Tony and Susan

TWO

When Edward and Susan were fifteen, his father died of a heart attack, and her father and mother took him in for a year. His real mother was in an institution, and his stepmother, who had just divorced the father, wanted nothing to do with the son. He had cousins in Ohio who took him later, but her parents took him first so that he would not have to leave Hastings High. There were negotiations and long distance calls and financial compensation, but she always thought it most kind of her parents.

There was no particular reason to take him in. They were neighbors. Edward’s father would ride the commuting train to New York with her father. He came to dinner from time to time. He was a mild amusing affable man who played the violin on the side.

They lived on Edgar’s Lane, a street with comfortable suburban houses under the trees, Edward’s house at the top of a curving flight of steps down where the street dipped below the overhanging branches. The street was historical, there having been a Battle of Edgar’s Lane in Revolutionary times.

She hardly knew him before his father died, or if she did, she did not remember. They walked to school on the Aqueduct, a level grassy path between the backs of the houses, separated from them by a fence and a wide swath of grass. The Aqueduct maintained its level on embankments across all the natural dips in the land, and wherever it crossed a street people walking had to pass through wooden gates from the old horse days.

His father died on a sunny day in May. On the afternoon of that day, Susan was on the Aqueduct with Marjorie Grabel, the grass unmowed on either side, the path still damp but not muddy. Edward was a hundred yards ahead, indolent with his bookbag, chewing blades of Aqueduct grass. Behind her, Susan’s younger sister and brother lagged, avoiding her. At that time Edward was a skinny kid with yellow hair, thin neck and squinty eyes like a water bird with long legs, and he was too shy to be liked, though Susan did not realize it was shyness but thought it was innate maturity compared to which she was only a child. They came up Edgar’s Lane under the trees. Edward went up the steps into his house. Marjorie turned left at the corner, and Susan went home, with Paul and Penny keeping their distance behind.

A few minutes later he was at the door of her house, his mouth working, trying to say, Get your mother. Then she followed her mother and Edward running down the street, even her mother running. They ran up the steps beside the rock garden to the house, stucco and timbered, her mother stopping to get her breath, while Susan caught up, asking what the matter was. She stayed outside while her mother and Edward went in. Afraid because she had never seen a corpse, she waited on the stone parapet by the front door, with its box of pansies and its view down the street. After a while people arrived, going into the house past her. A fat man puffing up the steps asked her, Is this the place? Her mother came down and told her to go home. By going home she missed the covered body removed on a stretcher, and only later regretted not having seen it.

That night, Edward came to dinner at her house, and she remembers questions. Do you know your stepmother’s address? No grandparents? No uncles and aunts? Do you know anything about your father’s finances?

They put him in the room on the top floor, where he had a view over rooftops to a section of the Palisades across the river and a smaller patch of the river itself between trees, where sometimes in the summer if he was lucky he would get a glimpse of the day boats going by.

No one dreamed that anything would develop between Edward and Susan. He said, Let’s have an understanding here. You don’t want me in your house, and I don’t want to be here, but what can we do, so let’s shut up about it. You stay out of my room and I’ll stay out of yours.

He said, So there’ll be no confusion later on, just because I’m male and you’re female doesn’t mean anything, agreed? You won’t expect me to ask you for dates and I won’t expect anything from you. We just happen to be boarding in the same house.

Less generous than her parents, she did not want him there, because it took away the family’s privacy. When he first made those remarks she was glad, thinking it cleared the air. Later when he repeated them she was annoyed. When he continued to say them, she felt really angry, but by then she was angry with him about everything, so she didn’t trust her judgment.

He lived with them for a year. When no one invited her to the spring dance he politely took her. They studied together and did well in school. He went with them in the summer to Maine. There were peaceful moments she hardly noticed. He never mentioned becoming a writer.