When he saw Weehawken again he wanted to crawl into his mother’s bed and die. He asked to see the room where he played as a child. He looked at the garden from the window upstairs and in utter despair he spat into it. He shut the door on his old friends and took to the bottle. Ages pass during which he shuttles back and forth on the loom of memory. He has only one security—his wealth. It is like telling a blind man he may have a white cane.
And then one evening, seated alone at a table in a village dive, a woman approaches and hands him a Mezzotint to read. He invites her to sit down. He orders a meal for her. He listens to her stories. He forgets that he has an artificial limb, forgets that there ever was a war He knows suddenly that he loves this woman. She does not need to love him, she needs only to be. If she will consent to see him occasionally, for just a few minutes, life will have meaning again.
Thus Rothermel dreams. He forgets all the heart-rending scenes which have sullied this beautiful picture. He would do anything for her, even now.
And now let us leave Rothermel for a while. Let him dream in his taxicab as the ferryboat gently cradles him on the bosom of the Hudson. We will meet him again, on the shores of Manhattan.
At Forty-Second Street Mona dives into the subway to emerge in a few minutes at Sheridan Square. Here her course becomes truly erratic. Sophie, if she were still on her heels, would indeed have difficulty following her. The Village is a network of labyrinths modelled upon the corrugated reveries of the early Dutch settlers. One is constantly coming face-to-face with himself at the end of a tortuous street.
There are alleys, lanes, cellars and garrets, squares, triangles, courts, everything anomalous, incongruous and bewildering: all that lacks are the bridges of Milwaukee. Certain doll’s houses, squeezed between sombre tenements and morbid factories, have been dozing in a vacuum of time which could be described only in terms of decans. The dreamy, somnolent past exudes from the facades, from the curious names of the streets, from the miniature scale imparted by the Dutch. The present announces itself in the strident cries of the street urchins, in the muffled roar of traffic which shakes not only the chandeliers but the very foundations of the underground. Dominating everything is the confusion of races, tongues, habits. The Americans who have muscled in are off-center, whether they be bankers, politicians, magistrates, Bohemians, or genuine artists. Everything is cheap, tawdry, vulgar and phony. Minnie Douchebag is on the same level as the prison warden round the corner. The fraternization, such as it is, takes place at the bottom of the melting pot. Every one is trying to pretend that it is the most interesting locale in the city. It is a quarter full of characters; they collide like protons and electrons, always in a five-dimensional world whose fundament is chaos.
It is in a world like this that Mona is at home and thoroughly herself. Every few paces she runs into some one she knows. These encounters resemble to a remarkable degree the collisions of ants in the throes of work. Conversation is conducted through antennae which are manipulated frenetically. Has some devastating upheaval just occurred which vitally concerns the entire ant-hill? The running up and down stairs, the salutations, the hand-shaking, the rubbing of noses, the phantom gesticulations, the pourparlers, the gurgitations and regurgitations, the aerial transmissions, the dressing and undressing, the whispering, the warnings, the threats, the entreaties, the masquerades—all goes on in insect fashion and with a speed such as only insects seem capable of mustering. Even when snowbound the Village is in constant commotion and effervescence. Yet nothing of the slightest importance ever ensues. In the morning there are headaches, that is all.
Sometimes, however, in one of those houses which one notices only in dream, there lives a pale, timid creature, usually of dubious sex, who belongs to the world of du Maurier, Chekov or Alain Fournier. The name may be Alma, Frederika, Ursula, Malvina, a name consonant with the auburn tresses, the pre-Raphaelite figure, the Gaelic eyes. A creature, who rarely stirs from the house, and then only in the Wee hours of the morning.
Towards such types Mona is fatally drawn. A secret friendship veils all their intercourse in mystery. Those breathless errands which drive her through the runnelled streets may have for objective nothing more than the purchase of a dozen white goose eggs. No other eggs will do. En passant she may take it into her head to surprise her seraphic friend by buying her an old-fashioned cameo smothered in violets, or a rocking-chair from the hills of Dakota, or a snuff-box scented with sandalwood. The gifts first and then a few bills fresh from the mint. She arrives breathlessly and departs breathlessly, as if between thunder claps. Even Rothermel would be powerless to suspect how quickly and for what ends his money goes. All we know, who greet her at the end of a feverish day, is that she has managed to buy a few groceries and can dispense a little cash. On the Brooklyn side we talk in terms of coppers, which in China is cash. Like children we play with nickels, dimes and pennies. The dollar is an abstract conception employed only in high finance-Only once during our stay with the Poles did Stanley and I venture abroad together. It was to see a Western picture in which there were some extraordinary wild horses. Stanley, reminded of his days in the cavalry, became so excited that he decided not to go to work that evening. All through the meal he told yarns, with each yarn growing more tender, more sympathetic, more romantic. Suddenly he recalled the voluminous correspondence which we had exchanged when we were in our teens.
It all began the day after I saw him. coming down the street of early sorrows, seated atop the hearse beside the driver. (After his uncle’s death Stanley’s aunt had married an undertaker, a Pole again. Stanley always had to accompany him on the burial expeditions.)
I was in the middle of the street, playing cat, when the funeral procession came along. I was certain it was Stanley who had waved to me, yet I could not believe my eyes. Had it not been a funeral procession I would have trotted alongside the vehicle and exchanged greetings. As it was, I stood rooted to the spot, watching the cortege slowly disappear round the corner.
It was the first time I had seen Stanley in six years. It made an impression on me. The following day I sat down and wrote him a letter—to the old address.
Stanley now brought out that first letter—and all the others which had followed. I was ashamed to tell him that I had long since lost his. But I could still remember the flavor of them, all written on long sheets of yellow paper, in pencil, with a flourishing hand. The hand of an autocrat. I recalled the perennial salutation he employed: My charming fellow! This to a boy in short pants! They were letters, to speak of style, such as Theophile Gautier might have written to an unknown sycophant. Doped with literary borrowings. But they put me in a fever, always.
What my own letters were like I had never once thought of. They belonged to a distant past, a forgotten past. Now I held them in my hand, and my hand trembled as I read. So this was me in my teens? What a pity no one had made a movie of us! Droll figures we were. Little jackanapes, bantams, cocks-o’-the-walk. Discussing such ponderous things as death and eternity, reincarnation, metempsychosis, libertinism, suicide. Pretending that the books we read were nothing to the ones we would write ourselves one day. Talking of life as if we had experienced it to the core.
But even in these pretentious exercises of youth I detected to my amazement the seeds of an imaginative faculty which was to ripen with time. Even in these fly-blown missives there were those abrupt breaks and rushes which indicate the presence of hidden fires, of unsuspected conflicts. I was moved to observe that even at this period I could lose myself, I who was hardly aware that I had a self. Stanley, I recalled, never lost himself. He had a style and in it he was fixed, as if constricted by a corset. I remember that at that period I thought of him as being so much more mature, so much more sophisticated. He would be the brilliant writer; I would be the plodding ink-slinger. As a Pole he had an illustrious heritage; I was merely an American, with an ancestry which was vague and dubious. Stanley wrote as if he had stepped off the boat only the
