Summer Crossing Page 6

  He emptied the broken compact out of his pocket into a waste can; whether or not Grady noticed he couldn’t tell, for whenever he made a motion she averted her head, as if she were afraid their eyes might connect, or that he would touch her. Dazed, and moving with a clumsy stealth, she’d gathered the ingredients of a cake; but in separating her eggs she’d dropped a yolk into a bowl of whites, and she stood now staring at her mistake as though she’d reached an impasse not ever to be surmounted. Watching her, Clyde took pity: he wanted to go over and show her how easy it would be to lift out the yellow. But there was a huge roar from the radio; someone had hit a homer and he waited to hear who: again, though, he could make no sense of the game, and rather violently he turned the radio off. Baseball was a sore subject anyway, reminding him, as it did, of past achievements and promises unfulfilled and dreams gone up the flue. Long ago it had been a pretty settled thing that Clyde Manzer was going to be a champion ballplayer: everyone had praised him as the best pitcher in the sandlot league: once, after a no-hit game, and with the high-school band leading the way, he’d been carried from the field on a crowd of shoulders: he’d cried, and his mother had cried too, though her tears had been motivated by more than pride: she’d been sure Clyde was ruined, and that now he would never live up to her plan of his being a lawyer. It was funny how it had all fallen through. Not a single talent scout approached him; no college offered a scholarship. He’d played a little ball in the army, but there no one had noticed him particularly; nowadays he had to be cajoled into a game of catch, and for him the lonesomest sound in all Brooklyn was the crack of a ball on a bat. Launching about for another career, he decided he wanted to be a test-pilot; and so after joining the army he’d applied for air-corps training: insufficient education was the reason they’d given for rejecting him. Poor Anne. She’d sat Ida down and dictated a letter: Let them jump in a lake, precious brother. They are boobs. It is you who will be the first to fly one of my space ships. And someday we will set foot on the moon. Ida had added a practical postscript: Better you should think about Uncle Al. Uncle Al ran a small luggage factory in Akron; more than once he’d offered to take his brother’s son into the business—a proposition that offended Clyde, the baseball champion: however, following his army discharge, and after a few upside-down midnight months of sleeping all day and running around all night, he’d one morning found himself on a bus to Akron, a city he hated before he’d half got there. But then, he hated most places that were not New York; away from it over any period and he dried up with misery: to be elsewhere seemed a waste of time, an exile from the main current into sluggish by-streams where life was flat and spurious. Actually, Akron had not been so dull. He’d liked his job, if only because it had carried some authority—four men worked under him: yessir, son, Uncle Al said, we’re going to turn us a buck together. All this might have worked out had it not been for Berenice. Berenice was Uncle Al’s only child, an overdeveloped spoiled pussycat with mad milk-blue eyes and a tendency toward hysteria. There was nothing innocent about her; from the start it was clear that she knew a thing or two, and no more than a week passed before she made decided overtures. He was living at Uncle Al’s house, and one night at dinner he felt her foot under the table; she’d removed her shoe, and her warm silken foot, rubbing along his leg, so aroused him he could not hold a fork steady. It was an incident he afterwards considered with the greatest shame: to be excited by a child seemed unnatural and frightening. He tried to move to a Y.M.C.A. in downtown Akron, but Uncle Al wouldn’t hear of it: we like you around the house, boy—why, just the other night Berenice was saying how much happier she is since her cousin Clyde came to live here. Then one day, while he was drying himself after a shower, he caught the pale blue of an unmistakable eye shining through the bathroom keyhole. Every fury inside him boiled to the surface. Wrapped in a towel, he flung open the door; and Berenice, backing blindly into a corner, had stood mute and hangdog while he heaped on her a vast dirt of army swear-words: too late he realized that, from the top of the stairs, Uncle Al’s wife had heard everything. Why do you talk that way to a child? she’d asked quietly. Not taking the time to answer, he’d put on his clothes, packed and walked out of the house. Two days later he was back in New York. Ida said what a pity it was he hadn’t liked the luggage business any better.

  Restless ants of energy, scrambling in his muscles, stung him into a need for action. He was fed up: with himself, and with Grady’s pensive brooding, which depressed him in much the same way as did the long-sorrow sessions at which his mother was so capable. As an adolescent he’d had a compulsion to steal, for the dangers involved had been his most effective way of retaliating against boredom; in the army, and for rather similar reasons, he’d once stolen an electric razor. He felt an impulse to do something of the sort now. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he exploded; then, more quietly: “There’s a Bob Hope picture at Loews.” With a fork Grady speared the misplaced egg yolk. “We might as well,” she said.

  It was wilting out on Lexington Avenue, and especially so since they’d just left an air-conditioned theater; with every step heat’s stale breath yawned in their faces. Starless nightfall sky had closed down like a coffin lid, and the avenue, with its newsstands of disaster and flickering fly-buzz sounds of neon, seemed an elongated, stagnant corpse. The pavement was wet with a rain of electric color; passersby, stained by these humid glares, changed color with chameleon alacrity: Grady’s lips turned green, then purple. Murder! Their faces hidden behind tabloid masks, a group, steaming under a streetlamp and waiting for a bus, gazed into the printed eyes of a youthful killer. Clyde bought a paper, too.

  Grady had never spent a summer in New York, and so had never known a night like this. Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing. It wasn’t that Grady was unfamiliar with the kind of accelerated desperation a city can conjure, for on Broadway she’d seen all the elements of it. Only there it was something she’d known vicariously, and she had not, as it were, taken part. But now for her there was nowhere an exit: she was a member.

  She stopped to straighten her socks, which had crawled down into her shoes; and she decided then to wait a moment, wondering how long it would take Clyde to realize he’d left her behind. On the corner was an open-air store, and the sidewalk there was like an amazing garden where fountains are fruit and the flowers are arranged in bunches of large parasols. Clyde stood an instant there, then walked rapidly back to meet her. And she wanted to hurry him through the streets, hide with him in the dark of the apartment. But: “Go across the street,” he said, “and wait for me in front of that drugstore.”

  A curious tension thinned his face; because of it, she did not ask him why he wanted her to wait there. Her view of him was confined to glimpses grabbed between bursts of traffic; presently she caught sight of him revolving around the fruit and flower store. It was at this moment, too, that she recognized coming toward her a girl who had been in her class at Miss Risdale’s: so she turned and, looking into the blazing windows of the drugstore, studied a display of athletic supporters. A roar from underground echoed through her, for she was standing on top of a subway grating: deep in the hollows below she could hear a screeching of iron wheels, and then, nearer by, there came a fiercer noise: car-horns clashed, fenders bumped, tires careened! and she whirled around to see a driver cursing at Clyde, who was jayhopping across the street as fast as his legs would go.

  Snatching her hand, he pulled her along with him, and they ran until they reached a side street muffled and sweet with trees. As they leaned together, panting, he put into her hand a bunch of violets, and she knew, quite as though she’d seen it done, that they were stolen. Summer that is shade and moss traced itself in the veins of the violet leaves, and she crushed their coolness against her cheek.

  When she got home she cal
led Apple to say she would not be coming to East Hampton after all. Instead, she drove with Clyde to Red Bank, New Jersey, and they were married there around two o’clock in the morning.

  Chapter 5

  Clyde’s mother was an ample, olive-dark woman with the worn and disappointed look of someone who has spent her life doing things for others: occasionally the mulling plaintiveness of her voice suggested that she regretted this. “Kinder, kinder, I’m asking, a little control,” she said, touching fingertips to her forehead; her hair, ribbed like a washboard and riveted by tiny combs tight against her head, rippled with silver zigzags. “Bernie darling, do like Ida says, don’t bounce balls in the house. Go for Mama into the kitchen and help your brother with the icebox.”

  “Don’t push!”

  “Push him?” said Ida, who had done the pushing. “I’ll cripple the little dope. I’m telling you, Bernie, you bounce balls in the house and I’ll cripple you.”

  To which Mrs. Manzer reiterated her first plea. Her ears were pierced with jet, and these beads tossed like bells as she waved her head, sighing an indistinguishable epithet. On a table beside her there was a small potted cactus-plant, and she tamped the earth around it; Grady, who was sitting opposite, remarked that it was the ninth or tenth time she had repeated this gesture, and deduced that Mrs. Manzer was quite as uneasy as herself: a deduction which helped her to relax somewhat.

  “You understand, my dear lady? Oh I see, you smile and nod your head; but it is impossible: you have no brothers in your family.”

  Grady said, “No, as a matter of fact I have just one sister,” and reached in her purse for a cigarette; but, as there were no ashtrays around, she doubted that smoking would be acceptable to Mrs. Manzer, and so withdrew her hand, wondering, alas, what to do with it: all the parts of herself seemed so cumbersome, which was a good deal Ida’s fault, for Ida, during the last hours, had subjected her to a scrutiny fine as lacework.

  “A sister only? That is a shame. But you will have sons I hope. A woman without sons has no consequence: she is not well thought of.”

  “Well, count me out,” said Ida, a stark, vindictive girl with kinky hair and a sallow, sullen expression. “Boys are hateful; men, too. The fewer the better, I say.”

  “You talk foolish, Ida dear,” said her mother, removing the cactus-plant to a window-shelf, where a square of Brooklyn sunlight fell upon it desolately. “That is a dried up way of talking; you want more juice in you, Ida dear. Maybe you better go to that mountain place like Minnie’s girl did last year.”

  “She wasn’t to any mountain. Believe me, I’ve got the news on her.”

  It was uncommon, the extent to which Mrs. Manzer and her older son duplicated each other’s traits and features: that blurred ambiguous half-smile, those imposing eyes, the slow spacing of words that characterized the speech of both: it was heart-quickening for Grady to see these characteristics reproduced, and to see them employed to so different an effect. “The man is everything, a delicate everything,” she said, disregarding her daughter’s insinuation, which also was very like Clyde, who ignored whatever he chose to. “And the man inside the child: that is what a mama must guard and trust, like Bernie: a sweet boy, so good to his mama, an angel. That was my Clyde, too. An angel. If he had a Milky Way he always gave his mama half. I’m very fond of Milky Ways. But now; yes, boys grow up changed and they don’t remember the mama so well.”

  “See? Now you’re saying the same thing I say: men are ungrateful.”

  “Ida, dear, please, do I complain? It is right a child should not love the mama the way the mama loves the child; children are ashamed of the love a mama has for them: that is part of it. But when a boy grows into a man it is right his time should be for other ladies.”

  A quiet settled upon them, and there was nothing strained about it, as there often is when silence falls among new acquaintances. Grady thought of her own mother, of the complicated affections that had passed between them, the moments of love that—out of disbelief? unforgiving doubt?—she had rejected; and considering what chance there was of making these up, she saw there was none, for only a child could have done so, and the child, like the chance itself, was gone.

  “Ah, what is worse than an old woman who talks too much, a yenta?” said Mrs. Manzer with a lively sigh. She was looking at Grady: it was not a look that asked, why did my son marry you? for she didn’t know they were married; but: why does my son love this girl? is for any mother a deeper question, and Grady could read it in her eyes. “You are polite and listen. But I will hold my tongue now, and listen to you.”

  In imagining the visit to Brooklyn, Grady had conceived of herself as an invisible witness wandering unobserved into the parts of Clyde’s life that took an hour to reach by subway: only at the door had she realized how unrealistic this was, and that she, as much as anyone else, would be on view: who are you? what have you to say? It was not presumptuous that Mrs. Manzer should ask, and Grady, meeting the challenge, forced herself forward: “I was thinking—I’m sure you’re wrong—about Clyde,” she stammered, having seized the nearest subject. “Clyde is so terribly devoted to you.”

  She knew at once that she had spoken out of turn, and Ida, with a look just this side of haughty, lost no time in telling her so: “All Mama’s children are devoted to her; she has had a lot of good fortune in that respect.”

  An outsider so indiscreet as to comment on the loyalties of a family must expect reprimand, and Grady accepted Ida’s with a grace that implied she did not know it was one. For indeed the Manzers were a family: the used fragrance and worn possessions of their house reeked of a life in common and a unity no fracas could disrupt. It belonged to them, this life, these rooms; and they belonged to each other, and Clyde was more theirs than he knew. For Grady, who, in this sense, had little sense of family, it was a strange, a warm, an almost exotic atmosphere. It was not, however, an atmosphere she would have chosen for herself—the airless inescapable pressures of intimacy with others would have withered her soon enough—her system required the cold, exclusive climate of the individual. She was not afraid to say: I am rich, money is the island I stand on; for she assessed properly the value of this island, was aware its soil contained her roots; and because of money she could afford always to substitute: houses, furniture, people. If the Manzers understood life differently, it was because they were not educated to these benefits: their compensation was in a greater attachment to what they did have, and doubtlessly for them the rhythm of life and death beat on a smaller but more concentrated drum. It was two ways of being, at least that is how she saw it. Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master’s wrist.

  Mrs. Manzer smiled at her; quietly, with the persuasive, firelight voice of a storyteller, she said: “When I was a girl I lived in a little city on the side of a mountain. There was snow on top and a green river at the bottom: can you see it? Now listen, and tell me if you can hear the bells. A dozen towers, and always ringing.”

  Grady said, “Yes, I do,” and she did; and Ida, impatient, said, “Is this about the birds, Mama?”

  “Strangers who came there called it a city of birds. How true. Of an evening, when it was almost dark, they flew in clouds, and sometimes it was not possible to see the moon rise: never have there been so many birds. But in winter it was bad, mornings so cold we could not break the ice to wash our faces. And on those mornings you would see a sad thing: sheets of feathers where the birds had fallen frozen: believe me. It was my father’s job to sweep them up, like old leaves; then they were put into a fire. But a few he would bring home. Mama, all of us, we nursed them until they were strong and could fly away. They would fly away just when we loved them most. Oh, like children! Do you see? Then when winter came again, and we saw the frozen birds, we always knew in our hearts that here and there was one we’d saved from some winter before.” The last bright ash in her voice guttered and darkened; musing, withdrawn, she took a low, shuddering breath: “Just
when we loved them most. How true.”

  And then she touched Grady’s hand, saying: “Can I ask, what’s your age?”

  It was as if the fingers of a hypnotist had popped close to her eyes: alerted, turned out of a slumber where the cherished, slain by other winters, burned in wing-fluttering fires, she blinked and said, “Eighteen”; no, not yet, it was weeks ahead, her birthday, almost two months of days uncut, not tarnished, like a cherry pie or flowers, which suddenly she wanted to claim: “Seventeen, really. I won’t be eighteen until October.”

  “Seventeen, I am already married; eighteen, I am the mother of Ida. That is the way it should be: young people married young. A man will work then.” She spoke vehemently; and with more color than seemed necessary: this, fading rapidly, left her pensive. “Clyde will be married. I have no worry.”

  Ida giggled. “If you don’t, Clyde does—have worries, I mean. I saw Becky in the A&P this morning, and she was just furious; so I said, what’s eating you, honey? And she said, Ida, you can tell that brother of yours to go sit on a tack.”