At the door he paused to withdraw and examine the pink-blotched hand from his pocket, half expecting to find it torn to a pulp of blood and gristle. Then, pulling his coat straight, he went through the door and up the steps into a high dusty chamber filled with the raw glare and deep shadows cast by naked light bulbs, where the Laurel Players, ablaze with cosmetics, stood talking to their sallow visitors in nervous, widely spaced groups of two and three around the floor. She wasn’t there.
“No, I mean seriously,” somebody was saying. “Could you hear me, or not?” And somebody else said, “Well, hell, it was a lot of fun anyway.” The director, in a scanty cluster of his New York friends, was pulling hungrily on a cigarette and shaking his head. Shep Campbell, pebbled with sweat, still holding his Tommy gun but clearly himself again, was standing near the curtain rope with his free arm around his small, rumpled wife, and they were both demonstrating their decision to laugh the whole thing off.
“Frank?” Milly Campbell had waved and risen on tiptoe to shout his name through cupped hands, as if pretending that the crowd were thicker and noisier than it really was. “Frank! We’ll see you and April later, okay? For a drink?”
“Fine!” he called back. “Couple of minutes!” And he winked and nodded as Shep raised his machine gun in a comic salute.
Around the corner he found one of the lesser gangsters talking with a plump girl who had caused a thirty-second rupture in the first act by missing her entrance cue, who had evidently been crying but now was hilariously pounding her temple and saying “God! I could’ve killed myself!” while the gangster, tremulously wiping grease paint from his mouth, said “No, but I mean it was a lot of fun anyway, you know what I mean? That’s the main thing, in a thing like this.”
“Excuse me,” Frank Wheeler said, squeezing past them to the door of the dressing room that his wife shared with several other women. He knocked and waited, and when he thought he heard her say “Come in,” he opened it tentatively and peeked inside.
She was alone, sitting very straight at a mirror and removing her make-up. Her eyes were still red and blinking, but she gave him a small replica of her curtain-call smile before turning back to the mirror. “Hi,” she said. “You ready to leave?”
He closed the door and started toward her with the corners of his mouth stretched tight in a look that he hoped would be full of love and humor and compassion; what he planned to do was bend down and kiss her and say “Listen: you were wonderful.” But an almost imperceptible recoil of her shoulders told him that she didn’t want to be touched, which left him uncertain what to do with his hands, and that was when it occurred to him that “You were wonderful” might be exactly the wrong thing to say—condescending, or at the very least naive and sentimental, and much too serious.
“Well,” he said instead. “I guess it wasn’t exactly a triumph or anything, was it?” And he stuck a cigarette jauntily in his lips and lit it with a flourish of his clicking Zippo.
“I guess not,” she said. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”
“No, that’s okay, take your time.”
He pocketed both hands and curled the tired toes inside his shoes, looking down at them. Would “You were wonderful” have been a better thing to say, after all? Almost anything, it now seemed, would have been a better thing to say than what he’d said. But he would have to think of better things to say later; right now it was all he could do to stand here and think about the double bourbon he would have when they stopped on the way home with the Campbells. He looked at himself in the mirror, tightening his jaw and turning his head a little to one side to give it a leaner, more commanding look, the face he had given himself in mirrors since boyhood and which no photograph had ever quite achieved, until with a start he found that she was watching him. Her own eyes were there in the mirror, trained on his for an uncomfortable moment before she lowered them to stare at the middle button of his coat.
“Listen,” she said. “Will you do me a favor? The thing is—” It seemed that all the slender strength of her back was needed to keep her voice from wavering. “The thing is, Milly and Shep wanted us to go out with them afterwards. Will you say we can’t? Say it’s because of the baby sitter, or something?”
He moved well away and stood stiff-legged and hump-shouldered, hands in his pockets, like a stage lawyer considering a fine point of ethics. “Well,” he said, “the thing is, I already said we could. I mean I just saw them out there and I said we would.”
“Oh. Then would you mind going out again and saying you were mistaken? That should be simple enough.”
“Look,” he said. “Don’t start getting this way. The point is I thought it might be fun, is all. Besides, it’s going to look kind of rude, isn’t it? I mean isn’t it?”
“You mean you won’t.” She closed her eyes. “All right, I will, then. Thanks a lot.” Her face in the mirror, nude and shining with cold cream, looked forty years old and as haggard as if it were set to endure a physical pain.
“Wait a second,” he told her. “Take it easy, will you please? I didn’t say that. I just said they’re going to think it’s damn rude, that’s all. And they are. I can’t help that.”
“All right. You go along with them, if you want to, and give me the car keys.”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t start this business about the car keys. Why do you always have to—”
“Look, Frank.” Her eyes were still shut. “I’m not going out with those people. I don’t happen to feel very well, and I—”
“Okay.” He was backing away, holding out both stiff trembling hands like a man intently describing the length of a short fish. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll tell them. I’ll be right back. I’m sorry.”
The floor rode under his feet like the deck of a moving ship as he made his way back to the wings, where a man was taking pictures with a miniature flash camera (“Hold it now—that’s fine. That’s fine”) and the actor who played Gabrielle’s father was telling the plump girl, who looked ready to cry again, that the only thing to do was write the whole thing off to experience.
“You folks about ready?” Shep Campbell demanded.
“Well,” Frank said, “actually, I’m afraid we’ll have to cut out. April promised this baby sitter we’d be home early, you see, and we really—”
Both their faces sagged in hurt and disappointment. Milly drew a section of her lower lip between her teeth and slowly released it. “Gee,” she said. “I guess April feels awful about this whole thing, doesn’t she? Poor kid.”
“No, no, she’s okay,” he told them. “Really, it’s not that. She’s okay. It’s just this business of the baby sitter, you see.” It was the first lie of its kind in the two years of their friendship, and it caused them all three to look at the floor as they labored through a halting ritual of smiles and goodnights; but it couldn’t be helped.
She was waiting for him in the dressing room, ready with a pleasant social face for any of the Laurel Players they might happen to meet on the way out, but they managed to avoid them all. She led him through a side door that opened onto fifty yards of empty, echoing high-school corridor and they walked without touching each other and without speaking, moving in and out of the oblongs of moonlight that lay on the marble floor.
The smell of school in the darkness, pencils and apples and library paste, brought a sweet nostalgic pain to his eyes and he was fourteen again, and it was the year he’d lived in Chester, Pennsylvania—no, in Englewood, New Jersey—and spent all his free time in a plan for riding the rails to the West Coast. He had traced several alternate routes on a railroad map, he had rehearsed many times the way he would handle himself (politely, but with fist fights if necessary) in the hobo jungles along the way, and he’d chosen all the items of his wardrobe from the window of an Army and Navy store: Levi jacket and pants, an army-type khaki shirt with shoulder tabs, high-cut work shoes with steel caps at heel and toe. An old felt hat of his father’s, which could be made to fit with a wad of newspaper folded into
its sweatband, would lend the right note of honest poverty to the outfit, and he could take whatever else he needed in his Boy Scout knapsack, artfully reinforced with adhesive tape to conceal the Boy Scout emblem. The best thing about the plan was its absolute secrecy, until the day in the school corridor when he impulsively asked a fat boy named Krebs, who was the closest thing to a best friend he had that year, to go along with him. Krebs was dumfounded—“On a freight train, you mean?”—and soon he was laughing aloud. “Jeez, you kill me, Wheeler. How far do you think you’d get on a freight train? Where do you get these weird ideas, anyway? The movies or someplace? You want to know something, Wheeler? You want to know why everybody thinks you’re a jerk? Because you’re a jerk, that’s why.”
Walking now through the same smells and looking at the pale shape of April’s profile as she walked beside him, he allowed his rising sense of poignance to encompass her as well, and the sadness of her own childhood. He wasn’t often able to do this, for most of her memories were crisply told and hard to sentimentalize (“I always knew nobody cared about me and I always let everybody know I knew it”), but the school smell made him think of one particular time she had told about, a morning in Rye Country Day when a menstrual flow of unusual suddenness and volume had taken her by surprise in the middle of a class. “At first I just sat there,” she’d told him. “That was the stupid thing; and then it was too late.” And he thought of how she must have lurched from her desk and run from the room with a red stain the size of a maple leaf on the seat of her white linen skirt while thirty boys and girls looked up in dumb surprise, how she must have fled down the corridor in a nightmarish silence past the doors of other murmuring classrooms, spilling books and picking them up and running again, leaving a tidy, well-spaced trail of blood drops on the floor, how she had run to the first-aid room and been afraid to go inside, how instead she had run all the way down another corridor to a fire-exit door, where she pulled off her cardigan and tied it around her waist and hips; how then, hearing or imagining the approach of footsteps in her wake, she had pushed through to the sunny lawn outside and set off for home, walking not too quickly and with her head high, so that anyone happening to glance from any of a hundred windows would think her on some perfectly normal errand from school, wearing her sweater in a perfectly normal way.
Her face must have looked almost exactly the way it did now, as they opened this other fire-exit door and walked out across these other school grounds not many miles from Rye, and her way of walking must have been similar too.
He had hoped she would sit close to him in the car—he wanted to hold her shoulders while he drove—but she made herself very small and pressed against the passenger’s door, turning away to watch the passing lights and shadows of the road. This caused his eyes to grow round and his mouth solemn as he steered and shifted gears, until finally, licking his lips, he thought of something to say.
“You know something? You were the only person in that whole play. No kidding, April. I mean it.”
“All right,” she said. “Thank you.”
“It’s just that we never should’ve let you get mixed up in the damned thing, is all.” With his free hand he opened his collar, both to cool his neck and to find reassurance in the grown-up, sophisticated feel of the silk tie and Oxford shirt. “I’d just like to get my hands on that what’s his name, that’s all. That director.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Well, the whole pack of them, then. God knows they all stank. The whole point is we should’ve known better in the first place. I should’ve known better, is what it amounts to. You never would’ve joined the damn group if the Campbells and I hadn’t talked you into it. Remember when we first heard about it? And you said they’d probably turn out to be a bunch of idiots? Well, I should’ve listened to you, that’s all.”
“All right. Could we sort of stop talking about it now?”
“Sure we will.” He tried to pat her thigh but it was out of reach across the wide seat. “Sure we will. I just don’t want you feeling bad about it, that’s all.”
With a confident, fluid grace he steered the car out of the bouncing side road and onto the hard clean straightaway of Route Twelve, feeling that his attitude was on solid ground at last. A refreshing wind rushed in to ruffle his short hair and cool his brains, and he began to see the fiasco of the Laurel Players in its true perspective. It simply wasn’t worth feeling bad about. Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.
And now, as it often did in the effort to remember who he was, his mind went back to the first few years after the war and to a crumbling block of Bethune Street, in that part of New York where the gentle western edge of the Village flakes off into silent waterfront warehouses, where the salt breeze of evening and the deep river horns of night enrich the air with a promise of voyages. In his very early twenties, wearing the proud mantles of “veteran” and “intellectual” as bravely as he wore his carefully aged tweed jacket and washed-out khakis, he had owned one of three keys to a one-room apartment on that street. The other two keys, and rights to “the use of the place” every second and third week, had belonged to two of his Columbia College classmates, each of whom paid a third of its twenty-seven-dollar rent. These other two, an ex-fighter pilot and an ex-marine, were older and more relaxed in their worldliness than Frank—they seemed able to draw on endless reserves of willing girls with whom to use the place—but it wasn’t long before Frank, to his own shy amazement, began to catch up with them; that was a time of wondrously rapid catching-up in many ways, of dizzily mounting self-confidence. The solitary tracer of railroad maps had never hopped his freight, but it had begun to seem unlikely that any Krebs would ever call him a jerk again. The army had taken him at eighteen, had thrust him into the final spring offensive of the war in Germany and given him a confused but exhilarating tour of Europe for another year before it set him free, and life since then had carried him from strength to strength. Loose strands of his character—the very traits that had kept him dreaming and lonely among schoolboys and later among soldiers—these seemed suddenly to have coalesced into a substantial and attractive whole. For the first time in his life he was admired, and the fact that girls could actually want to go to bed with him was only slightly more remarkable than his other concurrent discovery—that men, and intelligent men at that, could actually want to listen to him talk. His marks at school were seldom better than average, but there was nothing average about his performance in the beery, all-night talks that had begun to form around him—talks that would often end in a general murmur of agreement, accompanied by a significant tapping of temples, that old Wheeler really had it. All he would ever need, it was said, was the time and the freedom to find himself. Various ultimate careers were predicted for him, the consensus being that his work would lie somewhere “in the humanities” if not precisely in the arts—it would, at any rate, be something that called for a long and steadfast dedication—and that it would involve his early and permanent withdrawal to Europe, which he often described as the only part of the world worth living in. And Frank himself, walking the streets at daybreak after some of those talks, or lying and thinking on Bethune Street on nights when he had the use of the place but had no girl to use it with, hardly ever entertained a doubt of his own exceptional merit. Weren’t the biographies of all great men filled with this same kind of youthful groping, this same kind of rebellion against their fathers and their fathers’ ways? He could even be grateful in a sense that he had no particular area of interest: in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.
But as college wore on he began to be haunted by numb
erless small depressions, and these tended to increase in the weeks after college was over, when the other two men had taken to using their keys less and less frequently and he was staying alone in the Bethune Street place, taking odd jobs to buy his food while he thought things out. It nagged him, in particular, that none of the girls he’d known so far had given him a sense of unalloyed triumph. One had been very pretty except for unpardonably thick ankles, and one had been intelligent, though possessed of an annoying tendency to mother him, but he had to admit that none had been first-rate. Nor was he ever in doubt of what he meant by a first-rate girl, though he’d never yet come close enough to one to touch her hand. There had been two or three of them in the various high schools he’d attended, disdainfully unaware of him in their concern with college boys from out of town; what few he’d seen in the army had most often been seen in flickering miniature, on strains of dance music, through the distant golden windows of an officers’ club, and though he’d seen plenty of them since then, in New York, they had always been climbing in or out of taxicabs, followed by the grimly hovering presences of men who looked as if they’d never been boys at all.