He came out on the next train; it was an uneasy afternoon they spent together at the hospital; night came, and still no word, and Steve, who had managed with Grady a few jokes, a game of hearts, withdrew to a corner and let silence settle between them. The stale despair of train-schedules, and business and bills to be paid, seemed to rise off him like tired dust, and he sat there blowing smoke rings, zeros hollow as Grady had begun to feel … it was as if she curved away from him into space, as if the lake-image of him receded before her until now she could see him actually, a view that struck her as the most moving of any, for, with the exhausted droop of his shoulders and the tear at the corner of his eye, he belonged to Janet and to her child. Wanting to show her love for him, not as a lover but as a man slumped with love and birth, she moved toward him.
A nurse had come to the doorway; and Steve Bolton heard of his son without any change of expression. Slowly he climbed to his feet, his eyes blind-pale; and with a sigh that swayed the room his head fell forward on Grady’s shoulder: I’m a very happy man, he said. It was done then, there was nothing more she wanted of him, summer’s desires had fallen to winter seed: winds blew them far before another April broke their flower.
“Come on, light me a cigarette.” Clyde Manzer’s voice, grouchy with sleep, but always fairly hoarse and furry, had some singular quality: it was easy to get an impression of whatever he said, for there was a mumbling power, subdued as a throttle left running, that dragged the slow-fuse of maleness through every syllable; nevertheless, he stumbled over words, pauses occasionally so separating sentences that all sense evaporated. “Don’t nigger-lip it, kid. You always nigger-lip.” The voice, though attractive in its way, could be misleading: because of it, some people thought him stupid: this proved them simply unobservant: Clyde Manzer was not in the least stupid: his particular smartness was, in fact, the plainly obvious.
The four-lettered scholarship that carries a diploma in know-how—how to run, where to hide, how to ride the subway and see a movie and use a pay-phone all without paying—these knowledges that come with a city childhood of block warfare and desperate afternoons when only the cruel and clever, the swift, the brave survive—was the training that gave his eyes their agile intensity. “Aw, you nigger-lipped it. Christ, I knew you would.”
“I’ll smoke it,” Grady said; and, using the lighter Peter had thought so vulgar, she lighted him another. One Monday, which was Clyde’s day off, they had gone to a shooting gallery and he had won the lighter there and given it to her: since then she liked lighting everybody’s cigarettes: there was an excitement in seeing her secret, disguised as thin fire, leap naked between herself, who knew, and someone else, who might discover.
“Thanks, kid,” he said, accepting the new cigarette. “You’re a good kid: you didn’t nigger-lip it. I’m just in a lousy mood, that’s all. I shouldn’t ought to sleep like that. I was having dreams.”
“I hope I was in them.”
“I don’t remember nothing I dream,” he said, rubbing his chin as though he needed a shave. “So tell me, did you get them off, your folks?”
“Just now—Apple wanted me to drive her home, and an old friend showed up: it was very confused, I came straight from the pier.”
“There’s an old friend of mine I’d like to show up,” he said, and spit on the ground. “Mink. You know Mink? I told you, the guy I was in the army with. On account of what you said, I said for him to come around and take over this afternoon. The bastard owes me two bucks: I told him if he’d come around I’d forget it. So, baby,” his reaching hand touched the cool silk of her blouse, “unless the guy shows up,” and then, with a gentle pressure, slipped to her breast, “I guess I’m stuck here.”
They regarded each other silently for as long as it took a tear of sweat to slide from the top of his forehead down the length of his cheek. “I missed you,” he said. And he would have said something more if a customer had not come rolling into the lot.
Three ladies from Westchester, in for lunch and a matinee; Grady sat in the car and waited while Clyde went to attend them.
She liked the way he walked, the way his legs seemed to take their time, each step lazily spaced and oddly loping: it was the walk of a tall man. But Clyde was not much taller than herself. Around the parking lot he always wore a pair of summer khakis and a flannel shirt or an old sweater: it was a kind of dress better looking and far more suitable to him than the suit he was so proud of. He was usually wearing this suit, a double-breasted blue pin-stripe, whenever he appeared in her dreams; she could not imagine why; but for that matter, her dreams about him were unreasonable anyway.
In them she was perpetually the spectator, and he was with someone else, some other girl, and they would walk past, smirking disdainfully or dismissing her by looking the other way: the humiliation was great, her jealousy greater, it was unreasonable; still, her anxiety had some basis: two or three times she was sure he had taken her car out driving, and once, after she had left the car there overnight, she had found lodged between the cushions a garish little compact, decidedly not her own. But she did not mention these things to Clyde; she kept the compact and never spoke of it.
“Ain’t you Manzer’s girl?” She had been dialing for music on the radio; she had not heard anyone approach, and so it was startling when she looked up and found a man leaning against the car, his eyes screwed on her and half his mouth crooked in a smile that showed a gold tooth and a silver one. “I said, you’re Manzer’s girl, huh? We saw the picture of you in the magazine. That was a good picture. My girl Winifred (Manzer tell you about Winifred?), she liked that picture a lot. You think the guy that took it would take one of her? It’d give her a big kick.” Grady could only look at him; and that, hardly: for he was like a fat quivering baby grown with freakish suddenness to the size of an ox: his eyes popped and his lips sagged. “I’m Mink,” he said, and pulled out a cigarette which Grady allowed him to light: she began blowing the car-horn as loud as she could.
Clyde could never be hurried; after parking the Westchester car he ambled over at his own convenience. “What the hell’s the racket?” he said.
“This man, well, he’s here.”
“So, you think I can’t see that? Hiya, Mink.” Turning away from her, he brought his attention to the floury smiling face of Mink, and Grady resumed her efforts with the radio: she was seldom quick to resent anything Clyde said: his tempers affected her only inasmuch as they made her feel closer to him, for that he released them against her so freely reflected the degree of their intimacy. She would have preferred, however, that nothing had been reflected in front of this ox-child: ain’t you Manzer’s girl? She had imagined Clyde talking of her to his friends, even showing them her picture in a magazine, that was all right, why not? On the other hand, her imaginings had not gone so far as to consider what sort of friends they might be. But it was pretty late in the day for climbing a high-horse; so, smiling, she tried to accept Mink, and said: “Clyde was afraid you might not be able to come. You’re awfully nice to do this for us.”
Mink beamed as if she had pressed inside him a light switch; it was painful, because she could see, by the new life in his face, that he knew she had not liked him and that it had mattered. “Oh yeah, yeah, I wouldn’t let Manzer down. I’d have been here sooner, only Winifred, you know Winifred, she’s on a strike from her job and she had me down there to tell off some big (pardon).” Grady’s eyes fidgeted in the direction of the Nemo’s little office-shack: Clyde had gone there to change his clothes, and she was anxious for him to come back, not only because being alone with Mink was nerve-racking but because, and it was as true of a minute ago as a week, she missed him. “That’s a great car you got, sure is. Winifred’s uncle, he’s the one in Brooklyn, he buys used cars: bet he’d give you a load for that. Say, we all of us ought to double-date one night: drive out dancing, know what I mean?”
Clyde’s reappearance relieved her of answering. Under a leather windbreaker he’d put on a clean white shirt and
