Читать книгу Deadline at Dawn - Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich - Страница 4

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She went down the constructed hallway inside. She was alone now. She was alone for the first time since eight tonight. She was without a man. She was without a man’s arms around her. She was without somebody’s breath in her face. She was by herself. She didn’t know much about what heaven was like; but she imagined when you died and went to heaven, heaven must be like this—to be alone, without a man. She passed under a solitary light at the back, looking white, looking tired, and began to climb the slatternly stairs. At first fairly erect, fairly firmly if not jauntily; at the last, after two full flights of them, sagging forward over her own knees, wavering from side to side, supporting herself by contact now against the wall, now against the wooden guard-rail.

She went all the way to the top, and then, breathing expiringly, leaned against a door there at the front, face downward as though she were looking intently at something on the floor. She wasn’t. She was just being tired.

Presently she moved again. One more little thing to do, one slight little thing, and then it was all over. It was all over until tomorrow night this same time, and then it would have started once more. She got out her key and put it into the door blindly, head still down. She pushed the door in, took the key out, and closed the door after her. Not with her hands, or the knob. With her shoulders, falling back against it so that it flattened shut behind her.

She stayed that way, supine, and reaching from where she was, found the lever, put on the light. Her eyes dropped as she did so, as though they didn’t want to see it right away, didn’t want to look at it any sooner than they had to.

This was it. This was home. This. This place. This was what you’d packed your valise and come here for. This was what you’d looked forward to when you were seventeen. This was what you’d grown pretty for, grown graceful for, grown up for. All over the place, you could hardly move, it was littered with shards. Ankle-deep, knee-deep. You couldn’t see them. Shattered dreams, smashed hopes, busted arches.

Here you cried sometimes, cried low and quiet to yourself, deep in the night. But on other nights, that were even worse, you just lay dry-eyed, not feeling much, not caring any more. Wondering if it would take very long to grow old, if it would take very long to— Hoping it wouldn’t.

She came away from the door at last, and as she dragged off her hat, flung off her coat, drew nearer to the light—tired as she was, pallid as she was, the question was answered. Yes, it would. And it would be a darned shame, too.

She toppled into a chair, and fumbled with the straps of her shoes, and wrenched them off. That was the first thing she did, always, as soon as she came in. Feet weren’t meant to do what hers did. If they must dance, it should be of their own volition, joyously, for just a little while, a measure or two. They shouldn’t be driven to it, for endless hours beyond all endurance.

Presently she thrust them into a pair of felt slippers whose cuffs yawned shapelessly about her ankles. Then she still stayed where she was awhile longer, somnolent, head thrown back upon the top of the chair, arms hanging limply down toward the floor, before doing anything else of the little there remained to be done.

There was a cot of sorts over against the wall, depressed in its middle section even when untenanted, as though worn away by years of being slept in. Sometimes she wondered if they’d cried like she had, those who had slept in it before her turn came. Sometimes she wondered where they were now. Selling sachets of lavender on a street-corner in the rain, scrubbing office-vestibules at dawn; or perhaps by now lying on another sort of cot, for good—a firmer one, topped with sod—their perplexities eased.

There was a table with a straightbacked chair drawn to it out in the middle, under the light. An envelope lay on it, stamped and addressed, ready to mail but for the insertion of its contents and the sealing of its flap. Inscribed “Mrs. Anna Coleman, Glen Falls, Iowa.” And beside it the sheet of notepaper that was to go in, blank but for three words. “Tuesday. Dear Mom—” Then nothing more.

She could have finished composing it with her eyes closed, she’d written so many others like it. “I’m doing fine. The show I’m in now is a big hit, and turning them away at the door. It’s called—” And then she’d pick a name from the theatrical columns and fill that in. “I don’t do so much in it, just a little dancing, but they’re already talking of giving me a speaking part next season. So you see, Mom, there is nothing to worry about—” Things like that. And then: “Please don’t ask me if I need money, that’s ridiculous, I never heard of such a thing. Instead, I’m sending you a little something. By rights it should be a great deal more, they pay me a big enough salary, but I’m afraid I’ve been a little extravagant, you have to keep up appearances in the profession, and this flat, lovely as it is, comes quite high, what with the colored maid and all. But I’ll try to do better next week—” And then two single dollar-bills would find their way in, with her blood invisible all over them.

Things like that. She could have finished it with her eyes closed. She’d finish it tomorrow, maybe, when she got up. She’d have to finish it soon: it had been lying there like that for three days now. But not tonight. There are times when you are too tired and vanquished even to lie. And something might have crept through between the lines.

She got up and she went over to a sort of cupboard-arrangement, a niche without any closure, gaping against the back wall. It held, on a shelf, a gas-ring, with a rubber tube leading up and cupping onto a jet that protruded from the wall overhead. She struck a match, uncocked the jet, and a little circle of sluggish blue fire jumped into being. She placed a battered tin coffee-pot over this, readied for brewing from earlier in the day, when it had not been so much agony to move about.

Then her hands went to the shoulder of her dress, to open and discard it. She remembered, and looked toward the window, fronting the street. Its shade had been left up. There were rooftops across on the other side, if nothing else, and vermin sometimes crawled upon them. Once, during the summertime before, a jeering whistle had come in to apprise her of this. She’d never forgotten that since.

She let her dress be for a moment, went over to it to pull the shade down. Then with her hand to the cord, she stopped and forgot to go ahead.

He was still down there. He was lingering down there in the street, directly before this house. The very same one who had walked over with her just now. The street-light falling on him identified him to her beyond the possibility of a mistake.

He was standing out there at the margin of the sidewalk, as if at a loss, as if, having now come this far, he didn’t know where next to go from here, where to go on to. As if her defection had stranded him. He was motionless, yet not quite still. He kept fluctuating a little in the one place where he stood, shifting about like a jittering compass.

It was not herself that held him there, that was implicit in his very stance. His back was to her, or at least partially so; he was standing semi-profileward, parallel to the direction of the street. He wasn’t looking up, seeking her at any of the windows. He wasn’t looking in, questioning the doorway through which he had last seen her go. He was doing again as he had done while she was still with him, staring intently and with only momentary interruptions off into the distance, down the street and beyond, scanning the night in the direction from which they had last come, he and she. Anxiously, worriedly, fearfully. Yes, there was no mistaking the emotion the whole cast of his body conveyed, even from a height of three floors above; fearfully, as well.

Though she had every evidence that this was no trespass upon herself, that it had nothing to do with her, yet it did something to irritate her. What did he want down there? Why didn’t he go elsewhere and do his shadow-boxing? What did he hang around her door for? She wanted to be away from all of them, she wanted to forget them, all those who had to do with the mill. And he was one of them. Why didn’t he go on back where he belonged?

Her mouth tightened into a scowling pucker, and her hands sought the finger-grooves of the lower window-frame. She was going to fling it up high, and lean out, and rail down at him: “Go on now, beat it! Go on about your business! What’re you waiting down there for? Move on, take a walk, or I’ll call a cop!” And other things at fishwife-pitch she knew well how to say, that would have effectively dislodged him no matter how reluctant he was, or else forced him to brave the opening of every window all around him to see what the cause of the tirade was.

But before she could do it, something happened.

He turned his head and looked up the other way. Still along the street-level, but westward now, toward Tenth and beyond. It was just an intermission, a respite, in the steadiness with which he’d maintained his gaze in the first direction. And then suddenly she saw him give a half-crouched, abortive start, though she could still see nothing from where she was, within the window-pane.

An instant longer, no more, he waited to confirm the first glimpse of whatever it was, and then he darted aside, bolted from view somewhere directly underneath her vantage-point. Obviously, judging by his direction, he’d sought refuge in the doorway of this same building she was in.

For a moment there was no sign of what had caused his hasty retreat. The street stretched lifeless under her, gunmetal-dark save where the forlorn halo of the lamppost down there whitened it a little.

She stayed there, face pressed to the window, waiting, watching. Then suddenly, without any warning sound, something white, shaped like an inverted boat, came drifting past on the dark tide of the night. It took her a moment to understand what it was, it was coursing along so insidiously. It was a small patrol-car, making its routine rounds late at night. Approaching without lights or clamor, to catch malefactors off-guard.

It had no objective, it was not stalking anyone, least of all him; she could tell that by its lackadaisical gait. It was just cruising, it had turned in through here at random.

It had already gone on past now. For a moment she toyed with the idea of throwing open the window after all, as she had first intended, and hailing it to stop; of telling them: “There’s a man lurking in the doorway underneath here. Ask him what he’s up to.” She didn’t. Why should she, she asked herself? He hadn’t done anything overt against her, or anything wrong to her knowledge. She held no brief for him, but neither did she for them. He wasn’t her brother, but neither was she his keeper.

It had gone too far by now, anyway. Its occupants hadn’t even glanced over this way, at the door of this house. It coasted on down to the next corner, more boat-like than ever on the invisible current of its own motion, shrinking to the size of a pod, and then it turned to the right and was gone.

She waited a moment or two to see if he would come out again. He didn’t. The street before the house remained as barren as though he’d never been there. He stayed out of sight inside somewhere, wherever it was he’d gone, his courage all spent.

She drew the shade down at last, as she’d originally intended to before it all happened. She turned away, but she didn’t begin her delayed undressing. She crossed the room to the door and stood there by it listening. Then she opened it slowly, quieting it with a hand to its edge as she did so. She advanced out into the barren hall beyond, tread muted in her soft-soled foot-gear.

There was no sound to show that anyone was astir but herself, that anyone was in the building, up or down, who did not belong there. She moved back to where the railed gap surrounding the stairs began, leaned cautiously over it and looked down their dimly-lighted well, all three rungs of it, to the very bottom.

She couldn’t see anything from her first stance, they intercrossed too much. She shifted on a little further, and there got a diagonal insight at their bottom reaches.

She saw him down there. He was sitting huddled on the first flight, disconsolately up against the rail, about halfway between the last landing going down and the bottom. His legs were tucked up to within a step below his body. He’d taken his hat off; it must be resting on the step beside him, but she couldn’t see over that far. The only thing that moved about him were his hands, otherwise he was sitting quite still. She could see the one on the outside ploughing endlessly through his hair, over and over, as though some deep-seated predicament were gnawing at him.

He couldn’t stay there like that. He couldn’t stay there in the hall all night. Yet, when she made her unguessed presence known to him, as she did a moment later, it wasn’t as she had originally intended to, through the window before, by means of a strident tirade. Something had happened to change her mind. Perhaps it was the hopeless, helpless way he was sitting bunched there. Who knew; she didn’t know herself. She revealed herself to him without at the same time betraying his presence to others. She gave him that much of a break, at least. And it was a long time since she’d given anyone a break. Almost as long as since she’d last had one herself.

She hissed down, forcefully but surreptitiously, to attract his attention, gave him a sort of sibilant signal.

He turned and looked up, startled, ready to jump until he’d located the segment of her face far up the canal of opening between them.

She hitched her head sharply away from him a couple of times, in pantomimic order to him to come up and join her where she was. He rose in instant acquiescence, and she lost him for a moment or two, but she could hear him climbing hastily, two and three steps at a time. Then he showed up on the last flight, made the final turn of the railing, and stopped short beside her, breathing heavily. He looked at her questioningly, and at the same time in a half-hopeful sort of way, as if any summons to him, at this pass, was bound to be a good one.

He looked younger to her than he had before, somehow. Younger than she’d taken him for over at the mill. The lights over there, more than that even, the setting itself, made everyone look more sinister and seasoned than they actually were. She knew he hadn’t changed, it was her impression of him that must have. Perhaps the sight of him she’d had just now sitting on the stairs, rudderless, had retouched her mental image of him. And after all, everyone came to you through the filter of your own individual lens, not as they were in actuality.

“What’s your trouble, Joe? Whatiya got on your mind?” She asked it with intentionally-emphasized, grating harshness, to cancel out the interest implicit in her asking it at all in the first place, and not just letting him be down there on the stairs. Because she was breaking one of her own self-imposed rules, so she did it as grudgingly as possible.

He said, “Nothing—I—I don’t get you,” and faltered badly over it. Then got his second wind, and said, “I was just resting up down there a minute.”

“Yeah,” she observed stonily. “People rest on the stairs of strange houses, at two in the morning, when they’ve got nothing on their minds. I know. Listen, it all adds up. I don’t need my fingers to count off on. The way you kept hinging behind you, all the way over here; don’t you think I got that? The way you were roosting there in the corner, when I first came out of the barn—”

He was looking down at the rail beside him as though he hadn’t seen it until just now, as though it had suddenly appeared there where it hadn’t been before. He kept swivelling his palm around on it, as if he were polishing it off in one particular place, a place that wouldn’t come clean.

Yes, he kept getting younger to her by the minute. He was down to about twenty-three now, which was probably a little below par. And when he’d first come in the dance-hall he’d been—well, rats have no age. At least, you don’t inquire into it.

“What’d you say your name was again? I know you gave it to me outside before, but it slipped my mind.”

“Quinn Williams.”

“Quinn? I never heard that name before.”

“It used to be my mother’s before she married.”

She shrugged with her eyebrows. Not about the name, about their preceding discussion. “Well, have it your way,” she dismissed it. “It’s your own spot. Hang onto it, if you feel that way about it.”

Something from within her own room attracted her attention. A slight clattering commotion, that she could identify instantly, from long experience. She turned hastily and went in, left him out there without a word. She went over to the gas-ring and turned it off; the twinkling blue diadem fluffed out and the commotion subsided.

She picked up the tin coffee-pot and transferred it to the table. She’d left the door open. She stepped over to close it between the two of them.

He was still standing out there, back a little ways, by the stairs, where she’d last left him just now. There was a sort of passive, fatalistic air about him. He was still kneading his hand on the rail and looking down and watching himself do it.

She held her hand arrested to the door. What a dope you are, she wrangled with herself. Don’t you ever learn? Don’t you know any better than to do what you’re thinking of doing? Then she went ahead and did it anyway. Offering this to herself in extenuation: I’ve got one last friendly impulse left in me. Exactly one, that this town has overlooked and left me. May as well get it out of my system and get it over with, then I’ll be in the clear.

Again she gave him that curt, peremptory hitch of the head. “I’ve got some coffee in here. Come in a minute, and I’ll split a cup with you.”

He came forward again as eagerly as he’d come up the stairs. He needed bucking up, she could see; partly, that was what was the matter with him, someone to talk to.

But her arm stayed up, crossbarring the door-gap and blocking him when he’d come up to it. “Only get one thing,” she warned him lethally. “This is an invite to share a cup of coffee with me, and nothing more. No sugar goes with it. You give me one blink too many and—”

“I’m not thinking of that sort of stuff,” he said with an odd sort of demureness that she hadn’t known males could show until now. “A fellow can tell just by looking at someone whether they mean one thing or mean the other.”

“You’d be surprised how many of them ought to see an optician,” she commented sourly.

Her arm dropped and he came through.

She closed the door. “Keep your voice down,” she said. “There’s an old bat in the next room to me—”

“You can take that chair that’s there already,” she said. “I’ll move over this other one—if it don’t fall apart on the way there.”

He sat down with polite rigidity.

“You can throw your hat on the cot over there,” she condescended hospitably. “If you can reach it.”

He tried uncertainly from where he was, over table and coffee-pot both, but he made it.

They both turned from watching it land, smiled tentatively at one another. Then she remembered herself, quickly checked her own. His died of loneliness after it.

“I never can make enough for one in this thing, anyway,” she remarked, as if apologizing for her own softness in asking him in. “It won’t hit the roof if I do.”

She brought over an extra cup and saucer. “The reason I have a second one,” she said, “is because they were two for five in Woolworth’s. You had to take both or lose your change.” She turned it upside-down and shook it, and some flecks of straw fell out. “First time I’ve used it,” she said. “I’d better run some water in it.” She took it over to a greenish, mildewed tap lurking under the shelf in the cupboard-arrangement. “Go ahead,” she invited while her back was turned, “don’t wait for me.”

She heard the loosely-contrived pot rattle as he picked it up to pour from it. Then it fell back rather heavily. So bumpily, in fact, that the cup that was already on the table sang out. At the same time his chair gave a slight jar.

She stopped what she was doing, which was drying the cup by sailing it up and down so that the drops of water were flung out, and turned quickly to ask him: “What’d you do, burn yourself? Did you get some of it on you?”

His face had whitened a little, she thought. He shook his head, but he was too engrossed to look at her. He still had his hand to the pot, where he’d let it down. He was holding that envelope she’d addressed to her mother in the other, staring at it as though he were stunned. She saw at a glance what must have happened. The pot must have been squatting on it the first time, and the heat had made it adhere when he’d lifted it. He’d pried it off, and that was how he’d noticed whatever it was seemed to amaze him so.

She came back to the table, stood by it, and said: “What’s the matter?”

He looked up at her, still holding the envelope. His mouth was open; both before and after he’d spoken it stayed that way. He said, “Do you know someone there? Glen Falls, Iowa? Is that where you’re sending this?”

“Yes, why?” she said crisply. “That’s what it says on it, doesn’t it? That’s my mother I’m writing that to.” A little defiance crept into her attitude. “Why, what about it?”

He started to shake his head. He started to slowly rise to his feet as he did so, then changed his mind midway and sank down again. He kept looking at her for all he was worth. “I can’t get over it,” he gasped, and felt himself for a minute across the forehead. “That’s where I’m from! That’s my home town! I only came away a little over a year ago—” His voice went up a pitch in incredulity. “You mean you’re from there too? You mean the two of us—out of all the hundreds of little towns there are all over the country—?”

“I’m from there originally,” she assented warily. She left off the “too.” She sat down opposite him, with watchful deliberation. Suspicion was crackling like an electric current alive in her, generated at the first word he’d let out of his mouth. She was conditioned that way. She’d learned not to believe anybody, anytime, anywhere. That was the only way to keep from being taken in. What was this anyway? What was the angle? He’d got the name of the town from the envelope, it was there for anyone to see; so far, so good. Now what was he trying to build from that? What was the come-on? What was the frame leading to? A touch? A half-nelson on her affections, before she woke up and snapped out of it? One thing she gave it; it was a new gag, and she’d thought she knew them all.

Wait a minute, he was wide open. She’d get him. “So you’re from back in Glen Falls.” She stared at him searchingly. “What street did you live on back there?”

She timed him with her fingernails tapping the edge of the table. His answer beat them to the first tap. It spilled out before the starting-gun even. “Anderson Avenue, up near Pine Street. The second house down between Pine and Oak, right after the corner—” She’d watched his face closely. He hadn’t had to think at all; it came out spontaneously, like your own name is supposed to.

“Did you ever go to the Bijou movie-house, down on Courthouse Square, when you were there?”

This time there was a time-lag. “There wasn’t any Bijou when I was there,” he said blankly. “There were only two, the State and the Standard.”

“I know,” she murmured softly, looking down at her own hand. “I know there isn’t.”

Her hand was shaking a little, so she dropped it below the table. “What street is it where the iron foot-bridge crosses the railroad tracks—you know, to get from one side to the other of the ditch they run in?”

Only those who were from there, who’d lived there half their lives, could have answered that.

“Why, it doesn’t cross it at any street,” he answered simply. “It’s in an awkward place, midway between two streets, Maple and Simpson, and if you want to cross it you’ve got to go along a cat-walk till you get to it. People’ve been kicking for years, you know that yourself—”

Yes, she knew that herself. But the point was he did.

He said, “Gee, you ought to see your own face, it’s getting all white too. That’s how I felt before, myself.”

So it was true, and this freak number had come up.

She sat down, arms stiff against the chair-arms, and when she could speak again, she whispered: “Do you know where I lived? Do you want to know where I lived? On Emmet Road! You know where that is, don’t you? Why, that’s the next street over, after Anderson Avenue. It isn’t cut all the way through. Why, the backs of our two houses must have been facing one another, even if they weren’t directly opposite! Did you ever hear of such a thing?” Then she stopped and wondered, “How is it we never knew one another back there?”

“I came here a year ago,” he computed.

“And I came here five.”

“We didn’t move into the Anderson Avenue house until after my Dad died, and that’s a little over two years ago now. Before then we were on a farm we had out around Marbury—”

She nodded quickly, happy the enchantment hadn’t been shattered by cold cartography. “That’s what it was then. I’d already come away by the time you moved into town. But maybe right now, at this very minute, my folks already know your folks back there. Sort of backfence neighbors.”

“They must,” he said, “they must. I can see them now. Mom was always a great one for—” Then he stopped, and remarked with more immediate relevancy: “You haven’t told me what your name is yet. I’ve already given you mine.”

“Oh, haven’t I? It already seems like backing up a long way, doesn’t it? I’m Bricky Coleman. My real name’s Ruth, but everyone calls me Bricky, even the family. Gee, I hated it as a kid, but now—I sort of miss it. They started it—”

“I know, on account of your hair,” he finished it for her.

His arm crept out along the tabletop toward her, palm extended upward; a little hesitantly, as though ready to withdraw again if it were ignored. Hers started out from her side, equally hesitantly. The two met, clasped hands, shook, disengaged themselves again. They smiled at one another embarrassedly across the table, the little act completed.

“Hello,” he murmured diffidently.

“Hello,” she acknowledged in a small voice.

Then the brief glazing of formality evaporated again, and they were both fused once more by common interest in the bond they’d found between them.

“I think they must have met by now—back there—don’t you?” he suggested.

“Wait a minute—Williams, that’s a common name—but have you got a brother with a lot of freckles?”

“Yeah, my younger brother, Johnny. He’s only a kid. He’s eighteen.”

“I bet he’s the very one been going around with my niece, Millie. She’s only sixteen or seventeen herself. She’s been writing me off and on about some new heart-throb of hers, a boy named Williams, everything perfect about him but the freckles and she’s hoping they’ll wear off.”

“Hockey?”

“On the Jefferson High team!” She squealed the answer.

“That’s Johnny. That’s him all right.”

They could only shake their heads together, rapt with amazement.

“It’s a small world!”

“It sure is!”

Now she was the one doing the looking at him, boy how she was looking at him, studying him, learning him by heart, seeing him for the first time. Just a boy, a dime-a-dozen boy, plain as calico, nothing fancy about him. Just a boy from next door. The boy next door. There was one in every small-town girl’s life. And this was he. Here was hers now. The one who should have been hers; who would have been, if she’d stayed, waited a little longer.

Nothing to him. There never was anything to the boy next door. He was too close to you to see him clearly. Nothing dashing, nothing romantic. That always came from a distance. But he was clean-cut, that was the point. How had she missed seeing that at the mill, even when he first walked in, even before she knew? Well, when they were just a ticket to you, and a pair of feet, how were you going to see anything?

They talked about it, their home town, for a while, voices low, eyes dreamily lidded. They brought it close, in through the window, into the very room with them. They pushed New York, hanging around in the night outside, back, far back and away. The Paramount clock, riding the night sky somewhere beyond the window, receded, and instead they could almost hear the steeple bell of the little white church down by the square softly, sweetly, tolling the hour. Saying, “Sleep. I’m looking after you. You’re home where you belong. Sleep. You’re safe, I’m keeping watch over you—”

They talked about it for a while; slow in starting and self-conscious at first, awkwardly. Then faster, more fluently as they warmed to it, and forgetting who they were and what they were; not talking any more for one another but each one for himself. Till there was just one running stream between them, just one flow of reminiscence into which they dropped their neatly-interspersed memories with rhythmic alternation.

“That plank sidewalk in front of Marcus’ Department Store, with the board that used to tip up if you walked too close to the edge; I bet they haven’t fixed that yet!”

“And Pop Gregory’s candy store, remember? The names he used to think up for his specialties—‘De Luxe Oriental Delight Sundae’—”

“The Elite Drugstore, down on lower Main, that was another great one—”

“Morning glories on the porch-sheds—”

“Hammocks on all the front porches in the summer, in the evening, swinging lazy, and a glass of lemonade on the floor under you. With you was it lemonade? With me it was always—”

“And at night no music. A hush. You could hear a pin drop.”

“And Jefferson High, all spick and span, spotless granite and a block long. I used to think it was the biggest building in the world. Did you go to Jefferson High?”

“Sure, everyone goes to Jefferson High, I guess. Those polished stone bevels alongside the front steps, I used to slide down them standing up every time I came out.”

“I did too. I bet you had Miss Elliott. Did you have Miss Elliott in Advanced English?”

“Sure, everyone has Miss Elliott in Advanced English. You have to.”

Something hurt her a little bit, for a minute. The boy next door, and I’ve met him two thousand miles away and five years too late. The boy next door, the boy I was supposed to know and never did.

“Folks saying good morning to you from all the way over on the other side of the street, even if you’d never set eyes on them before in your life, and they never had you.”

“And no music, after dark came. No slide-trombones that go in and out, and bray. Only crickets and things like that. No music. No music, ever.”

“Thick, deep, fluffy snow in the winter, topping everything like marshmallow—”

“But in the spring—! Oh I could skip it in the winter, in the fall, and even in the summer. But in the spring! Those pale pink things used to come out in the trees, and you’d walk down the street like through a whiff of Dorothy Gray’s apple-blossom stuff—”

“People that knew you from the time you were a kid, all up and down the line. People that took an interest in you. That stopped at the door with jellies if you were sick. That would have gladly lent you money, when you got a little older, if you happened to be broke—”

“And look at us now.” Her head dropped into her folded arms on the tabletop as suddenly as though her neck had been broken.

Twice, three times, her fist struck lightly at the tabletop, in futility. “Home,” he heard her say smotheredly. “Home, where I belong—I want to see my Mom again—”

He was standing over her when she looked up again. He hadn’t touched her, but she knew he’d started to, he’d put out his hand and tried to when she wasn’t looking, and then didn’t know how to go ahead, had given the idea up. She could tell by the lame way he was holding his hand.

She smiled and tried to blot her eyes by blinking them, to keep him from seeing they were wet.

“Give us a cigarette,” she said huskily. “I always have one after I cry. I don’t know what got me. I haven’t cried for company like that in years.”

He wasn’t having any of that. He didn’t give her the cigarette, to help her pretend she was tough again. “Why don’t you go back?” he said. He seemed again a little older. Maybe now it was that she’d grown a little younger in turn. The city made you old. Home, you stayed young at home. And even when you thought of home, that made you a little younger, for a little while.

She wasn’t going to answer. He came back to it again. She saw that he had a one-track mind when he once got started on anything. “Why don’t you? Why don’t you go on home?”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” she asked him sullenly. “I’ve priced the fare until I know it backwards. I’ve been down there so many times to inquire, I know the bus schedule by heart. There’s only one through once a day, and that leaves at six in the morning. There’s an evening one you can take, but you have to stop overnight in Chicago. And overnight—in Chicago or anywhere else—you lose your nerve; you’d only turn around and come back again. I know; don’t ask me why, I know. Once I even got as far as the terminal, had my bag all packed next to me, sat there waiting for them to open the gates. I couldn’t make it; I backed out at the last minute. Turned my ticket in, and dragged myself back here.”

“But why? Why can’t you go, if you want to that bad? What’s holding you?”

“Because I didn’t make good. I didn’t make the grade. They think I’m in a big Broadway flash-production. I’m just a taxi; just a hired duffle-bag you push around the floor. See that piece of paper there, with nothing on it but ‘Dear Mom’? That’s part of the reason; the stuff I’ve been writing home to them. Now I haven’t got the courage to go back and face them all and admit that I’m a flop. It takes plenty, and I haven’t got enough.”

“But they’re your folks, they’re your own people; they’d understand, they’d be the first to try to make it easy on you, to buck you up.”

“I know; I could tell Mom anything. It isn’t that. It’s all the friends and neighbors. She’s probably been bragging to them about me for years, reading my letters, you know how it goes. Sure, Mom and the other girls would stand by me, they wouldn’t say a word; but it would hurt them just the same. I don’t want to do that. I always wanted to go back and make them proud of me. Now I’ve got to go back and make them feel sorry for me. There’s a big difference there.” She looked up at him, shook her head. “But that’s only part of the reason. That isn’t the main reason at all.”

“Then what is?”

“I can’t tell you. You’d only laugh at me. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why would I laugh? Why wouldn’t I understand? I’m from home too, aren’t I? I’m here in the city just like you.”

“Then here it is,” she said. “It’s the city itself. You think of it as just a place on the map, don’t you? I think of it as a personal enemy, and I know I’m right. The city’s bad; it gets you down. It’s got a half-nelson on me right now, and that’s what’s holding me, that’s why I can’t get away.”

“But houses, stone and cement buildings, they haven’t got arms, they can’t reach out and hold you back, if you want to go.”

“I told you you wouldn’t understand. They don’t have to have arms. When there are that many of them bunched together, they give off something into the air. I don’t know fancy language; I only know there’s an intelligence of its own hanging over this place, coming up from it. It’s mean and bad and evil, and when you breathe too much of it for too long, it gets under your skin, it gets into you—and you’re sunk, the city’s got you. Then all you’ve got to do is sit and wait, and in a little while it’s finished the job, it’s turned you into something that you never wanted to be or thought you’d be. Then it’s too late. Then you can go anywhere—home or anywhere else—and you just keep on being what it made you from then on.”

This time he just looked at her without answering.

“I know that sounds spooky to you. I know you don’t believe me. But I know I’m right. I’ve felt it, I tell you. There’s a brain, something that thinks on its own, hanging over it. Watching you, playing with you, like a cat does a mouse. It’ll let you go a little ways away from it—like it did me, to the bus terminal—and then just when you think you’ve made it, you’re going to get away altogether, it’ll reach out after you and haul you back again. You think it’s your own free mind, but it isn’t; you think you changed your mind, but you didn’t. It’s the vapor, the fumes—there’s a certain word, see if I can remember it—the miasma given off by the city, that’s got into you already, that does it for you. Or you could say it’s like a whirlpool. If you sit quiet in the middle of it, don’t try to get away, you don’t feel anything. But when you get too near the outside, trying to work your way out, is when it sucks you back again. I know what I’m saying. There’ve been times I could almost feel the pull of it. Like when you’re in swimming and an undertow gets you. You can’t see anything, but you can feel the drag of it. You’re the only one that knows it’s there, but you’re the only one that has to. It’s you it’s hauling under. You can’t break that by yourself; now do you see what I mean?”

She swept her hand out, brushed aside what he hadn’t said, but what she’d thought he might. “Oh I know. There are thousands of them like us come here every year. They shoot right up to the top. They’re in every walk of life. All New York came from somewhere else, is what they say. But that doesn’t kill my point, it only proves it all the more. The city’s bad. If you’re the one out of the thousand who’s a little weaker than the rest, a little slower, needs a little extra help, a little boost over the hurdles, that’s when it jumps you, that’s when it shows its true colors. The city’s a coward. It hits you when you’re down and only when you’re down. I say the city’s bad, and if it’s good for everyone else, I’m me, and that still makes it bad for me. I hate it. It’s my enemy. It won’t let me go—and that’s how I know.”

“Why don’t you go back?” he said again. “Why don’t you?”

“Because I’m not strong enough any more to break the grip it has on me. I thought I just got through telling you that. I proved it to myself that early-morning when I sat waiting in the bus terminal, I saw what it was then. The lighter it got outside, the stronger the pull back got. It sneaked up on me calling itself ‘common sense’; it sabotaged me. When the sun started to creep down from the tops of the buildings, and the people started to thicken along the sidewalks on 34th Street, it kidded me by trying to look familiar, something I was used to, something that wouldn’t hurt me, I didn’t need to be afraid of. It whispered, ‘You can always go tomorrow instead. Why not give it one more night? Why not try it one more week? Why not give it one more tumble?’ And by the time the bus-starter said ‘All aboard,’ I was walking like a sleepwalker, with my bag in my hand, going the other way; slow and licked. No kidding, when I came outside I could hear the trombones and the saxes razzing me, way up high around the building-tops somewhere. ‘We’ve gotcha! We knew you couldn’t make it! Hotcha! We’ve gotcha!’ ”

She planted her head against her hand, stared thoughtfully down at nothing. “Maybe the reason I wasn’t able to break the headlock it has on me is because I was all alone. I wasn’t strong enough alone. Maybe if I’d had someone going back home with me, someone to grab me by the arm when I tried to back out, I wouldn’t have weakened, I would have made it.”

His face tightened up. She saw that. She saw the imaginary boundary line he stroked across the table with the edge of his hand. As if setting off something from something else; the past, perhaps, from the present. “I wish I’d met you yesterday,” she heard him say, more to himself than to her. “I wish I’d met you last night instead of tonight.”

She knew what he meant. He’d done something he shouldn’t, since yesterday, and now he couldn’t go back. He wasn’t telling her anything; she’d known all along he had something on his mind.

“Well, I guess I better clear out,” he mumbled. “Guess I better go.”

He went over toward where his hat was. She saw him lift up the edge of the pillow a little. She saw the half-start his other hand made, toward his inside coat-pocket, as if to take something out without letting her see him.

“Put it back,” she said metallically. “None of that.” Then her voice mellowed a trifle. “I’ve got the fare, anyway. I’ve had it put aside for over eight months, down to the last nickel for a hamburger at the stop-over. Like a nest-egg. A nest-egg that’s so old it’s curdled already.”

He came back to her, his hat on his head now. He didn’t linger at the table any more. He went on toward the door, not fast, not purposefully, at a sort of aimless trudge, and let his hand trail over her shoulder as he passed her, in a parting accolade that expressed mutely but perfectly what it was intended to convey: mutual distress, sympathy without the power of helping one another, two people who were in the same boat.

She let him get as far as the door, with his hand out to the knob. “They’re after you for something, aren’t they?” she said quietly.

He turned and looked back at her, but without any undue surprise or questioning of her insight. “They will be, by about eight or nine this morning at the latest,” he said matter-of-factly.