“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
