The McNeils were on A deck in a suite of varnished rooms with fake fireplaces. Lucy, just-arrived orchids trembling on her lapel, skittered to and fro while Apple trailed after her reading aloud from cards that had come with offerings of flowers and fruit. Mr. McNeil’s secretary, the stately Miss Seed, passed among them with a Piper-Heidsieck bottle, her expression vaguely curled with the incongruity of champagne in the morning (Peter Bell told her not to bother with a glass, he would take whatever was left of the bottle), and Mr. McNeil himself, solemnly flattered, stood at the door discouraging a man who televised important travelers: “Sorry, old man … forgot my makeup ha ha.”
No one even liked Mr. McNeil’s jokes except other men and Miss Seed: and that, so Lucy said, was only because Miss Seed was in love with him. The dachshund ripped the stockings of a female photographer who flashed Lucy in her rigidest rotogravure stance: “What are we planning to do abroad?” said Lucy, repeating the reporter’s query. “Why, I’m not sure. We have a home in Cannes that we haven’t seen since the war; I suppose we’ll stop by there. And shop; of course we’ll shop.” She hemmed embarrassedly. “But mostly it’s the boat ride. There’s nothing to change the spirit like a summer crossing.”
Stealing the champagne, Peter Bell led Grady away and up through the saloons and onto an open deck where voyagers, parading with their well-wishers against the city skyline, had already proud ocean-roll walks. One lone child stood at the railing forlornly flying kites of confetti: Peter offered him a swallow of champagne, but the child’s mother, a giant of uncommon physique, advanced with thunderous steps and sent them fleeing to the dog-kennel deck. “Oh dear,” said Peter, “the dog house: isn’t that always our lot.”
They huddled together in a spot of sun; it was as hidden as a stowaway’s retreat, a yearning bellow from the smokestacks poignantly baled away, and Peter said how wonderful it would be if they could fall asleep and awake with stars overhead and the ship far at sea. Together, running on Connecticut shores and looking over the Sound, they had, years before, spent whole days contriving elaborate and desperate plots: Peter had assumed always a serious enthusiasm, he’d seemed absolutely to believe a rubber raft would float them to Spain, and something of that old note shivered his voice now. “I suppose it’s just as well we’re not children anymore,” he said, dividing the last of the wine between them. “That really was too wretched. But I wish we were still children enough to stay on this boat.”
Grady, stretching her brown naked legs, tossed her head. “I would swim ashore.”
“Maybe I’m not up on you as I used to be. I’ve been away so much. But how could you turn down Europe, McNeil? Or is that rude? I mean, am I intruding on your secret?”
“There isn’t a secret,” she said, partly aggravated, partly enlivened with the knowledge that perhaps there was. “Not a real one. It’s more, well, a privacy, a small privacy I should like to keep awhile longer, oh not always, but a week, a day, simply a few hours: you know, like a present you keep hidden in a drawer: it will be given away soon enough, but for a while you want it all to yourself.”
Though she had expressed her feeling inexpertly, she glanced at Peter’s face, sure of seeing there a reflection of his inveterate understanding; but she found only an alarming absence of expression: he seemed faded out, as though the sudden exposure to sun had drained him of all color, and, aware presently that he’d heard nothing she had said, she tapped him on the shoulder. “I was wondering,” he said, blinking his eyes, “I was wondering if there is, after all, a final reward in unpopularity?”
It was a question with some history; but Grady, who had learned the answer from Peter’s own life, was surprised, even a little shocked to hear him ask it so wistfully and, indeed, ask it at all. Peter had never been popular, it was true, not at school or at the club, not with any of the people they were, as he put it, condemned to know; and yet it was this very condition which had so sworn them together, for Grady, who cared not one way or the other, loved Peter, and had joined him in his outside realm quite as though she belonged there for the same reason he did: Peter, to be sure, had taught her that she was no more liked than himself: they were too fine, it was not their moment, this era of the adolescent, their appreciation he said would come at a future time. Grady had never bothered about it; in that sense, she saw, thinking back over what seemed now a ridiculous problem, she’d never been unpopular: it was just that she’d never made an effort, not felt deeply that to be liked was of importance. Whereas Peter had cared exceedingly.
All their childhood she’d helped her friend build, drafty though it was, a sandcastle of protection. Such castles should deteriorate of natural and happy processes. That for Peter his should still exist was simply extraordinary. Grady, though she still had use for their file of privately humorous references, for the sad anecdotes and tender coinages they shared, wanted no part of the castle: that applauded hour, the golden moment Peter had promised, did he not know that it was now?
“I know,” he said, as if, having divined this thought of hers, he now replied to it. “Nevertheless.” I know. Nevertheless. He sighed over his motto. “I suppose you imagined I was joking. About the university. Really, I was kicked out; not for saying the wrong thing, but for saying perhaps the too-right thing: both would appear to be objectionable.” The exuberant quality that so suited him rearranged his mischief-maker face. “I’m glad about you,” he said inexplicably, but with such a waterfall of warmth that Grady pressed her cheek near his.
“If I said that I was in love with you, that would be incestuous, wouldn’t it, McNeil?” All-ashore gongs were clanging through the ship, and ashes of shadow, spilt by sudden cloud-shades, heaped the deck. Grady for an instant felt the oddest loss: poor Peter, he knew her even less, she realized, than Apple, and yet, because he was her only friend, she wanted to tell him: not now, sometime. And what would he say? Because he was Peter, she trusted him to love her more: if not, then let the sea usurp their castle, not the one they’d built to keep life out, it was already gone, at least for her, but another, that one sheltering friendships and promises.
As the sun flooded out, he stood up and pulled her to her feet, saying, “And where shall we be gala tonight?” but Grady, who every moment meant to explain that she could not keep a date with him, let it pass again, for, as they descended the steps, a steward, brassy with the shininess of a gong, called his warning to them, and later, confronted with the activity of Lucy’s farewell, she forgot altogether.
Fanfaring a handkerchief, and embracing her daughters fitfully, Lucy followed them to the gangplank; once she’d seen them down the canvas tunnel, she hurried out on the deck and watched for their appearance beyond the green fence; when she saw them, all clustered together and gazing dazedly, she started flagging the handkerchief to show them where she was, but her arm grew strangely weak and, overtaken by a guilty sensation of incompleteness, of having left something unfinished, undone, she let it fall to her side.
The handkerchief came to her eyes in earnest, and the image of Grady (she loved her! Before God she had loved Grady as much as the child would let her) bubbled in the blur; there were stricken days, difficult days, and though Grady was as different from her as she had been from her own mother, head-sure and harder, she still was not a woman, but a girl, a child, and it was a terrible mistake, they could not leave her here, she could not leave her child unfinished, incomplete, she would have to hurry, she would have to tell Lamont they mustn’t go. But before she could move he had closed his arms around her; he was waving down to the children; and then she was waving too.
Chapter 2
Broadway is a street; it is also a neighborhood, an atmosphere. From the time she was thirteen, and during all those winters at Miss Risdale’s classes, Grady had made, even if it meant skipping school, as it often did, secret and weekly expeditions into this atmosphere, the attraction at first being band-shows at the Paramount, the Strand, curious movies that never played the theaters east of Fifth or
