couldn’t think, only remember, and I remembered when I lay down in Darien with Earl Sanders we stretched out naked on the terrace; we talked about Dorothy Sayers and we had a quart jar full of mint juleps: then he didn’t wait until I was ready, and hurt me, and it was the first time I saw the birds, alive, apart from dreams, crowding stiffly like feather dusters across the lawn beneath the maple trees. I shut my eyes to close out the ugly Connecticut sun and I knew I was paying Harry back for his defection so small, I drowned on the terrace and when I slept afterwards I dreamt of drowning too. Now I had signaled, one forefinger outstretched wiggling, and the bartender brought me another martini. “Let me pay, kid,” said the soldier, breathing garlic. “No, thank you,” I said. “Aw, come on … tell us your name, kid,” he said. “My name is Mary,” I said, “Mary Ricci.” “Glad to know you, Mary.” “The same,” I said. “My name is Mickey Pavone.” “Glad to meet you, Mickey,” I said. “Where you goin’ tonight?” he said. “I’ve got to go meet Harry,” I answered. The martini hurt my teeth; somewhere hammers were knocking and plaster slid down between the walls. I was beginning to drown some: the water not so much within me as if swallowed, but around me, not touching me, with the shimmering quality of vagrant but surrounding thick light. It seemed to lap at the wi
ndows, the mirror, making the air opalescent and somehow milky; yet it was not this water which threatened me so but my own mind: the water remained, like the birds, detached and even aloof, upon the boundaries of my consciousness a submarine wall persistent, but without menace: I wanted to not think about it. “I’ve got to go meet Harry,” I said, as if he’d kept on asking me the question, which he hadn’t. “I’ve got to go meet Harry.” “O.K., baby, I believe you, take it easy. Who’s Harry?” “Harry’s my brother,” I said, “Harry Ricci.” “Yeah? You got a brother?” “Yes, I have three.” “I got five,” the soldier said. “What does he do?” “He’s from Philadelphia. He’s very rich. He’s a stockbroker.” “I once lived in Philadelphia,” the soldier said, “it’s a dead dump, you know. I lived in Darby. What part of Philly does this Harry live?” “In Shaker Heights,” I said, and thought no, closing my eyes to the water. “You can’t kid me, baby,” he said, “I worked in Cleveland before the war. Shaker Heights is outside of Cleveland.” “I know,” I said, “he is in Cleveland now, he was from Philadelphia.” “Aw, baby,” he said, “come on, what’re you tryin’ to cover up? Come on, let Mickey in on it. Now tell me, if this Harry works in Cleveland just what building does he work at?” I turned away thinking, from the black gums, the sawed-off teeth; I was very confused: “Now you lie about it, persistently, and outlandishly, Peyton, why did you say Greenwich now when I know damn well it was Darien”—and I turned back to the soldier. I don’t know why, I wanted to cry again, but I thought no. “He works at home, he doesn’t work in a building, and besides——” I paused. “Besides what, kid?” “Besides, it’s hardly any of your business.” The soldier leaned back and laughed, smacking his leg: I watched the orifice glinting with stubs of ivory, shredded black gums, quivering, upraised tongue: “You kill me, kid. You’re a real storyteller!” “Yes,” I said, and I swallowed the rest of my martini whole and burning, “and now I must be off to meet Harry.” He was still laughing. “Harry! That kills me, baby. I’ll tell Tony Cecchino you’re two-timin’ him.” I opened my mouth: “You’d better not”—but I didn’t say it, and I remembered I had forgotten Tony. Guilt is the thing with feathers, they came back with a secret rustle, preening their flightless wings and I didn’t want to think. “Tonight, baby.” He had hair on his shoulders like wires. Harry, I did it because we loved each other, once we lay awake all night and he said blessed Beatrice, he said Lady I saw a garland borne by you, lovely as fairest flower. “Now why are you crying?” the soldier said. “Turn ’em off. I won’t tell on ya.” I stopped right away, looking up through the water. “You’d better not, Mickey,” I said, “please don’t.” Then I thought: Well, it’s all right, when Harry comes back it’ll be all right about Tony. Only. Only we’d have to move away, because Harry and Tony wouldn’t get along, living next door. And Mrs. Marsicano: Harry would pay the rent, and I was glad the place was so pretty and clean. Only. “Yes, tell Tony,” I said, “if you want to. Only——” “Only what, kid?” “Only wait until tomorrow.” “O.K., kid.” I got up to go, holding my bag and clock close against my breast: this always gave me a certain peace. I thought I could hear it ticking there, a clean, ordered multitude of jewels and springs, above my heart. Globed from the atoms, I hadn’t heard: such destruction, the radio said, has never before been seen on earth. “What you standin’ there for, kid?” said the soldier. “I’m listening to the radio,” I said. “I’m communing with the spirits of the dead.” “You’re nuts, I think,” he said. “Good-by, Mickey,” I said. “So long, Mary,” he said. I went out the door, it was like walking into a kitchen where the oven is on and all the burners: colossal and suffocating, and thick with smells-—of a bakery somewhere, caramel popcorn from the theater, gasoline and factory smoke and drains. I tried to think: here it became very odd, for it took me a long time, half a minute maybe even a minute, to decide on going left or right. A thousand times at least we’d walked up to see Lennie there; I knew it was somehow north, yet I felt that the bar had been in another country: had I not already walked too far north? I had to ask a girl. She had her tongue wrapped around an ice-cream cone, black insects on top, sprinkling off: “That way—” pointing north—“second corner.” “Are you sure?” “Sure, I’m sure.” “Thank you then,” I said. So I started walking again, looking down at the concrete and scuffling along. Surrounded by water it was hard this way, but the pain had retreated far down inside me and out of sight: it was lucky this month with small nausea and no headache. Then I thought: Even if I begin to drown completely and the day comes down on me like all the oceans as it did last time, then still Harry will keep my head up above: that was my pride and joy and just to hell with Tony anyway. Past the drugstore it smelled of Coca-Cola and medicine, cool, but I went on: in the window, hung amid soot-coated blue and white crepe streamers, a sign said LAXATEEN—Conquer Irregularity Forever. Albert Berger had piles. But then I stopped, moved in under the awning, and thought. Oh Harry. I thought. Oh. No. Because he had said just that. Oh Harry. “You’re asking the completely impossible. Something you inherited from your mother, only in reverse. You’re a Helen with her obsessions directed in a different way. Talk about my irregularly oriented mind, how about yours: you want to lay anything in pants, that’s all——” Only I said then (it was two months ago, couldn’t he see how close I was to drowning?) I said, “Oh, Harry darling.” I said to Lennie, “Make him come back, Lennie. I promise. I’m drowning.” Only they couldn’t see, they just couldn’t see—“Go on back to your Italian friend,” Harry said—I just couldn’t make them understand: that with Tony it was different, that the heat and the gin and the drowning. We dumped some trash in the incinerator and then I could see the Christopher nestling in his hair: it was gold or something, and I had drunk all the gin, then he pressed up against me and made me—— That sober part of me shrieked in dread, yet the shrieks—oh Christ!—they wouldn’t go through the water, and then he had his hand inside: couldn’t Harry understand? “There was no defection so small,” he said; “there’s a big difference between a pat on the tail and a quick roll in the hay with the milkman.” Couldn’t he see? “I’ll never do it again!” I hollered, “I’m drowning! I need you!” Couldn’t he see? But he said, “You’re just drunk. I’ve given you every chance in the world. You said the same thing when you came back from Greenwich or Cos Cob or Darien or wherever you went with that writer slob and so to hell with you.” My poor Harry, couldn’t he understand? “Need, need,” he’d said, “I refuse to be needed unless I’m loved too and so to hell with you.” Beneath the awning it was cooler. Two fat nuns in summer white fluttered past, mumbling secretly in French: Monseigneur O’Toole … la la … gras comme un moine—they were sweating, they vanished around the corner, white-pleated butter churns. Chimes in my drowning soul: oh, no, God, I thought, he’ll come back with me. And I thought, lifting the handbag to my ear, the clock ticking inside precise and steady as before: here all our guilt will disappear among the ordered levers and wheels, in the aqueous ruby-glinting sun. Then I said, “Please help me,” and the druggist, sunning his sallow face in the light beside me, said, “What’s the matter, young lady, you got an earache?” He was an old man, a tiny one with hair sprouting from his nose. “Yes,” I said. It was hard to orient now, as Harry would say: the man wanted to help me because I’d asked. “Yes,” I said again, “it’s in this ear.” I pressed the bag against my head. “Right here.” “You’d better see a doctor,” the druggist said, “that’s dangerous. It can get in your brain and kill you dead.” “Yes,” I said, “it hurts terribly.” “You just wait here,” he said, “and I’ll get you a couple of aspirins.” He went off into the store. I stood there in the heat, the bag against my head, listening to the tick and whir of the wheels: oh, he’d come, I knew, and I tried to think of anything, music or poems or the clock—music and poems within the clock—anything but Tony and lying down in Darien with Earl Sanders and all the bad things I’d done. He’s soft and tender, I thought, is my Harry, and how does it
go: bind him with cowslips and bring him home. But it’s decreed. It’s decreed that I shall never find him. When I was a little girl I had the earache and Bunny held my legs and Mr. Lewis up the street held my arms and Dr. Holcomb stuck a thing in my ear to puncture it; I’d scream out loud it hurt so, and she said poor Peyton poor little Peyton, but did it really hurt so much, did you have to scream: then she and Bunny got in an argument: I went to sleep then with a fever and I dreamed of a fat woman sitting down on me and then of a little boy in a field picking a violet. “Here you are, young lady. You just take these and then go straight to a doctor. Hear me?” “Yes,” I said. I took the pills with water in a cup which he brought. “You go straight to a doctor, understand? Let that infection spread and you’ll get mastoiditis. A doctor’ll take care of you.” “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much. Which way is Cornelia Street?” “Two blocks up, you just go straight to a doctor.” His nose quivered like a rabbit’s. “Thank you,” I said, “good-by.” “Good-by, young lady.” I walked on up the avenue, holding my clock and bag. I was sweating, and that I knew wouldn’t be so nice for Harry, I wish I had remembered to use the O-dor-o-no: saves your clothes from stains, does not rot dress. But my dress was pretty—silk, cream and blue in stripes—clinging nicely: wouldn’t Harry be glad? From the corner, waiting for the light to change, I could almost see the end of Cornelia Street and Lennie’s place, but Jeanette MacDonald, famous star of stage, screen and radio, held up a cigarette on a stripped and peeling billboard: boys played baseball in the shade beneath, one of her arms was amputated: it lay on the grass below and the boys sat on it when they rested. I leaned outward so I could see past the billboard, but only one window was showing three flights above, the green curtain hanging limply: I couldn’t see Harry there. And then I thought: what would I say? The clock would come last, a sort of surprise gift. Perhaps he’d be alone. First the buzzer, then the long climb upward; I’d hear his voice from above: “Who is it … is it?” I wouldn’t answer, but wait. Then panting some, I’d knock at the door, and he’d open it: Hello, I’d say. Hello. I’ll bet you’re surprised to see me. And he’d say, No, I knew you’d come. And I’d say, I’m sorry, Harry, and then I’d say, I love you, Harry, and then we’d lock the door and pull down the blinds and lie there through the heat and the afternoon darkness, watch dusk come late, lie down and sprawl on the springs and drowse awhile, touch hands across the incessant, ticking wheels; this darkness is as perfect as the center of the earth, only with the glow of rubies and diamonds, shining with a self-luminous light, flawless and divine: blessed Beatrice, man at that light, said Harry, be-cometh so content that to choose other sight, and this reject, it is impossible that he consent: once he took me upstairs in Richmond, I was home rocking upward in his arms, and then he laid me down on a strange bed, and I called out, “Daddy, Daddy,” for I didn’t call him Bunny then. Yet. I knew I mustn’t think of this: I clutched the clock to my breast, and stepped down off the curb, looking toward the window. Then there was a monstrous and agonized shriek of tires behind me, so close I could almost see them—sparks, tortured asphalt, peeling rubber—and I turned, saw it approaching, the grille of a truck with a metal face smiling, and the onrushing, enlarging, threatening word—halting not two inches from my eyes: CHEVROLET. “You nuts? You wanna get yerself killed!” He stuck his head out of the window, a man with a mashed-in nose like a spoon that’s been stepped on, and bulging outraged eyes. He hadn’t shaved, there were rough red patches beneath. “In plain sight!” he yelled. “You nuts? You seen me comin’, I seen you look up!” “I most certainly did not,” I said. “Please don’t shout.” But he went on talking, and I stood there holding my clock, while cars began to honk behind him: “People like you oughta have theirselves examined. Suppose I’da knocked you down?” “Don’t holler at me,” I said, “I’m not deaf,” but then a policeman came up, and I watched the sweat run purple underneath his shirt. “Now just what goes on here?” “Ah, this nutty dame, she walked against the light and I almost run her down. People like her gimme a pain in the ass.” “Now you mind how you talk,” said the cop: it was a voice of Mayo or Down or Antrim, I thought of green things suddenly and a far, fantastic lawn: “Now tell me, miss, how fast was this fellow going?” “Fast as the wind,” I said, “faster.” “Faster than the wind you say now?” “Yes,” I said. He looked at me shrewdly, perspiring and with suspicion. “Well then, tell me now, miss, just how fast is faster than the wind?” “I don’t know,” I said. I held the clock and bag close against my breast and I wanted to cry again, but I didn’t. “I don’t know,” I said again, “very fast.” “Well now, miss, you know you must be more careful. You can scare the bejesus out of a man doing that.” The horns persisted up and down the street, growing louder, a chorus of chromatic moans. The cop motioned the truck on, and the driver went off with clashing gears, scowling at me, still pale with fright. “You must watch your step, miss.” “I will,” I said, and I held the clock closer to my breast. He looked down at me, sniffing. “Haven’t you been drinking quite a bit, miss?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “I had two martinis at the Napoli Bar.” “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said, “I won’t hurt you. Might I ask where you’re going?” “I’m going to see Bunny,” I said. “Bunny?” he said. “I mean—” I answered—“I mean Harry.” “Well now, miss, sure that’s fine, but what I meant was could I help you find your way? You look a bit like you’re lost.” “No,” I said, “I’m going up to Cornelia Street, right up there.” He walked across the street with me, holding my arm. I could see water rising up across the avenue, luminous but clear, my drowning: I felt a cramp coming on. “In this city you must watch your step, miss, they drive like the divil himself.” “Yes, they do,” I said. “They don’t drive like this down in Virginia.” “Ah now, that’s where you’re from?” “Yes,” I said, “Port Warwick. Harry’s my uncle from Port Warwick. He’s visiting with Lennie on Cornelia Street.” “Ah now, so, and who’s Lennie?” “Oh, he’s a cousin of ours.” “And might I ask, miss, what you’re holding so careful in that purse?” I looked up and smiled at him. “Harry and I robbed that bank on Ninth Street last week. They don’t know. This is all money.” We were on the curb, he threw back his head and laughed. “Aw, sure you’re a fine one all right!” He patted me on the back. “Now you take care, miss.” “I will,” I said. “Thank you very much.” “Good-by.” “Good-by.” Then I had the cramp again, walking down the block to Lennie’s: it was all I could do to keep from getting sick, and I leaned up against a light pole, getting rust on my hand; and then I couldn’t think of anything again but becoming immoral, the birds came rustling around me through the silent, luminous water, fluffing up their wings, and a cloud seemed to darken the day and chilled, like a fan, the sweat on my back: I leaned there while the pain worked awhile on my womb. One drop of anything, I thought, would save the life of poor damned Peyton, for it had all been so immoral, and maybe, after all, he would say no: “No,” he’d once said, more filled with grief than myself, “no, I don’t understand it. I’ve heard of men turning queer in a year or two, but never a girl so good and decent and with such fine ideas just to collapse. That’s what I can’t see, Peyton, can you? What’s happened to you?” Yet he didn’t understand about my sudden drowning, these birds, I never told him about them. Harry didn’t know about the birds, or how I felt about Marta Epstein, his defection so small: couldn’t he forgive me for not forgiving him, and for what I’d done? Couldn’t he understand how I suffered over my own hatred, and in my own despair? He could never see that or anything: or when I lay down in Darien with Earl Sanders once we were standing up, in the shower stall, and then the wings and feathers all crowded through the yellow translucent curtain: so I slumped down against him in the pelting spray and I thought oh Harry, I thought oh my flesh! I thought poor thing that hungers, poor inch of God, poor man. The cramp went away. I stood up straight from the lamp post, then I took my bag and walked on down the street. The light had sunk more be
hind the housetops and people were sunning themselves in doorways, slow-stirring and torpid like dozing cats; I wanted another martini but at Lennie’s building I forgot about it. My heart was pounding so. I paused. A woman shook a blanket above, in a thicket of fire escapes, sending down a dust storm, and a baby howled somewhere; the street was deserted mostly and peaceful: I knew I mustn’t think of home. I went into the hallway and pressed the button, heard the bell ring above; it was so quiet here, like a distant telephone chiming in your sleep—once and twice and one more time: on the avenue trucks passed mumbling, and a bus, I could hear it: the hiss of an opening door, another hiss as it closed, and the motor’s labored, ascending roar, fading away. On the avenue; then I was on the bus myself, packed in sweltering among all the shoppers, smelling the fumes, the sweat-stained leather seats, borne uptown and away from all this misery and my pounding heart, with a throttled, hushing roar. Only now, the bell rang five times at least, I was still in the hallway, sweat streaming down my face, and alone. I rang once more but no one answered. And I thought: oh Harry. And sat down on the ledge by the door and took the clock from the bag, but no: then I felt that I was humoring myself, like a child: too much of a good thing was bad, even my clock, so I refused—refused to think even of this the consoling cool darkness and the ceaselessly moving wheels. That I’d save for Harry. But Harry. Oh Harry. And will he not come again? I put the clock back in my bag, feeling it from outside, all the levers and buttons to operate. There was a patter of feet outside the door, a flurry of heels, two puffs of light on tossing hair, and a woman’s voice: “Children … come back … Dorothy … Tommy … come back … children … come back … come back.” I sat there quietly, hardly moving, and I thought as surely as my lost love: oh God, I must die today, but will I not rise again at another time and stand on the earth clean and incorruptible? I tried to pray without weeping but when I prayed I wept, for I couldn’t tell what or whom I was praying to. I said there is no God. God is a gaseous vertebrate and how could I pray to something that looks like a jellyfish? So I stopped praying and took a paper napkin out of my purse and dried my tears; I would be a good girl, like Bunny always said: once in school we had a play and I was the Spirit of Light and I had a silver gown on that you could almost see through, then he took me in his lap and when I jumped up I saw his face: it was red and tense like a baby’s when it goes off in its diapers. You must be a good girl, honey; don’t mind what I do, don’t mind what she says. Just remember what Grandmother said, there’ll be pie in the sky for them that keep their pants on: it’s what he said she said, and once Bunny and I went sailing, I trailed seaweed in my hand watching crabs scuttle in the shallows: then she spanked me with a hairbrush or something. It was all very confused, but she spanked me because I made Bunny cut my lovely hair short, like Marlene Dietrich, and then we went sailing, my hands filled with bubbles, periwinkles, and I thought of Grandmother with snuff beneath her lip. Schlage doch, gewünschte Stunde. The children had returned: they came back past the door and dragged their heels, looking solemn. The boy had a toy tin watering can; scowling handsomely, he carried it beneath his arm. Outside pigeons whirled giddily in the sunshine, and a garbage truck came by with a clatter. I couldn’t think what to do. I tried to pray: lighten my darkness, I beseech you, oh Lord, and make me clean and pure and without sin; God, give me my Harry back, then, Harry, give me my God back, for somewhere I’ve lost my way: make me as I was when I was a child when we walked along the sand and picked up shells. Amen. Then I opened my eyes, and then I saw the note: a folded-up piece of paper hanging out of the mailbox. It said “Laura,” and I opened it, read in Lennie’s scribble: “Gone to A. Berger’s for what we don’t know except we’re bored. Harry says if P. comes to tell her he’s gone to Peru love and kisses.” I read it three times, just to make sure: my salvation. At least I knew exactly where to look. I refolded the note carefully and stuck it back in the slit in the mailbox, and the door slammed: in came Tommy Givings in tweeds, with his pipe, with kindly blue eyes, a very parfit gentil Hingleshman. “I say, what are you up to, Peyton?” he said. “I’m reading a note,” I said, “I mean I was reading a note.” He had a bald spot, over it he smoothed back nervously a twist of kinky gray hair; expatriate like myself, a happy scholar gypsy. “Dear gull, what’s the matter? You look like you’ve been having trouble.” “Nothing,” I said, “I was just reading the note.” “Ayess, I see.” He chewed on his pipestem, looking at me gravely. “I was hunting for Harry, but he’s gone out,” I said. “Ayess.” He pulled out a huge linen handkerchief. “Now you have smut all over your face. All amongst the tears. Tommy wipe.” He wiped my face, humming some tune, smelling of tobacco. “There now. How’s about a drinkie up at my place? You can wait for Harry boy there.” “No, thank you, Tommy,” I said. “I’ve got to go right now over to find him. He’s gone out with Lennie.” “Dear gull, do you think you’d better? You look all whacked, you know. What on earth have you been doing? Now come on with me——” “No,” I said, “thank you, Tommy. I’ve got to go find him.” I backed down the hall past the mailboxes, holding the bag at my breast, watching him: the pipe in his hand now, eyebrows up, and a smile on his lips, perplexed and concerned. He put out a bony hand. “Dear gull——” but I pulled open the door and went out into the street. Heat smoldered in the air like a living flame. The children had gone, and the mother. Pigeons clucked and rustled on the rooftops. A little old Italian staggered past, perishing beneath the load of an armchair, groaning, sweating; far down the street a hydrant burst in a fountain of silver water, and three boys in shorts scampered in and out, and darted and retreated like slick brown bees toward a silver blossom. Shrill cries in the air, and a plane muttered overhead, but the rest of the street was silent. A taxi came slowly by, I stuck out my hand. He opened the door for me, reaching back with his arm, and I said, “Forty, Washington Mews.” I put the bag down beside me on the seat, kept my fingers on it. His name was Stanley Kosicki, 6808 behind the dust-smeared glass, and he said, “The man on the radio says that bomb’ll finish up the war inna hurry.” I didn’t answer. I took out my compact and put powder on the tear-streaks, then painted my lips. “I was in World War One. In France. Argonne, Belleau Wood, Shadow Terry. You know how many times I was wounded? Take a guess.” “I don’t know,” I said. “How many times?” “Take a guess,” he said. “Oh,” I said, “three times.” I looked out the window; we were on the avenue, halted at a stoplight, and I watched those who crossed by: a Western Union boy poking along; twins in a baby stroller and their mother, drinking a Coke; a Jewish woman, fifty maybe sixty, with red pancake makeup and a lavender veil thick as a fishnet: she wore a look of anguish, and all of them, sweating, including the wilted, sun-prickled twins, were trailed by two lesbians in trousers, who loudly flaunted their tough, sad voices on the suffocating air. The light blinked green, we went on; he said, “Three times! Guess again.” “Two,” I said. “Four times,” he said, “more than any man in my outfit.” “That’s nice,” I said. “I seen it all,” he said, “Argonne, Belleau Wood, Shadow Terry. A buck private I started out, too. Guess what I ended up at?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Take a guess.” “Oh,” I said, “major.” Sweat oozed out in beads behind his ears, through the bristles of his gray hair. “Major! Guess again.” “Oh,” I said, “I don’t know. Captain?” “Captain! Naw. Master Sergeant. I went in buck private and I rose up higher than anybody I joined up with in my outfit.” I couldn’t think. I was tired from praying, and from weeping, too, and I was ashamed Tommy Givings had seen me: why was it when I thought of prayer I thought of home: why these two things always together, giving me grief? So for a moment thoughtless I glided up the avenue in content, cooled by the breeze, listening to the driver. He talked of Shadow Terry then, we passed Fourth Street, and I thought—it came fast as light, this thought, I surrendered—of Harry meeting me, once more, at Albert Berger’s door. It’s me, I’d say, it is I, Peyton your darling, come home to the land of the living. Well, there would be
that hesitation, only natural, in which his face would darken some, he’d shake his head, but it would be only the puzzled prelude to a smile: he’d take my hand, move out into the hall. Land of the living indeed, picking me up and whirling me around in that way, so that my heels would go clacking against the walls. Land of the living indeed! Maybe we wouldn’t go back in; no, we wouldn’t go back in to Albert Berger’s and his gang of lost moral libertines, as Harry used to say. No longer the air-conditioned carpet, the dry martini, the wet Freudian soul, as Harry used to say. Let’s get out of here, baby, he’d say. And I’d say, Let’s go where there’s grass. And he’d get Lennie’s car and we’d bump through the dusk toward grass and trees and rocks—perhaps to Long Island, to his uncle’s house, or maybe Connecticut, where there was an inn we knew. Yet the clock first, in the hall. Yet again, perhaps later, in the darkness: Darling, I bought us a present, much too expensive, it cost $39.95 but you don’t mind. And so it would be just that way: globed from the atoms in the whirling night, among the springs and jewels and the safely operating, bright celestial wheels. Our bed transformed, a spring coiled, softer than the feathers from a dandelion, sheltered by steel from the threat of hell or anything. Yet lying. And we could hear the sound of katydids among the trees as we always did, in the pine-smelling, frog-filled Connecticut night. It happened at the inn, where Harry and I. Yet lying. And only I knew it wasn’t Harry at all, and the taxi driver, peering back at me through green sunglasses, must have heard the noise I made in my throat, for he said, “Watsa matter, lady?” only I knew it had not been Harry at all. Remembered that: when I lay down in Darien with Earl Sanders it hadn’t been Darien the second night at all, but the inn, outside Torrington, and the night was filled with the smell of pine, and the noise of katydids: then he pulled back the sheets and said, Baby, you’re good at this, and I smelled woodsmoke in the air and felt his soft, fat flesh; there was the juke box from below: To-night—we—LOVE (while the moon is): then in my drowning soul the birds pranced solemnly across the plain and their feathers rustled flightless in the evening, but with a noise, like the chill, fretful chatter of katydids. How long, Lord, wilt Thou hide Thyself forever? “Watsa matter, lady, you sick? You shakin’ like a leaf.” I looked straight into his mirrored eyes. “Remember how short my time is,” I said. “You wan’ me to stop at a drugstore? You look like you got the colic,” he said. “No, that’s all right,” I said, “I’m all right. I just don’t have much time.” He swerved past a bus and turned down Eighth Street. “Don’t you worry none,” he said, “I’ll have you there in two minutes. Flat.” He hocked something up, spat it out the window; in the fading afternoon two young men strolling along, one with an earring, both in silk verdigris pants. Shall Thy wrath burn like fire? I couldn’t think again, then thought flooded over me with a rustle of feathers, scraping, katydid wings: suppose. Yes. Suppose it was not like that at all, but that he should say you just go to hell. Suppose that turned out to be. Then I should never go home, south again, but always uptown like this, always north: and he shall never come again. I couldn’t help it, with Harry going: once at night at Uncle Eddie’s in the mountains, it was summer and cold and upstairs alone the katydids scared me: she closed the door, sealing me in blackness, with only my child’s fearsome conscience—the alarm clock at my bedside whirring away, bright with greenly evil, luminous dots and hands. I knew nothing about birds then, or guilt, but only my fear: that I should be borne away on the wings of katydids, their bewhiskered faces that nuzzled mine and brittly crackling claws that pinched my flesh, a hum of wings overhead carrying me outward and outward and outward into the alien northern night; more I couldn’t know—only perhaps to land among the rocks and the trembling unfriendly ferns, swooning in the darkness, serf-child to the katydids forever. So in my bed I cried but voiceless, afraid to call really (afraid of her anger), the words strangled in my throat. Instead, I covered up my head with the pillow and peered out at the clock: friend and enemy: I knew that once past my conscience, those wicked, luminous dots and hands, I would find my peace amid the consoling wheels. Yet alas, and I knew alas for it was what they said in the fairy books, I was thwarted by those evil, luminous eyes; they wouldn’t let me go into my clock, and the gathering shrill wings of the katydids scared me so that I called aloud, “Mother, Mother, Mother.” And she came in her slip, a lovely silhouette against the door. Shame on you, Peyton. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Then the door closed and I was alone. Then Bunny came up from the party below, weaving through the furniture: I could smell the whisky and the sweat beneath his arms, he lay down in the darkness beside me and told me about the katydid circus, never be afraid. Then he went to sleep and I put my hand on his chest, and felt his heart beating and heard him snore: could there ever be a love like ours? “Now, lady, you just stick with old Stan Kosicki,” he said, “I know this city like the back of my hand,” and we had drawn up at the corner of Fifth Avenue, another stoplight. I could see the entrance to the Mews down the street, I wanted to get out now. “I’ll just get out——” I began. But he raised his hand and curled his lips, grandiose, in complete command. “Now you just wait, lady, and we’ll go right there. You look sick. Just leave it to old Stan Kosicki.” So we waited, and I tried not to think of home, but. Oh, I tried not to think that way, yet if Harry. So we waited. I looked out the window; the afternoon had grown later, yet nothing had seemed to cool. On the corner a man in droopy, stained white sold Good Humors from a cart: two little girls in sunsuits held out nickels for orange ice, and there was a woman in slacks, with a pointed, insolent face like the Afghan she held on a leash, who bought an ice-cream sandwich: she held it down to the dog and he devoured it with a greedy pink tongue. Heat-worn people, moving languidly through the afternoon, fanned themselves with newspapers; I began to get thirsty again, and I thought of home. Albert Berger had said, “Of course you suffer over that, you have revealed more than you know to me, my pretty; after all (his eyes watering), I am a student of people; it is symptomatic of that society from which you emanate that it should produce the dissolving family: ah ah, patience my pretty, I know you say symptomatic not of that society, but of our society, the machine culture, yet so archetypical is this South with its cancerous religiosity, its exhausting need to put manners before morals, to negate all ethos—— Call it a husk of a culture. It’s a wonder, my pretty, you weren’t put out at the age of six, like certain tribal children in the d’Entrecasteaux, to dig grubs for yourself alone.” “Yes. Yes.” That’s what I replied. But I remembered grass, and gulls. “All right, lady,” the driver said, pulling up in front of the Mews, “old Stan Kosicki brings you to your destination safe and sound.” The meter gave a last click; he stopped it, pulling up the flag: 0.50. I felt in my purse but I counted only thirty cents. Terror. This would mess me up with Harry, and I remembered him, before it really got bad: “I hate to bring it up, darling, but you’ll have to be more careful with the dough, I hate to say it, darling, but it all becomes part of the syndrome, along with the dirt beneath the bed, do you understand?” “I only have thirty cents,” I told the driver, and my heart was pounding not because of him but of my Harry: what would he say when he had to pay? But then I said, “But just wait a minute, and I’ll go get some.” “Sure, lady, old Stan Kosicki is patience incarnated.” He stuck up his hand, lit a cigarette and leaned back. Or was it, I thought, sitting on the edge of the seat and retrieving my bag, or was it—— It was Strassman who talked about the syndrome: you are dangerously abstracted, he said and he wiped his nose, you do need my help you know. “Oh pooh, you’re crazy,” I said aloud, and the driver turned and chuckled: “That’s right, lady. It’s a crazy world. Sometimes I wonder if even old Stan Kosicki ain’t crazy.” “Not you,” I said. I got out of the cab. “Just a minute,” I said. Then I walked across the asphalt drive to Albert Berger’s, the first door painted white, with a bronze phallic knocker from Spanish Morocco. A skinny Hindu answered right away, before I had time to think. Of Harry coming or anything. His name w
as Cyril Something: he had an accent both Balliol and Indian and a perpetual leer, he had a martini in his hand. “ ‘Allo, Peyton,” he said. “Hello Cyril,” I said. “Is Harry here?” “You mean Meestah Harry Meelah?” “Yes,” I said, “Harry Meelah. Is he here?” He stood wobbling for a minute, looking at me and thinking, with a wrinkled brow and blue, pouting lips. “Naw,” he said, “I’m rawther afred not.” I couldn’t think: I stood watching him, then I turned sideways toward the avenue and saw a flight of sparrows come from a tree, sprung out of the foliage like a swarm of wasps, chattering shrilly, disappear over a housetop. A bus passed south, six people on the top deck absorbing the sunshine: I couldn’t think. Then I thought: oh Harry. I held the bag to my breast, bent my head down, heard the patient steady click and whir of wheels. You, swiftly fading. Where had he gone? “Why, Peyton, why do you weep?” Cyril said slyly. “I’m drowning,” I said. “Drowning?” “No,” I said, “I mean I’m not drowning. I mean I’m crying because I’m so happy. Because the war is over and we have saved the world from democracy.” “Queer girl. Won’t you plis come in? Albert will be delayted, you know.” “Yes.” I wiped the tears on my bag, and the powder came off, too. I stepped inside, my reflection in the hallway mirror: a perfect mess. Cyril opened the other door; he wobbled slightly. He put a hand on my waist, propelled me forward gently: “We haven’t seen you for such a time.” “I know——” I began, but then I thought, why am I here? With Harry not. And I turned around, clutching my clock: “No really, Cyril, I mustn’t come in.” “And why not, mayt I ask?” He had wide-spaced teeth, his fleshy lips surrounded them like blue rubber cushions. I said, “Because he’s not here.” “Who?” Puzzled again, the mystified East. “Harry,” I said, “Harry!” “Ah,” he leered, “Meestah Harry Meelah. Well, stay a bit, p’raps someone will provide you weeth info’mation.” “Perhaps,” I said. He turned me around again, pushed me into the room: an air-conditioned seacave with strangled sick sunshine and darkness infringing upward, where cigarette smoke curled in milky wreaths and Albert Berger, like Poseidon and his trident approaching me through the gloom with a cocktail shaker, sidestepped the rocks huddled on the floor. “Ah, Peyton,” he said, “my pretty one, you’ve come back to us.” “Yes,” I said, “where’s Harry?” “Oh, my dear, you’ll have to ask Lennie. He’s in the study with La Baronesse du Louialles.” “Oh,” I said. He hovered over me with a caved-in chest, eyes watering allergically behind his glasses, skin white as a turnip. “And Harry isn’t here?” I said. “Oh, dear no, he left almost as soon as he came. Something about work, poor drudge. Come sit down by me, pretty one.” His voice was high and hollow, sexless, ageless, almost extinct, like the empty clacking of a metal bird. “Come with me, my pretty,” he said, and he took my hand with fingers chilled by the cocktail shaker and by something else cold and internal, too, as if his heart pumped not blood but frigid, dark, subterranean water. Thus I passed with him through the room, my clock clutched tightly, thinking of home. I saw their faces in the darkness: Daphne Gould, who had once taken on a pony; and Mario Fischer, the millionaire’s son; Dirk Schuman and Louis Pesky and Schuyler van Leer, the anthropology students; Pierre Liebowitz, a rich florist who dyed his hair; two soft-voiced Negro boys I didn’t know; Pamela Oates and Lily Davis, who were in love; Edmonia Lovett, who once almost suffocated to death in her orgone box; four stray soldiers—all these gave me a swift darting glance, and turned away. Then Albert and I were sitting on the window seat; I had a martini in my hand and he spoke: I half-listened, watched the beautiful day begin to expire outside with a final gush of yellow light; across the alley the slate roofs of the houses were in sunshine, the walls in shadow: soon the roofs, too, the gables, birds’ nests and crawling ivy, would be in shadow, and in darkness. A cloud above drifted slowly eastward, fluffy, touched with pink, shaped like Africa: lands I will never see, the far coasts, flamingo evenings, the yellow, rotted jungle dawn. I said, “It’s been a lovely day.” And Albert Berger said, “Pretty romantic one. Have you thought of forests and wonderlands and fairy books like you used to? Have you been thinking of all the impossible things?” I said, “I’ve been thinking of morns by men unseen. I’ve been thinking of a far fantastic dawn …” and I had a cramp, bent over, heard in the dizzy, spark-speckled darkness one single voice hoarse and arrogant, somewhere on the floor: “Malin-owski! How can you say that? Old Bronislaw?” I pressed the bag and clock to my belly, trying to push back that pulsating pain: worse this time than ever before: I bit my tongue. It went away. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should be at home.” I sat erect, not looking at Albert Berger but outside, at the sunshine. “Poor pretty,” he said, “even the loveliest must wear the duodecimal disgrace, bear the catamenial anguish. I should write a book of sonnets about the poor lost lovelies; perhaps Cleopatra used a wad of crushed roses, you know, and I suspect that Helen——” But I couldn’t listen; I watched the sunshine, thinking of Harry: first Helen, then blessed Beatrice, sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss: once I squatted beneath the rosebush by the kitchen. It was summer, too, and I heard Ella singing in the pantry and the constant buzz of bees; then I saw water trickle on the ground beneath me, a rivulet flooding toward the garden, and Helen snatched me up among the smell of roses: you mustn’t mustn’t can’t you be proper. God punishes improper children. I could smell roses and I heard the bees buzzing in the heat; then Bunny came and we sat out on the seawall and he read me James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby … “So it must be difficult, pretty one,” said Albert Berger. “What’s not proper?” I said. “What?” he said; his skin seemed to get paler and paler in the sunlight. “What’s not proper?” I said. “My dear girl,” he said, “such a feckless wandering mind you must have. I didn’t say proper, I said difficult.” “Oh,” I said. “I said it must be difficult for you?” “What’s difficult?” I asked. “To live in this distressing world—alone now as you are—with no real intellectual supports to put your mind at ease. Have you heard about the bomb?” “Yes,” I said. He leaned back on the seat and made a weak sexless laugh. “Coo!” he said. “Man’s triumph. I’ve been predicting it for months and months. To Louis and Schuyler. Now they’re appalled, such lovely boys but soft-minded, unwilling, safe in their bosom of social anthropology—social, mind you: the science is getting so cluttered with offshoots that it begins to look like Medusa’s hair—unwilling to accept the historical determinism, tragic as it is to the spirits of neo-humanists, the historical determinism—may I not even say propriety, to use your word?—they are unable to accept the pure fact in all its beauty. Man’s triumph! Jaweh! So up in bloody pulp go the children of Nippon … and yet … and yet——” His eyes watered, he sipped daintily at his martini. “And yet,” he went on in a sudden sad tone, “even Louis and Schuyler, they don’t have to agree. My view of the universe is harsh and brutal. In each act of creation, be it the orgasm of the simplest street cleaner or the explosion of atoms, man commits himself to the last part of the evolutionary cycle; by that I mean death, frosty, cruel and final. Thus I do not ask you any more, my pretty, to believe with me that the evil in man is both beautiful and preordained. Socially, I’m catholic and I have the most tolerant of minds. You just stay as pretty as you are, safe in your land where a whimpering Jesus gently leads Winnie-the-Pooh down a lane of arching plum blossoms. You will always—why, pretty one, you have tears in your big brown eyes.” “Yes,” I said, “remember how short my time is.” He put his hand on mine, like some polyp from an arctic sea. “Oh dear,” he said, “I’m very sorry. Really, Peyton, I’m very sorry. Is there anything I can do?” I looked into my bag for something to blow my nose on, saw the clock, covered it up quickly. Albert Berger handed me a handkerchief, I blew my nose: a young man leaned back against the rug, rolled his eyes up at one of the soldiers: “But you see,” I heard him say, “I’m happy in my inversion. I have found but a perfect relationship with Angelo, but a perfect one.” “Yes,” I said to Albert Berger, “you can tell me where Harry is. That’s how yo
u can help me.” “Pretty one. You’re such a lost child. You do want your Harry back, don’t you?” I said, “Yes. Yes. Oh, yes.” He snickered. “Such a brave new girl. You do expect a lot. May I make a suggestion—of course it wasn’t Harry but little Laura who told me, who finally impels me to suggest this to you—might I suggest that you rid your house of dairymen much as you might cockroaches; then I have no doubt that your Harry could take a different stand. As it is, Harry is such a lovely boy, I’ve had such hopes——” No, I thought. Across the room Edmonia Lovett heaved to her feet, dumpy in winter sack tweeds, preening her henna hair. “Why does he go out with her,” she shrilled, “when he can go out with an analyzed dame like me who can reach a climax?” I watched her lurch to the phonograph, put on a record, the Wang-Wang Blues; yet I watched her through water for a moment, my drowning, the submarine cave, the dwarf shapes floor-sprawled, all immersed in transparent aqueous light. The voices came up as from the bottom of the sea: Albert Berger, he said I must exorcise my dairymen, yet he didn’t know, nor could he hear, as I did somewhere among the draperies behind me, the fidget and stir of flightless wings. Albert Berger, I must say, can’t you ever know what it is when you lie down in a strange bed and with a strange man and in a strange country; there is no menace in their tread, which is so cruel: across the darkening sand they come stiff-legged craning their necks, stately and regal, ruffling their lovely plumes. So even clutching his hot hostile flesh, you can’t find peace in the dawn but hinge your eyelids down tightly, feel his Christopher against your breast and then even then they pursue you across the plain, incurious and bored like feathered kings: Albert Berger, O my God! I would cry out, don’t I know my own torture and my own abuse? How many times have I lain down to sin out of vengeance, to say so he doesn’t love me, then here is one that will, to sleep then and dream about the birds, and then to wake with one eye open to the sweltering, joyless dawn and think my life hath known no father, any road to any end may run, to think of home. I would not pray to a polyp or a jellyfish, nor to Jesus Christ, but only to that part of me that was pure and lost now, when he and I used to walk along the beach, toward Hampton, and pick up shells. Once he took me in his arms and gave me beer to drink and I heard her voice from behind the mimosas, shame, shame, shame. “For shame, pretty one,” Albert Berger said, straight through his martini. “Why do you cause that lovely boy such trouble? Did Strassman say merely that you were dangerously abstracted or that you were psychogenically incapable of sexual fidelity——” “You just hush,” I said. He raised one finger whimsically aloft, pale Ichabod Crane ready for a pronouncement, but Lennie came up then, shirt sleeves rolled up over his pink sunburned arms. “Hello, honey,” he said nicely. “What’s the matter? You look all done in.” “Lennie, tell me please where Harry is, please do,” and I took his fingers, my handbag falling to the floor with a sudden frightening, jangling bell: all the eyes goggled up through the water from the floor bottom through wreaths of smoke like trailing seaweed, alert and popeyed as startled fish. Still the alarm clattered on, muffled some by the bag, but loud. I groped for it, hearing through the room a slow-rising chorus of laughter. Then I found the button and turned off the bell. Lennie sat down laughing beside me. “What have you got in there, honey?” he said. “A time bomb?” “No,” I said, “a clock. For Harry and me. It’s a present.” “Oh,” he said. The smile faded; he looked at me kindly, but with suspicion. “Are you going to give it to him today, Peyton?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “Tell me where he is, Lennie. Please do.” Through the room the laughter dwindled, then died out: the bespectacled faces regarding me with interest. Someone whispered. Someone said, “My God,” looking at me—they who have no God, less than mine, a prayer automaton, less than mine, who dwells in some land I shall never see again. Albert Berger moved away through the water. “Listen, Peyton,” Lennie said. “Why don’t you go over to Cornelia Street and stay with Laura for a while? You look positively awful. What have you been doing? You look like you’ve been on a two weeks’ drunk.” He paused. “I told Harry I wouldn’t tell. It’s that simple. You go stay with Laura——” “No,” I said, pulling at his sleeve. “No, Lennie, please tell me where he is. Please do.” “I can’t.” “Please do.” “I can’t. You look like you need something to eat. Go tell Laura I said break out the bacon and eggs——” “But Laura doesn’t like me anymore,” I said, “so I can’t.” “She doesn’t doesn’t like you,” Lennie said. “She’s just disappointed and irked with you like everyone else——” “Oh, no,” I said: but no, not even Lennie, he didn’t understand. So I would say Lennie, behold, I tell you a misery: “I’m sorry, Lennie, for what I’ve done, today I’m trying to exorcise my milkman and my guilt.” Couldn’t he see? But then I said, “Please, Lennie. I’m drowning.” He took my hand and looked me in the eyes: it was a disappointed look, past irritation but not quite disgust: “Peyton, honest to Christ, please don’t give us that again today. Really, Peyton …” “But I am, Lennie,” I said. “Can you blame him,” he said, “can you really blame him? He’s done everything he could for you. He’s worried himself sick, he’s lost weight, he’s nearly had a breakdown. Every time you’ve come back he’s listened to you, he’s agreed with you. Then you begin all over, with your bad checks, your Tony, or that guy Sanders. You wouldn’t even stick with Strassman. And the terrible part, Peyton, is the fact that in spite of all you’ve done he still loves you. But he just can’t take it——” Lennie would always be the first to understand but now he wasn’t, nor could I tell him all, the reason: when I lay down in Darien with Earl Sanders I hated it; on the terrace, lying on that blanket, I could hardly hear the swollen, rustling plumes for the other things that bothered me: I was sorry in this way I’d punished Harry for his defection so small, and then there was the smell of paint on the terrace railing and I thought of summers long ago. Once we went down where they were painting a boat on the beach: I remembered Bunny’s hand, and the way the sand came up between my toes, the paint chemical and hot on the swarming summer air, swimmers beyond and gulls floating in the blinding blue: then he squeezed my hand and I remembered remembering I will remember this forever. But at the door something knocked and the Hindu Cyril answered, just then, letting in a rectangle of light. That driver, Stanley Kosicki, stood there; he said, “That’s the dame. She owes me fifty cents.” I had forgotten. “Lennie,” I said, “I forgot. That taxi driver. I owe him fifty cents but I only have thirty. Here. Could you pay him the rest?” Lennie looked at me, the disappointment disgust. “Christ, Peyton. You take a taxi when you don’t have hardly subway money and then you make the guy wait. What’s the matter with you?” “I’m sorry, Lennie,” I said. “I really did forget. Here, please take this thirty and pay him the rest. I’ll pay you back.” “Oh, nuts.” He got up, walked to the door, his shoulder finally obscuring the driver’s scowling, muttering face. So desperately I tried to make my lips work, to say, “I’m sorry,” to the driver; the door closed. I sat there saying nothing, listening, with my bag uptilted, to the ticking, ordered wheels: then across the room I saw Albert Berger’s mouth yawn with noiseless laughter like a shark’s, say: “Coo! And the irony is this: with the revulsion we humans have for the body, the secretions and juices and, as it were, plasms, the weakest still lie down in the moist and odorous conjugal embrace. Coo! And yet——” And yet now more strong than before something in me stole into the clock: we lay there together, Harry and I, in the safety of springs and the order of precisely moving wheels, like sleeping to exist in some land where we were young again, and dream of meadows or such consoling visions that come at the brink of sleep, dogs that barked once in the September woods, ducks across the sky, and the way he carried me up and upward—oh Christ!—when I was the Spirit of Light. “Now please do what I told you,” Lennie said, looking down at me. “Go over and tell Laura to feed you. You look starved. Then go home. I’ll talk to Harry later. Maybe——” I said, “No, I can’t wait. Please tell me where he is. He’s going to come back with me
. And the clock.” “What?” he said. I didn’t answer. “What is this about the clock? What are you carrying it around for?” “Nothing. I just bought it,” I said. “Oh,” he said. “Well now, you just——” I got up. “No, Lennie,” I said. “Please listen to me. You’ve got to tell me where he is.” “No,” he said. “You’ve got to,” I said, “you’ve just got to. If you don’t——” He put his hands on my shoulders. “Shhh-h, honey, take it easy. If I don’t, what?” I turned away. “I don’t know,” I said, “I’ll——” “What?” he said. “I don’t know,” I said, “kill myself.” He grabbed me by the arm. “Look, baby. I think you are in a bad state. Look, my car’s outside, I’ll call Strassman and we’ll get Harry and drive over to Newark——” “No,” I said, “he’s crazy. Strassman. He has a cold.” “A what!” Lennie said. “Nothing,” I said, “I mean—I mean just tell me where Harry is.” I turned and pulled him by the sleeves. “You’ve got to, Lennie. You’ve got——” Lennie put his arm around my waist and led me toward the hall, past the people squatting like rocks, through the submarine drowning light; the Wang-Wang Blues petered away and the young men rolled their eyes like agates through seaweed wreaths of smoke. So in the hall then. “All right,” he said, “but if he won’t see you, promise to come here or go to Laura’s. You need somebody to take care of you.” “Thank you, Lennie,” I said, “oh, thank you. Please forgive me, Lennie. Do you think I’m bad?” “No,” he said, “no, honey. You just need straightening out. Why do you——” “Why do I what?” I said quickly. “Nothing,” he said. “Why what?” I said. “Why do you act like you do? Why did you have to run off with that Tony guy that last time? That’s what got Harry. It’d get me, too. Why? Why?” His voice was gentle; though I tried, how could I speak to Lennie, when behind us in the foyer, at his words, prancing harmlessly with speckled, flightless feathers, came across through the polished regency chairs—the brasswork, the spotless mirror—my poor, despised, wingless ones: how could I explain that? Or when I remembered: Harry doesn’t love me else why would he have hollered at me like that about the checks unpaid and the dirt beneath the bed and lying down in Darien with Earl Sanders, my agonizing vengeance … That would be difficult to explain, indeed: that I couldn’t have Harry holler at me like that, so I must lie down with someone, perishing in my hatred, hearing the echo in the night: “What do you mean I don’t love you, Peyton? I love you more than you’ll ever know. I’m just not your father. I’m not supposed to put up with these things.” Thus an echo in my guilt and feathered darkness; how could I explain this to him? “I don’t know why,” I said. “I don’t know.” “Don’t cry,” Lennie said, and he took out a big red handkerchief and wiped at my tears. “Don’t cry, honey. Now look. Harry’s painting. Marshall Freeman lent him his studio this afternoon. Harry’s there. It’s right around the corner, on University Place. Look, I’ll put down the address.” And he took out his wallet and a slip of paper and began to write down the address. “There,” said Lennie. “Now promise me. If he won’t see you, you promise to come back here or call me, or go over and see Laura. I can’t guarantee——” “Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “He’ll see me. Soft and tender is my Harry.” “A new line, huh?” said Lennie. “Yes,” I said. “Thanks, Lennie.” He closed the door behind me; I was sweating again, standing in the hot, still afternoon. I walked east. The houses across the alley were drowned in shadows; even on the rooftops there was no light. Way off in the river, so faint they seemed like car horns, boat whistles moaned: it was high tide, I guessed; they’d be pulling out to sea. At home high tide too, or thereabouts, and between the seawall and the water not more than two feet of sand, where we’d walk carefully along, kicking the driftwood and shells; Ella Swan would come out for the washing in the afternoon August heat, raising her hand to shield her eyes, to look at the ships passing out to sea: thus once Ella and Maudie and I—we proceeded slowly across the grass, listening to the bees in the rosebush, smelling the sea. Thus once. Only I couldn’t remember, but just know the mimosas nearby, and that was another time. Thus she brought it up: when you let her fall when you let her fall. And the mimosas in the heat fingering the air, pale strands like hands of water: when you let her fall. And Strassman said, “Birds?” And I said, “No birds for that,” for birds were for another time, another guilt, when I lay down with all the hostile men. “No birds,” I said. “Then what?” he said. Then I couldn’t remember, couldn’t tell Strassman of this separate despair hidden beneath the smell of mimosas and sea somewhere beyond my reckoning: you let her fall. But I didn’t. “Perhaps you didn’t but you are still dangerously abstracted.” Then he was toying with me, that bastard psychoanalyst. I said all hope lies beyond memory, back in the slick dark womb, and he said, “That’s what I mean, your abstraction,” yet couldn’t he see, too? Why was it when I thought of her I thought of blessed Beatrice? That was what I’d like to know, Dr. Irving Strassman; please to remove that Kleenex from your silly nose: was it because once when we were blown like petals through the years of our innocence he said twin heroines have I: one fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars, the other blessed Beatrice, O Light Eternal, self-understanding, shining on thy own. Something like that. But mixed-up. And when he said, Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Then I cried. Then Strassman said, “But there’s no connection.” How could I tell him about the mimosas, the light at home coming down and the bees sailing plumply about in the salty air? You let her fall, Helen said. Then I walked down alone on the seawall; then Bunny came up and took my hand: we saw darkness fall across the bay and I thought of Grandmother with snuff beneath her lip. Schlage dock, gewünschte Stunde. “Are you sick, dear?” I was leaning with my head up against the gate, and the old woman came out—she had a dog on a leash—tapping me on the shoulder. I didn’t answer. “Can I help you, dearie?” I looked up. She had a wide, cheerful face and blue eyes. “Are you sick?” she said. “Yes,” I said, “I have a headache.” “Poor dear,” she said, “hold Buster and I’ll give you a piece of Aspergum.” I took the chain, holding it along with my bag. “It’s like chewing gum but it’s got aspirin in it. Here, now just pop it into your mouth. Why don’t you go home and rest?” I stuck the gum in my mouth and began to chew, tasting peppermint. “I will,” I said. “Thanks very much.” “Not at all,” she said, “you just go home and rest. Here, I’ll let you out of the gate.” The dog sniffed at my heels, I stepped out onto the street. “Now do what I say,” she said, smiling through the fence. “I will,” I said. “Thank you. Good-by.” I spat the gum into the gutter: WIFE HACKS LOVER, WATCHES HIM DIE, the scrap of tabloid said against the grating; a puff of breeze caught it, pushed it along. I crossed the street with the green light, the wind flicking my skirt; but it was a hot breeze, filled with some suffocating vapor and the odor of a bakery, and I sweated more; then the breeze died. I looked at the address Lennie gave me: it said 15, and I walked south down the block gazing upward at the—21, 19, 17—descending numerals. Then I came to 15 and then I thought: suppose the clock again. Suppose the blessed, wonderful, enclosing, warm clock. Suppose he should fail to realize the value and the sacrifice: $39.95, our womb all jeweled and safe. Suppose. Just suppose. But I didn’t want to think about that. I climbed three brick steps, pushed open the door and went in: FREEMAN on the mailbox, first floor rear. I pushed the bell and waited, but I waited even less than a time to think, for the buzzer went off right away, clattering beneath my hand, an imprisoned rattlesnake. I went in and down the hall, past a frieze of tiles, a table littered with mail, a mirror in which I saw myself—shocked, with circles under my eyes, and disordered hair: I passed on breathing, from behind chrysanthemum wallpaper, the stench of other peoples’ lives. My drowning. I paused: please let him say yes. Then I walked on, and then I reached the door. I pressed the bell, heard it sound inside somber chimes—bing bong bong—staid and solemn, churchlike, outside my soul. “Who is it?” I didn’t answer, stood with my head against the door and listened to my
heart’s fearful pounding, the clock ticking too, against my breast, all ordered and safe. “Who the hell is it?” Then footsteps across the creaking timbers. “Yes?” he said. I didn’t answer, for fear he. Suppose he. Couldn’t he understand the miracle of my invention, the soaring dark soul-closet, lit only by jewels through the endless night? I confess an ecstasy at that: thinking, while he stood separated from me for one second by the thinnest panel of oak, of us untroubled through some aerial flight across time, the ticking like music, only better, sheltered from the sun and from dying, amid the jewels and wheels. “Who is it, dammit. Speak up.” I held my breath, But yes. He threw open the door, stood there silent when he saw me, tense and grim: I saw a vein pulse at his throat. “It’s me,” I said, smiling, “come back to the land of the living.” “You’ve got the wrong house,” he said. “We don’t want any.” Past him in the room an easel and a painting, windows thrown open to the fading light. There was a streak of blue oil across his brow, and the sweat stood up on it in tiny globes, and he said, “Why don’t you go away?” Yet this I had prepared for too; I said, “I brought you a present.” “You mean a bribe?” he said. “No,” I said, “a present. Can’t I come in?” “No,” he said, “I’m working.” He started to close the door, and the fright came up in my throat; I said, “I won’t disturb you. I’ll be very quiet.” “No,” he said, “go back to your Italian friend.” “I’m drowning,” I said, and I took his arm; he pulled away. “Oh, Christ,” he said, “go see Strassman or somebody——” “Harry,” I said, “listen to me, please——” He let me in, turned his back on me and walked to the easel; the door slammed behind, I strolled across the floor, holding my clock. He was painting an old man. In grays, deep blues, an ancient monk or a rabbi lined and weathered, lifting proud, tragic eyes toward heaven; behind him were the ruins of a city, shattered, devastated, crumbled piles of concrete and stone that glowed from some half-hidden, rusty light, like the earth’s last waning dusk. It was a landscape dead and forlorn yet retentive of some glowing, vagrant majesty, and against it the old man’s eyes looked proudly upward, toward God perhaps, or perhaps just the dying sun. “That’s a beautiful picture,” I said. He didn’t answer, took a brush and painted a gray stroke across the ruined city. “I think it’s wonderful,” I said. Still he didn’t answer, painted on, his shoes scraping on the floor. I sat down on a chair and watched him. Outside in the garden the paradise trees stirred almost imperceptibly in the stifling air; sparrows rustled among the leaves, chirping, and the yells of children came from afar, like something out of memory. I said it then: “Come back, darling.” He didn’t answer. “Come back,” I said. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done.” Still he didn’t answer; the ruins came closer, faded beneath his touch, soundlessly. He painted on. I thought of the clock, took it out of my bag. “Look, darling, look at the clock I bought us. You were always complaining that that old clock wouldn’t keep time. Now look.” He didn’t say a word. “Look, darling,” I said, “all jeweled and safe,” then wondered: why safe, why that? He turned, held the brush in mid-air, dripping a bead of blue oil. He looked at the clock. In the silence we could hear its ticking, along with the sparrows, the far-off children. “You got it at Macy’s,” he said, “and it cost $39.95. Right?” “Yes,” I said. “And you paid for it by check,” he said. “Yes,” I said. “And the check bounced higher than a kite,” he said, turning back to the easel. “Thank you very much for the present, which I paid for out of our joint quote bank account unquote. Ex-bank account, that is: there’s nothing left.” “Oh,” I said, “oh,” listening to the words over his shoulder and not knowing how his face looked, except the words: bitter and angry and full of disgust: and in the clock, for one brief moment plummeting earthward, he and I crushed and ruined amid all the fiercely disordered, brutally slashing levers and wheels. Yet “Oh,” I said, “oh.” Then I said “I’m sorry, Harry, really I am. I didn’t know. It was a present for you. I’ll get some money from Bunny.” Safe again, the clock upright, soaring through space, Harry and I: it was a close call, I thought. “Why?” he said, and turned angrily, clutching the brush: “Why, why, why? Why, Peyton?” “Why what, darling?” I said. “Why do you do these things? Deliberately, without the slightest twinge of guilt? How can you do it?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I forgot.” “So you say your Bunny’ll pay for it,” he said. “Well, somebody better had. I had to borrow from that ass Berger to cover the check. What’s the matter with you?” “I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.” “No,” he said, and he went back to the easel. “No, it certainly won’t happen again.” Then I walked past him to the window, and the dread began to move up inside. I couldn’t think: the paradise leaves rustled ever so slightly, turning up their bleached undersides to the dying sun. A cat crawled along the fence and a woman called to it—“Toby!”—from where she stood huddled, a shawl around her shoulders, in a garden, among phlox and roses and crimson zinnias. I couldn’t think, the evening had crept part way up the walk here, and I thought I heard thunder in the distance, but it was something else, a subway train, or a truck or remote, fantastic guns. So I said without thinking then, “Come back with me, Harry.” Over my shoulder. “The three of us?” he said. “That would be cozy. We could get free milk, though. I’ll bet.” And I said, very slowly, “But don’t you see, darling? Tony is nothing, nothing at all. I’m sorry, I really am, and I’ve told you so. I was mad at you because you were right, you know. That I was depending on you for everything, and being a spoiled child and everything. But I was mad because that was the truth, don’t you see? And I took out my little vengeance that time you left in a huff. It was cruel to do it that way, I know, but I’m sorry——” “You’ve told me that,” he said, and I heard his voice become more tense, more angry and bitter. “Look, Peyton, I’m trying to work while I’ve got the light. Why don’t you just go?” “No, Harry,” I said, and I turned. “We could have children——” “Those tears won’t help a hell of a lot with me, baby,” he said. “We could have had children a year ago, but that was the time you said I was so unreliable that I wouldn’t know how to be a good father——” “That was the time——” I started to say. “That was the time,” he said, “when I knew the truth and told you so: you are absolutely incapable of love. Oh, to hell with it anyway.” He threw down the brush. “Now will you kindly——” he began, but I said, “Children, Harry, we could——” no sooner than saying it, than remembering again, with a rustle somewhere behind the fading plaster walls and water-stained ceiling, through the stacked-up empty picture frames, of Sightless wings. They came across the sand. Out loud I said, “Protect——” but didn’t finish, remembering that guilt, for the second time, which I had not even told Harry: the doctor, probing, the instrument, the merciless, inside twitching. “Oh, Harry,” I said, “I’m sorry for what I’ve done.” “Protect you from what?” he asked. “From milkmen, from mystery writers?” “No,” I said, sinking down on the windowsill, “from me.” He was gentler with me now. “Where did you pick up your strange code of ethics?” he said. “What’s happened to you? If I could remember you as you were once, that would be fine. At least I could keep my temper. But I don’t think I can even remember that time. When you at least had a few ideals that weren’t product of myth or fairy-book fantasy. That time when you modeled for me and I was fool enough to say to myself that a girl with a face and body as lovely as yours could never be anything but beautiful inside, too. What happened to that time, my lost lady, my blessed Beatrice——” “Don’t,” I said, “please don’t say that, darling.” “I guess I was a fool,” he went on, “with all the suspicions I had, too. Inside. I ignored them. When you’d nag and nag and nag at me for my so-called attentions to other women. Just when you were so Goddamned beautiful that it made me itch just to be in the same room with you. How could I convince you that I had no designs on some other dame, that idiot Epstein girl? I couldn’t. Well, by God I’ve had designs in the past two months. You can bet your sweet life I have. Y
ou want to know how many times I’ve got laid——” “No, Harry,” I said. “Don’t, please.” “Weep your head off,” he said. “The shoe is on the other foot. Isn’t that the metaphor?” “Yes,” I said. He was silent then, shaking a bit and playing with a brush. I tried to think as I watched him, both of us silent for no more than five seconds: couldn’t he see, couldn’t I convince him of, instead of joy, my agony when I lay down with all the other hostile men, the gin and the guilt, the feathers that rustled in the darkness, my drowning? Then I would say: oh, my Harry, my lost sweet Harry, I have not fornicated in the darkness because I wanted to but because I was punishing myself for punishing you: yet something far past dreaming or memory, and darker than either, impels me, and you do not know, for once I awoke, half-sleeping, and pulled away. “No, Bunny,” I said. That fright. I spoke: “Please don’t stay angry with me today, darling. I won’t be able to stand it. Bunny’ll pay for the clock.” “Clock, schmock,” he said. “To hell with the clock. It’s paid for. What I want to know is do I still have to pay the rent for you and Tony?” “No,” I said. “No, don’t talk like that.” “I don’t like to talk like that,” he said. “I’d much rather talk about other things. I’d like to sit around like I think I remember we used to and talk about color and form and El Greco or even just which drugstore sold the best ice cream. Like we used to. Blessed Beatrice——” “Don’t,” I said. He went on, “There are a lot of things I’d like to talk about. Do you realize what the world’s come to? Do you realize that the great American commonwealth just snuffed out one hundred thousand innocent lives this week? There was a time, you know, when I thought for some reason—maybe just to preserve your incomparable beauty—that I could spend my life catering to your needs, endure your suspicions and your mistrusts and all the rest, plus having to see you get laid in a fit of pique. I have other things to do. Remember that line you used to quote from the Bible, How long, Lord? or something——” “Remember how short my time is,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “Well, that’s the way I feel. With your help I used to think I could go a long way, but you didn’t help me. Now I’m on it alone. I don’t know what good it’ll do anyone but me, but I want to paint and paint and paint because I think that some agony is upon us. Call me a disillusioned innocent, a renegade Red, or whatever, I want to crush in my hands all that agony and make beauty come out, because that’s all that’s left, and I don’t have much time——” “I’ll help you,” I said. “Oh, Harry, I’ll help you.” “Balls,” he said. “If this had been the first time, maybe so; I’d still be a fool. But it’s not, it’s the fourth or fifth or sixth; I’ve lost track.” “It’s a beautiful picture,” I said. In the dim light the tragic face still looked heavenward, amid the junk and the rubble, through the final, extinguishing dusk, proud and unafraid, my Harry. Who knows our last end, thrown from the hub of the universe into the dark, into everlasting space: once he said we are small blind sea things pitched up wriggling on the rock of life to await the final engulfing wave, yet my Harry: who can tell the eyes of man gazing ceaselessly upward toward his own ascending spirit? “It’s got belief,” I said, “or something. It’s got——” “It’s time for belief,” he said. “Don’t you think? You should know.” “Yes,” I said, “once I had belief. When we walked along the sand and picked up shells.” “Who?” he said, “you and Sanders in the cabaña. At Rye?” “No,” I said, “Bunny and I.” “You and your bloody father,” he said. “Yes,” I said, not thinking all this time. Then I said this: “I wish you’d take the clock. Even if you bought it. Inside there—did you know?” I took him by the sleeve and drew him closer, smelling the sweat and the paint, the blessed flesh. “Look here,” I said, and I pointed toward the alarm hole. “Look, you know? You know what? We could get inside and float merrily along.” I laughed then, very loudly, not knowing why. “Harry and I among the springs and wheels. It’d be so safe there, to float around and around on the mainspring. The man said there were jewels in there, too, fifteen of them. Wouldn’t it be glorious, Harry, to——” But I felt his hand on my arm then, gripping it tightly; he said, “Peyton, don’t say any more. What’s the matter, honey? Look, there’s something really wrong with you. You’re trembling all over.” “Yes,” I said, “the clock——” Only, “Sit down,” he said. “Sit down here and wait a minute.” And he pushed me down in the chair. “Marshall has some phenobarb around somewhere. Wait a minute——” He started to move away, but I took him by the hand. “No,” I said, “that’s all right, darling, I’ll be all right. I was just afraid.” “Of what?” he said. “I don’t know,” I said. “Have you been taking dope?” he said. “No,” I said, “that’s one vice I haven’t mastered.” “Well, you just rest for a minute,” he said. Then he said, “Awful, awful, awful!” his voice behind me loud and anguished, his worried pacing heels, too, on the floor that creaked: I sat trembling and with a cramp now and the pain rising inside to claw aside every organ, kidneys and stomach and whatever else, and I bent over suddenly, watching the light deepen, turn purple outside above some shingled water tower, the furious pigeons wheeling around: far off there was the sound of thunder, or of guns. “Awful,” he said. “What?” I said. The pain receded, went away. “What’s happened to us,” he said. “That’s what’s awful. That’s what.” “I should see Strassman,” I said. “I think so,” he said. “Why don’t you let Lennie take you over again? On Monday.” “That’ll be too late,” I said. “What?” he said. He sat down and took my hand. “I mean,” I said. “Oh, darling, that’s not what I need. I need! I need——” He squeezed my hand. “Take it easy, darling, take it easy.” “All right,” I said. And he said, “I’m with you, baby.” He said, “I’m with you, baby,” again, like that, and rubbed my hand. “I’ve got the curse,” I said, yet even with this—“I’m with you, baby”—I felt the same despair, no better or worse, and it was strange: I had not anticipated this, but only had foreseen some blossoming joy, where we’d kiss or something, swoon into the clock, and everything would be without fear or dread or pain. The light waved in the sky, sent shadows across the garden, where the cat sprawled asleep in the dusk and the woman came and went in her shawl, picking flowers, carnations. A young man walked out and yawned, looking at the sky, cleaned his spectacles, then went in. The air was hot with guilt; I sweated. Then, Harry, I would say, why are you like this to me? Not for your defection so small, really, did I do my petty vengeance, but just because always you’ve failed to understand. Me. Oh yes, it started out with your hand on the ass of Marta Epstein, so then lying down there was a sweet thing for me. Yet the guilt that always followed: oh God, haven’t you been able to tell how I’ve suffered in my own torture and my own abuse? Why haven’t you understood me, Harry? Why? Why? That’s all I’ve worried about, really: not that you should accept what I’ve done. Of course, no man. But that, once it was done, you should try to understand me, for it lies past memory or dreaming, and darker than either, and once when you were angry at me because these was no toilet paper in the john I could have pitched myself out of the window, so lost did I feel and homeless, and everything. So that when I would come to you screaming about my drowning, and you’d never understand, then I’d have to go back and shriek at him, smothered by the odor of milk. Oh, I would say, you’ve never understood me, Harry, that not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins but because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I’ve sinned only in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new father, a new home. Bother the birds, they were not half so bad as your not understanding. I took my hand away from his. “You’ve just never tried to see my side of the matter, have you?” I said. For a moment he said nothing, nothing at all. I thought he might not answer. Then he said, “What do you mean by that?” Then I wished I hadn’t said it: like always my mouth opened to speak peevish words my consciousness hadn’t thought of, only thought of by that part of me over which I have no authority: my guilt. “What do you mean by that?” he said again in
a flat voice. “I mean,” I said and I knew I had to go on, yet even now still was there no escape? “I mean, Harry, don’t you see? All of this, as bad as it is, is just reacting to the fact that you’ve never understood me. You haven’t tried.” He got up. “Haven’t tried?” he said. “What are you talking about? Haven’t tried, my eye! That’s all I’ve spent two years doing, trying to understand you——” And I thought: oh Christ, I said it and didn’t mean to say it, now there’s no retrieving myself, yet I had to go on: “I mean, darling—don’t get angry—I mean every time I’ve gone off like this it wasn’t entirely my fault, don’t you see? Remember Marta Epstein——” I could feel myself shiver at my own words, and then at his groan. “Oh, really, Peyton, you make me ill. Is that all you came for, to give me a tough time about that?” “Oh, no, darling,” I said quickly. “No, don’t get angry. Please don’t. It’s just, I mean that you—that I’ve been at fault, I mean, but that I never did it unless you gave me some cause to. When I felt I couldn’t rely on you, or when you got cynical——” “Cynical!” he cried. “Who’s cynical? Are you trying to tell me now that just because on the few occasions when I didn’t obey your tiniest whim or spoil you half to death, you had a right to cuckold me, and almost in front of my eyes! Why, God damn it——” “Harry,” I said, “don’t get angry. Please——” “Awful!” he said. “No, it’s true. You just can’t love. You come up here on a pretext that you’re sorry and contrite when all you want me to do is to tell you that I’m the one who should be on my knees, begging your forgiveness for sins I didn’t commit. Isn’t that right, Peyton, isn’t that right?” “Yes,” I said. “I mean no. No, Harry, please believe me——” But he said, “Why don’t you get out? Get out.” “Oh, Harry,” I said, “you just don’t understand.” “You can dry your tears, baby; they don’t work on me. Get out.” “No,” I said. “Get out,” he said, “get the hell out of here, you slut.” “Oh, Harry,” I said, “there you go again. I’m not that. If you just had any understanding——” “I’ve got plenty of it,” he said. “Right at the moment I understand that you want me to go through the same routine you’ve wanted me to go through for months. To take you on my knee and put my strong arms around you and tell you that I was wrong because there was dirt beneath the bed, that I was wrong for calling you on your extravagance, that I was wrong for not letting you ruin us both by being the spoiled, willful child that you are—now you have the wrong idea. Now get the hell out of here.” I put my arms out to him. “Get out.” Across the margin of my mind they came, the wingless birds, the emus and dodos and ostriches and moas, preening their wings in the desert light: a land of slumber, frightening me, where I lay forever dozing in the sands. Would he never come again, protect me from my sin and guilt? I saw them prance staidly in the far corners of the room, at the edges of the walls, through the piled-up picture frames, all grave and unmenacing in the drowned and stifling dusk. Outside the sparrows chirped and fluttered; someone called distantly; I held out my arms. “Get the hell out,” he said. “I’m drowning,” I said. “Help me, Harry.” “Get out,” he said. I got up. “I’ll never be able to come again,” I said. “Good,” he said. I walked past the easel, past the ruined city, the dusty twilight, the tragic upraised eyes. “Don’t make me go,” I said. “It’s a beautiful picture. I’ll help you.” There was no reply; he stood at the door, unconsciously stiff in a gesture he himself would be the first to think funny: one hand on the knob to the open door, the other arm outstretched and pointing downward toward the hall, classical and stern, the cartoon father to the prodigal, pregnant girl: Go, and never darken my door again. “Get out.” His face was red, fierce, unremitting. “It won’t do you any good,” he said. “I’ve tried. I’ve been through this too many times.” “O.K.,” I said. My pride. Then I said, “It seems that you’d try to understand. I never did it except when——” He took my arm and pushed me toward the hall. “That’s enough,” he said. “Tony’ll understand. Tell Tony. Or tell your old man; he’ll take you on his lap and tell you what a good girl you are. As for me, I’ve had it to my——” And the door slammed behind me. I was standing in the hall holding my bag, his last words—“to my very guts”—muffled, deadened now by the walls. I blew my nose on my handkerchief, stood listening to his retreating, creaking footsteps on the floor. Then the footsteps came back again. I held my breath. He opened the door and said, “Here, take your clock.” I felt it cupped in my hands, the rounded, polished metal, the levers and wheels to operate; then the door closed, the diminishing footsteps, he was gone. I pounded on the door: “Harry, let me in! Let me in!” And until I scraped my knuckles. “Let me in, Harry. I’ll be a good girl!” He didn’t answer. I walked down the hallway and out onto the sidewalk, walked along north, past a florist’s, where red cannas were set out like flags in the dusk. The lights were on inside and I bought a daffodil for a nickel and pinned it to my breast. The woman was small and dumpy, with freckled arms. “Don’t you want to use my comb?” she said. “No, thanks,” I said. Then I walked outside, with everything gone, including the clock: this I took to a drain near the curb. I bent down and pulled it out of the bag, holding it close to my ear: I heard the last ticking, all my order and all my passion, globed from the atoms in the swooning, slumbrous, eternal light. Then I threw it into the drain, heard it rattle below against the accretion of gravel and litter, and vanish far below with a splash. I stood up: to my very guts. I thought I saw an old man fishing in the twilight, his line limp in the shimmering, mirrored water, but it was a string he dangled into a basement grating and groped for money; the bum tipped his hat to me as I walked by, and he smelled foul and of whisky. I had twenty-five cents left, and I gave him two dimes. “God will praise you for that,” he said. “I know,” I said, and walked along. I got sleepy, the brother of death haunting me with a dying memento: Bunny would understand that, perhaps he would understand my going: undivorced from guilt, I must divorce myself from life, in this setting part of time. I would go back to Bunny, but she would never permit that, or understand. I walked along, turned the corner at Fourteenth Street and went down into the subway. I had a nickel left for the turnstile; I pushed through. They followed me, prissing along with their stiff-legged gait and their noiseless, speckled wings. I turned. “Go away,” I called, “go away,” but they came on, and a woman passed giggling, said to a man sweating underneath a tower of packages: “Drunk as she can be.” “I am not drunk——” my mouth working, but I didn’t say it, and walked down the stairs. A train came by with that frightful noise; I put my hands over my ears, watching it in a blur of vanishing light, heading south, a forest of up-thrust arms, all tilted as if by a gale. And I thought: it was not he who rejected me, but I him, and I had known all day that that must happen, by that rejection making the first part of my wished-for, yearned-for death-act, my head now glued to the executioner’s block, the ax raised on high and I awaiting only the final, descending, bloody chop: oh my God, why have I forsaken You? Have I through some evil inherited in a sad century cut myself off from You forever, and thus only by dying must take the fatal chance: to walk into a dark closet and lie down there and dream away my sins, hoping to wake in another land, in a far, fantastic dawn? It shouldn’t be this way—to yearn so for dying, or for that chancy, early fate, when I’m young yet and lovely and braver than you think, my God, and my heart beats stronger than a pump: then too I want to be bursting with love, and not with this sorrow, at that moment when my soul glides upward toward You from my dust. What a prayer it was I said; I knew He wasn’t listening, marking the sparrow but not me. So to hell. I was thirsty enough but even hungrier. I wanted to drink water, gallons of it, but I was hungrier first. So I looked into my bag again for some money, hoping. But there wasn’t any. Then I put my hand in the pocket of my skirt and found, covered with lint in the seam, a zinc penny. There was a machine with chocolates in it, four kinds and a mirror: I stood aside from the glass so I wouldn’t see myself. In it I discovered bittra and nut and bittersweet and
plain and I decided on bittra, putting in the penny and pulling the plunger: nothing came out. I pulled it again, but I got no chocolate. Then I tapped the machine but still nothing came out; besides, the subway trains pulled in, red and green lights burning port and starboard like ships at home, and I got on then, thinking about the machine. I sat down next to a Puerto Rican reading a newspaper; he smelled in the heat but no worse than I now, most likely, and the headline read—traficante marijuana: I turned away, thinking of gallons of water to drink, thinking of home. So proceeding north on the Lex. Ave. Express to Woodlawn Ave., where I’d rather not go, but home: if Grandmother lived now, had not dwelt in some jasmine time of long ago. That was hard to remember, that house in Richmond: it was very old, Bunny always said. There were oaks all around it; I remembered those and the hollyhocks: thus in the sweltering summer noon I was carried upward in his arms to lie down in murmurous, strange light, on the damp, strange sheets, napping, hearing along the cobblestones the staid clipclopping of a horse, and a Negro’s voice far off—flowahs! flowahs! I saw him even then, when I was three or four or five: he luxuriated in my drowsing fancy, and my mind went forth, half-dreaming: I saw him below hunched behind his sleepy mare, coal-black, and with a switch for the flies, sweat pouring off his brow as he sourly frowned at the horse’s coarse, flourishing tail: behind them both begonias and lilacs and larkspur nodding beneath an umbrella, cool in pots of clotted moist earth. Then the cry again—flowahs! flowahs!—and the fading hooves along the cobblestones, beneath the sheltering cedars, vanishing flowahs flowahs into my dreams, in a strange bed, in a strange land. And I thought then, oh Bunny, what has happened to me that I hate myself so today: Albert Berger said that I was blocked up in my sexual area but I know something else and so, Bunny, I would tell Albert Berger a misery: behold, we have not been brought up right and my memory of flowers and summer and larkspur is conjoined equally with pain: that all my dying. That when I lay down in Richmond in Grandmother’s bed I saw her picture on the wall so benignly smiling, even on that day I heard the flower man clipclop along beneath the cedars, moved and peered at it in my slumber through half-closed eyes; a face that once brushed Longstreet’s beard preserved behind the nacreous glass, still smiling and with a bulge of snuff: and I reached out my arms, cried mother mother mother, to that image even then twenty years before turned to bones and dust. The train stopped at a station; this last car deserted, save for the Puerto Rican, who moved away. Then it went on rocking down the tunnel with rails, with darkness, with winking red eyes. I put my head in my hands, thinking of thirst, thinking of gallons of water to drink and cool dew somewhere, resting on a lawn beneath the mimosa shade to hear the distant trumpeting of gulls or thunder or guns. I couldn’t think; the train rocked on, bearing me north, and I prayed, though my prayer in the sweat and fever and sudden cramp, which made me almost sink to the floor, seemed addressed no longer to God but to Albert Berger, a gaseous vertebrate with eyes weeping strange red tears all over the windy universe. The train stopped at 125th Street; I got off amid a crowd of shoving Negroes. I pushed up the littered stairs, dropping my bag. “Hey, lady, you drapped yo’ bag.” I didn’t answer, climbed on, came out into the twilight, where a theater marquee blossomed capering globes of red and blue, and Van Johnson, twenty feet high, sent a smirk across the evening. And then I walked fast up the avenue, past the throng, into the shadows where there was little noise. I turned. Sooty buildings towered all around me. I turned again, facing the street: I thought I could see them still, prancing up the avenue, a whole flock of them flightless, wingless, borne floating through the aqueous twilight like feathered balloons caught upon strings. I said, “No” out loud, and an old colored woman paused at my side, with round, white, curious eyes. I turned and ran a bit but it was too hot: I began to wheeze and to sweat and the pain returned in my womb: I thought, oh Christ, have mercy on your Peyton this evening not because she hasn’t believed but because she. No one. had a chance to. ever. I stopped running then and calmed myself down: Have mercy, I said. There was a loft building here, facing an alley: the door had swung open. You had to climb three steps for the door; these I walked up gingerly, holding onto the rail, and the steps sagged and creaked, giving off an odor of dust. In one corner there was an elevator; inside and beneath a dimly glowing bulb an old Negro dozed on a stool: moths fluttered around his head. I tiptoed past him toward the stairs. Then I climbed and while I climbed I thought that only guilt could deliver me into this ultimate paradox: that all souls must go down before ascending upward; only we most egregious sinners, to shed our sin in self-destruction, must go upward before the last descent. I climbed seven flights and rested, propped up against a wall fanning myself with my hand: the hall smelled of some fabric, a cutting room where Negroes worked: everything was deserted, and over the darkness and the desertion hung that odor of lint and dust and the strong sour odor of sweat. I stood erect: Did I have a companion? I felt that someone was watching me, myself perhaps; at least I knew I was not alone. The birds had vanished for a moment, and around me hung that idea of someone watching me in the darkness: friend or enemy from another time, male, female, it made no difference, even perhaps a dog—some presence huddled in a corner of the cutting room, among the presses and frames silhouetted against the city lights, looking at me with mourning eyes. I turned and walked up again, past walls peeling plaster, crayon marks and water stains, upward and upward through the pervasive sour smell—like a pantry I knew once where La Ruth used to change, an odor of pickles there, and lemons, resting mingled and palpable on the heat, yet through it all this smell, of a land lost from me, unvisited, irretrievable. Bulbs hung at every landing and around them, as if borne back ceaselessly to the light of their beginning, fluttered a cloud of moths: more than I had ever seen before, rich and plump from the woolen lint and scraps of cuttings, beating at my face upon each landing like a bleached storm of windblown petals. I reached the top. “Finish,” I said out loud. Oh, let me die. I walked down a long corridor, in the darkness stumbling over piles of jackets: I could feel the touch of woolen arms, knew the smell again—of blankets and lint and wool, enfolding me forever. Then I came to a door. There was enough light to see: it said WOMEN. I threw open the door and went in, touching a row of tiles. A toilet gurgled somewhere in the darkness and I groped toward the window. I sat down on the radiator beneath it, looking out on the starless sky fired red as an oven from the city. Then I stood up, heard far below one furious, continual honk of a car horn; some mortal insanely attuned to noise: it blatted on. Now all this blessed relief, taking off my clothes; my dress first: I carried it out to the loft where I’d seen an ashcan, ripped the silk up so that it looked like so much scrap and shoved it down into the can beneath a pile of cuttings. Then I walked back into the washroom. I went to the window again, took off my other things and threw them on the floor. Afterwards, I kicked off my shoes and stockings and stuffed them beneath the radiator, stood up: I was naked, clean if sweating, just as I had come. Something seemed to hurry me through space, I heard that thunder again, on the remotest horizon, guns perhaps, something: above Java or palms on the Lacca-dives, in the profoundest sunlit seas. Something hurries me through memory, too, but I can’t pause to remember, for a guilt past memory or dreaming, much darker, impels me on. I pray but my prayer climbs up like a broken wisp of smoke: oh my Lord, I am dying, is all I know, and oh my father, oh my darling, longingly, lonesomely, I fly into your arms! Peyton you must be proper nice girls don’t. Peyton. Me? Myself all shattered, this lovely shell? Perhaps I shall rise at another time, though I lie down in darkness and have my light in ashes. I turn in the room, see them come across the tiles, dimly prancing, fluffing up their wings, I think: my poor flightless birds, have you suffered without soaring on this earth? Come then and fly. And they move on past me through the darkening sands, awkward and gentle, rustling their feathers: come then and fly. And so it happens: treading past to touch my boiling skin—one whisper of feathers is all—and so I see them go—oh my
Christ!—one by one ascending my flightless birds through the suffocating night, toward paradise. I am dying, Bunny, dying. But you must be proper. I say, oh pooh. Oh pooh. Most be proper. Oh most proper. Powerful.