“… Oh, my, no; we’ve only been in this funny place a few months; this is just temporary. But then we’ve always moved around a lot: the children were saying just the other day they’ve lost count of all the different houses and apartments we’ve had. Can’t remember how many places, or even how many towns; isn’t that remarkable? No, we’ve always been very restless, you see. I suppose you could say we’re vagabonds at heart.”
Charles and Evan had each accepted a deep glass of sherry some minutes ago, and Evan was discovering he liked the taste of it. This wasn’t really so bad, goofing around Greenwich Village with your father. Even if some West Village Motors mechanic could fix the car they would probably miss the eye-clinic appointment now, and so the day would be wasted; but weren’t there pleasures to be taken, sometimes, in a wasted day? Father and son could hit a few of the bars in this arty part of town; they might even get looped together, telling jokes and laughing, knowing they could catch a little sleep on the train going home.
“… Oh, I do hope you can stay long enough to meet the children,” Gloria Drake was saying. “They really should’ve been home by now; I can’t imagine what’s keeping them. They had to take our fine cat Perkins to the cat doctor, you see, because he’s been throwing up all over the place …”
Once Charles risked a glance at Evan, as her voice rumbled on and on, and they were able to exchange quick winks that she couldn’t have seen. Telling them about the cat reminded her of another, much earlier cat she’d once had—“Oh, this was long, long ago, when the children were small”—and that story required her to mention, in passing, that she’d been divorced for many years.
It came as no surprise to either of her listeners. Wives didn’t often talk this way—even unhappy wives—and neither did widows. The Shepards were both ready to believe, this afternoon, that only a long-divorced woman would ever talk as if talking were sustenance, talk until veins the size of earthworms stood out in her temples, talk until little white beads of spit were gathered and working on each other near the corners of her mouth.
“… Well, yes, and of course it’s never been easy,” she was saying, “with two children to raise entirely alone. I sort of—live by my wits, you see.”
Charles had always thought “living by your wits” meant having some nimble if haphazard way of earning money, so he said “Oh? What kind of work is it you do, then, Mrs. Drake?” But he was sorry at once, because her own interpretation of the phrase had nothing to do with earning, or with work.
“Well, as I say”—and here the clownish look came briefly back into her face—“as I say, it’s mostly been a matter of living from month to month, living from day to day; but we manage.”
So she probably lived on alimony, and there was certainly nothing the matter with that; still, it might have been nicer if she hadn’t tried to pretend it wasn’t so.
“… Oh, there they are,” she cried, bolting to her feet at the sound of the doorbell. “My, I was beginning to worry.” To pantomime “worry” she made as if to put her hand on her heart, but instead it cupped and clasped her pendulous left breast, as if she were feeling herself up, and that seemed funny enough to provoke another couple of winks as soon as her back was turned.
Gloria Drake’s children were a boy just getting into adolescence and a girl just getting out of it. They both looked as frail as she was, suggesting that nobody in this family would ever be strong, but the girl had learned to carry it off in a surprisingly pretty way.
“Isn’t this nice?” their mother demanded of them. “These gentlemen had some trouble with their car and they happened to ring our bell, you see, and now we’ve been having a wonderful time …”
The girl’s name was Rachel, and when she came up to shake hands with Evan she looked stricken. It lasted only a heartbeat or two before she smiled politely, but Evan had caught it, and could tell she’d seen him catch it. There might still be times in Evan Shepard’s life when he was afraid he wouldn’t amount to much, but he always knew what he looked like, and he knew it gave him a decided advantage with girls.
Soon the sherry was flowing again for everyone except the boy, Phil, a melancholy kid who didn’t seem to mind being left out. He was fooling around on the floor with the cat. Rachel had taken a chair some distance away from Evan’s, almost as though she didn’t trust herself to be any closer, and he looked her over carefully as she exchanged a few courtesies with his father. He liked her skin and her brown hair and wide brown eyes. Nobody would ever call her “saucy”; still, everybody knew there were thousands of kinds of prettiness in girls; and besides, with this particular girl you didn’t think of kinds or categories. She was herself: a little thin and soft, but with a wonderful look of having newly come to life. His mind began to play with the implications of words like “tender” and “fresh” and “perishable”; this was a girl you could cherish and protect. And the best part was that he knew it would be easy to come back to this place and see her again, soon, and take her out.
The boy Phil was sitting in a chair now with his thighs pressed together; he was holding the cat on his lap, stroking and fondling it, bent over and murmuring to it, and he was apparently still too young to know what a pansy-looking way that was to sit. When he looked up there were shadows under his eyes as plain as dust. He probably spent a lot of his time like this—indoors, hearing his mother’s relentless talk and longing for it to stop, dying a little when the alcohol began to thicken her tongue—and Evan had to feel sorry for him. Well, but even so, if he didn’t like this kind of afternoon, why didn’t he go outside? Why didn’t he get into stickball games in the street, or get into fights with Italian kids and learn a few things about life?
“How old are you, Phil?” Evan asked him.
“Fifteen.”
“Oh? You look younger than that.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You go to school around here?”
“Yeah, I go to—” Phil began, but his mother broke in and talked him quickly down.
“Oh, well, that doesn’t matter any more,” she explained, “because he’s our wonderful big prep-school boy now. He’ll be going to prep school in the fall; isn’t that exciting?”
Evan said it was fine, and Charles mumbled something appropriate too; but then Charles had to blink a few times, looking around into various parts of the room. There was nothing about this place, or these people, to suggest the kind of money a preparatory school would probably cost. Whoever the absent father was, he must now be writing out an avalanche of other checks, on top of the alimony, paying for more and ever more unnecessary things.
“… Well, it’s a small school,” Gloria Drake was saying, “and it’s not as old as some of the better-known ones, but it has a certain character of its own. I think he’ll have a marvelous time there, and I think it’ll do him a world of good …”
When the man from West Village Motors came to the door, Evan left the building with him and took him down the street to have a look at the car. It didn’t take long. A very few minutes later Evan was back in the Drakes’ apartment, accepting more sherry, turning to face his father with a mixture of humor and apology as he reported that the man had told him the car would have to be towed away and scrapped. “He said to me ‘This is junk you got here, pal. Nothing but junk.’ ”
“Oh!” Rachel Drake cried. “What a terrible thing for anyone to say about your car.” And she looked instantly shy because those were the first words she’d spoken to Evan.
“Oh, well, it’s a very old car,” he explained to her, not quite brave enough to meet her lovely eyes. “I should’ve known it was practically finished.”
“Well, I think you’re wonderful,” she said, and she was consciously flirting with him now, “if you can take something as important as a car and just let it be destroyed, without any regrets.”
“Some things you do are worth regretting,” he told her; “others not.” He could almost never express his thoughts as neatly as that, and it pleased him until
he remembered it was something he’d heard his father say.
Phil Drake had looked openly astonished that his sister could say “I think you’re wonderful” to a man she’d scarcely met. And Rachel seemed to know how her brother felt, because the two of them were now engaged in a little battle of looks, both of them pink in the face, each fearfully daring the other to make some punishing remark. They were clearly accustomed to a heavy dependence on each other, this brother and sister, and that seemed to confirm Evan’s first impression of the Drakes: none of them would ever be strong.
But the girl was growing up fast. If you could get her away from this crappy little place, if you could bring her out into the nourishing sunlight and build her up and have her and keep her long enough, she might easily turn into a woman who’d be worth your blood, worth your life, worth everything. And if nothing else, she would be worth the try.
With Evan’s help in the dialling, Charles called the eye clinic and cancelled his appointment; then he made a collect call to Cold Spring Harbor and told his wife they’d be a little late. And he’d scarcely turned away from the phone before still another heavy, brimming glass was pressed into his hand. This woman didn’t know the meaning of surrender.
“… Well, hasn’t this been delightful?” she asked an hour later, when they were able to begin inching toward the door at last. “Oh, and wasn’t it a funny way to meet? Just imagine: if your car hadn’t broken down exactly where it did, and if you hadn’t happened to ring our bell, out of all the other bells …”
Like shy conspirators, Evan and Rachel hung back a little from the others gathering at the doorway.
“Can I call you sometime?” he asked her very quietly, while Phil watched both of them with a partly lifted upper lip.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’d like that.”
And no sooner had the door closed on their visitors than Rachel Drake began to feel like an exceptionally pretty girl. She felt almost like a girl in the movies, because meeting Evan Shepard had given her the opening episode of a movie she could play over and over in her mind whenever she felt like it. Her saying “I think you’re wonderful” was the line that would let the audience know how bold a girl she could be, for all her shyness, and Evan’s saying “Can I call you sometime?” was the one that would always mean their romance had now begun. It didn’t even matter that all further episodes would have to wait until after his phone call, because this wasn’t the kind of movie you’d want to rush through anyway.
Oh, but what if he didn’t call? Every time she asked herself that heart-stopping question she’d feel desolate for a while, but those spells didn’t last very long. Soon her lungs would go back to work and she’d feel blood in her veins again, because she knew he would call; she was certain of it.
“Boy,” her brother said. “Boy, Rachel, if this guy Evan doesn’t call you up I guess you’ll probably commit suicide, huh?”
“Oh, don’t be boring,” she told him.
“That sounded to me like a very silly thing to say, Philly,” their mother said from across the room.
“Well, okay, I’m sorry,” Phil said, and to make sure they’d both heard him he said it again: “I’m sorry.”
Apologies were as common as blame in this small, fatherless family, and forgiveness was always in the air. Affection mattered. Until Phil was nearly eleven they had addressed one another in a ritualized baby talk that no outsider could probably have followed, and even now they often said “I love you.” If any two of them were more than an hour late in getting home, the one who was at home alone and waiting would be sick with anxiety.
The Drakes had changed their place of residence twelve times in thirteen years. They’d been evicted twice, but it wasn’t always the scrape of poverty that kept them moving: Gloria would often be impelled to find a new place only because the old one seemed alien to her nature in ways she seldom felt obliged to define. At certain disorderly intervals between one home and the next they had found they could only cling together like disaster victims, warding off a vast bewilderment with the laughter of artificial bravery or with groundless, pitiably tearful quarrels; then they’d settle uneasily into new surroundings and wait once again for a stirring of forces beyond their control.
All three of them had a weakness for the mirror that hung on the living-room wall of this current, temporary apartment; Rachel might have spent an hour there now, admiring the shape and tilt of her face at various angles, if she hadn’t known her brother would be watching.
Instead it was Gloria who monopolized the mirror in the fading light of the day. She touched up her hair and tried several different facial expressions to suit the word “congenial,” which had occurred to her as the perfect way to describe Charles Shepard. This glowing afternoon would be unforgettable, always, because Charles Shepard was the most congenial person she’d met in years.
“Oh, weren’t they nice, though?” she asked her children. “I can’t get over what a nice, congenial time we all had. And I think we’ll be seeing more of them soon, don’t you?”
Then her face froze with a frightening thought. “Oh, but I didn’t—” she began, and she could see her rising fear reflected in the children’s eyes. “I didn’t talk too much, did I?”
“No, no,” Phil told her. “No, you were fine.”
The Shepards, father and son, did get a little looped at several Village bars that afternoon, taking pleasure in their wasted day and their newfound interest in each other, taking their time because the last train wouldn’t leave for hours, and they laughed easily whenever either of them mentioned Gloria Drake or gave a little parody of the way she’d talked.
“I thought the girl seemed nice, though,” Charles pointed out.
“Yeah,” Evan said. “Oh, yeah; very nice.”
“Very pretty girl, too.”
“Yeah.”
But Evan was afraid his father might now say “You going to take her out?” or something like that, and it was always important to keep matters of private business to yourself when you lived with your parents. Besides, he was ready to give another impersonation of Gloria Drake, and he didn’t want to lose the momentum of the comedy.
“Hey, Dad?” he said. Then, stepping away from the bar, he tried to gather up and bunch the clothes on the left side of his chest to form a bulge there in the approximate shape of a woman’s breast. With one hand he made conspicuous gestures of cupping and fondling what was meant to be the point of it, and in an effeminate voice he said “My, I was beginning to worry.”
“Well, that’s—that’s good, yes,” Charles said after an appropriate chuckle. “Still, I think we’ve probably made enough fun of her now, don’t you? As a matter of fact—” He swirled the ice in his drink, took a sip, and put it back on the bar. Then he stood straighter and settled the fit of his suit coat with several smart tugs at the hem of it, as if it were a military tunic. “As a matter of fact,” he said again, “there’s never been anything funny about a woman dying for love.”
And Evan had to think that over, impressed with his father’s insight, before he agreed that his father was probably right.
Evan found a bargain in a much-used, nine-year-old car a few days later; then he telephoned Rachel Drake for a carefully planned, oddly breathless little talk, and a day or two after that he was back at her door.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “Come on in.”
There was the reek of catshit again, and the grubby upholstery, and the torrentially talking mother—“Well, how nice to see you again, Evan; is your father well?”—and the frail, moody boy. But Rachel looked lovely in a fresh blue dress that she might have bought especially for this evening. Evan knew everything would be okay in a minute, if he could only get her out of here fast, and it was.
“… Well, you certainly are a good driver,” she told him far uptown as he headed for the George Washington Bridge. “You’re never nervous, are you. There’s such—authority in everything you do. Everything you do with the car, I mean.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve always liked to drive,” he said.
He was planning to take her to a place he knew along the Palisades where you could walk out into a little field and have a spectacular view of Manhattan in the colors of the setting sun. Then they’d go to a certain restaurant he thought he’d be able to afford, on the outskirts of Teaneck, and what happened after that would depend on how well they were getting along.
With the car parked behind them at the roadside, he led her through tall grass and laurel shrubs until they came to a flat rock of the right height and size for sitting, and he laid down his folded jacket to protect the seat of her dress.
“Oh,” she said when they were settled there together. “Oh, that’s really something, isn’t it.”
“Well, I’ve always thought so, yes.”
It was something, all right. The unimaginable skyline of New York, seen from this cliff across the Hudson, was more than enough to take your breath away. It let you know at once that all those yellow- and orange- and red-struck towers, with their numberless blazing windows, were there for better reasons than commerce; they were there for you, as if you’d wished them into being, and their higher purpose was to enhance your aspirations and accommodate your dreams.
Evan knew he could probably put his arm around her and kiss her now, but thought it might be better to wait. Instead he took hold of one pale, delicate hand on the rock, as gently as if it were a bird, and the funny thing was she pretended not to notice. Her dead-serious face remained in profile to him, fixed on the extravagant sight across the river, though a heavy blush had come into her neck and cheek. Shyness could be nice in a girl, but this one might have a tendency to take it a little too far. If he were to make a lunge and kiss her now, would she pretend not to notice that either? Well, damn; she probably would. And what if he were to run his hand up the inside of her leg?