Summer Crossing

  “Hey, hurry up with those waffles. There’s a ball-game on the radio.”

  “There’s a radio in the cupboard,” she said, not looking up from the peculiar message of her second telegram. “Turn it on if you want.”

  He touched her hand softly. “What’s the matter: bad news?”

  “Oh no,” she said, laughing. “Just something rather silly.” And she read aloud: “My nightly mirror says you are divine and the daily mirror says you are mine.”

  “Who sent it?”

  “Walt Whitman the Second.”

  Clyde was fiddling with the radio. “Don’t you know the guy?” he said, between scraps of broadcast.

  “In a way.”

  “Must be a joker: or is he nuts?”

  “A bit,” she said, meaning it: once, during the time he was in the navy, and when his ship had touched at some Far East port, Peter had mailed her an opium pipe and fifteen silk kimonos. She had given all but one of the kimonos to a charity auction, a generosity that backfired when someone discovered the simple designs that patterned them were an illusionary trick: held in certain lights they revealed dreadful obscenities. Mr. McNeil, caught dead-center in the ensuing ruckus, had said, nonsense, obviously the value of the kimonos should increase: he hadn’t objected at all to Grady’s wearing one. In fact, she was wearing it now, though the cumbersome sleeves had a nasty habit of drooping into the bowl as she stood whipping up her waffle-batter.

  She would not admit she was making a mess. Unfazed by bacon already shriveled and coffee stone-cold, she poured her mixings onto a grill she’d forgotten to grease, and said, “Oh I adore to cook: it makes me feel so mindless in a worthwhile way. And I’ve been thinking—if you’re going to listen to a ball-game, why, I might bake a chocolate cake: would you like that?” Presently, with a gust of smoke, the waffle-iron indicated a charred content; twenty minutes later, having scraped the iron, she announced cheerfully, and not without pride: “Breakfast ready.”

  Clyde sat down and surveyed his plate with a smile so wan that she said, “What is it, darling? Couldn’t you find your ball-game on the radio?” Hmm, he’d found the right station, but the game hadn’t started yet: and would she mind heating up the coffee again? “Peter loathes baseball,” she said, for no reason other than that it was a detail she’d just remembered: as an opposition to Clyde, who appeared so to guard his own talk, she’d begun saying whatever came into her head, regardless of how irrelevant. “Be careful,” she said, carrying the percolator from the stove and pouring him more coffee, “you’ll burn your tongue this time.” As she passed he caught her hand, swinging it a little to and fro. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Why?” he said. “Because I’m happy,” she answered, and swung her hand free of his. “That’s funny,” he said, “it’s funny you’re not happy all the time,” and his arm swept outward in a gesture she instantly regretted, for it indicated, indeed proved, how aware he was of her advantages: absurdly, she’d not thought him resentful.

  “Happiness is relative,” she said: it was the easiest reply.

  “Relative to what: money?” This retort seemed to give his spirits a lift. He stretched, yawned, told her to light him a cigarette.

  “After this, you’ll light your own,” she said, “because I’m going to be very busy with a chocolate cake. You can get some ice-cream from Schrafft’s: won’t that be heaven?” She propped a cookbook in front of her. “Lots of wonderful recipes in here: listen to this—”

  Interrupting, he said, “It just came to me: did you mean that when you told Winifred she could have a party here? She’s the kind of girl that’ll think you meant it.”

  This derailed her own train of thought: what party? And then, in a rainfall of memory that left her quite drenched, she remembered that Winifred was the dark, hefty, huge girl Mink had brought to the picnic in the Catskills: a picnic to which Winifred had contributed, in addition to a pound of salami, something near to two hundred pounds of giggling fat and muscle. Rhinoceros into wood-nymph, and clad in a pair of gym-bloomers, these a hold-over from athletic days at Lincoln High, she’d romped with nature all the afternoon, never letting go the clutch she kept on a sweaty bunch of daisies: there were some people who just thought it was funny the way she loved flowers, she said, but honestly there was nothing she loved better than flowers because that was the kind of person she was.

  And yet, in an ill-defined way, she was admirable, Winifred. Like her spaniel eyes, there was a tender good kind of warmth in her unrestraint; and she so adored Mink, was so proud and solicitous of him. Grady knew no one she thought less attractive than Mink, or more preposterous than Winifred: yet together and around them they made a clear lovely light: it was as if, out of their ordinary stone, their massive unshaped selves, something precious had been set free, a figure musical and pure: she could not but pay it homage. Clyde, who, it would seem, had presented them as a warning that what was his would not suit her, appeared surprised that she liked them. But when the tire blew, and while the men were fixing it, Grady had been left alone in the car with Winifred; and Winifred, luring her into a cave of feminine confidence, quickly brought about one of the few times Grady had ever felt close to another girl. They each told a story. Winifred’s was sad: she was a telephone operator, and that she liked, but her life at home was misery because, determined to marry Mink, she wanted to have an engagement party, and her family, who thought Mink worthless, would not allow it in the house: what oh what was she to do? Grady had said, well, if it was only a party, why she could use the McNeils’ apartment. Promptly Winifred had burst into fat tears: it was the nicest thing, she said.

  “Even if you did mean it,” Clyde continued, “I don’t think it’s such a hot idea: if your family ever heard about it I’ll bet there’d be hell to pay.”

  “Isn’t it rather incongruous, your worrying about my family?” she said; and it flashed upon her that he was jealous; not of her, but of Mink and Winifred, for it was as if he believed she had bribed them away from him. “If you don’t want the party, very well: I couldn’t care less. I only offered to because I thought it would please you: after all, they’re your friends, not mine.”

  “Look, kid—you know what it is between us. So don’t go getting it mixed up with a whole lot of other things.”

  She smarted under this: it made her feel quite ugly; and, maintaining silence at a cost, she hid herself behind the cookbook. Most of all, she wanted to say to him that he was a coward: only a coward, she knew, would revert to such tactics; and she was tired, too, of the quiet he imposed upon her: he seemed so familiar with quiet, and to accept it so easily, that perhaps he did not understand guilt was something she herself, at least in relation to him, was far from feeling. Irritably, and with her recipe a blur on the page, she listened to the rustle of his paper. He was leaning back in a chair, and it came forward with a thud.

  “Christ!” he said, “here’s your picture,” and twisted around so that she could see over his shoulder. A fuzzy, flyspecked image of her and Peter, both resembling embalmed frogs, stared from the paper. Clyde, following the print with his finger, read: “Grady McNeil, debutante daughter of financier Lamont McNeil, and her fiancé, Walt Whitman the Second, in private conversation at the Atrium Club. Whitman is a grandson of the famed poet.”

  It was outrageous, she could hear Apple telling her so: all the same, it took a stony comment from Clyde to stop her laughter: “Let somebody else in on the joke.”

  “Oh darling, it’s so complicated,” she said, wiping her eyes. “And anyway, it’s nothing.”

  Tapping the picture, he said, “Isn’t this the guy that sent the telegram?”

  “Yes and no,” she said, and despaired of explaining. But Clyde did not seem to care. With his eyes pinched and far-looking, he sucked in smoke and let it out slowly through his nose. “Is that true?” he asked. “Are you and what’s-his-name engaged?”

  “You know better than that: of course not. He’s just an old friend, someone I’ve known all my
life.”

  Scowling, he drew on the table a contemplative circle: his finger traced round and round it; and Grady, who had thought the subject ended, saw something more was to come. Her sense of this deepened as each circle evolved, evaporated; and the suspense brought her to her feet. She looked down at him, expectant. But it was as if he could not make up his mind what it was he had to say.

  “Peter and I grew up together, and we—”

  Clyde cleared his throat decisively. “I don’t guess you know it, I guess maybe this is news: but I’m engaged.”

  The smallest affairs of the kitchen seemed suddenly to attack her attention: time passing in an invisible clock, the red vein of a thermometer, spider-light crawling in the Swiss curtains, a tear of water suspended and never falling from the faucet: these she wove into a wall: but it was too thin, too papery, and Clyde’s voice could not be canceled. “I sent her a ring from Germany. If that’s what engaged means. Well,” he said, “I told you I was Jewish: or anyway my mother’s—and she’s crazy about Rebecca. I don’t know, Rebecca’s a nice girl: she wrote me every day I was in the army.”

  Distantly the telephone was ringing: Grady had never thought a call more important; ignoring the extension phone in the kitchen, she rushed through a maze of servant-halls into the outer apartment and her own room. It was Apple in East Hampton. Talk slower, Grady told her, for at the other end there was only a lot of words and sputter: trying to ruin the family? she said, when she realized that Apple’s long-winded dramatics were related to Peter Bell and the newspaper picture: alas, someone had shown it to her. Ordinarily, she would have hung up; but now, when even the floor seemed unsubstantial, she held to the sound of her sister’s voice. She wheedled, explained, accepted abuse. Gradually Apple softened to such a degree she put her little boy on the phone and made him say, hello, Aunt Grady, when you coming out to see us? And when Apple, taking up this theme, suggested she come and stay the week in East Hampton, Grady put up no struggle at all: before they hung up it was settled that she would drive out in the morning.

  By her bed there was a cloth doll, a faded homely girl with tangled strings of red raggedy hair; her name was Margaret, she was twelve years old, and probably older, for she’d not been much to look at when Grady had first found her forsaken by some other child and lying on a bench in the park. At home everyone had remarked how much alike they looked, both of them skinny and straggling and red-headed. She fluffed the doll’s hair and straightened her skirt; it was like old times when Margaret had always been such a help: oh Margaret, she began, and stopped, struck still by the thought that Margaret’s eyes were blue buttons and cold, that Margaret was not the same anymore.

  Carefully she moved across the room and raised her eyes to a mirror: nor was Grady the same. She was not a child. It had been so ideal an excuse she somehow had persisted in a notion that she was: when, for instance, she’d said to Peter it had not occurred to her whether or not she might marry Clyde, that had been the truth, but only because she’d thought of it as a problem for a grown-up: marriages happened far ahead when life grey and earnest began, and her own life she was sure had not started; though now, seeing herself dark and pale in the mirror, she knew it had been going on a very long while.

  A long while: and Clyde too much a part of it: she wished him dead. Like the Queen of Hearts, forever shouting off with their heads, it was all in her fancy, for Clyde had done nothing to warrant the severity of execution: that he should be engaged was not criminal, he was within his rights absolutely: for what in fact were her claims on him? There were none she could present; because, unadmitted but central in her feelings, she’d had always a premonition of briefness, a knowledge that he could not be sewn into the practical material of her future: indeed, it was because of this almost that she’d chosen to love him: he was to be, or was to have been, the yesteryear fire reflecting on snows soon enough to fall. Before she quit the mirror she’d seen that all weathers are unpredictable: the temperature was dropping, snows were already upon her.

  She tipped back and forward on a seesaw of anger and self-pity. There was a limit to the charges to be brought against herself: she had a few in store for him. And chief among these was the compact she’d found in her car; with rather a flourish she extracted it from a bureau-drawer: hereafter, he could ride Rebecca on a trolley.

  The hush and roar of baseball filled the kitchen; Clyde, biting his nails, was bending over the radio, but on her entrance his eyes cut anxiously sidewise. And she paused, wondering if really she should. In a moment, however, it was done: she had put the compact down beside him. “I thought your friend might like to have this back: it must be hers—I found it in the car.”

  A rush of shame smeared his neck; but then, after he’d slipped the compact into his pocket, there was a steely top to bottom hardening, and his husky voice went pit-deep: “Thanks, Grady. She was looking for it.”

  It was as if an electric fan churned in Clyde’s head, and the drone of the sports announcer, caught in its whir, was a sound clapped and crazy. He felt in his pocket for the compact and closed his hand on it hard: a snap, a tinkle, and it burst: splinters of mirror pierced his palm, which bled a little.

  He was sorry to have broken the compact, because it had belonged to someone he’d loved, his sister Anne.

  In April, when he’d first known Grady, a kink had developed in the fuselage channel of her Buick, an ailment he himself could not seem to remedy, and so he had taken the car over to Brooklyn to show his friend Gump, who worked in a garage. Anne used to hang around this garage most of the day. A stunted, weazened girl of nineteen who looked no more than ten or eleven, she’d understood motors as well as a man. At home she’d collected a pile of scrapbooks high as herself, and they contained nothing but the fantasia of her own designs for super-speed automobiles and inter-planet aeroplanes. This had been her life’s work, all she’d known, for when she was three years old she’d had a heart attack, and so had never gone to school. Despite a united effort in the family, no one had been able to teach her to read or write, she’d simply rejected every attempt, and gone defiantly on with her real concerns: the workings of an engine, the sweep of wings in outer space. There had been a rule in the house that one did not lift their voice to Anne: always, and by everyone except Clyde, she was given the ostentatious consideration shown someone expected to die: Clyde, who could not imagine that she would, who could not picture the house without her motor-talk and tool-tinkering, her fairy-tale wonder at the sound of a plane or the spectacle of a new car, had treated her with a natural robustness she’d answered by adoring him: we’re brothers, aren’t we, Clyde? was how she’d described her view of their closeness. And he was not ashamed of her. The others had been, somewhat. His sister Ida had been particularly disgruntled that Anne should be allowed to hang around all day in a garage: what do you suppose people think of me when there is my own sister dressed like a trollop and loafing with every bum in the neighborhood? Clyde had said truthfully that these boys Ida called bums were nuts about Anne: and they were the only friends she had. But it was more difficult to excuse the way she dressed. Until she was seventeen Anne had worn infantile clothes from Ohrbach’s children’s department; then, just one day, she bought herself a pair of three-inch heels, a razzle-dazzle dress or two, a pair of false breasts, a compact and a bottle of pearl-colored nail polish; swishing along the streets in her new décor, she looked like a little girl in masquerade: strangers laughed. Clyde had once beat up a man for laughing at her. And he’d told her never mind Ida and the rest: wear what she pleased. And she’d said, well, she didn’t care personally what she wore, but that she wanted to look pretty because of Gump. Out of the clear sky she’d proposed to Gump, who had been nice enough to say that if he married anybody it would be Anne. It was because of this that Clyde counted him his best friend: he never complained when Gump cheated at cards. The day he had driven Grady’s car out to the garage in Brooklyn, Anne was there: wearing high heels and with a rhinestone comb
in her hair she was helping Gump locate a motor-knock. There was a spring rainbow in the sky, and the blending of a rainbow and a blue glittering convertible had been too much for her: in a car like that, she’d said, begging Clyde to take her for a ride, why, in a car like that you could reach the end of the rainbow before it faded away. So he had driven her all over the neighborhood, and past a school where the children were letting out (even the littlest ones know more than me, but they never were in such a gorgeous car); perched sparrow-like on the top of a seat, and dancing her legs, she’d waved to everyone, as though she were the heroine of a big parade. And when he’d stopped by their house to let her out, she’d thrown him a kiss from the curb: he thought he’d never in all his life seen a prettier girl. A few minutes later, hurrying up the stairs, she’d plunged backwards and down: it was the Lord’s mercy, said Ida, who had been the only one at home, and who had not reached her in time.

  Clyde thought back: during those days when Ida and his mother and Bernie and Crystal were collecting sympathy and perpetuating funeral sorrow, he’d stayed away from home and had a good time with Grady: you didn’t want to talk about Anne to a crazy kid like her. When he was in the army he’d picked up a great many girls: sometimes nothing happened except a lot of talk, and that was all right, too: because it didn’t matter what you said to them, for in those transient moments lies or truth were arbitrary and you were whatever you wanted to be. The morning he’d first seen Grady at the parking lot, and later, when she’d been around a few times and he’d known for sure there was something in the air, she’d seemed to him like one of these girls, someone on a train; and he’d thought what the hell: take what comes your way: so he’d asked her for a date. Afterwards, he did not understand her at all: she had in some way outdistanced him, overshot the mark of his expectations: a crazy kid, he said, knowing full well how inadequate a label this was, and yet, handicapped by the width of her feeling and the narrowness of his, he could not improvise another. It was only with retreat that he could keep the least position: the more important she became, the less he made her seem so: because, for Christ’s sake, what was he supposed to do when she walked out? Which sooner or later she would. If he believed differently, then maybe he could share himself in the way she wanted, but the prospect facing him was all-subway and all-Rebecca, and to accept that meant he could not take too seriously a girl like Grady McNeil. It was hard. And becoming more so. At the picnic he’d gone to sleep for a while with his head on her lap; dreaming, someone had said it was not Anne who had died, but Grady: when he’d wakened, and seen her face in a halo of sunlight, there had been a breaking all through him: if he’d known how, it was then that he would have exposed the fraud of his indifference.