A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Poor Girl

Everyone has a first-time love, and remembers it afterward, always, forever. I had a first-time love too, and I remember mine:

There was a fellow named Frank Van Craig, a year or possibly two years older than I, who lived a few doors up the street from me. I called him Frankie, as might be expected at that time of our lives, and we were more or less inseparable, although we had only got to know each other a fairly short while before this.

His father was a retired detective of police, who lived on his pension, and the mother had died some years before, leaving this forlorn little masculine menage of three (there was a younger brother, still of school age) to get along as best they could. Frankie used to speak of his father patronizingly as “the old man.” But gruff and taciturn as the father was, embittered by his loss and withdrawn into his shell, there must have been some deep-felt if unspoken bond between the two of them, for more than once, when I’d stop by for Frankie, I used to see him kiss his father respectfully and filially on the forehead before leaving. It touched me oddly, and I used to think about it afterward each time I saw it happen, for I had no father, and even if I had had, I couldn’t visualize myself kissing him like that; it didn’t seem right between two men. But Frankie was my friend, and I was too loyal to entertain even a secret disapproval of him.

Frankie had a job in a machine- or tool-shop, but that was merely his way of earning a living. His real avocation was amateur boxing. He spent every spare moment at it that he could: evenings after his job, Saturdays, holidays. And he was good. I used to go down with him sometimes to the gym where he trained and watch him work out: spar with partners, punch the bag, chin the parallel bars, skip rope, and all the rest. Then when we’d come away afterward, I used to walk along beside him with a feeling almost akin to adulation, proud to have him for a friend.

It was this feeling that had first brought us together, in what amounted on my part, at least in the beginning, to a mild but unmistakable case of hero-worship. He had the athletic prowess and the rough-and-readiness of disposition that I would have given anything to have had myself, and that I could tell was going to be lacking in me for the rest of my life; otherwise, it would already have appeared by this time. Then when this preliminary phase blew over as I became habituated to him, we became fast friends on a more evenly reciprocal basis, for there were things about me that I could sense he, in his turn, looked up to and wished he had.

At any rate, we were strolling along Eighth Avenue one evening side by side, under the lattice-work of the El, when a very pretty girl of about my age, who was coming from the opposite direction, gave him a smile of recognition, stopped beside us and said hello to him. She was blonde, with a fair, milk-and-roses Irish complexion and hazel eyes lively as spinning pinwheels. Her pale hair was smooth and cut evenly all around at ear-tip level, with just a clean, fresh-looking part running up one side of it to break the monotony of its evenness.

After a few words had been exchanged, he introduced us with a characteristically gruff amiability. “Con, meet Vera,” he said. “Vera, meet Con.” But our eyes had already become very well acquainted by this time.

“Hello Con,” she said, and smiled.

“Hello Vera,” I said, and smiled back.

Now that I’d met her I remember becoming more diffident than before I’d met her, and having less to say. (I’d already been talking to her before the introduction.) But she didn’t seem to notice, and he on his part, obviously unattached, showed no constraint.

We stood and chatted for a while and then we parted and went our ways, on a note of laughter at something that he’d said at the end.

But I looked back toward her several times, and once, I saw her do it, too, and somehow I knew it was meant for me and not for him.

“You know her well?” was the first thing I asked him.

“She lives around here,” he answered indifferently, implying, I think, that she was too familiar a part of his surroundings to be of any great interest to him.

Then he turned around and pointed out the house. “Right over there. That one on the corner. See it?”

It was a six-story, old-law, tenement building, one of an almost unbroken line that stretched along both sides of Eighth, from the top of the park well up into the Hundred-and-forties. Its top-floor windows were flush with the quadruple trackbeds of the Elevated, two for locals, two for expresses — two for downtown, two for up.

“She lives on the top floor,” he went on. “I been up there. I went up and met her family once, when I first started to know her. Her family are nice ’nd friendly.”

“Didn’t you ever go back again?”

“Na,” he said, blasé. “What for?”

I wondered about this. There just wasn’t any amatory attraction there, that was obvious. I couldn’t understand it, with a girl as appealing and magnetic as she’d seemed to me. But each one to his own inclinations I suppose, even at that age.

“What’s her last name?” I asked. “You didn’t give it.”

“Her old man’s name is Gaffney,” he said. “I know, because I’ve met him.” I didn’t know what he meant by that at first. Then he went on to explain: “She likes to call herself Hamilton, though; she says it was her grandmother’s name and she’s entitled to use it if she wants.”

“Why?” I wondered.

“I danno; maybe she thinks it’s classier.”

I could understand that discontent with a name. I’d experienced it a little myself. I’d been fiercely proud of my surname always. Only, all through my boyhood I’d kept wishing they’d given me a curt and sturdier first name, something like the other boys had, “Jim” or “Tom” or “Jack,” not “Cornell,” a family name, originally). But it was too late to do anything about it now. The only improvement possible was by abbreviation. And even there I was handicapped. “Corny” was unappealing, even though the slang descriptive for “stale” hadn’t yet come into use. “Connie” was unthinkable. All that was left was “Con,” which always sounded flat to me for some reason.

“Hey!” he jeered explosively, belatedly becoming aware, I suppose, of the number of questions I’d been asking. “What happened? Did you get stuck on her already?”

“How could I have got stuck on her?” I protested uncomfortably. “I only just now met her.”

But I knew I was lying; I knew I had.

The next evening, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t stop by Frankie’s place to have him come out with me. His company had suddenly become unwanted. Instead, I went around to Eighth Avenue by myself. As if to get my courage up sufficiently, I passed and repassed the doorway I had seen her go into, and finally took up my post in a closed-up store inset, across the way, and hopefully and watchfully began my first love-wait.

The love-wait — that sweet, and sometimes bittersweet, preliminary to each new meeting, which can be sanguine, sad, jealous, impatient, hurtful, angry, or even end in a heated quarrel; and which I have sometimes thought has more in it of the true essence of the love affair — is the better part by far of the two, than the actual meeting itself that follows and ends it. For the latter is often humdrum, a let-down by comparison. Its opening remarks are certainly never brilliant, or even worth the making, most of the time. And the little things they say, and the little things they do, are quite commonplace after all, after the anticipatory reveries of the love-wait.

This love-wait can be carried out only by the boy or the man, for if the girl or the woman carries it out, she somehow detracts by just so much from it and from herself: from the desirability of meeting her, from the uncertainty as to whether she will appear or not, turning a mystic wistful expectancy, the borderline between absence and presence, into a flat, casual, commonplace meeting. Like the difference between a kiss and a handshake.

El trains would trundle by at intervals with a noise like low-volume thunder and cast strange parallelograms and Grecian-key friezes of light along the upper faces of the shrouded buildings, like the burning tatters of a kite’s tail, streaming evenly along in the breezeless night. A little more often, one of the squared-off high-topped autos of the early twenties would skirt over the gutters and through the enfilading iron girders that supported the structure above, with only an imminent collision to stop for, since there were no traffic lights yet this far uptown.

And on the sidewalks, more numerous still than either of the others, people on foot passed back and forth, as they’d always done on sidewalks, I suppose, since cities were first built, and as they’d continue to do long after the elevated trains and the high-topped cars were gone.

Once another girl showed up unexpectedly, and scurried up the few entrance-steps that led into the doorway, and I thought it was she, and almost started forward from where I was standing to sprint across the street and catch her before she went in. But then she stopped and turned for a moment, to say something to someone on the sidewalk behind her, and I saw her face and saw it wasn’t, and sank back again upon my heels.

As the evening grew later, a sharp-edged wind sprang up, with the feel of cold rain in it. One of these supple, sinuous winds, able to round corners and make circles and eddies along the ground. It made me miserable, made me stamp my feet continuously and duck my chin down into the upturned collar of my coat, but I still wouldn’t give up and go away. Until at last it was so late that I knew she wouldn’t appear, or be able to linger with me if she did. Finally I turned and trudged off disconsolately, hands in pockets and downcast eyes on the sidewalk before me.

The following night the rain-threat of the night before had become an actuality, but that didn’t keep me from my vigil. When you’re eighteen and newly in love, what’s rain? It didn’t bother me as much as the wind had the night before, since it couldn’t get into the niche of the store-entrance I had made my own, and the protective shed of the elevated-structure even kept the roadway of the street comparatively dry, though not the sidewalks, for there was an open canal above each one. The rain made the street seem gayer, not more dismal than it was at other times, for all these wet surfaces caught the lights more vividly and held them longer, as they went by. The rain was like an artist’s palette, and these blobs of color, these smears of red and green and white and yellow and orange, hid the sooty grayness the street had in the light of day.

But at last I could see that, whatever the reason the night before, the weather would keep her in tonight. I had to turn and go away again, after standing a good deal less time.

The night after that, I reverted to my old habit and sought out Frankie. I wanted his advice. Or at least his reassurance that she actually did live there.

“Remember that girl you introduced me to couple days ago?” I blurted out almost as soon as we’d come out of his place.

“Vera? Sure,” he said. “What about her?”

“Does she really live there, where you showed me?”

“Of course she does,” he assured me. “Why would I lie about it?”

“Well, I hung around there all last night, and she never showed up, and I hung around all the night before—” I started to say it before I’d thought twice. I hadn’t intended to tell him that part of it, but simply to find out if he’d seen her himself or knew her whereabouts. But once it was out, it was out, and too late to do anything about it. You’re not anxious to tell even your closest friends about frustrations like that.

“In all that rain?” he chuckled, a wide grin overspreading his face.

“What’s rain?” I said negligently.

This comment struck him as very funny, for some reason that I failed to see. He began to laugh uproariously, even bending over to slap himself on the kneecap, and he kept repeating incessantly: “Holy mackerel! Are you stuck on her! Waiting in the rain. No, you’re not stuck on her, not much! Waiting in the rain.”

“I wasn’t in the rain,” I corrected with cold dignity. “Maybe it was raining, but I wasn’t in it.”

I waited sullenly until his fit of (what I considered) tactless amusement had passed, then I suggested: “Let’s go around there now, and see if we can see her. Maybe she’s around there now.” Why I would have been more likely to encounter her with him than alone, I wouldn’t have been able to say. I think it was a case of misery wanting company.

When we’d reached the stepped-up entrance to her flat-building, we slung ourselves down onto the green-painted iron railing that bordered it, and perched there. We waited there like that for a while, I uneasily, he stolidly. Finally, craning his neck and looking up the face of the building toward its topmost windows, which were impossible to make out at such a perspective, he stirred restlessly and complained: “This ain’t going’ get us nowhere. She may not come down all night. Go up and knock right on the door. That’s the only way you’ll get her to come down.” He repeated the story of having once been up there himself, and what kindly disposed people he’d found her family to be.

But this did nothing to overcome my timidity. “Not me,” I kept repeating. “Nothing doing.”

“Want me to come with you?” he finally offered, tired, I suppose, of being unable to get me to budge.

In one way I did, and in one way I didn’t. I wanted his moral support, his backing, desperately, but I didn’t want him hanging around us afterward, turning it into a walking-party of three.

“Come part of the way,” I finally compromised. “But stay back; if she comes to the door, don’t let her see you.”

So we walked inside the ground-floor hallway and started to trudge up the stairs, I in the lead, but of necessity rather than choice. We got to the fifth floor, and started up the last flight. He stopped eight or nine steps from the top. I had to go on up the short remaining distance alone, quailingly and queasily.

When I made the turn of the landing and reached the door, I stopped, and just stood there looking at it.

“Go on, knock,” he urged me in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t just stand there.”

I raised my hand as if measuring the distance it had to go, and then let it fall again.

“Go ahead. What’s the matter with y’?” he hissed, hoarser and fiercer than before. He flung his arm up and then down again at me in utmost deprecation.

Again I raised my hand, touched the woodwork with it, let it fall back without striking. My knuckles had stage-fright; I couldn’t get them to move.

Suddenly, before I knew what had happened, he bounded swiftly up the few remaining steps, whisked around the turn, and gave the door two heavy, massive thumps that (to my petrified ears, at least) sounded like cannon shots, the very opposite of what any signal of mine would be upon that particular door. Then he bounded back onto the stairs again, jolting down each flight with a sprightly but concussion-like jump that shook the whole stairwell. Before I had time to trace his defection (and perhaps turn around and go after him, as I was longing to do), the door had already opened and it was too late.

Vera’s father stood there. Or at least, a middle-aged man did, and I assumed he was her father. He had on a gray woolen undershirt and a pair of trousers secured over it by suspenders. He must have been relaxing in a chair en deshabille when the knock disturbed him, for he was reslinging one of them over his shoulder as he stood there. He had a ruddy-complexioned face, and although he was by no means a good-looking man, he was a good-natured-looking one.

If he protruded somewhat in the middle, it was not excessively so, not more than to be expected in a man of his (to my young mind) multiplicity of years. He certainly was not corpulent. I would have stood there indefinitely, without being able to open my mouth, if he hadn’t spoken first.

Frankie’s bombastic retreat was still in progress, and the sound of it reached his ears.

“What’s that going on down there?” he wanted to know. Stepping to the railing, he bent over and tried to peer down the well.

“It must be somebody on one of the lower floors in a hurry to go out,” I said meekly. It was technically the truth anyway, even if a subterfuge of it.

Then Frankie gained the street, and silence descended once more.

Coming back to the door and turning to me, the man asked, with a sort of jovial severity, “Well, young fellow, and what can I do for you?”

After a swallow to wet my throat first, I managed to get out: “Excuse me, is Vera in?” And then added, somewhat redundantly: “I’m a friend of hers.”

“Oh, are you now?” he said with a chuckle. “Well, come on in, then. Glad to see you.”

And before I realized it, I was on the inside, guided by his hand. The door had closed, and hundreds of her family seemed to be staring at me from all directions. Then the motes of momentary panic subsided in front of my eyes, and they condensed into no more than three or four people.

She wasn’t there; I found that out almost at once. For the first moment or two I kept hoping she was merely out of sight in one of the other rooms, and would come in when she heard the increased tempo of their voices, but since she didn’t, and they didn’t call in to her, I finally had to resign myself to the fact that she wasn’t in the flat at all. I’d have to face the music by myself as best I could.

In addition to her father, there were two other members of the family present; one was her mother, and the other presumably an aunt, but it took me some little time to differentiate between them. There was also a little girl in the room, of about nine or ten, whom they neglected to identify. I couldn’t make out whether she was a smaller sister of Vera’s, or the aunt’s child, or just some neighbor’s youngster given the freedom of the flat. In any case, at my advanced age I considered her beneath notice.

My impressions of her mother are not nearly as clear as they are of her father, possibly because he was the one who came to the door and who I saw first, and without anyone else to distract my attention. I have a vague recollection of a tall but spare woman, with dark hair quite unlike Vera’s, with an overtone of gray already about it at the outside, where it had a tendency to fuzz and fly up in gauzy little swatches that you could see the light through (the grayness therefore might have been only an illusion), and she would frequently put her hand to it and try to bring it back down to order, but it would never obey for long. Of the aunt, I have no surviving impressions whatever.

I sat down in the middle of all of them. They were probably actually spread about at random the way people usually are in a room, but it felt as if they were sitting around me in a complete circle, eyeing me critically and weighing me in the balance. I felt very constrained and ill at ease, and kept wishing I could sink through the floor, chair and all. It had been the worst possible timing on my part, too, I kept telling myself. If I’d just waited a few minutes longer and not listened to Frankie, I could have met Vera by herself, intercepted her when she came back and kept out of all this.

I’d already been smoking, sparingly but steadily, for some months past, and I’d already found it to be good as a bracer in moments of difficulty or stress. There was a package in my pocket right as I sat there, but I was afraid to take it out in front of them. I wanted to make a good impression, and I cannily told myself that if they thought me too knowing or advanced for my years they might discourage my trying to see any more of her.

As soon as I’d given my name, her father said: “Oh, sure. Con, is that you? We’ve heard about you from Veronica.”

(He called her Veronica, I noticed, never Vera. I couldn’t, if I’d wanted to; there was something too stiff and distant about the name.)

And her mother, nodding approvingly, added: “Yes, she told us about meeting you.”

Hearing this made me feel quite good, though it did nothing to alleviate my present misery. It showed she was interested, if nothing else, and it augured well for the future.

The next and natural question from her father was, what did I do, what sort of work?

I told him, with a slight touch of contrition, that I was going to college. This seemed to impress him, to my surprise. I had thought they might turn up their noses at me for not being an honest working-man. “Are you, now?” he said. “A college sthudent.”

“I’m just a first-year man,” I explained, again a little penitently. I had had impressed on my mind only too well the low opinion held about us by upperclassmen. “Freshman class, Frosh they call us. Then after that come sophomores. Then juniors. Then you’re a senior.”

Vera’s mother clucked her tongue at this, and I wasn’t quite sure how to translate the little sound accurately. I think it was intended as sympathy for all that hard work ahead.

“And what are you taking up?” her father asked. “What are you going to be after you get out?”

“Journalism,” I said. “I want to be a writer.”

“That’s a hard job,” he said forebodingly.

I tried to explain that I meant free-lance writing and not newspaper writing, that I was just majoring in journalism because that was the closest thing to it. But he didn’t seem to follow that too well; he seemed content to remain with his original conception. And turning to Vera’s mother, he said, “I think that’s the first college sthudent Veronica’s ever known, isn’t it?”

She tactfully interposed: “Well, she’s very young yet.”

In the meantime, in spite of the conversation having been an easy one to carry on, since it had dealt exclusively with me, I kept wondering what there would be to talk about next, once this topic was over, and hoping that another elevated train would go clattering by momentarily and bring me a brief respite. It would be impossible to continue a conversation until after the front windows had stopped rattling. But none did. It seemed as though, just when you wanted them, they became few and far between.

At this point there was a twitching-about of the doorknob from the outside, the door was pushed open, and Vera came in. She’d evidently been to the store for groceries. She hugged two very large brown paper bags in one arm, and since these came up past one side of her face and hid it, she did not see me at first.

She rounded her cheeks, blew out her breath, and said something about the stairs. That they were enough to kill you, I think it was. But in a good-natured, not ill-humored way. She closed the door by pushing a heel back against it, without turning.

I remember thinking how graceful and debonair was the little flirt and swirl this movement created in the loose-hanging checked coat she had on, as I watched her do it. Then she turned her head suddenly, so that the obscuring bags were swept to one side, and saw me.

“Con!” she said, in a high-pitched voice that was almost a little scream. She nearly dropped the columnar bags, but reclasped them just in time. “How did you get up here?”

“I walked up,” I answered in perfect seriousness, without stopping to think, and they all laughed at that, herself included, as though I’d intended it to be very funny.

“I never thought I’d find you up here,” she said next. “You’re the last one!”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that; and afraid that, if I asked her, the answer might turn out to be unwelcome, I didn’t ask.

“How did you know where it was?” she went on. “How did you know this was the right place?”

My instinct told me it might not be in my own best interest to bring Frankie’s name into this, or recall him to her mind any more than was strictly necessary. She’d known him before she had me, after all. So I simply and untruthfully said: “I asked somebody in the house,” and that seemed to content her.

I had a fleeting impression, as I watched her expression and listened to the intonation of what she was saying to me, that she was enjoying, rather than otherwise, having her entire family as spectators to this little meeting of ours, and auditors to its accompanying dialogue, liked having their attention fixed on her the way it was. But if she enjoyed it, I didn’t, quite the opposite, and this nerved me to summon up courage to come out with what had brought me up there in the first place.

“Vera,” I said nervously, “would you like to come for a walk with me?”

She didn’t answer directly, but said “Wait’ll I take these back where they belong first,” and picking up the two cumbersome bags, which she had set down upon a table, she left the room with them. She was gone for some time, longer than would have been necessary simply to carry them back to the kitchen and set them down there, so I began to imagine she had stopped off in her own room on the way, to tidy her hair or something of the sort. Then when she came back, I saw that she had removed both the checked coat and the tamoshanter she had been wearing, and my hopes were dashed.

After a lame pause, I finally asked her a second time: “Vera, wouldn’t you like to come for a walk?”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said, and I saw her exchange a look with her mother.

The latter remarked cryptically, “You run along. I’ll do them for you tonight, and you can do them tomorrow night instead.”

Whereupon Vera hurried back inside again, throwing me an auspicious “I’ll be ready in a minute, Con,” over her shoulder, and this time, when she returned, was once more in coat and tamoshanter, and ready to leave.

I said the required polite and stilted good-byes, she opened the door, and a minute later we were free and by ourselves on the other side of it.

“It was my turn to do the dishes tonight,” she told me as we went scrabbling down the stairs, she running her hand along the banister railing, I on the outside with her other hand in mine.

The moment we were by ourselves, the moment the door had closed behind us, perfect ease and naturalness came back to me again, and to Vera too, though she hadn’t felt herself to be on exhibition as I had: One didn’t have to weigh one’s words, they just came flowing out in any kind of order, and yet inevitably they were the right words, without the trouble of trying to make them so beforehand. One didn’t have to execute each smallest move or gesture twice, once in the mind and once in the actuality, they too flowed unchecked in perfect unstudiedness. There were no questions that required answers, none were put and none were given, there were just confidences streaming out and blending.

And I remember wondering at the time why this should be, for they had been amiable enough, her people, hadn’t been unfriendly, had tried to make me feel at ease, and yet they hadn’t been able to. I think I know now: It wasn’t because we were a boy and girl who were interested in each other that we felt this lack of constraint the moment we were away from them, it was because we were both of the same generation, and they were not.

There is an insurmountable wall, a barrier, between each generation, especially in the earlier stages of life. Children are so cut off from the grown-up world they are almost a species apart, a different breed of creature than the rest of the race. Very young people of our age, hers and mine, have no interests whatever in common with those who are in the next age group. Then as we progress up through the thirties, the barrier becomes less and less, until finally it has melted away altogether, and everyone is middle-aged alike. Twenty-five and forty-five seem alike to us now. But by that time a new barrier has formed, at the back instead of the front, and new very young are once more walled off from those who, only yesterday, were the very young themselves.

I asked her if she wanted to see a movie.

“No,” she said. “Let’s just walk instead. I saw the one at the Morningside a couple of days ago, and they haven’t changed it yet.”

We stopped in first at an ice-cream parlor on the corner of 116th Street. This had little tables separated from each other by lattices, up which clambered waxed-linen leaves and cretonne flowers. It also had an electric player piano at the back, forerunner of the later jukeboxes, and arched festoons of small, gaily colored light bulbs, curved like arabesques across the ceiling. There was a marble-topped soda fountain running the length of it at one side, but we sat down opposite one another at one of the little tables.

She made a selection, and I followed suit and ordered what she had.

These were called banana splits, as far as I can recall. They were served in oblong glass receptacles with stems on them, for no ordinary-size dish could have held everything that went into them. The holder was lined first with two half bananas, sliced lengthwise. On top of these were placed three mounds of ice cream in a row, green, white, and pink. Over these in turn was poured a chocolate syrup. Next were added chunks of pineapple and a sprinkling of chopped or grated nuts. The whole thing was surmounted by a feathery puff of whipped cream, and into this was stuck a maraschino cherry, dyeing the whipped cream red around it.

Beside each of these, for obvious reasons, was placed a glass of plain water.

That we found this concoction not only edible but even immensely enjoyable is only another illustration of the differences there are between the generations.

When we got up I left a tip on the table, more to impress her than for the sake of the waiter. I saw her eyes rest on it for a moment, as I had hoped they would.

After we left there, we walked over to Morningside Park, and through it along a softly lamplit pathway. It is a long but narrow park, no more than a block in depth at any point. That part of New York is built on two levels, and Morningside Heights, which runs along the western edge of the park, is perched high above Morningside Drive, which runs along the eastern edge. From it you can overlook all that part of the city which lies to the eastward, its rooftops and its lights.

We walked along slowly, our hands lightly linked and swinging low between us. I began to whistle “Kalua,” which had just come out a little while before, and after a while she accompanied me by humming it along with me. For years, whenever I heard “Kalua,” it brought back that first walk I took with her, and I could feel her fingers lightly twined in mine again, and see the lamplight falling over us again in blurry patches like slowly sifted, softly falling cornmeal.

She asked me where I lived, myself. I told her One-hundred-thirteenth Street.

“We’re just a block apart,” she noted. “Only, on different sides of the park.”

But New York then, in its residential zoning, was a snobbish, stratified sort of town, and the park did more than divide it physically, it divided it economically as well. That, however, was of no concern to us. That applied only to our elders.

We climbed the wide, easily sloping stairs that led to the upper level and came out at 116th Street, at that little rotunda with its bas-reliefs and circular stone seat-rest, and stood there a while, taking in the spread of the city’s lights below and outward from us, until the eye couldn’t follow them anymore, and lost them in the reaches of the night. But the young haven’t too much time to spend on mere inanimate beauty, they’re too immediately interested in each other.

We turned away and walked down Morningside Heights a block or two, and opposite, where there was a little French church standing, called Notre Dame de Lourdes, I think. We sat down together on a bench without saying a word, and moved close.

And from that night on, whenever we met, we always met at that one particular bench and never any other. I used to wonder at times, later, who had been sitting there after we did, who had met there once we stopped going to it, and if they were young like we were, and if they were happy: what their stories were, and how they turned out in the end. They never knew about us, we never knew about them. For park benches can’t talk.

We kissed, and nestled close, and (I suppose) laughed together about something now and then. The pattern never changes throughout time. Then presently and very tentatively I crossed the line from the innocuous to the more innate.

The first time she let it pass unnoticed, either not wanting to seem too edgy and ready to take offense, or else mistakenly thinking it had been unintentional and the wiser thing to do was not to call attention to it, and I, misconstruing, repeated it. This time she caught my hand and held it fast, but in such a minor-keyed way that it is difficult to put it into exact words. For she didn’t brush it off or fling it aside peremptorily, but held it still with hers, almost where it had been but not quite, so that her gesture couldn’t be mistaken for collaboration, only for the deterrent it was.

“Don’t do that,” she said in a low-spoken voice that was all the more inflexible for that reason. I’ll get up from here if you do.

“And I don’t want to,” she went on after a moment. “I like you, and I like being here with you.”

I kept quiet, feeling that it was not up to me to do the talking. And even if it had been, not knowing what there would have been to say, the thing was so self-explanatory. In my own mind I unjustly put her into the position of having to excuse or at least explain herself, when it should have been the other way around. But she seemed to accept the role without questioning its fairness.

“I know how some girls feel about it,” she said thoughtfully. “ ‘Oh, it’s just this once, with this one boy. Then it’ll never happen again.’ But it does happen again. If you didn’t stop the first time, then you never will the second. And before you know, it’s with another boy. And then another boy. And pretty soon, with any boy at all.”

Made uncomfortable, I gave a slight pull to my hand, and she released it, and I drew it away.

“I want to get married someday,” she explained. “And when I do, I don’t want to have anything to hide.” And tracing the point of her shoe thoughtfully along the ground in little patterns and watching it as she did so, she went on: “I wouldn’t want to stand up in a church, and know that somewhere some other man was laughing at my husband behind his back. I wouldn’t be entitled to wear a bridal veil, it would be a lie before God.” Then she asked me point blank: “Would you want to marry somebody that had been with everybody else before that?”

She stopped and waited for my answer.

I hated to have to give her the answer, because it vindicated her own argument so.

“No,” I said grudgingly, at last.

I wondered if her mother had instilled this into her, if they had had a talk about it, for it must have come from somewhere to be so strong and clear-sighted in her, but I didn’t think it was right to openly ask her.

But almost as if she had read my mind, she added: “I don’t need anybody else to tell me. I’ve had it all thought out from the time I was fourteen, already. From the time I first knew about things like that. Or knew a little about them, anyway. I made up my mind that when I got older, no matter how much I cared for a fellow, it wasn’t going to be that way.

“It don’t have to be that way,” she reiterated, unshakably. “No matter how much in love a girl and a fellow are, it still don’t have to be that way.”

I remember thinking that, as she spoke, the slight dent in the grammar only added to, didn’t detract from, the beautiful sincerity of her conviction.

I looked at her in a new way now, commending her, esteeming her, for the values she adhered to. Nineteen is basically idealistic, far more than the after-years are, and in spite of its young blood would rather have an ideal it can look up to, that keeps itself just beyond reach of the everyday grubbing fingers.

She probably translated the look. I saw her smile with quiet contentment, as if that were the way she had hoped to be looked at. Then, as if to make up for any crestfallenness I might have felt, she stroked me lightly but affectionately along the side of the face with the tips of her fingers. And bunching her lips and poising them, commanded me winningly, “Now let me have a kiss.”

After I’d taken her back to her own door and then gone home myself, I thought about it. I’d been very intent in the first place: I could tell that easily enough, as I took off my clothing piece by piece to get ready for bed. But that wasn’t the important thing, that was just a reflex, little better than a muscle-spasm. I sat down in a chair first, to quiet down before I tried to sleep, and I turned the whole thing over in my mind.

The important thing about her refusal was the vastly longer term of life and the far more indelible imprint it gave to our relationship. It changed what would have been an overnight thing into a more or less permanent affinity, at least as far as the foreseeable future was concerned. On the one hand there would have been a few short weeks of furtive, overheated meetings, and then oblivion. No name to remember, no face to recall. On the other hand, there was an uncurtailed succession of joyous, daily encounters, sprightly, open and unashamed, and though immature perhaps, in every sense a budding love affair. And an imperishable print on the memory. She stayed with me ever since. I still remember her name, and some of the things she said, and some of the clothes she wore, and some of the ways she looked. There’s a sort of inverse ratio at work there.

Women, even very young girl-women (which amounts to the same thing), must walk a precarious tightrope. If they fall off, into somebody’s waiting arms, they almost always lose him in the end. If they stay on, even though he’s been kept at a distance, they capture some part of him.

I think I dimly sensed this to some extent, even that very first night as I sat there and thought it over. But if I didn’t then, I certainly realize it now, as I look back from forty years away. For I must have had some girl fully, must have had my first girl fully, then or not long after. But not a trace of recollection remains. Yet Vera still stays in my mind. The very fact that I’m writing this is proof enough of that.

That first-night incident on the bench set the whole pattern from then on for our little sentimental interlude. (And I suppose it was little, but it was a valid one nevertheless; seventeen and nineteen can’t have a bravura romance.) It was understood between us without speaking about it any further, it was crystallized, that that was the way it was going to be. And that was the way it was. And I myself wanted it that way now just as much as she did. She personified that to me now, she was its identification. She wore a halo, as far as I was concerned. Youthful and jaunty and informal, but a halo just the same.

We met every day from then on, without missing one. But not always at the same time. For my schedule of classes was zigzag, no two days alike, and since it was all Greek to her anyway, no matter how often I tried to have her memorize it, she always got to the bench before I did in order to be sure to be on time.

I’d see her doll-sized figure from a distance. As I came closer she’d jump to her feet and fling her arms wide in pantomimic welcome, while I’d break into a headlong run, and as I reached her, I tossed my books carelessly over to the side in order to have both arms free for the hug that would follow.

There was something of the antic in this. We both recognized it and we both would have been willing to admit it. But the underlying emotion was bona fide enough; it was just that we didn’t know how to handle it, so we parodied it. If we were too young to actually be in love, to know how to be in love, then we were certainly smitten with one another, infatuated with one another, that much was sure.

We’d sit there for hours sometimes, oblivious of the needling cold, huddled closely together, sometimes my coat around the two of us, our breaths forming bladder-shapes of vapor like the dialogue-balloons cartoonists draw coming out of their characters’ mouths.

We talked a lot. I don’t remember about what; the language of the young. You forget that language very quickly; within a few short years it’s a foreign tongue, the knack for it is completely gone. Sometimes, though, we were quiet and tenderly pensive.

I used to get home at all hours. I ate alone almost every night now; everyone else had usually finished by the time I showed up. But I’d find something put aside and kept warm for me. What it was I never knew half the time, I was so wrapped up in retrospect repetitions of what had just taken place. I don’t recall that my family ever voiced any remonstrances about it. They seem to have been very lenient in this respect. Maybe being the only male, even though a very unseasoned one, in a household of two doting women had something to do with it.

This routine went on daily for about two or three months, as the season began its final climb to the holidays at the top of the year and 1922 slowly blended into 1923. Then a fly landed in the honey, from a totally unexpected quarter. I came home one evening and my mother remarked: “Hetty Lambert called up today while you were out.”

This was a life-long friend of my mother’s. They had been schoolgirl chums, and the intimacy had continued uninterrupted into the married lives of both. Hetty had been well-to-do in her own right even as a youngster (my mother had told me), and she had married a man in the silk-import business who was in turn exceedingly well off, so she must have been a very wealthy woman.

For my part, from my pre-twenty point of view, I found her musty and dowdy. When she wasn’t spending whole mornings clipping coupons in a bank vault, she was spending afternoons visiting with her dead in the family mausoleum. Their one recreation, she and her husband, was a lifetime box at the Metropolitan Opera, but since he invariably fell asleep in it, even that was wasted. She used to do her own marketing for the table personally, squeezing produce, with an elderly chauffeur following her around with a basket to put them in, and if she thought the weight was a bit short or the price a few cents too high she would fume to the high heavens, until they let her have it her way for the sake of peace and quiet.

“What’d she have to say?” I said, totally uninterested but dutifully willing to appear to listen for the sake of the high regard my mother seemed to hold her in.

“Thursday of next week is her daughter’s birthday. Janet’s giving a little party for her friends, and she wants you to come.”

“Oh, no I’m not!” I promptly burst out. “That’s the last place I’m going. You don’t get me there, not on your life!” And so on, at great length.

“I don’t see why you feel that way,” my mother remonstrated mildly, when I had finally come to a stop. “You’ve gone every year, since you were both children. You went last year.”

“Last year was different.” Meaning I’d been a year younger then. And mainly, I hadn’t known Vera then.

Then, perhaps thinking this might be an added inducement, she went on reassuringly: “Hetty and her husband aren’t going to be there. They’re going out for the evening, and turning over the whole apartment to Janet and her friends.”

But this was no inducement whatever as far as I was concerned. I found Janet about as appealing — romantically speaking — as an overstuffed chair with broken-down springs, whether her mother was present or not. No mutual dislike felt by two boys toward one another (or by two girls toward one another, for that matter) can ever quite equal in wholehearted intensity the very occasional and very rare dislike felt toward one another by a boy and girl, when it does happen to come along. And that was the case with us. We had a beautiful, inbred ill will toward one another, due most likely to having been thrown so constantly at each other’s heads when we were both small children.

There wasn’t a thing about her that suited me. Her laugh resembled a sneer. Her most inconsequential remark had a cutting edge, but you only realized it sometime after the cuticle had slowly started peeling back. Her clothes were probably costly, but she always managed to do something to them that spoiled the looks of them. Just by being in them, I guess. Her manners weren’t bad, for only one reason. She didn’t have any at all. She was the only young girl I had ever seen who crumbled her rolls up into pieces at a dinner-party table and then threw them at every boy around her. Not just momentarily, but throughout each and every course, until they became miserable trying to eat without getting hit.

Even the way she kissed was a form of snobbish superiority. She didn’t kiss with her mouth at all. She tilted her nose in the air and pushed her cheek up against the recipient somewhere just below the eardrum. I hadn’t kissed her since we were twelve, but I had watched her kiss her mother and her older married sister, and she did it that way even with them.

All in all, though it was difficult for me then (and now) to find an exact verbal synonym for the word “brat,” a pictorial one was easy to come by. It was simply Janet. She was the perfect spoiled rich brat.

“You’ll have to call her up, one way or the other,” my mother said, still trying to persuade me. “You can’t just ignore it. Even if you’re not fond of Janet,” she pointed out, “you may have a good time. There may be somebody there you’ll like.”

A sudden inspiration hit me. You bet there will be somebody there I like, I promised myself. I’ll see to it that there is!

I made the courtesy call back, as required. The maid answered first, and then called Janet to the phone.

“ ’lo,” Janet said, in that sulky voice that was a characteristic of hers.

“ ’lo,” I answered, equally uncordial.

Neither of us ever used our given names to one another any more than was strictly necessary: another sign of fondness.

“Are you coming?” she asked briefly.

“Yeah,” I answered. Then my voice took on an added degree of animation. “Listen,” I said.

“What?” she asked, as lifeless as ever.

“Can I bring somebody with me?”

“A boy?” she asked, and her voice perked up a little.

“Nah, not a boy,” I said disgustedly. Who’d ever heard of taking another fellow along with you to a party? “A girl.”

“Oh,” she said, and her voice deflated again. Then after a moment’s reflection she agreed, without any great show of enthusiasm. “I s’pose so. There was one girl short at the table, anyhow.”

I couldn’t wait to tell Vera about it. I came rushing up to the bench the following day, kissed her breathlessly and for once almost perfunctorily, and pulling her down onto the bench along with me, blurted out: “Know what? We’ve been invited to a party.”

But to my surprise, instead of being pleased, she acted appalled about it at first. "Where is it?” she asked, and when I’d told her, she kept repeating almost hypnotically, “But Riverside Drive! I can’t go there.”

“What’s so wonderful about Riverside Drive?” I said, shrugging uncomprehendingly. “I’ve been to their place lots of times. In the wintertime they get all the ice-cold wind blowing in from the river. And in the summer, when it would be cooler than other parts of town, they’re not there to enjoy it anyway.”

But temperature wasn’t the deterrent, some kind of monetary denominator — or differential — was. Her mind evidently magnified it and couldn’t rid itself of the fixed idea. I had never taken this into account myself, so I wasn’t in a position to see her point of view.

“That isn’t what I mean!” she said impatiently. “Only rich people live there.”

“What difference does it make?” I said. “You’re going with me. You’re not worried about me, are you? Then why worry about them?”

“But you’re different,” she said, groping to find the right words. “I never think about you in that way, maybe because I’m used to you. You’re friendly, and you never seem to dress up much. And besides, you’re a fellow, and it’s not the fellows that worry me as much as it is the girls.”

“What about them? They’re a bunch of drips. You’ve got more real personality than all of them put together,” I said loyally.

But I couldn’t seem to overcome her misgivings.

“And what about a dress? What kind are they going to wear?”

“I d’no,” I said vaguely. “Dresses for dancing in, I guess. Haven’t you got one of those?”

“When do I go dancing?” she said, almost resentfully.

When we separated that evening, I still hadn’t been able to bring her to the point of agreeing to come. The most I could get her to say was “I’ll think it over, and I’ll let you know.”

The next time we met it was the same thing, and the time after. As far as I could judge her attitude, it wasn’t coyness or wanting to be coaxed. She seemed attracted to the idea of going, and yet at the same time something seemed to keep holding her back. One time she even made the outrageous suggestion: “I’ll walk down there with you as far as the door, and then you go in by yourself. I could even meet you later, after you leave.” Then before I had time for the heated protest that I felt this deserved, she quickly recanted it, saying, “No, that would be foolish, wouldn’t it?”

I finally told her, another time, “Let’s forget about it. If you’re not going, then I’m not either. Who needs the party?”

But she wouldn’t hear of this either. “No, I’m not going to dish you out of the party. You’re expected there, and if you don’t show up, I’ll get the blame. You’ll have to go. I won’t meet you that night, I won’t come out at all, so if you don’t go, you’ll be all by yourself.”

“We go together, or we stay away together,” I insisted stubbornly, as I had right along.

This went on for nearly the whole week or eight days preceding the controversial little event. Then on the very night before, after I’d already just about given up all further hope of persuading her and was ready to quit trying once and for all, she suddenly said — not at the very first, but after we’d been sitting there together for quite some time — “I’m going to tell you something that’ll please you. Want to hear it?”

I told her sure, sure I did.

“I’m going with you tomorrow night.”

I bounced to my feet, took hold of her two hands in my two, and swung them vigorously in and out, to give vent to my elation.

“I made up my mind several days ago,” she admitted, smiling at my enthusiasm, “but I didn’t tell you until now because I wanted to keep it as a surprise.”

The dinner had been set for “somewhere between seven-thirty and eight” (Janet s words), so we arranged to meet three-quarters of an hour earlier, in order to give ourselves time enough to get there without hurrying. She told me to wait for her at the bench, she’d come there, and I gave in to that readily enough. I didn’t like the idea of having to pass in review before her whole family, anyway.

By six-fifteen the following evening, all aglow, I’d completed my rather uncomplicated toilette, which included the by-now semiweekly rite of a light overall shave, more in tribute to the future than a present necessity, and put on my one dark blue suit. I stopped in to see my mother for a minute, before leaving.

“Are you taking her anything?” she asked me. “Because I have a little unopened bottle of cologne you could have. It would save you the expense of buying something.”

“I’ll pick her up a box of candy on the way,” I said evasively. I knew I wouldn’t; I didn’t think that much of Janet.

“I’d like to take her a baseball bat, and give it to her over the head!” I added darkly.

She was laughing, accommodatingly but a little unsurely, as I left her.

I was ahead of time, Vera wasn’t there yet, when I got to the bench.

I sat down to wait for her, and at first I whistled and was relaxed, one knee cocked up high in front of me and my hands locked around it. But the minutes came, the minutes went, more minutes came, more went, and still she didn’t arrive. Pretty soon I wasn’t carefree anymore, I was on needles and pins. I turned and I twisted and I shifted; I constantly changed position, as though by doing that I would bring her there faster. I crossed my legs over one way, then over the other. I swung my hoisted foot like a pendulum. I drummed the bench-seat with my fingers like the ticking away of a fast-moving taxi meter. I raked my nails through my hair, wrecking its laboriously achieved sleekness. I clasped my hands at the back of my neck and let my elbows hang from there. I probably smoked more than in any comparable length of time up to that point in my short young life.

I even combined two positions into one, so to speak — the sitting and the standing — using the top of the bench-back for a seat and planting my feet on the seat itself.

It was while I was in this last hybrid position that I heard a skittering sound, like raindrops spattering leaves, and a small figure came rushing out of the lamp-spiked darkness toward me. A figure smaller than Vera, anyway. It was the little girl who’d been up in the flat that first day I went there, and who seemed to tag around after Vera a good deal. I’d glimpsed her more than once hanging around, helping Vera pass the time while she was waiting for me on the bench, and then when I came along she’d discreetly drift off, probably at a confidential word from Vera.

She seemed to have run all the way, judging by her breathlessness; it was no inconsiderable distance for a youngster her size. Or maybe it was only feasible for that very reason, because of her young age.

“What happened?” I asked, hopping down from the bench-back. “Why didn’t she meet me here like she said she was going to?”

But she only repeated verbatim the message she had been given, evidently having been told nothing else. “She says come right away. She’s waiting for you at her house.”

I bolted off without even giving the poor little thing time to stand still a minute and catch her breath. She turned and faithfully started back the way she had just come, following me. But my long legs soon outdistanced her shorter ones, and after falling behind more and more, she finally bleated out: “Don’t go so fast! I can’t keep up with you!”

I stopped a couple of times to let her catch up, but finally I shouted back to her, rather unfeelingly: “You’re holding me up! I can’t stand and wait for you each time. Come back by yourself!” And I sprinted off and soon left her completely behind.

When I got to the building that housed Vera’s flat, I ran up the whole six flights without a pause even at landings — but if you can’t do it at that age, then you never can do it at all — and finally, half-suffocating, I rapped on the door with tactful restraint (remembering the terrible thump Frankie had given it that first day, and trying not to repeat it).

The door opened, but there was no one standing there alongside it. Then Vera’s voice said, from in back of it: “Come on in, but keep walking straight ahead and don’t turn your head. Hold your hands over your eyes.”

I thought, for a minute, she hadn’t finished dressing yet, and wondered why she’d admitted me so quickly in that case. I heard her close the door.

Then she said: “Now you can turn. But don’t look yet.”

Obediently I turned, eyelids puckered up, exaggeratedly tight, as though normal closing in itself wasn’t a sufficient guarantee.

“Now!” she said triumphantly. “Now look.”

I opened my eyes and looked, and she was all dressed up for the party.

“How do you like me?” she asked eagerly.

It was blue, I’m almost sure. I was sure then, but I’m not sure now anymore. But I think it must have been blue. She was a blonde, and it would have been blue more likely than anything else.

“My aunt ran it up for me on her machine,” she went on breathlessly. “We bought the material at Koch’s, on a-Hunner-twenty-fifth. We only needed four yards, and we even had some leftover for a lampshade when we got through.”

Looking at it, I could well believe it. They were wearing them short and skimpy that year.

“But that isn’t all I’ve got to show you. Just wait’ll you see this!” She went hurrying into one of the other rooms, a bedroom, I guess, and then paper crackled in there. It didn’t rustle softly, as tissue paper would have; it crackled sharply, more as stiff brown wrapping paper would.

Then she came back, something swirling blurrily about her as it settled into place.

“What’ve you got to say now?” she cried.

The blue party-shift had disappeared from view, and she had glossy fur wrapped all around her, covering her everywhere, except her face and legs. She was hugging it tight to her, caressing it, luxuriating in it, in a way I can’t describe. I’d never seen a girl act that way over something inanimate before. She even tilted her head and stroked one cheek back and forth against it, over and over and over again. She made love to it, that’s about all I can say.

I don’t know what kind it was. I didn’t know anything about furs then. Years later, when it had gotten so that I could identify mink, simply by dint of constant sight-references ("Mink,” somebody would say, and then I would look at it), I realized in retrospect that whatever it had been, it hadn’t been mink. It hadn’t been that dark a shade of brown. It had been more a honey-colored kind of brown. Anyway:

“Holy mackerel!” I cried in excitement, or something equally fatuous but equally sincere, and I took a step backward in a parody of going off balance that was only partly pretense.

She kept turning from side to side, and then pivoting all the way around like a professional model, showing it to me from all angles. Her little eyebrows were arched in the cutest expression of mimic hauteur I’d ever seen then or ever have since.

“But it must have cost a pile of money,” I said anxiously. “How’d you ever get them to...?”

“Oh, it’s not all paid for,” she said facilely. “We made a down payment on it, and they let us take it home on approval. If we’re not satisfied we can return it, and they’ll give us our money back.”

“I didn’t know they did that with fur coats,” I said, impressed. But then I didn’t know much about the fur-coat traffic anyway. “It’s the cat’s meow,” I said, which was the utmost you could give to anything in commendation.

We kissed, I in ecstatic admiration, she in jubilant satisfaction at being so admired. “Don’t spoil my mouth, now,” she cautioned, but even that didn’t mar the kiss, for though she withheld her lips protectively from mine, she held my head between her two hands in affectionate pressure.

“We all set, now?” I asked.

“Just one thing more,” she said. She produced a tiny glass vial, not much thicker than a toothpick, and uncapped it. She stroked herself with it at several preordained places: at the base of her throat and in back of both ears. “Wool worth’s,” she said. "But it’s good stuff. You only get a couple of drops for twenty-five cents.”

It smelled very good to me, that was all I knew. Like a hundred different flowers ground up into a paste and leavened with honey.

“Don’t let me forget to turn out all the lights,” she said with a final look around. “They’ll raise cain if I do. It costs like the devil when you leave the electh-tricity on all night.” I remember how she said it. That was how she said it. Electh-tricity. It sounded even better than the right way.

That taken care of, we closed the door after us and went rattling down the stairs, on our way at last.

“Have you got a key for when you come home, or will you have to wake them up?” I asked her on the way down.

“My aunt gave me hers for tonight,” she said. “I don’t think they’ll be back until after we are. They went to a wake, and you know how long those things last.”

I didn’t, but I nodded knowingly, so she wouldn’t know I didn’t.

When we reached the street-entrance, she stopped short, and even seemed to shrink back within its recesses for a moment, almost as though she were afraid to come out into the open, you might say. “How’re we going down there?” she asked.

“Why, in a taxi, of course,” I answered loftily. “I wouldn’t take you any other way, dressed the way you are.”

“Well then you go out ahead and get one, and bring it back to the door with you,” she said. “I’ll wait inside here until you do. I don’t want any of the neighbors to see me standing around on the sidewalk dressed like this. Then by tomorrow, it’ll be all over the house.”

“What’s that their business?” I asked truculently, but I went ahead and did what she’d suggested.

I got one about a block away, got in, and rode back to the doorway in it. Then I got out and held the door open for Vera.

There was a moment’s wait, like when you’re gathering yourself together to make a break for it. Then Vera came rushing out headlong and scurried in. I never saw anyone get into a waiting taxi so fast. She was like a little furry animal scampering for cover.

She pushed herself all the way over into the corner of the seat, out of sight. “Put the light out,” she whispered urgently.

The closing of the door, as I got in after her, cut it off automatically. I heard her give a deep, heartfelt sigh as it went out, and thought it was probably one of contentment because we were finally on the last lap of our way to the party.

I told the driver Janet’s address, and we started off, she and I clasping hands together on the seat between us.

The lights came at us and went by like shining volleyballs rolling down a bowling alley, and it was great to be young, and to be sitting next to your girl in a hustling taxi, and to be going to a party with her. It’s never so much fun in your whole life afterward as it is that first time of all.

I remember thinking: This is only the beginning. I’ll go to other parties with Vera, like this. Every party I ever go to from now on, I’ll go to only with Vera.

I can no longer recall too many of the particulars of the party, at this distance, just its overall generalities. It was about average for its time and for its age group, I guess: like any other party then, and probably still pretty much like any such party now, given a few insignificant variations in tricks of dress and turns of dance and turns of speech. The basic factor remains the same: the initial skirmishing of very young men and girls in preparation for the pairing off of later life. Learning the rules for later on. The not-quite-fully mature, trying to act the part of grown-ups. No, that’s not wholly accurate, either. For we were enclosed in our own world, and therefore we were what we seemed to ourselves to be, in every sense of the word. We reacted to one another on that plane, and that made it a fact. Those outside that world were not the real grown-ups, they were simply aliens, and their viewpoint had no validity among us. The wall of the generations.

She had a fleeting moment or two of uncertainty, of faltering self-confidence, as we stood facing the door, waiting for it to be opened. I could tell it by the whiteness of her face, by the strained fixity of her eyes. Then as the room spread itself out before us like a slowly opening, luminous, yellow and ivory fan, alive with moving figures and flecks of disparate color — the party — her lack of assurance passed and she swept forward buoyantly, almost with a lilt to her step, not more than two or three fingers lightly touching the turn of my arm in token indication that I was her escort. And from then on, all the rest of the evening, that was the word to describe her: buoyant. Whether she was standing or sitting still, dancing or just moving about without music; whatever she was doing. She seemed to skim over the floor instead of being held to it like the rest of us.

She was well liked at once, it was easy to see that. All the very first words that followed my pronunciation of her name each time were warm and friendly and interested and showed a real eagerness on the speaker’s part to become better acquainted with her, over and above the formal politeness that the occasion indicated. We weren’t much on formal politeness anyway, at our ages.

I had expected the boys to like her, but the girls very patently did too. For a boy will like almost any girl except the most objectionable, that’s part of his make-up, but to be liked by her own kind is the real test of popularity for a girl. Within an hour or two of the start of the affair, Vera was a beckoned-to and sought-after and arms-about-waists member of each successive little group and coterie that went inside to the bedroom to giggle and chatter and powder its collective noses away from the boys for a few moments’ respite. She was as incandescent as a lighted lamp swinging from the ceiling of an old-fashioned ship’s cabin and darting its rays into the farthest corners.

But Janet was the big surprise of it all. I had fully expected her to be her usual prickly self, and though for my own part this wouldn’t have fazed me in the least (I even welcomed it, for it put us on a more even footing of mutual ill will, of verbal give-and-take with no holds barred), I had intended to do all I could to protect Vera from her quills. But it turned out not to be necessary at all. Janet seemed to take to her from the moment that she first stepped forward to welcome her, sizing her up in one quick, comprehensive, head-to-foot look, the kind even very young girls her age are fully capable of giving. She obviously liked her, whatever her reasons. From then on, she made her the exception to the entire group. She was quite simple, natural, unaffected, cordial, and hospitable toward her, with just a touch of self-effacement. Her smiles were elfin, but at least they were real smiles. Her remarks had no rusty razor blades embedded in them. A new Janet I had never seen before began to peer shyly forth.

I caught myself thinking as I watched her: Well, I’ll be darned. Sometimes you know people for years, and then suddenly you find out you don’t really know them at all. Somebody new comes along who brings out another side to them that you didn’t even suspect was there, simply because it never had been shown to you before. This is how she would be if she had really liked anyone before. She feels about all of us exactly as I feel about her; she’s known us all too long and well, and she sees only our unappealing qualities by now.

We had dinner first, and then afterward we danced. We played records on the phonograph and danced to them: “Kalua,” which was just going out, and “April Showers,” which was just coming in, and others which were in-between. The phonographs of the day were upright consoles, generically called victrolas, although other manufacturers in addition to the Victor Company marketed them. The average one still had to be cranked by hand, although a few of the costlier ones could now be operated on electrical current, but that was as far as mechanization had gone. They stopped after just one record each time, and a new one had to be put on by hand. We were uncomplaining, though. Our older brothers and sisters, or at least the younger ones among our parents, had had to rely for the most part on player pianos and hand-played pianos, and squeaky, open-topped little turntables with tremendous tulip-horn amplifiers, when they wanted to dance in their homes.

We had dinner and we danced, and that’s all there really was to the party.

We were the last ones to leave, Vera and I. I think we would have stayed on even longer if it weren’t for the fact that we were now reduced (from my point of view, at least) to being alone with the unpleasing Janet. Vera seemed not to mind how long we stayed. She was so keyed up and animated from the hours-long peak of stimulation whipped up by the party (just like an actress is after an opening night, I suppose) that she kept talking away without a let-up, as if there were still dozens of people there and not just three of us.

Janet, whom I had frequently known to be quite ungracious and even blunt in her dismissals (she had once said to a whole group of us, holding the door back at full width, “All right, everybody out; go home now”), seemed to enjoy having her stay. She sat beside Vera, an arm about her shoulder, nibbling at something from the refreshment table, drinking in everything she said with little nods and grins of accord. But it was close to one o’clock, which was still a fairly raffish hour for us at that stage of our lives, and I finally suggested to Vera she’d better let me take her home.

“Oh, what a lovely party that was!” she burst out as we emerged from the glowingly warm building into the cold, bracing night air, which immediately formed little wisps of steamy breath in front of our faces. “I never dreamed I’d have such a good time. My head’s still swimming from it.” And while I was busy scanning the street for a cab, she spread her coat and dress out wide between her outstretched hands and executed a succession of little whirling dance steps, waltz-turns, there on the sidewalk, turning, reversing, then turning back again.

Back at her house, we hustled all the way up those six flights of stairs, and then stopped suddenly almost at the top, and threw our arms around each other, as much in high spirits as in love. We stood there, and we kissed, and we whispered so low that no one standing right beside us could have heard, even if there had been someone standing right beside us.

Something more could have happened; she would not have opposed it. She was stirred by the party, intoxicated by her success at it, and this would have been part of that, and that would have been part of this. There is an unspoken understanding, a wordless language, at certain times, and even a youngster such as I was then, can sense and translate it. The half-turn her head made against my shoulder, lying inert, passive, submissive, the way her hand dropped off my arm and hung down loose, the play of her breath as soft as the ebb and flow of breath-mist on a mirror, against my face, were words enough, no real ones were needed. This is part of the race’s instinct.

But I didn’t want it to happen. I did, but I didn’t. And I made the didn’t master the did. She had me accustomed now, conditioned now. I wanted her this way, the way she was, the way she had been on the bench that night. I had this image of her. I wanted to keep it, I didn’t want to take anything away from it. (I didn’t realize until years later that that’s all there are, are our images of things. There are no realities. There are only the hundred different approximations of reality that are our images of it, no two the same, from man to man, from case to case, from place to place.)

There was a breathless springtime charm about her this way, a fragile sway she exerted over me, which would have been gone at a touch. Maybe a more heated, more grown love would have taken its place. But only for a while. Then that would have gone too, as it always does in such cases. And nothing would have been left. Not the first, not the second.

It wasn’t a mere matter of purity or non-purity. Even that young, I wasn’t narrow-minded. That was a mere cuticle-distinction.

It was partly possessive: You have something that belongs to you, that you value, like a bright new necktie or a leather wallet or a chrome lighter with your initials on it, and you don’t want to get a stain on it, you don’t want to deface it.

There was part self-esteem in it, I think. Your girl had to be better than any other girl around, or what was the use of her being your girl? You were so good yourself that you rated only the best, nothing less would do. Caesar’s sweetheart.

But it was idealistic, mostly. If you’re not going to be idealistic at that age, you’re never going to be idealistic at all.

I don’t know. I didn’t know then, I still don’t now. Who can explain the heart, the mind, the things they make you do?

I dropped one foot down to the step below, and took my arms off her.

“You better get inside, Vera.” I said. “You better say good-night to me.”

And then I said again, “You better hurry up and get inside, Vera.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-night first?” she said softly.

“No, say it from up there. Not down here.”

She went up the three or four remaining steps to the level, and took her key out and opened the door with it. Then she turned and looked at me as she went in. I saw her put the backs of a couple of her fingers across her lips, then she tipped them toward me in a secretive kissing sign. Still looking at me to the last, she slowly drew the door closed past her face, very slowly and very softly, almost without a sound.

She didn’t come to the bench the next afternoon. I waited there for her for several hours, with that slowly fading afterglow you’re left with on the day after a party, wanting to share it with her by talking the whole thing over, but she didn’t come. Finally, when the early winter twilight had closed down and turned the whole world into a sooty, charcoal line drawing, all of black and gray, I got up and left, knowing she wasn’t coming anymore this late, and knowing just as surely I’d see her the following day. I didn’t even stop by her house to find out what had kept her away, because I felt sure it was nothing more than a case of her being overtired from the night before, and of having slept late as a result.

But the next day she didn’t come again, either, and I wondered about it. I wondered if she’d stayed out too late with me to suit her family, and they were keeping her away from me for a few days to show their disapproval. But they hadn’t been home yet themselves, to all appearances, when I’d brought her back.

Then I wondered if something had happened at the party that had offended or displeased her, something that she hadn’t told me about. But I remembered how she’d danced in exuberance out on the sidewalk after we’d left, so it didn’t seem likely it was that.

The third time she disappointed me, it was already the start of a new week, the party was already three or four days in back of us now, and I didn’t wait any longer. The only possible explanation left was that she’d been taken ill; she might have caught cold that night, she’d been thinly dressed and it had been stingingly cold from what I remembered. And if she was ill, I wanted her at least to know I’d asked for her, and not let her think I’d been completely indifferent. So after a forlorn half-hour’s token vigil on the bench, with no real anticipation even at the start, I got up again and went over to her house to see if I could find out anything.

I don’t recall any longer whether I made two visits over there on two successive days, on the first of which I merely loitered about in front of the place, in hopes either of catching sight of her or else of questioning somebody who might possibly know her (such as the little girl who had carried her message the night of the party), and on the second of which I finally went all the way up the stairs as far as her door; or whether the two telescoped themselves into one and the same occasion. But I do know that, all else having failed, I finally stood at the top of the six flights of stairs and I finally knocked at her door.

After a moment’s wait I heard a single heavy crunch of the flooring just on the other side of it; I imagine the one board that had been trodden on creaked, while all the rest of them did not.

A voice asked: “Who’s that?” A woman’s, but that was all I recognized about it.

“Me,” I said. “Vera’s friend, Con.” (To my own ears, it sounded like a faltering quaver that came out of me.)

The door opened, and her mother stood there.

Her face wasn’t friendly. I couldn’t decipher exactly what was on it at first, but it was set in bleak, grim lines and no smile broke on it.

“And is it Vera you’re asking after?” she said, and I can still remember the thick Irish twist of speech she gave it.

I nodded and swallowed a lump of self-consciousness in my throat.

Her voice grew louder and warmer, but not the warmth of congeniality, the warmth of glittering, spark-flying resentment. “You have the nerve to come here and ask for her? You have the nerve to come here to this door? You?”

She kept getting louder by the minute.

“I should think you’d have the decency to stay home, and not show your face around here. Isn’t it enough you’ve done? Well, isn’t it?” And she clamped her hands to the sides of her head, as when you’re trying to stifle some terrible recollection.

I drew back a step, stunned, congealed with consternation. Only one explanation was able to cross my mind. I knew nothing had happened on the stairs that night. But maybe they didn’t, maybe they thought something had. And if they did, what way was there I could ever—

“Now go on about your business!” she said sternly. The expression “Get lost” had not yet come into general parlance, but she used an approximation of it. “Take yourself off,” I think it was.

By that time I was partly down the stairs already, and then had stopped again and half-turned around to her to hear the rest of it out.

“Stay away from here. There’s no Vera here for you.”

The door gave a cataclysmic bang, and that was the end of it. There was no Vera there for me.

I have often wondered since why it was such a long time after that before I ran into Frankie again. Maybe it actually wasn’t, but it seemed so at the time. Weeks, if not quite months. But our paths didn’t happen to cross, I guess, for we each had differing interests by now. The hero-worship stage was long a thing of the past. I had probably grown out of it by myself; I don’t think my friendship with Vera had anything to do with ending it. And I hadn’t sought him out, because it had never occurred to me that he might be in a better position than I to pick up the neighborhood rumors and gossip, his ear being closer attuned to it than mine, in a way.

Anyway, one day we came along on opposite sides of the same street, he going one way, I the other. He threw up his arm to me, I flung up mine to him, and he crossed over to me. Or we met in the middle, whichever it was.

We made a couple of general remarks, mostly about his current boxing activities (he was still in the amateur category, he told me, but about ready to become pro; all he needed was to find the right manager). Then he suddenly said: “That was tough about your friend, wasn’t it?”

I must have sensed something serious was about to come up; I quickly became alerted, even before the conversation had gotten any further. “Vera? What was tough? What was?” I asked tautly.

"About her getting caught up with like that.”

“Caught up with how?” I insisted.

“What are you, serious?” he said impatiently. “I thought you knew about it. The whole block knows. How come you don’t know about it, when you been going around with her so much lately? Practically steady.”

“All of a sudden I didn’t see her anymore,” I tried to explain. “She dropped out of sight, and I couldn’t find out why. Nobody told me.”

“I could’a’ told you,” he said. “Why di’ntya come to me?”

“Well, what is it?” I urged. “What?”

“She was picked up,” he said flatly.

I didn’t understand at first; I thought he meant a flirtatious pickup, by some stranger on the street.

“Picked up by some fellow? She wasn’t that kind. I know her too well.”

“I don’t mean picked up by some fellow. Picked up by the cops. She was taken in.”

I felt as though one of his best punches had hit me squarely between the eyes. All I could see for a minute were swirls in front of them. Like a pair of those disks with alternate black and white circular lines that keep spinning into a common center, but they never come to an end, they always keep right on coming.

“For what?” I managed to get out when they’d finally thinned somewhat and started to fade away. “What for?”

I guess he could see by my face the kind of effect he had had on me; it seemed to make him feel regretful that he’d told me. “Don’t take it like that,” he said contritely. “I wounna told you, if I knew it was going to get you like that.”

“But why?” was all I kept saying, tearful without any tears, querulous, resentful, all those things at once. “What’d she do? They can’t just come along like that and haul anybody in they want to.”

He didn’t stop to argue that with me; evidently he felt the facts did it for him. “You know the old lady she worked for part-time, the rich old lady on West End Avenue—? She ever tell you about her?”

“Yeah, I knew she worked for her,” I said marginally.

“The old lady put in a complaint about her to the cops. She called them up and told them there was an expensive fur coat missing out of her closet, and she accused Vera of swiping it. So they went over there to Vera’s place, looking for it, at eight o’clock in the morning. She was still in bed, but they found it folded up underneath her mattress.”

“She had one she was paying for on time—” I tried to say in her defense.

“Na,” he said juridically. “The old lady identified it, it had the same labels on it.”

“Then what’d they do?” I faltered, sickish in the throat with backed-up salty fluid.

“They made her get dressed, and they took her with them. She claimed she just borrowed it to wear for one night, and was going to bring it right back the next day. The trouble was she couldn’t prove that, because they caught up with her too quick and she still had it in the room with her when they got there.”

An excruciating little mental image crossed my mind, of her coming out the street-doorway of her house, that same doorway where she hadn’t wanted the neighbors to see her “all dressed up,” but now with two men alongside her, people looking on from windows and from the steps, holding her head down, and with tears probably, tears almost certainly, gliding down her shame-flushed face.

“But if the old lady got her coat back, why didn’t she just let her go?” I wailed querulously.

“She wanted to teach her a lesson, I guess. She said she’d been very good to Vera, and Vera had repaid her by stealing from her behind her back.” And he interpolated sagely: “You know, them old ladies can be very mean sometimes, especially when it comes to losing something like a fur coat.”

“I know,” I assented mournfully. To both of us, I suppose, a woman of forty would have been what we considered an old lady.

“She was sore, and she wouldn’t drop the charges. They brung Vera up before a magistrate — I doanno if it was in juvenile court or where, but I guess it was there, because she’s still a minor — and he committed her to a reformatory for six months. She’s up there now, at some farm they got upstate.”

And he added, quite unnecessarily, “That’s why you haven’t seen her around anymore.”

After a wordless pause of several moments, I started to move away from him.

“Hey, come back here,” he said. “Come back here.” He was trying to be sympathetic, consolatory, in a gruff sort of way, which was the only way he knew how.

I kept on going, drifting away from him.

Then he tried to come after me and rejoin me. I didn’t see him because I didn’t turn to look, but I knew he was, because I could tell by the sound of his feet, coming along behind me. I motioned to him with a backward pass of my hand to leave me alone, to go on off.

I didn’t want him to see my face.

I felt like a dog that’s just had its paw stepped on real hard, and it goes limping off on three feet and is leery of everyone, doesn’t want anyone to come near it for a while. The only thing I didn’t do was whimper like one.

All the winter long I’d pass there now and then, and every time I passed I’d seem to see her standing there in the doorway. Just the way I’d seen her standing sometimes when we’d met by her door instead of at the park bench.

Complete, intact in every detail: looping her tamoshanter around by its headband on the point of one finger. Much more than an illusion: a life-size cut-out, like those figures they sometimes stood up outside of theaters. So real that the checks of her coat hid the grubby brownstone doorway-facing behind where they were. So real that even the remembered position of her feet repeated itself on the brownstone doorstep, and they seemed to be standing there once again just as they once had: one planted flat out a little way before her so that the shank of her leg curved gracefully outward a little to reach it, the other bent backward behind her, and planted vertically against the sideward part of the doorway. And as I’d once noticed, when she thrust a door closed behind her with a little kick-back of her heel, here again she gave grace, not grotesqueness, to this odd little posture.

But then as I’d look and look, and look some more, longingly (not so much with love — for what did I know of love at nineteen? Or for that matter, what did I know of it at thirty-nine or forty-nine or fifty-nine? — as with some sense of isolation, of pinpointed and transfixed helplessness under the stars, of being left alone, unheard and unaided to face some final fated darkness and engulfment slowly advancing across the years toward me, that has hung over me all my life), the brownstone-facing would slowly peer back through the checks of her coat, the doorstep would be empty of her disparately placed feet, and I’d have to go on my way alone again. As all of us have to go alone, anywhere that we go, at any time and at any place.

The young, I think, feel loneliness far more acutely than the older do, for they have expected too much, they have expected everything. Those older never expect quite everything, or more than just a little at best, and when loneliness strikes, their lack of complete expectation in the first place dulls the sharp edge of it somewhat.

The spring came again, and then that warmed itself into early summer, and by now it was a year since I had first met her. I still thought of her very often, but I no longer thought of her all the time. Her immediacy had faded.

One night in June I was passing along Eighth Avenue again, and as the corner of One-hundred-fourteenth Street came abreast of me and opened up the side-street into view, it suddenly seemed to blaze up from one end to the other like a rippling straw-fire, an illusion produced by scores of light bulbs strung criss-cross from one side of the street to the other, and fidgeting in the slight breeze. Vehicular entry had been blocked off by a wooden traffic horse placed at the street entrance. People were banked on both sidewalks looking on, and between them, out in the middle, tightly packed couples were dancing. They were holding a block party on the street.

Block parties were nothing new. In fact, by this time they were already well on their way out. They had first originated about four years before, at the time of the mass demobilization, when each individual block celebrated the return to its midst of those young men who had seen service overseas by holding a community homecoming party in their honor out in the street (because that was the only place that could conveniently accommodate all the participants).

But this was the early summer of 1923, not 1919 any longer; the last soldiers had finished coming back long ago; the only ones left were regulars, on garrison duty along the Rhine, at the Koblenz bridgehead. Another thing: The climate of public opinion had noticeably changed in the meantime. The naive fervor of the first postwar year or two had now given place to that cynicism toward all things military and patriotic that characterized the remainder of the decade. So the occasion for this particular party must have been something else: a church benefit or charity affair of some kind.

I moved in among the onlookers and stood there with my shoes tipping over the edge of the curb, watching. The music wasn’t very good, but it was enthusiastic and noisy, and that was the mood the crowd was in, so that was all that mattered. They were probably amateurs who lived on the block themselves, and each one had brought his particular instrument down into the street with him, and joined forces with the others. But they were so uneven they were almost good, because the music of the moment was supposed to be played in just that sort of jagged, uneven time, anyway. I can still remember them blaring and blatting away at two of the current favorites: “Dearest, You’re the Nearest to my Heart” and “Down, Down Among the Sleepy Hills of Ten, Ten, Tennessee.”

Then as I stood there on the lip of the curbing, taking it all in, she was suddenly there in front of me. I never knew afterward which direction she’d come from, because I didn’t have time to see. She was just suddenly there, that was all, and I was looking at Vera again.

She hadn’t changed much. The even-all-around cut might have been missing from her hair, but I can’t be sure, for I didn’t look up at it, just looked at her. She had on a fresh, summery little dress, orchid in color, that much I seem to remember. It was both gauzy and crisp at the same time, most likely what they call organdy.

But there was one thing I did notice clearly, as we looked straight into one another’s eyes, one thing that hadn’t been there before. There was a little diagonal crevice, like a nick or slit, traced downward from the inside corner of each eye, slanted like an accent mark and just as brief as one. It couldn’t have been called a crease, for she was too young to have creases yet. It wasn’t a furrow either, it wasn’t deep enough for that.

Studying her, I wondered what had caused it. Tear-tracks, maybe, from excessive crying? No, not tears alone. Tears maybe, but something else as well. Long, sleepless nights of brooding, of frustration and rebellion.

If they grew longer, deeper, I sensed somehow they would change the expression of her face, give her eyes a hardened, crafty aspect. But it was too soon to do that yet. All they were so far was a mark of hurt; they gave her eyes an apprehensive, reproachful look.

I don’t know what we said first. Probably I said her name, and she said mine.

Then she moved her mouth upward toward me a little, and we kissed.

“It’s been an awful long time I last saw you,” I said, skipping the “since” in the hurry of my speech. Tactless, without meaning to be. But what else could I have said? I hadn’t seen her just yesterday.

“I’ve been away,” she said reticently.

I wondered if she knew I knew. I hoped she didn’t. I would have liked to tell her that I didn’t know, but I couldn’t figure out a way that wouldn’t tell her that I did know.

“Working,” she added even more reticently.

“You still live here on the block?” I asked her.

She answered that with less constraint. “Not anymore,” she said. “I just came around tonight to see what the old neighborhood looked like.”

Then, as if to break the chain-continuity of questions, she suddenly suggested: “Dance with me. It’s too hard to try to talk with all that noise they’re making.”

I stepped down to the asphalt roadbed she was standing on, which had been powdered over with something to make it less abrasive to the dancers’ feet.

We moved a few steps, a few steps only, and then even that was taken away from me.

A girl came jostling and thrusting her way through the mangle of dancers, someone I had never seen before. She touched Vera on the back or something, I couldn’t see what it was, to attract her attention.

“What’re you doing?” she demanded in a tone of urgency. “Don’t you know they’re waiting for us?”

“I just met an old friend,” Vera told her happily, and she indicated me with her head, about to introduce us.

The other girl brushed that aside, as if to say: This is no time for that now. She didn’t even look toward me.

“This is the second time they’ve sent me out to look for you,” she went on rebukingly. “How much longer you going to be? You must have seen everything you wanted to by now. What’s there to see around here, anyway? They won’t like it if you keep them waiting much longer.”

“All right, I’m coming,” Vera said with a sort of passivity, as though she were used to being told what to do.

“I guess I have to go now,” she said, turning to me, with a regretful little smile that, whether she meant it or not, was a pleasant balm to my feelings.

She turned aside from my still-upheld arms and followed the other girl back through the crowd. And after a moment, I went after the two of them, more slowly.

Once up on the sidewalk and in the clear, they broke into a choppy little quick-step that girls sometimes use, not quite a run but more than a walk, Vera still a trifle in back of the other one.

“But when am I going to see you again?” I called out after her, bewildered by the rapidity with which I’d found her, only to lose her again.

She turned her head around, but without breaking stride in the little jogging trot she was engaged in, and called back reassuringly: “Real soon, Con. And that’s a promise.”

Then they both made the turn of the corner and whisked from sight. I went down there after them, not to try to stop them, for I knew that wouldn’t have worked, but simply to see if I could get a look at who it was they were hurrying so to join.

As I put my head around the corner, a pale-stockinged after-leg was drawing from sight into a car that was standing there, and then the car door cracked shut with that flat sound they always have.

It was standing, oh I don’t know, about ten yards along from the corner, and there were a number of men in it, exactly how many I couldn’t tell, maybe three, possibly four, but certainly more than just two to pair off with the girls. They were older men, not youths my own and Vera’s age. This was more a matter of outline than anything else, since I couldn’t see their faces to the slightest degree, but the impression of maturity was unmistakable. The massiveness of their shoulders gave it to me, and the breadth of the backs of their necks, and they were all alike wearing rather too dressy snap-brim felt hats (and this was already June). One of them was smoking a cigar, I saw it glow for a moment in the darkness under the roof of the car, and the livid concentric swirl it made was much larger than a mere cigarette ember would have been, particularly if seen from a distance like that.

And finally, the car itself was not of a type that young men would have owned or cared to own or habitually been found driving around in. It was no runabout or roadster or rattling, motto-inscribed “flivver.” It was a closed car, a black sedan, a very heavy-set, high-powered affair. It almost looked custom-made. It had more than the usual amount of burnished hardware on the outside (door handles, headlights, and a smaller, cone-shaped swivel light up alongside the windshield). If it weren’t for the wheels, it could have resembled a coffin.

I don’t know who or what they were, and I never will. Maybe they were just hard-bitten older men, older than the two girls with them, toughened up by years of wresting every hard-fought buck from a reluctant world. Without grace, without compunction, without laughter. Harmless otherwise in general (except of course to young girls such as those). Non-lethal, or I should say, non-illicit.

And then again maybe not. About two or three years after that, around ’25 or ’26, when an awareness of the new type of public violence, which the First War and Prohibition had bred between them, finally percolated through to the public consciousness from the specialized areas to which it had been confined until now — the police-files, crime- and police-reporters, certain politicians, speakeasy operators, and the like — and new words like gangster and racketeer and public enemy began to sprinkle the pages of the newspapers more and more often, along with accounts of nocturnal ambuscades and machine-gun fusillades and murders in garages and warehouses and concrete-weighted drownings along the water’s edge... Every time I’d come across one of them, something brought back the picture of that car to my mind’s eye.

And I’d wonder then, as I still wonder now, was it men of that kind she and her friend had gone off with that night? Some of their earlier prototypes, their very first vanguard? Or was there just a superficial resemblance there that fooled my untrained, unknowledgeable eye?

And I’d hope, every time I thought about it, that that was what it was, and nothing more.

But I never could be sure.

It didn’t even have a tail-light on, to follow its recession by. But like a great big inky patch against the paler night it grew smaller and smaller as it dwindled down the street, stealthily, without sound, until it had contracted into extinction and was there no more.

We never saw each other again, in this world, in this lifetime. Or if we did, we didn’t know each other.