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 called 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
