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.
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
