Summer Crossing Page 3

  He came out on the next train; it was an uneasy afternoon they spent together at the hospital; night came, and still no word, and Steve, who had managed with Grady a few jokes, a game of hearts, withdrew to a corner and let silence settle between them. The stale despair of train-schedules, and business and bills to be paid, seemed to rise off him like tired dust, and he sat there blowing smoke rings, zeros hollow as Grady had begun to feel … it was as if she curved away from him into space, as if the lake-image of him receded before her until now she could see him actually, a view that struck her as the most moving of any, for, with the exhausted droop of his shoulders and the tear at the corner of his eye, he belonged to Janet and to her child. Wanting to show her love for him, not as a lover but as a man slumped with love and birth, she moved toward him. A nurse had come to the doorway; and Steve Bolton heard of his son without any change of expression. Slowly he climbed to his feet, his eyes blind-pale; and with a sigh that swayed the room his head fell forward on Grady’s shoulder: I’m a very happy man, he said. It was done then, there was nothing more she wanted of him, summer’s desires had fallen to winter seed: winds blew them far before another April broke their flower.

  “Come on, light me a cigarette.” Clyde Manzer’s voice, grouchy with sleep, but always fairly hoarse and furry, had some singular quality: it was easy to get an impression of whatever he said, for there was a mumbling power, subdued as a throttle left running, that dragged the slow-fuse of maleness through every syllable; nevertheless, he stumbled over words, pauses occasionally so separating sentences that all sense evaporated. “Don’t nigger-lip it, kid. You always nigger-lip.” The voice, though attractive in its way, could be misleading: because of it, some people thought him stupid: this proved them simply unobservant: Clyde Manzer was not in the least stupid: his particular smartness was, in fact, the plainly obvious. The four-lettered scholarship that carries a diploma in know-how—how to run, where to hide, how to ride the subway and see a movie and use a pay-phone all without paying—these knowledges that come with a city childhood of block warfare and desperate afternoons when only the cruel and clever, the swift, the brave survive—was the training that gave his eyes their agile intensity. “Aw, you nigger-lipped it. Christ, I knew you would.”

  “I’ll smoke it,” Grady said; and, using the lighter Peter had thought so vulgar, she lighted him another. One Monday, which was Clyde’s day off, they had gone to a shooting gallery and he had won the lighter there and given it to her: since then she liked lighting everybody’s cigarettes: there was an excitement in seeing her secret, disguised as thin fire, leap naked between herself, who knew, and someone else, who might discover.

  “Thanks, kid,” he said, accepting the new cigarette. “You’re a good kid: you didn’t nigger-lip it. I’m just in a lousy mood, that’s all. I shouldn’t ought to sleep like that. I was having dreams.”

  “I hope I was in them.”

  “I don’t remember nothing I dream,” he said, rubbing his chin as though he needed a shave. “So tell me, did you get them off, your folks?”

  “Just now—Apple wanted me to drive her home, and an old friend showed up: it was very confused, I came straight from the pier.”

  “There’s an old friend of mine I’d like to show up,” he said, and spit on the ground. “Mink. You know Mink? I told you, the guy I was in the army with. On account of what you said, I said for him to come around and take over this afternoon. The bastard owes me two bucks: I told him if he’d come around I’d forget it. So, baby,” his reaching hand touched the cool silk of her blouse, “unless the guy shows up,” and then, with a gentle pressure, slipped to her breast, “I guess I’m stuck here.” They regarded each other silently for as long as it took a tear of sweat to slide from the top of his forehead down the length of his cheek. “I missed you,” he said. And he would have said something more if a customer had not come rolling into the lot.

  Three ladies from Westchester, in for lunch and a matinee; Grady sat in the car and waited while Clyde went to attend them. She liked the way he walked, the way his legs seemed to take their time, each step lazily spaced and oddly loping: it was the walk of a tall man. But Clyde was not much taller than herself. Around the parking lot he always wore a pair of summer khakis and a flannel shirt or an old sweater: it was a kind of dress better looking and far more suitable to him than the suit he was so proud of. He was usually wearing this suit, a double-breasted blue pin-stripe, whenever he appeared in her dreams; she could not imagine why; but for that matter, her dreams about him were unreasonable anyway. In them she was perpetually the spectator, and he was with someone else, some other girl, and they would walk past, smirking disdainfully or dismissing her by looking the other way: the humiliation was great, her jealousy greater, it was unreasonable; still, her anxiety had some basis: two or three times she was sure he had taken her car out driving, and once, after she had left the car there overnight, she had found lodged between the cushions a garish little compact, decidedly not her own. But she did not mention these things to Clyde; she kept the compact and never spoke of it.

  “Ain’t you Manzer’s girl?” She had been dialing for music on the radio; she had not heard anyone approach, and so it was startling when she looked up and found a man leaning against the car, his eyes screwed on her and half his mouth crooked in a smile that showed a gold tooth and a silver one. “I said, you’re Manzer’s girl, huh? We saw the picture of you in the magazine. That was a good picture. My girl Winifred (Manzer tell you about Winifred?), she liked that picture a lot. You think the guy that took it would take one of her? It’d give her a big kick.” Grady could only look at him; and that, hardly: for he was like a fat quivering baby grown with freakish suddenness to the size of an ox: his eyes popped and his lips sagged. “I’m Mink,” he said, and pulled out a cigarette which Grady allowed him to light: she began blowing the car-horn as loud as she could.

  Clyde could never be hurried; after parking the Westchester car he ambled over at his own convenience. “What the hell’s the racket?” he said.

  “This man, well, he’s here.”

  “So, you think I can’t see that? Hiya, Mink.” Turning away from her, he brought his attention to the floury smiling face of Mink, and Grady resumed her efforts with the radio: she was seldom quick to resent anything Clyde said: his tempers affected her only inasmuch as they made her feel closer to him, for that he released them against her so freely reflected the degree of their intimacy. She would have preferred, however, that nothing had been reflected in front of this ox-child: ain’t you Manzer’s girl? She had imagined Clyde talking of her to his friends, even showing them her picture in a magazine, that was all right, why not? On the other hand, her imaginings had not gone so far as to consider what sort of friends they might be. But it was pretty late in the day for climbing a high-horse; so, smiling, she tried to accept Mink, and said: “Clyde was afraid you might not be able to come. You’re awfully nice to do this for us.”

  Mink beamed as if she had pressed inside him a light switch; it was painful, because she could see, by the new life in his face, that he knew she had not liked him and that it had mattered. “Oh yeah, yeah, I wouldn’t let Manzer down. I’d have been here sooner, only Winifred, you know Winifred, she’s on a strike from her job and she had me down there to tell off some big (pardon).” Grady’s eyes fidgeted in the direction of the Nemo’s little office-shack: Clyde had gone there to change his clothes, and she was anxious for him to come back, not only because being alone with Mink was nerve-racking but because, and it was as true of a minute ago as a week, she missed him. “That’s a great car you got, sure is. Winifred’s uncle, he’s the one in Brooklyn, he buys used cars: bet he’d give you a load for that. Say, we all of us ought to double-date one night: drive out dancing, know what I mean?”

  Clyde’s reappearance relieved her of answering. Under a leather windbreaker he’d put on a clean white shirt and a tie; there was an attempt at a part in his hair and his shoes were shined. He planted
himself before her, his eyes set apart and his hands cocked on his hips: the glare of the sun made him scowl, but his whole attitude seemed to say, how do I look? And Grady said, “Darling, you look just wonderful!”

  Chapter 3

  It had been her idea for them to lunch in Central Park at the cafeteria which adjoins the zoo. Because the McNeils’ apartment was on Fifth Avenue and almost opposite the zoo, she had long since wearied of it, but today, goaded on by the novelty of eating out-of-doors, it seemed a gala notion; and furthermore, it would be all new to Clyde, for he drew a blank concerning certain sections of the city: the entire territory, for instance, that, beginning around the Plaza, stretches and widens up and eastward. This park-east world was naturally the New York Grady knew best: except for Broadway, she’d not often ventured out of it. And so she’d thought it was a joke when Clyde said he hadn’t even known there was a zoo in Central Park; at least, that is, he had no memory of one. These ignorances intensified the overall riddle of his background; she knew the number and names of his family: there was a mother, two sisters who worked, a younger brother—the father, who had been a sergeant of police, was dead; and she knew generally where they lived: it was somewhere in Brooklyn, a house near the ocean that required over an hour by subway to reach. Then there were several friends whose names she’d heard often enough to remember: Mink, whom she’d just seen, another called Bubble, and a third named Gump; once she’d asked if they were real names, and Clyde had said sure.

  But the picture she had devised from these oddments was too amateurish to deserve even the most modest frame: it lacked perspective and showed few talents for detail. The blame of course belonged to Clyde, who just was not much given to talk. Also, he seemed very little curious himself: Grady, alarmed sometimes by the meagerness of his inquiries and the indifference this might suggest, supplied him liberally with personal information; which isn’t to say she always told the truth, how many people in love do? or can? but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him. It was her feeling, however, that he would as soon not hear her confessions: he seemed to want her to be as elusive, as secretive as he was himself. And yet she could not quite properly accuse him of secretiveness: whatever she asked, he answered: still, it was like trying to peer through a Venetian blind. (It was as if the world where they joined were a ship, one becalmed between the two islands that were themselves: with any effort he could see the shore of her, but his was lost in the unlifting mist.) Once, armed with a far-fetched idea, she had taken the subway to Brooklyn, thinking that if only she could see the house where he lived and walk the streets that he walked, then she would understand and know him as she wanted to; but she had never been to Brooklyn before, and the ghostly lonesome streets, the lowness of the land stretching in a confusion of look-alike bungalows, of empty lots and silent vacancy, was so terrifying that after twenty steps she turned and fled down back into the subway. She realized afterwards that from the outset she’d known the trip would be a failure. Perhaps Clyde, without conscious insight, had chosen best in by-passing islands and settling for the solitude of a ship: but their voyage seemed to have no port-of-call of any kind; and, while they were sitting on the terrace of the cafeteria in the shade of an umbrella, Grady had again sudden cause to need the reassurance of land.

  She had wanted it to be fun, a celebration in their own honor; and it was: the seals conspired to amuse, the peanuts were hot, the beer cold. But Clyde would not really relax. He was solemn with the duties of an escort on such an excursion: Peter Bell would have bought a balloon for mockery’s sake: Clyde presented her with one as part of a tenacious ritual. It was so touching to Grady, and so silly, that for a while she was ashamed to look at him. She held fast to the balloon all through lunch, as if her own happiness bobbed and strained at the string. But it was at the end of lunch that Clyde said: “Look, you know I’d like to stay! Only something came up, and I’ve got to be home early. It was something I’d forgot about, or I would’ve told you before.”

  Grady was casual; but she chewed her lip before replying. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that really is too bad.” And then, with a temper she could not detour: “Yes, I must say you should’ve told me before. I wouldn’t have bothered to plan anything.”

  “What kind of things did you have in mind, kid?” Clyde said this with a smile that exposed a slight lewdness: the young man who laughed at seals and bought balloons had reversed his profile, and the new side, which showed a harsher angle, was the one Grady was never able to defend herself against: its brashness so attracted, so crippled her, she was left desiring only to appease. “Never mind that,” she said, forcing a lewd note of her own. “There’s nobody at the apartment now and I’d thought we’d go there and cook supper.” Tower-high and running halfway across a building, the windows of the apartment, as she had pointed out to him, could be seen from the cafeteria terrace. But any suggestion of visiting there appeared to upset him: he smoothed his hair and twisted tighter the knot of his tie.

  “When do you have to go home? Not right away?”

  He shook his head; then, telling her what she most wanted to know, which was why he had to go at all, he said: “It’s my brother. The kid’s having his bar mitzvah and it’s only right I ought to be there.”

  “A bar mitzvah? I thought that was something Jewish.”

  Stillness like a blush came over his face. He did not even look when a brazen pigeon sedately plucked a crumb off the table.

  “Well, it is something Jewish, isn’t it?”

  “I’m Jewish. My mother is,” he said.

  Grady sat silent, letting the surprise of his remark wrap round her like a vine; and it was then, while splashes of conversation at near tables rolled in waves, that she saw how far they were from any shore. It was unimportant that he was Jewish; this was the sort of thing Apple might have made an issue of, but it would have never occurred to Grady to consider it in any person, not Clyde certainly; still, the tone in which he’d told her presumed not only that she would, but emphasized further how little she knew him: instead of expanding, her picture of him contracted, and she felt she would have to start all over again. “Well,” she began slowly. “And am I supposed to care? I really don’t, you know.”

  “What the hell do you mean care? Who the hell do you think you are? Care about yourself. I’m nothing to you.”

  An antique lady with a Siamese attached to a leash was listening to them rigidly. It was her presence that kept Grady in check. The balloon had wilted somewhat, the swell of it was beginning to pucker; still clutching it, she pushed back the table, hurried down the steps of the terrace and along a path. It was some minutes before Clyde could catch up with her; and by the time he did it was gone, the anger that had provoked and carried her away. But he held her by each arm, as if he supposed she might try to break loose. Flakes of sunlight falling through a tree lilted about like butterflies; at a bench beyond them a boy sat with a windup Victrola balanced on his lap and from the Victrola the eel-like song of a solo clarinet spiraled in the fluttered air. “You are something to me, Clyde; and more than that. But I can’t discover it because we don’t seem to be talking about the same things ever.” She stopped then; the pressure of his eyes made language fraudulent, and whatever their purpose as lovers might be, Clyde alone seemed to understand it. “Sure, kid,” he said, “anything you say.”

  And he bought her another balloon; the old one had shriveled like an apple. This new balloon was far fancier; white and molded to the shape of a cat, it was painted with purple eyes and purple whiskers. Grady was delighted: “Let’s go show it to the lions!”

  The cat house of a zoo has an ornery smell, an air prowled by sleep, mangy with old breath and dead desires. Comedy in a doleful key is the blowsy she-lion reclining in her cell like a movie queen of silent fame; and a hulking ludicrous sight her mate presents winking at the audience as if he could use a pair of bifocals. Somehow the leopard does n
ot suffer; nor the panther: their swagger makes distinct claims upon the pulse, for not even the indignities of confinement can belittle the danger of their Asian eyes, those gold and ginger flowers blooming with a bristling courage in the dusk of captivity. At feeding time a cat house turns into a thunderous jungle, for the attendant, passing with blood-dyed hands among the cages, is sometimes slow, and his wards, jealous of one who has been fed first, scream down the roof, rattle the steel with roars of longing.

  A party of children, who had wedged themselves between Clyde and Grady, jogged and shrieked when the tumult began; but gradually, awed by the swelling tide of it, they grew quiet and clustered closer together. Grady tried to push through them; midway she lost her balloon, and a little girl, silent and evil-eyed, snatched it up and whisked herself off: both robber and robbery escaped almost unnoticed, for Grady, fevered by the lunging loin-deep animal sounds, wanted only to reach Clyde and, as a leaf folds before the wind or a flower bends beneath the leopard’s foot, submit herself to the power of him. There was no need to speak, the tremble of her hand told everything: as, in its answering touch, did his.