But he was walking alone. Warren Berg and Bill Stringer were drifting away across the street, walking backwards in order to look back on him with furious contempt. “Just like the lies you told about the policeman shooting your father,” Bill Stringer called.
“Even movies he lies about,” Warren Berg put in; and suddenly doubling up with artificial laughter he cupped both hands to his mouth and yelled, “Hey, Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern!”
It wasn’t a very good nickname, but it had an authentic ring to it—the kind of a name that might spread around, catch on quickly, and stick. Nudging each other, they both took up the cry:
“What’s the matter, Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern?”
“Why don’tcha run on home with Miss Price, Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern?”
“So long, Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern!”
Vincent Sabella went on walking, ignoring them, waiting until they were out of sight. Then he turned and retraced his steps all the way back to school, around through the playground and back to the alley, where the wall was still dark in spots from the circular scrubbing of his wet rag.
Choosing a dry place, he got out his chalk and began to draw a head with great care, in profile, making the hair long and rich and taking his time over the face, erasing it with moist fingers and reworking it until it was the most beautiful face he had ever drawn: a delicate nose, slightly parted lips, an eye with lashes that curved as gracefully as a bird’s wing. He paused to admire it with a lover’s solemnity; then from the lips he drew a line that connected with a big speech balloon, and in the balloon he wrote, so angrily that the chalk kept breaking in his fingers, every one of the words he had written that noon. Returning to the head, he gave it a slender neck and gently sloping shoulders, and then, with bold strikes, he gave it the body of a naked woman: great breasts with hard little nipples, a trim waist, a dot for a navel, wide hips and thighs that flared around a triangle of fiercely scribbled pubic hair. Beneath the picture he printed its title: “Miss Price.”
He stood there looking at it for a little while, breathing hard, and then he went home.
The Best of Everything
NOBODY EXPECTED GRACE to do any work the Friday before her wedding. In fact, nobody would let her, whether she wanted to or not.
A gardenia corsage lay in a cellophane box beside her typewriter—from Mr. Atwood, her boss—and tucked inside the envelope that came with it was a ten-dollar gift certificate from Bloomingdale’s. Mr. Atwood had treated her with a special courtliness ever since the time she necked with him at the office Christmas party, and now when she went in to thank him he was all hunched over, rattling desk drawers, blushing and barely meeting her eyes.
“Aw, now, don’t mention it, Grace,” he said. “Pleasure’s all mine. Here, you need a pin to put that gadget on with?”
“There’s a pin that came with it,” she said, holding up the corsage. “See? A nice white one.”
Beaming, he watched her pin the flowers high on the lapel of her suit. Then he cleared his throat importantly and pulled out the writing panel of his desk, ready to give the morning’s dictation. But it turned out there were only two short letters, and it wasn’t until an hour later, when she caught him handing over a pile of Dictaphone cylinders to Central Typing, that she realized he had done her a favor.
“That’s very sweet of you, Mr. Atwood,” she said, “but I do think you ought to give me all your work today, just like any oth—”
“Aw, now, Grace,” he said. “You only get married once.”
The girls all made a fuss over her too, crowding around her desk and giggling, asking again and again to see Ralph’s photograph (“Oh, he’s cute!”), while the office manager looked on, nervously, reluctant to be a spoilsport but anxious to point out that it was, after all, a working day.
Then at lunch there was the traditional little party at Schrafft’s—nine women and girls, giddy on their unfamiliar cocktails, letting their chicken a la king grow cold while they pummeled her with old times and good wishes. There were more flowers and another gift—a silver candy dish for which all the girls had whisperingly chipped in.
Grace said “Thank you” and “I certainly do appreciate it” and “I don’t know what to say” until her head rang with the words and the corners of her mouth ached from smiling, and she thought the afternoon would never end.
Ralph called up about four o’clock, exuberant. “How ya doin’, honey?” he asked, and before she could answer he said, “Listen. Guess what I got?”
“I don’t know. A present or something? What?” She tried to sound excited, but it wasn’t easy.
“A bonus. Fifty dollars.” She could almost see the flattening of his lips as he said “fifty dollars” with the particular earnestness he reserved for pronouncing sums of money.
“Why, that’s lovely, Ralph,” she said, and if there was any tiredness in her voice be didn’t notice it.
“Lovely, huh?” he said with a laugh, mocking the girlishness of the word. “Ya like that, huh, Gracie? No, but I mean I was really surprised, ya know it? The boss siz, ‘Here, Ralph,’ and he hands me this envelope. He don’t even crack a smile or nothin’, and I’m wonderin’, what’s the deal here? I’m getting fired here, or what? He siz, ‘G’ahead, Ralph, open it.’ So I open it, and then I look at the boss and he’s grinning a mile wide.” He chuckled and sighed. “Well, so listen, honey. What time ya want me to come over tonight?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Soon as you can, I guess.”
“Well listen, I gotta go over to Eddie’s house and pick up that bag he’s gonna loan me, so I might as well do that, go on home and eat, and then come over to your place around eight-thirty, nine o’clock. Okay?”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll see you then, darling.” She had been calling him “darling” for only a short time—since it had become irrevocably clear that she was, after all, going to marry him—and the word still had an alien sound. As she straightened the stacks of stationery in her desk (because there was nothing else to do), a familiar little panic gripped her: she couldn’t marry him—she hardly even knew him. Sometimes it occurred to her differently, that she couldn’t marry him because she knew him too well, and either way it left her badly shaken, vulnerable to all the things that Martha, her roommate, had said from the very beginning.
“Isn’t he funny?” Martha had said after their first date. “He says ‘terlet.’ I didn’t know people really said ‘terlet.’” And Grace had giggled, ready enough to agree that it was funny. That was a time when she had been ready to agree with Martha on practically anything—when it often seemed, in fact, that finding a girl like Martha from an ad in the Times was just about the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her.
But Ralph had persisted all through the summer, and by fall she had begun standing up for him. “What don’t you like about him, Martha? He’s perfectly nice.”
“Oh, everybody’s perfectly nice, Grace,” Martha would say in her college voice, making perfectly nice a faintly absurd thing to be, and then she’d look up crossly from the careful painting of her fingernails. “It’s just that he’s such a little—a little white worm. Can’t you see that?”
“Well, I certainly don’t see what his complexion has to do with—”
“Oh God, you know what I mean. Can’t you see what I mean? Oh, and all those friends of his, his Eddie and his Marty and his George with their mean, ratty little clerks’ lives and their mean, ratty little . . . It’s just that they’re all alike, those people. All they ever say is ‘Hey, wha’ happen t’ya Giants?’ and ‘Hey, wha’ happen t’ya Yankees?’ and they all live way out in Sunnyside or Woodhaven or some awful place, and their mothers have those damn little china elephants on the mantelpiece.” And Martha would frown over her nail polish again, making it clear that the subject was closed.
All that fall and winter she was confused. For a while she tried going out only with Martha’s kind of men—the kind that used words like “amusing” all the time and w
ore small-shouldered flannel suits like a uniform; and for a while she tried going out with no men at all. She even tried that crazy business with Mr. Atwood at the office Christmas party. And all the time Ralph kept calling up, hanging around, waiting for her to make up her mind. Once she took him home to meet her parents in Pennsylvania (where she never would have dreamed of taking Martha), but it wasn’t until Easter time that she finally gave in.
They had gone to a dance somewhere in Queens, one of the big American Legion dances that Ralph’s crowd was always going to, and when the band played “Easter Parade” he held her very close, hardly moving, and sang to her in a faint, whispering tenor. It was the kind of thing she’d never have expected Ralph to do—a sweet, gentle thing—and it probably wasn’t just then that she decided to marry him, but it always seemed so afterwards. It always seemed she had decided that minute, swaying to the music with his husky voice in her hair:
“I’ll be all in clover
And when they look you over
I’ll be the proudest fella
In the Easter Parade. . . .”
That night she had told Martha, and she could still see the look on Martha’s face. “Oh, Grace, you’re not—surely you’re not serious. I mean, I thought he was more or less of a joke—you can’t really mean you want to—”
“Shut up! You just shut up, Martha!” And she’d cried all night. Even now she hated Martha for it; even as she stared blindly at a row of filing cabinets along the office wall, half sick with fear that Martha was right.
The noise of giggles swept over her, and she saw with a start that two of the girls—Irene and Rose—were grinning over their typewriters and pointing at her. “We saw ya!” Irene sang. “We saw ya! Mooning again, huh Grace?” Then Rose did a burlesque of mooning, heaving her meager breasts and batting her eyes, and they both collapsed in laughter.
With an effort of will Grace resumed the guileless, open smile of a bride. The thing to do was concentrate on plans.
Tomorrow morning, “bright and early,” as her mother would say, she would meet Ralph at Penn Station for the trip home. They’d arrive about one, and her parents would meet the train. “Good t’see ya, Ralph!” her father would say, and her mother would probably kiss him. A warm, homely love filled her: they wouldn’t call him a white worm; they didn’t have any ideas about Princeton men and “interesting” men and all the other kinds of men Martha was so stuck-up about. Then her father would probably take Ralph out for a beer and show him the paper mill where he worked (and at least Ralph wouldn’t be snobby about a person working in a paper mill, either), and then Ralph’s family and friends would come down from New York in the evening.
She’d have time for a long talk with her mother that night, and the next morning, “bright and early” (her eyes stung at the thought of her mother’s plain, happy face), they would start getting dressed for the wedding. Then the church and the ceremony, and then the reception (Would her father get drunk? Would Muriel Ketchel sulk about not being a bridesmaid?), and finally the train to Atlantic City, and the hotel. But from the hotel on she couldn’t plan any more. A door would lock behind her and there would be a wild, fantastic silence, and nobody in all the world but Ralph to lead the way.
“Well, Grace,” Mr. Atwood was saying, “I want to wish you every happiness.” He was standing at her desk with his hat and coat on, and all around here were the chattering and scraping-back of chairs that meant it was five o’clock.
“Thank you, Mr. Atwood.” She got to her feet, suddenly surrounded by all the girls in a bedlam of farewell.
“All the luck in the world, Grace.”
“Drop us a card, huh Grace? From Atlantic City?”
“So long, Grace.”
“G’night, Grace, and listen: the best of everything.”
Finally she was free of them all, out of the elevator, out of the building, hurrying through the crowds to the subway.
When she got home Martha was standing in the door of the kitchenette, looking very svelte in a crisp new dress.
“Hi, Grace. I bet they ate you alive today, didn’t they?”
“Oh no,” Grace said. “Everybody was—real nice.” She sat down, exhausted, and dropped the flowers and the wrapped candy dish on a table. Then she noticed that the whole apartment was swept and dusted, and the dinner was cooking in the kitchenette. “Gee, everything looks wonderful,” she said. “What’d you do all this for?”
“Oh, well, I got home early anyway,” Martha said. Then she smiled, and it was one of the few times Grace had ever seen her look shy. “I just thought it might be nice to have the place looking decent for a change, when Ralph comes over.”
“Well,” Grace said, “it certainly was nice of you.”
The way Martha looked now was even more surprising: she looked awkward. She was turning a greasy spatula in her fingers, holding it delicately away from her dress and examining it, as if she had something difficult to say. “Look, Grace,” she began. “You do understand why I can’t come to the wedding, don’t you?”
“Oh, sure,” Grace said, although in fact she didn’t, exactly. It was something about having to go up to Harvard to see her brother before he went into the Army, but it had sounded like a lie from the beginning.
“It’s just that I’d hate you to think I—well, anyway, I’m glad if you do understand. And the other thing I wanted to say is more important.”
“What?”
“Well, just that I’m sorry for all the awful things I used to say about Ralph. I never had a right to talk to you that way. He’s a very sweet boy and I—well, I’m sorry, that’s all.”
It wasn’t easy for Grace to hide a rush of gratitude and relief when she said, “Why, that’s all right, Martha, I—”
“The chops are on fire!” Martha bolted for the kitchenette. “It’s all right,” she called back. “They’re edible.” And when she came out to serve dinner all her old composure was restored. “I’ll have to eat and run,” she said as they sat down. “My train leaves in forty minutes.”
“I thought it was tomorrow you were going.”
“Well, it was, actually,” Martha said, “but I decided to go tonight. Because you see, Grace, another thing—if you can stand one more apology—another thing I’m sorry for is that I’ve hardly ever given you and Ralph a chance to be alone here. So tonight I’m going to clear out.” She hesitated. “It’ll be a sort of wedding gift from me, okay?” And then she smiled, not shyly this time but in a way that was more in character—the eyes subtly averted after a flicker of special meaning. It was a smile that Grace—through stages of suspicion, bewilderment, awe, and practiced imitation—had long ago come to associate with the word “sophisticated.”
“Well, that’s very sweet of you,” Grace said, but she didn’t really get the point just then. It wasn’t until long after the meal was over and the dishes washed, until Martha had left for her train in a whirl of cosmetics and luggage and quick goodbyes, that she began to understand.
She took a deep, voluptuous bath and spent a long time drying herself, posing in the mirror, filled with a strange, slow excitement. In her bedroom, from the rustling tissues of an expensive white box, she drew the prizes of her trousseau—a sheer nightgown of white nylon and a matching negligee—put them on, and went to the mirror again. She had never worn anything like this before, or felt like this, and the thought of letting Ralph see her like this sent her into the kitchenette for a glass of the special dry sherry Martha kept for cocktail parties. Then she turned out all the lights but one and, carrying her glass, went to the sofa and arranged herself there to wait for him. After a while she got up and brought the sherry bottle over to the coffee table, where she set it on a tray with another glass.
When Ralph left the office he felt vaguely let down. Somehow, he’d expected more of the Friday before his wedding. The bonus check had been all right (though secretly he’d been counting on twice that amount), and the boys had bought him a drink at lunch and kidded around
in the appropriate way (“Ah, don’t feel too bad, Ralph—worse things could happen”), but still, there ought to have been a real party. Not just the boys in the office, but Eddie, and all his friends. Instead there would only be meeting Eddie at the White Rose like every other night of the year, and riding home to borrow Eddie’s suitcase and to eat, and then having to ride all the way back to Manhattan just to see Gracie for an hour or two. Eddie wasn’t in the bar when he arrived, which sharpened the edge of his loneliness. Morosely he drank a beer, waiting.
Eddie was his best friend, and an ideal best man because he’d been in on the courtship of Gracie from the start. It was in this very bar, in fact, that Ralph had told him about their first date last summer: “Ooh, Eddie—what a paira knockers!”
And Eddie had grinned. “Yeah? So what’s the roommate like?”
“Ah, you don’t want the roommate, Eddie. The roommate’s a dog. A snob too, I think. No, but this other one, this little Gracie—boy, I mean, she is stacked.”
Half the fun of every date—even more than half—had been telling Eddie about it afterwards, exaggerating a little here and there, asking Eddie’s advice on tactics. But after today, like so many other pleasures, it would all be left behind. Gracie had promised him at least one night off a week to spend with the boys, after they were married, but even so it would never be the same. Girls never understood a thing like friendship.
There was a ball game on the bar’s television screen and he watched it idly, his throat swelling in a sentimental pain of loss. Nearly all his life had been devoted to the friendship of boys and men, to trying to be a good guy, and now the best of it was over.
Finally Eddie’s stiff finger jabbed the seat of his pants in greeting. “Whaddya say, sport?”
Ralph narrowed his eyes to indolent contempt and slowly turned around. “Wha’ happen ta you, wise guy? Get lost?”
“Whaddya—in a hurry a somethin’?” Eddie barely moved his lips when he spoke. “Can’t wait two minutes?” He slouched on a stool and slid a quarter at the bartender. “Draw one, there, Jack.”