The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher Part 25

Jim settled back and felt for Esther's hand. As soon as they were away, out of that neighborhood, he would be released from his compulsion to compare, to remember. From here on, it would all be new. He was half aware that his unwilling memories were the more painful because his first marriage had been embarked upon in the same golden warmth and faith, the same sense of inevitability. It had been an October day, that day full of scudding cloud and changeableness, and this day, more than twelve years later, was all moist and May, with a m.u.f.fled vibrato of approaching summer. But in essence each day held the same fixed dream of rightness, of an incredibly lucky voyage with the one person without whom the world dulled. In essence, one day had been, and one day was, the happiest day of his life. It was as if, carefully putting away a freshly inked guaranty in a drawer, he had come upon another, gilt-scrolled and bright and ridiculously voided by time.

He looked at Esther, her serenely musing profile nodding faintly up and down with the movement of the cab. He was beyond seeing her, he knew, in any literal terms as a tall, good-looking girl with dark-blond hair, with features whose imbalance, stopping just short of strangeness, struck one on further scrutiny with their curiously personal beauty. For four years now, from the very beginning of the affair, she had seemed to him a medal struck once, and superbly, for him. Now she looked, as always, fresh and lovely. She always dressed, with wise chic, for the second glance, but today, in a gray dress he had seen once before, and a small spray of veil, she had been perhaps especially careful to avoid the flowery smirk of the bride. Neither of them had brought any huge emphasis to bear on today's ceremony, held as they had been by an unspoken agreement that for two who had so long been lovers this would be silly, perhaps gross. On their way downtown, stopping around the corner from her place to buy her a camellia at the florist shop they always went to, he had found a pleasing element of continuity, almost a safety, in the benedictory smile of the Greek, in the way he handed the flower, as usual, to Jim, and watched, bowing a little, while Jim handed the flower to Esther. She was wearing it pinned not on her shoulder but on her belt.

She looked around at him now with a smile, a slight pressure of the hand in his, then returned to her wide-eyed contemplation of the driver's back, and he saw with a rush of warmth that she was surrounded by her own dream of rightness. If she was thinking of her own first wedding-that phlox-and-roses still life of a Connecticut lawn more than ten years back-he did not begrudge her this. Framed in black, it could lie in her memory only with the finality of a mourning card. The house and lawn of her parents had long since been sold; the boy, with whom she had never shared a house with, dead within two months in Korea, could only tug importunately now and then at the rim of her remembrance. In a frightening way, he envied her this cameo of a memory, which must have for her the perfect finish given only by death. For her, there was no Marie, no young Jimmie, standing forever wounded, forever suppliant, on the fringe of conscience.

He opened his mouth to speak, because one of them must soon speak, and closed it again, in fear of the random significance of the first thing to be said. It was a feeling like that on the birthdays of his boyhood, when he had hesitated, wary, at the childish chant "If you do it on your birthday, you do it all year around-if you cry on your birthday, you cry the whole year round." The long affair had been an idyll, hardly shaken by the long divorce, so sure had they been of themselves and of the deep morality of the end in view. Now that they had it, he wanted to touch wood. He had never been more sure of the end; only the beginning troubled him a little.

"Decided where to, Mister?" the driver asked.

Jim looked over at Esther. She turned the palms of her hands upward, then clasped them lightly in her lap. "Where to ..." she said, smiling, certain. He gave the driver the address of her apartment and leaned back, stretching his legs.

The cab turned down her street-still hers, even though he had come there for years and his things were there now. "Maybe we should have gone off to the country somewhere," he said. "Would you have liked that?"

"No." She shook her head slowly. "I like us just as we are."

He kissed her and let his face rest for a moment on her shoulder, lazily breathing her perfume, watching the sun and shade dapple her lap. When he had paid off the cab, he followed her down the steps to the dark-blue door, flanked with potted shrubs, through which one entered her building, and they stood in the areaway for a minute, looking down the two streets that converged before it. s.p.a.ced along the sidewalks, small, wire-bracketed trees had put out every straining leaf, each trunk holding its rosette of branches like a child's head too heavy for the delicate stalk of neck. "What a day!" she said. "Isn't it a lovely day!" She spun on her heel, and put her hands in his.

"Lovely!" he said. It was the kind of day when the season, poised for the summer plunge, enclosed the city in a golden bubble whose faintly rounded walls distorted everything into a curve of beauty. Down the far distance, where the stores were, windows dazzled into cataracts, signs flew like pennants.

"Spring's the nearsighted season," Esther said softly, and it was true that although he had his gla.s.ses on, everything did look blurred, merged, as if he might just have taken them off, except for the door, on whose k.n.o.b she had put her hand. Over the years of evenings when he had walked toward it in light-footed, sensuous quickening, the door had become the image that had halved his life, first as a rendezvous, with all the giddy charade the word implied, later with urgency and conflict, and finally as a symbol of what he wanted to walk toward forever. During the business days before the nights when he was to see her, it had always been this he had gone toward in his mind, so much so that if anyone had casually asked, "You know Esther King, don't you?" he would have been able to answer indifferently, but if anyone had said, "Do you know a house with a blue door?" he would have been left stammering and undone. Until the very last, when they had had to wrench themselves out into the open, once he had closed it behind him no one else had known where he was, nothing had been able to reach him, shuttered there in secrecy and love.

"Well?" She smiled and twisted her hand on the k.n.o.b, and again he was back in a forgotten birthday, standing in a clutter of wrapping paper, looking, choked and prayerful, at the largest and most beautiful box of all.

"Too nice to go up yet," he said. "What do you say we have a drink at Rolo's?"

"Yes, let's," she said. "Let's go get a drink at Rolo's," she said singsong, tucking her hand under his arm, urging him back up the steps, as if this had been her idea, almost as if his thought had been hers.

"Strange, isn't it?" she said. She was sauntering along, eyes half closed, smiling. "Not to see you for a month, and then all of a sudden-this. I can't believe it. I can't believe you're not going to have to-go."

He squeezed the arm with her hand in it against his side. During the last weeks, they had kept apart; she had gone out of town while the decree became final and he went through the series of small obsequies-dreadful because they were so small-that had attended his final rupture with the house in New Canaan. Esther had wanted them to start clear, she had said, obsessed by a sudden, wistful grasp at propriety, and they had done so. On his last visit to the house, to get his summer clothes out of the attic and back to the hotel where he was staying, he had come down the attic stairs with his arms full, thinking, Was it only last summer-was it only last summer-that he had been living here? And he had run straight into Marie, who had always been carefully absent when he came before, on similar forays or for an appointed outing with young Jim. She had turned quickly into a room, shutting the door behind her, but not before he felt the same oddly monogamous twinge of guilt that had made his continued life there impossible. For it had been guilt, and a monogamous one-but its allegiance had been to Esther.

"Down this way. Remember?" Esther said, and stopped him from continuing past Second Avenue. The bar, Rolo's, was halfway down the block. It was a place they had first gone to one afternoon years before, out of a deep need to show their love in the company of someone. Little by little, as it became the one spot where they let themselves be seen, the magic comfort of such places gathered in its grimy red shadows, for here they were known to belong together. Here they had their own corner and their special drink; and their status, though never commented upon, had been well surmised and appraised-and this, too, made them happy. Finally, even the "characters" in the bar became dear to them, for in the eyes of these, they themselves were characters in their own romance.

At the door of the bar, Jim hesitated. Perhaps she would be hurt, after all, if there were not some celebration, some tiny bursting of the rose, even if only among the supernumeraries here. "As we were?" he asked.

"As we were." She touched a finger to her lips, and the smile was still upon them.

As we still are, he thought, following her in. He nodded to Tom, the bartender, raised two fingers, pulled out Esther's chair, sat down in his own, and nodded again, this time to Lydia Matthews, a white-haired beauty of fifty, who returned the nod with the dainty, spectral smile of her five-o'clock Martini swoon. The bartender, coming over to their table to set down their vermouth-ca.s.sis, glanced back at her with a pitying shrug.

Jim clinked his gla.s.s against Esther's. "To things as they are," he said. With a forefinger, he stroked the back of her hand. Over the raised rim of her gla.s.s, her eyes filled with tears.

They sat there for a long time; they had supper there while the window behind them turned into a great ox eye of blue. When the bar was crowded, the place full, Lydia left, as she always did. They watched her thread her way out, a hostess speeding her guests, pausing here and there to lean over a table and drop the same muted phrases from the wry, aging dimple of her mouth. She stopped to speak to a couple at the table next to theirs. "Found your boy?" she asked the woman. "That's right, darling. That's everything there is." The woman laughed.

Lydia leaned over Esther. "Found your boy," she said, nodding like a pink, ruined, grandmotherly girl.

She drew herself up, her head queenly, her purse clasped tight in front of her. "Night, ducks," she said, her voice round and warm, and walked past them, out the door, treading lightly on the civet flow of the Martinis, her head held high in the regency of drink.

Glancing at each other, they rose, too, with intuitive rhythm, and left the place, walking silently through the blue element of the evening. And now he caught her around the hip and urged her, laughing, running, to the corner of their street. There they slackened, breathless, and again he urged her forward. On the brink of the steps, they teetered, then ran down them in unison; he flung the door open, pushed her inside, and caught her in his arms, listening with satisfaction to the door soothing shut behind them.

"Oh, Lord!" she said, laughing, picking the spray of veil from her hair and hanging its circlet on her wrist, falling silent as he still held her. Together they looked through the lozenge of window set high in the door, thick gla.s.s through which the world outside appeared tiny, distorted, clever-a world in a bull's-eye mirror. The young trees were holding their brave rosettes cleverly on high, the day was ending in an extraordinary gentleness, as if someone were pouring over it a knowing wash of dark, and he and she, standing close in its lambent shadow, were the cleverest of all.

"I'll just get the mail." She darted a quick kiss at him and bent to fumble in her purse for the mailbox key. He felt in a pocket for his key to the inside door, opened it, and, when she had got the mail, pushed her childishly up the stairs in front of him, hearing, with another flicker of satisfaction, the inner door click closed below.

Once inside the familiar oval of her one room, he sank down into a chair, winded and replete, watching her as she went about the room, turned a lamp on, then off, put her hands idly to her hair, flung open the cas.e.m.e.nt, and leaned there, looking out. It was a room that he had never once returned to without feeling grateful that he was there again, another lap won. Now he sat there dizzy with grat.i.tude, a.s.sessing each familiar symbol-the ashtray with the two deer beneath the glaze, the copper pot in which she made espresso coffee for them, the jar that variously held rhododendron and chrysanthemum, and now had willow in it. He almost resented the willow, because it was new, placed there in his absence, until he remembered that he would never have to resent change in this room again; he would always know what was in the jar.

"Smell it," she said, leaning out. "How can it smell like that-almost like the country? It's like syringa, or honeysuckle."

"It's the spring-blooming neons," he said. "The lovely neon smell."

"A little dusty." She stood up and brushed her hands together, then came and put her head down on him for a moment before she sat down across from him and looked through the mail. He sat watching, in his wonderful sloth of antic.i.p.ation, thinking of what a remarkable rhythm women had for situation, and how they moved best, to some delicate inner pulse, in the situation of love. He found a moment of pity for the crude young couples they had seen at the marriage bureau, the visionary girls, the red, stammering boys, staring not at each other but past each other at some rigid pantomime of s.e.x. This room was burned into his mind, and now that he sat in its center, it was lit from behind by all the banked hours that started up, once he set foot here, percussive as drums.

She raised her head from an open letter on the pile in her lap. "From my brother. All good wishes-and they want us down for a weekend next month. The twentieth."

Jim took the letter she pa.s.sed him, only skimming the welcoming words in his relief that now, and so easily, the strands were beginning to knit-all the good, a.s.sociative strands of dinner with these, Sundays with those. We look for you two on the twentieth.

"Why, and here's one for you," she said. "Forwarded from the hotel." She handed it to him with a little flourish that said it was his first letter here, that she, too, had her satisfactions.

One glance at the large, smudged envelope told him that it was from Jimmie. Thin at the crease, worn, with an old business address of his own in the upper corner, it was one of a stock of leftover letterheads that had been kept in the desk at New Canaan. The inscription was printed in purple indelible pencil. Mr. James Nevis, it said, then Esther's address, in ink, above the canceled address of the hotel, and then: New York City. The United States. The World. The Universe.

"The World, The Universe," she said, leaning over him. "Ah, I used to do that, didn't you?"

"He always signs himself 'your favorite child,'" Jim said. "Joke. Because he's the only one." He heard his tone, the careful deprecation with which parents boast to strangers of their heart's blood.

"His pictures are so like-" she said. "I want so much to-Jim, now we can have him visit here, can't we?"

"Yes," Jim said. "We can have him." He slit the letter open. Dear Jim, it said. This is to remine you the last time Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey, the circus, the last time is Sunday May 10. Hoping to here from you. Your favorite child. James R. Nevis. A clipping of a circus ad was attached, stuck on with Scotch tape.

"But that was yesterday," he said. "Oh, G.o.d d.a.m.n! That was yesterday."

"What, dear?"

He handed her the letter. A final sinking of the light outside the window sent prisms into the room, touching the wall, the jar, her bent head.

"Oh, Jim!" she looked up, clutching the letter, then patted it tenderly straight and handed it back to him. "Oh, the poor-I wouldn't have had it happen for the-"

"Neither would I."

"Had you promised?" she asked.

He nodded. "When I was up there last time," he said. "I came downstairs and found him playing outside, but I'd b.u.mped into Marie upstairs, and I just wanted to get out of there. Later on, it must have slipped my mind."

He had come down the path, heavy with the unreasoning irritation the house always forced upon him lately, his arms clumsy with the clothes he was carrying, and Jimmie, dropping his ball, had rushed him, b.u.t.ting him in the stomach and uttering one of those comic-book noises that are the Esperanto of eight-year-olds: "Boinng!" Jim had replied feebly, "Playing ball?"

Jimmie had followed him to the car, talking excitedly. Jim had stuffed the clothes hurriedly into the car, promised, and driven away.

"I could have taken him yesterday," Jim said. "I just hung around the hotel. It rained yesterday, though. Didn't it rain yesterday?"

"Yes. But they have it in the Garden."

"Oh, sure," he said. "Sure, that's right."

Last year, Marie and the boy had been in Reno, but the spring before that Jim had taken him for the first time, not to a circus like the cheap-Jack traveling tents of his boyhood but to Madison Square Garden, where the big top was so far up that it was not there at all, and there were no cracks to admit the sky. He had been amused to find how girly the show had grown, but there had still been the all-powerful smell of horse. There had been so many rings in that circus that the most loving gaze could not do them all justice. He had given up, content to watch Jimmie, his head turning like a thatched brown bun, on the rack of delight.

"Call him," Esther said. "Why don't you call him now?"

"What could I say? No, I'll call him tomorrow. I'll think of something." He weighed the letter on his palm. "Besides, he'll be asleep by now." Surely he would be asleep by now, deaf to The World and The Universe, his vigil over. "No. I'll call him tomorrow," Jim said.

She sighed and stood up, looking down at him, her mouth rueful and soft. "Think I'll take a shower," she said. "Unless you want one first."

"No, go ahead."

The bathroom door closed behind her. He reached for his pipe, then chose a cigarette from a table. He turned on a lamp, and the room sprang up, limned and clear. Yes, they would have him come here. Marriage is a small room, too, Jim thought. She does not know that yet. And I have just begun to remember.

When she padded out of the bathroom, flushed and lovely, she had on a housecoat he had never seen. She sat down opposite him for his notice, folding her hands in her lap, childishly hiding her feet under the stiff silk. He lit a cigarette and pa.s.sed it to her. After a while, she leaned toward him, drew the letter from his fingers, and tucked it out of sight behind the jar of willows. She sat back, her lids lowered, her chin cupped in her hands. Her hair was loose on her shoulders and her face had the vulnerable look this gives to women. So many rings to the show now, he thought. And the loving heart must do each justice.

He knelt and put his head in her lap, kneading his face against her knees. Once, he raised it, as if he heard something waning in the distance. She stretched out a draped arm then, and turned out the lamp. But in the darkness his eyes retained the room in perfect memory, with that finish given only by death. So, in the darkness, he clung to her for a moment not as a lover but as he might cling to some foolish crony who had once been there together with him in the Arcady of the past.

One of the Chosen.

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE fall reunion of his college cla.s.s, Spanner had come home a little ashamed of his easy acceptance of the prodding special invitation over the phone that day from Banks, a man whose face he could not even remember. For years he had ignored the printed notices that came to him now and then, even though he lived in the city where the college was, but this time, Banks had said, there was to be a private conclave of all the members of the crew who had won the regatta for the college over twenty years before. Half reluctant to include himself in the picture of the old grads redundantly deploying the terrain of dead triumphs, he had found himself saying that he would come. He had been c.o.xswain of that crew.

Thinking it over idly in bed later on, in those random images just before sleep, which carried with them unexpected p.r.i.c.kings of realization that lay just below the surface of expressed thought, he had found himself dwelling, not on the members of the crew, but on all those odd ones, the campus characters who had existed, hardly acknowledged, on the penumbra of his own sunlit, multiform activities of those days. Why should he now think suddenly of De Jong, the spastic, who, jerking and shambling his way one day into the office of the college literary magazine of which he, Spanner, had been a staff member, had thrust upon the group there a sheaf of ma.n.u.script, and gargling incomprehensibly, had left before their gauche heartiness could detain him? The sheaf had contained a group of poems clearly derivative from the unfashionable Housman, and therefore unusable, but marked by a discipline of language, a limpidity, almost a purity of organization-as if in them De Jong had tried to repudiate his disjointed idiot face, the coa.r.s.e clayey skin, the wide s...o...b..ring mouth, thickened with effort. They had avoided discussing him, until Black, the psychology student, had remarked, with his clinician's air, "I saw him once in Phipps' lecture cla.s.s, way at the top, you know, in one of those high gallery seats. My G.o.d-there he was-twitching away at some lecture of his own-oblivious!" One of the others had sn.i.g.g.e.red nervously. The talk had pa.s.sed on, and later that year, because of a lack of copy, one of the poems had been printed after all.

He thought now, with a belated guilt, of the grim separation that must have been De Jong's, and whether there would have been anything that the rest of them, if less swaddled with their own crude successes, could have done. He'd never heard the man mentioned again, or seen a reference to him in the alumni magazine.

Why now, in this context, should he remember George Shipley, the Negro basketball star of their era, certainly handsome enough, with straight, clipped features so completely lacking the prognathous bulges commonly a.s.sociated with his race that this, no doubt, had some effect on his acceptance on certain levels by the student body. Smiling, quiet, he had often sat near Spanner in the rotunda of the law library; Spanner had heard that he was a professor of law now in one of the good Southern colleges for Negroes. Why, burning now with something like shame, should he remember him at the dances to which he brought always the same prim-faced mulatto girl; why should he see him, wide shoulders bent in the degage dance fashion of that day, black features impa.s.sive, slowly circling with the girl, always in a small radius of their own?

Spanner was fully awake now and, raised up on his elbow, his eyes gradually following the familiar outlines of the furniture as they grew more perceptible in the darkness, he forced himself to probe in the archives of recall for others who, like Shipley, like De Jong, seemed bound together in his memory only by the mark of that rejection by the group, which now, in pitying retrospect, it seemed to him, had he then been less grossly unaware, less young, he, by some friendly overture, might have partially repaired.

There was the Burmese princeling who had lived at International House, who had treated a group of them to several awkwardly accepted dinners at Oriental restaurants of his choosing, whose foreignness and wealth had at first had a certain cachet, but from whom they had shortly retreated in ridicule, in gruff embarra.s.sment at the hand, sliding as silk, the emotional waver of the voice. At that, they had never been sure what he was really-that it hadn't been just a form of Eastern cajolery, or a misbegotten sense of acceptance which had elicited the moist look, the overheated hand. Afterward, when they had met him on campus in a few curt scenes of misshapen talk in which it was evident that camaraderie had flown, his gestures had been restrained enough, Lord knows, his eyes sufficiently flat and dull, with reserve enough to satisfy the most conventional of them.

Of course, there had been that group of those others, pariahs without question, who convened always in that little Greek restaurant, the Cosmos, through the door of which they sometimes glanced out at you with the hauteur of tropical birds in a zoo, jangling consciously into conversation as you pa.s.sed, with their tense, dulcet exuberance. Toleration of these had been more than one could expect of boys suffused with their own raw reactions to adulthood, which they covered up with a pa.s.sionate adherence to the norm, with apprehensive jeerings at the un-average in its lightest forms, so that even displaying too good, too undulate a French accent, in cla.s.s, was likely to incur for one the horse-laugh from behind. But could they have helped, with some small glow of receptivity, young Schwiller, that model young German from the cleanly swabbed villa in North Jersey, with too little money, background, or ability-too little of everything except a straining, unhumorous will to belong-who, after some covert, abortive incident on a group camping trip, had hanged himself to a tree?

Ah well, Spanner thought, fumbling in the dark for a cigarette, and lighting it in a thankful momentary absorption with the ordinary-these had been the extreme cases. But what of the others, less vividly obvious to memory because they had been more usual, or because they had perhaps already achieved their secret dikes of resignation? He remembered, for instance, all the little Jewish boys, with their overexpressive eyes, their thickets of hair whose Egyptian luxuriousness no barber could tame, and most revelatory of all, the forced vying, the self-conscious crackle of their conversation.

As a Jew himself, he had been helped, he knew, by his fair-skinned, freckled, almost "mick" exterior, by the generations of serene cosmopolitan living that were evident, implicit in the atmosphere of his family's sprawling apartment on the park, and frankly, he supposed, by the unrevealing name of Spanner, which his great-grandfather had brought over from England, and had come by honestly, as far as the family knew. His family had belonged among those lucky Jews, less rare than was commonly realized, who had scarcely felt the flick of injustice expressed socially, much less in any of its harsher forms. Still, despite this, it had been unusual, he knew, to remain so untouched, so free from apprehension of the lurking innuendo, the consciousness of schism-for in addition to his race, he had carried, too, that dark bruise of intellectuality, the bearers of which the group flings ever into the periphery, if it can.

That was where the luck he had had in being c.o.xswain had come in. Because of it, although he had done well, almost brilliantly in his law cla.s.ses, all his possibly troublesome differences had remained hidden, inconspicuous under the brash intimacy of the training session, under the hearty accolade of his name on the sporting page-because of it he had been hail fellow in the boat house and on the campus-he had been their gallant "little guy." So, he thought, he had ridden through it all in a trance of security which, he realized now, had been given only to the favored few, while all around them, if he and the others had not been so insensible of it, had been the hurts, the twistings, that might have been allayed. The image of the spastic crossed before him again, a distortion to the extreme of that singularity from which many others must have suffered less visibly, from which he himself had been accountably, blessedly safe. He lay back again, and turning, blotted his face against the dispa.s.sionate pillow and slept.

The next morning he awoke late. It was Sat.u.r.day. Taking his coffee at the dining-room table deserted by his wife and children some hours before, he was half-annoyed at the emotionalism of the previous night. "Who the h.e.l.l do I think I am-Tolstoy?" he thought, wincing. Rejecting the unwonted self-a.n.a.lysis that had preceded sleep, he finished his coffee offhandedly, master of himself once more. He got the car out of the garage and swung slowly down the parkway, thinking that if he delayed his arrival until well after twelve he would miss the worst of the speechifying.

As he approached the college-dominated midtown neighborhood, idling the car slowly along, he pa.s.sed some of the brownstone houses, shoddier now with the indefinable sag of the rooming house, which had been the glossier fraternity houses of his day. He had heard that many of them, even the wealthier ones which had survived depression times, subsidized to plush draperies and pine paneling by some well-heeled brother, had gone down finally during the war years just past, when the college had become a training center for the Navy. Then, he supposed, those accelerated waves of young men pa.s.sing through had not only not had time for such amenities, but, trapped together in a more urgent unity, had had no need for the more superficial paradings of Brotherhood.

Although he had had his fair share of indiscriminate rushing during his freshman year, he himself had had no particular desire to join a house, comfortably ensconced, as he had been, in his family's nearby home, already sated with the herded confinement of prep school. In his soph.o.m.ore year, he remembered, after he had joined the magazine, and it was evident that he would have a place on the varsity crew, the best Jewish fraternity had been very pressing, then annoyed at his tepid refusal, and there had been overtures from one or two of the Christian fraternities whose social position was so solid that they could afford, now and then, to ignore the dividing lines in favor of a man whose campus prominence or money would add l.u.s.tre to the house, but by this time he had already been focusing on his law career. Still, he thought now, he had always had the comfortable sense of acceptance; he had, for instance, never felt that deep racial unease with the Gentile to which his most apparently a.s.similated Jewish friends sometimes confessed. To be free from the tortuous doubt, the thin-skinned expectancy of slight-it had helped. He had been lucky.

In front of one of the brownstones not too far from Jefferson Hall, the old residence hall in one of whose rooms the luncheon was to be held, he found a place to park the car, and got out. He hadn't been near here in years; his life was a well-conducted bee-line from suburb to downtown office, and most of his a.s.sociations were on the East Side anyway. He walked past the familiar architectural hodgepodge of the buildings, noting with pleasure that the rough red cobbles of the walks had been preserved, glancing with disapproval at the new library which had been begun in his time, on the field where they used to play tennis. Half utilitarian, but with reticent touches of b.a.s.t.a.r.d Greek on its lean, flat facade, it stretched out, two-dimensional and una.s.similable, a compromise of tastes which had led to none. The vulgarization of taste in a place which should have been a repository of the best still had power to shock him; he was pleased at having retained this naivete, this latent souvenir of youth. Around him and past him, male and female, hurrying or sauntering, or enthusiastically standing still, was that year's crop of imperishable young, on their faces that which the college had not yet vulgarized-the look of horizons that were sure, boundaries that were limitless-the look of the unreconciled.

Already, he twitted himself, he was developing the spots of the returning alumnus. The secret conviction that inwardly, outer decay to the contrary, one had preserved a personal ebullience better than most, the benignant surveying glance with its flavor of "si la jeunesse savait"-he had them all. Smiling to himself he turned in at the doorway of Jefferson Hall, and making another turn to the reception room on the right, met the slightly worn facsimiles of his youth full on.

They were gathered around the mantel, most of them, talking in voices at once hearty and tentative, gla.s.ses in hand. Drinks to melt the integument of twenty years and more-of course. From the group a man detached himself to come forward and pump his hand.

"Davy! Why, Davy Spanner!" The lost face of Banks coalesced at once in his recognition, fatally undistinguished, except for the insistent, hortatory manner that had battened on the years. He had been business manager of the crew.

Banks conveyed him toward the others like a trophy.

"Look who's here!" he crowed. "Our little c.o.xie!"

Grinning a little stiffly, Spanner acknowledged, not without pleasure, the nickname paternally bestowed on him long ago by these men who had all been so much bigger than he, who had chaffingly, unmaliciously treated him as their mascot perhaps, because of his size, but had unswervingly followed his direction. As a group they were still physically impressive, carrying extra weight fairly well on their long bones.

They gathered around to greet him. With the unfortunate sobriety of the latecomer, he noted, accepting a drink, that they were all, although not yet tipsy, a little relaxed, a trifle suffused, with the larger-than-life voices and gestures of men who had had a few. A table set buffet style in a corner, and a coffee urn, had apparently not yet been touched. Downing his first drink, he took another, and plunged into the babble of expected questions, the "where you been all these years?"-the "what're you doing now?"-the "whereabouts you living?" One by one he remembered them all, even to the little personal tricks and ways they had had in the locker-room. Bates, whose enormous sweaty feet had been a loud joke with them all, was almost completely bald now, as was Goetschius, the polite quiet boy from upstate, who, politely as ever, bent his tonsure over Banks' pictures of his house, his family.

Rea.s.suringly, they all looked pretty good, as he thought he did himself, but he wondered if they knew any better than he did what had impelled them to come. "Horse" Chernowski, who stood nearest him, had driven up from Pennsylvania, beckoned on, Spanner wondered, by what urge to rea.s.severate the past? In his ill-cut, too thick tweeds, his great shoulders swollen needlessly by shoulder pads, the hocklike wrist bones projecting from the cuffs-his nickname fitted him still. He had been their dumb baby, stronger than any of the others, but dull of reaction; once they had lost a race because of his slowness in going over the side when he had jammed his slide.

"Ah, my G.o.d, Davy," said Chernowski delightedly, "do you remember the cops picking us up for speeding after the big day-the night we drove back from Poughkeepsie?"

"Yes. Sure I remember," said Spanner, but he hadn't, until then. From across the room he saw Anderson, the stroke, nursing his drink at the mantel, staring at him ruefully, almost comprehendingly; encountering that blue gaze which had faced him steadily, in the inarticulate intimacy of three years of gruelling practice, faraway incident, and triumph, there was much that he did remember.

Handsome, intelligent son of a family which had contributed both money and achievement to the college for more than one generation, Anderson had more perfectly straddled the continuum of campus approval that stretched between "grind" and "hero" than anyone Spanner had known. Spanner remembered him, effortlessly debonair and a.s.sured, burnished hair spotlighted over the satin knee breeches of his costume as Archer in The Beaux' Stratagem, or stripped and white-lipped, holding Spanner's gaze with his own as the water seared past the sh.e.l.l. Although he had been as perilously near the prototype of campus hero as one could be without stuffiness or lampoonery, there had never been any of the glib sheen of the fair-haired boy about him, nothing in the just courtesy of his manner except the measurable flow of a certain n.o.blesse oblige.

He crossed now to Spanner, and took, rather than shook, Spanner's hand.

"Davy!" he said. "Well, Davy!"

The crisp intonation had the same ease, the ruddy hair had merely faded to tan, the eyes stared down at him now straight as ever, but from between lids with the faint, flawed pink of the steady drinker, and Spanner saw now that there was in his posture the controlled waver, the scarcely perceptible imbalance of the man who is always quietly, competently drunk.

"You look fine, Davy," he said, smiling.

"You look fine too, Bob."

"Sure. Oh sure," he said, with a wry, self-derisive grimace. He indicated with his drink. "Look at us. Everyone looks fine. Householders all. Hard to believe we were the gents who took it full in the belly-depression, social consciousness." His accent was a little slurred now. "And wars and pestilence," he said more firmly. "Even if we were a little late for that." He downed his drink.

"You in the war, Bob?" said Spanner, somewhat lamely.

"Me? Not me," he said. "My kids were. Lost one-over Germany." He walked over to the buffet, poured himself a drink, and was back, swiftly. "Sounds antiquated already, doesn't it? Over Germany. We're back to saying 'in Germany' now." He went on quickly, as if he had a speech in mind that he would hold back if he thought it over.

"Remember the house I used to belong to? 'Bleak House,' they used to call it, sometimes, remember? The one that got into the news in the thirties because they hung a swastika over the door. Or maybe somebody hung it on them." He drank again. "Could have been either way," he said.

Spanner nodded. He had begun to be sick of the word "remember"; it seemed as if everyone, including his self of the night before, was intent on poking up through the golden unsplit waters of his youth the sudden sharp fin of some submerged reality, undefined, but about to become clear.

"They were a nice bunch of fellows in our time," said Spanner.

"You know ... Davy ..." Anderson said. His voice trailed off. The fellow was apologetic; in his straight blue look there was a hint of guilt, of shame, as if he too, the previous night, had half dreamed and pondered, but unlike Spanner had met the dark occupant of his dreamings face to face.