Departure Page 15

  “She has a voice like music.”

  “Oh. Does she know about this?”

  “Naturally not,” I said—almost sorry that I had taken him into my confidence at all. However, it was necessary. Being in love was going to complicate my life; that I realized from the very beginning, and I couldn’t have become a cross-country runner without my brother knowing what the motivating forces were.

  At that time, we both went to George Washington High School, which is at the upper end of Manhattan Island. School let out at three; we finished our newspaper route at six, and then, since we had no mother, we prepared supper, ate it with my father, who came home from work about seven, did our homework and turned in. Love alone threw new drains on my energy. With the cross-country running, only a holy devotion permitted me to operate …

  My brother was waiting for me when I came out of the English class the next day.

  “Which one?” he wanted to know, and I pointed her out.

  “The tall one?”

  “She’s not so tall.”

  “She’s five feet nine inches if she’s an inch.”

  “Oh, no. No. Never. Anyway, I’m five feet eight myself.”

  “Five six,” my brother said coldly.

  “Not with heels. Anyway, the rate of growth is different in different people. I’m just hitting my stride. She’s all finished. Growing, I mean.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, how tall can a girl get?”

  “If you can keep on growing, so can she. That’s logical.”

  I conquered the chill of fear that stole over my heart. He was understandably bitter; I held no resentment against him; I was filled with an inner purity and I let some of it shine through.

  “You look sick,” my brother said. “I hope you’re all right. She didn’t even look at you.”

  “She doesn’t know me.”

  “Well, why don’t you introduce yourself?”

  “I can’t until I have some achievement to lay at her feet. I’m no one. Did you see how beautiful she is? Anyone would be in love with her. That’s natural.”

  “I’m not in love with her,” my brother said.

  “Anyway—”

  “What do you mean by laying an achievement at her feet?” my brother asked. “Are you going to buy something for her?”

  I walked away. It was no use talking to him about this; it was no use talking to anyone. It was something I had to contain within me until I had won my struggle to make myself worthy. For a week I brooded about that. The football season was too far gone, and anyway I weighed only one fourteen, and football was a long-term project with all sorts of special skills required. Love, I was beginning to discover, was not something that stood still; it was a dynamic force that moved a person to immediate action, and when the week was over, I turned out for the track squad. After all, how many football players ever made an Olympic?

  “Your feet are too big,” the coach told me.

  “For what?” I had gotten along very well with them until then.

  “For sprinting.”

  “I don’t suppose my feet will grow much more, and I intend to.”

  “We can’t wait,” the coach said.

  “Don’t you want to try me?” I pleaded.

  “It’s no use,” the coach said patiently. “You can’t sprint with such feet.”

  “Well, isn’t there something where you don’t have to sprint?”

  “Your feet are against you. If you jumped, it would be just the same. Also, you’re small and light—and that’s bad for discus or shot. If you want to try for cross-country, you can.”

  “Cross-country?”

  “That’s right. You spend a year at that, and then maybe the rest of you will catch up with your feet. It’s good training, if your heart is all right.”

  My heart was all right, and at three o’clock I was shivering in my underclothes in Van Cortlandt Park. It was a cold, bleak fall day, and a hundred other boys shivered with me. Then we started out, and for the next half hour, over hill and dale, we ran a course of two and a half miles. It may be that education, in probing the bypaths of knowledge, has discovered something crueler and more senseless than a cross-country run; if so, I missed it. I don’t know what upheld the rest of the squad, but love carried me through pantingly to the end. I showered and joined my brother on the route, an hour and half late.

  This time I couldn’t make the top three floors, and I told him why.

  “You mean you’re going up there and run two and a half miles every afternoon?” he demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  “For her.”

  “You mean she asked you to do this?”

  “How could she ask me when I’ve never spoken to her?”

  “Who asked you then?”

  “No one.”

  “You’re crazy,” my brother said, which was what I might have expected, his mind being capable of rising no higher above the dirt. For the rest of that week, there was a certain bitterness of feeling between us, something I sensed only vaguely, since all my acute perceptions were blurred by a fog of constant weariness. If ever in the history of western romance love was stretched to a breaking point, that was it, and it seems to me that it is a real tribute to the gentle passion that both my devotion and I survived. However, my survival was a tough-and-go business; if I did not walk in darkness, I certainly walked in a gray haze, and my classroom response became, if not downright idiotic, at least far from alert. More than before, I realized that I would have to become the best cross-country runner America had ever produced to redeem a faltering, tired, incoherent young man in the eyes of the woman I loved.

  Somehow, the five weekdays passed, and without a complete loss of the saintly gentleness that was the most manifest outward indication of my passion. The cross I bore was made no lighter by my brother’s grim curiosity; in a completely scientific manner, he experimented with my new tolerance. I came late to work, but I certainly did my share.

  The paper we delivered was an afternoon paper, except on Sundays, when it came out in the morning. That meant we had to dig ourselves out of bed at 3 A.M., stagger over to the assembly room, and collate mountains of newsprint. By seven or seven-thirty in the morning, we were through with the delivery and could go home and catch a nap. Ordinarily, I would be tired enough, but the cross-country team—and whoever was the diabolical brain behind it—decided to hold a conditioning run on Saturday, five miles instead of two and a half; and when Sunday morning finally rolled around my accumulated fatigue was something to see. My brother’s respect was tinged with awe by now, and there was almost a quality of gentleness in his suggestion that I go home and sleep most of the day.

  “No,” I said wistfully. “It would be nice, but I can’t. I’m going to her house.”

  “You mean you’ve met her, you’ve talked to her? She invited you over?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You mean you’re just going over and introduce yourself,” my brother nodded admiringly.

  “Not exactly that either. I’m just going to stand outside her house.”

  “Until she comes out?”

  “Yes—yes, that’s it,” I agreed.

  “Don’t you think you ought to get some sleep first?” my brother suggested.

  “I can’t take the chance.”

  “What chance?”

  I didn’t try to explain, because there are some things you can’t explain. Her house was a fourteen-story building on Riverside Drive. It awed me and overwhelmed me; it widened the gap; it made me search my memory for any evidence that America was a country where cross-country running was even nominally honored. And to make things more difficult, the house had two entrances, one on the Drive and one on the side street. There was no bench from which I could observe both entrances, so I had to take up my vigil on a windy street corner, reflecting morosely on the fact that even if the rest of me grew, I was not treating my feet in a manner calculated ei
ther to keep them at their present size or preserve them for sprinting.

  There are cold places on earth; there are places that have a whole literature of coldness woven around them; they do not compare with a street corner on Riverside Drive on a cloudy November morning. That is a special cold; a nice, wet, penetrating cold that increases slowly enough for you to perish with a minimum of pain. By twelve o’clock I had finished with my consecration to life and had newly consecrated myself to death. There was a new poignancy to the realization that I would die here like this, on her very doorstep—a communal one, true enough, but hers too—and that she would not know. Yet wouldn’t she have to know? When she looked at my pale white face, the ice rimming my lashes, wouldn’t something tell her, and wouldn’t she regret that never by word or sign had she indicated anything to me?

  It was about that time my brother appeared. He had a brown bag under his arm. “I brought you some lunch,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I murmured. “It was sweet of you and good of you to think of me, but food doesn’t matter.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” I said gently.

  “That’s all right,” my brother nodded. He was beginning to realize that with love, you felt your way with an open mind. “Try a salami sandwich. Suppose we go over to a bench and sit down.”

  “No—we can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have to watch both entrances, and you have to stand here to see them.”

  “Won’t she look for you when she comes out?”

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “What?”

  “You keep saying what. I think you don’t understand what this means to me.”

  “No, I guess I don’t.”

  “How could she know I’m here,” I asked my brother, “when I never spoke to her?”

  “Then what are you waiting here for?”

  “For her to come out,” I answered simply, eating the sandwich.

  “And then?”

  “Then I see her.”

  “But you see her every day, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  My brother looked at me searchingly. “Oh,” he said.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing. But suppose she doesn’t come out?”

  “She has to come out sooner or later.”

  “Why?” my brother demanded, parading the cold vista of logic. “On a day like this, she would be very smart to stay at home. She could stay at home and read the funnies. Maybe she’s even got a party up there and all kinds of people are coming in to visit her.”

  “Stop that.”

  “I’m only trying to be logical,” my brother said.

  “You don’t know how you’re hurting me. If you knew, you wouldn’t talk like that.”

  Indicating that if I thought so little of his advice, I could maintain my vigil alone, he left me to my meditations and to the incredible combination of damp wind that blew in two directions at the same time. The top of me wasn’t so bad; I had a woolen cap and a short coat we used to call a Mackinaw; but my feet suffered. It was ironical to consider that it might be her fault that I would never be a sprinter; even the question of plain and simple walking began to raise doubts in my mind.

  The sun had set behind the Palisades and the policeman on the beat was beginning to eye me uncertainly when my brother appeared again.

  “Still no sign of her?” he said.

  “I’m above anything you can say.”

  “All right. But Pop thinks you ought to come home.”

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “How could you?”

  “It’s all right,” my brother assured me.

  “How could it be all right? How could a man Pop’s age know what I’m going through? Even you can’t understand it.”

  “I try to,” my brother said. “Don’t think I don’t want you to be a great cross-country runner, because that wouldn’t be true.”

  “You don’t even understand that my only interest in this damned cross-country running is because I want to lay something at her feet.”

  “I just feel you ought to introduce yourself. Then if she were to come out while you’re standing here, she’d know you. You got to admit that would be an advantage.”

  It was true; I had to. I turned it over in my mind until Wednesday of the following week, and then because it looked like rain practice in Van Cortlandt Park was cancelled. I took my heart in my hands and I stopped Thelma Naille when the dismissal bell rang. As I looked up at her, she was more than ever the Greek Goddess. I asked her how she went home.

  “By bus.”

  “Do you go alone?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “Do you like to sit on the top—where it’s open?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  “Could I go home with you today?” I managed.

  “If you want to,” she said.

  I walked on air. My heart beat like a trip hammer. Once, her hand even touched mine for just a moment. Outside, a northeaster blew, and I found a bus with an open top.

  “It’s cold up here,” she said, when we sat down on the top of the bus. We had it to ourselves, the two of us alone with the whole world beneath us.

  “You get used to it.”

  “And I think it’s going to rain,” she said.

  “Maybe it won’t, and anyway that’s lucky for me because there’s no cross-country practice.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “That’s like sprinting, only it goes on for two and a half miles.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I made the team,” I said.

  “Yes? Don’t you think we ought to go downstairs?”

  “You’ll get used to it in no time. There are seventy men on the team, but that’s the kind of a sport it is.”

  “Oh,” she said. She turned up the collar of her coat and wrapped it more tightly around her. She stared straight ahead of her.

  I made small talk to the best of my ability, but she didn’t unbend, except to shiver occasionally. I even made one or two excursions into the matter of my feelings, and that was just as nonproductive of reaction. Then the sleet started, not much at first, actually not enough for you to really notice.

  “I think we should go downstairs,” she said.

  “Oh, no. No. It’s nice up here. Up here, you can see everything.”

  “Well, you did pay the fare,” she said.

  “That doesn’t matter. I always pay the fare when I take someone on a bus.”

  “Aren’t you cold?” she wanted to know.

  “No. No—”

  The sleet increased and then it turned to rain. For a minute or two more, she sat huddled against the rail. Then she stood up and walked to the back of the bus and down to the lower deck. I followed her, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say until we came to her house.

  “I’m soaked,” she said. “I’m soaked through and through. And it’s your fault.”

  “Just a little wet.”

  “No, I’m soaked,” she said. “I’m good and soaked. Thank you for taking me home.”

  I told my brother about it later and he observed, “There you are. You can’t tell.”

  “I love her more than ever,” I said.

  “Well—”

  “What do you mean, well?”

  “Nothing. Only tall girls don’t like short men. That’s something to think about too.”

  “I think it was mostly the rain. I guess she’s delicate.”

  “She’s awful big to be delicate.”

  “But she’s sensitive,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand that.”

  She wasn’t in school the next day, and I went through the tortures of the damned. “Call her up,” my brother said.

  “Call her?”

  “Sure. Phone her. You know her address. Look up her number in the phone boo
k and call her. She’ll think it thoughtful of you.”

  I did as he said. A lady’s voice answered. “Thelma is sick,” the voice said coldly.

  “Can I speak to her?”

  “You can’t,” the voice said, and hung up.

  I wouldn’t want anyone to suffer the way I suffered those next few days. Penance was all I could think of. I had read in books about how people spent whole lifetimes atoning for some awful wrong they had done. I saw myself walking in her funeral. No one knew me, but no grief was like mine, because when all was said and done, I had slain her. I and no other. A lifetime would be hardly long enough to atone for that. I decided that I would do good things. My love would never change, never slacken; people would think of me as a saint, not knowing that in all truth I was a murderer. Even my cross-country running suffered. Instead of leading the pace, I lagged. The coach called me up for it, but what did cross-country mean now?

  And then Monday came, and she appeared in school, and my heart sang again. She was paler—that was true—but it only increased her beauty. I went up to her and said:

  “You were ill, and I’m sorry. If it was my fault—” I had thought the speech out very carefully, but she didn’t permit me to complete it. Instead she broke in:

  “You are a horrible, nasty little boy. Please don’t speak to me again.”

  I skipped cross-country that day. I turned up for work at three and my brother shook his head somberly when he saw my face.

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  “The world ends, and you want to know what happened!”

  “You’ll still take the top floors, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said sadly. “It doesn’t matter. I still love her. I will always love her, I guess.” I saw the future then, a grim and bitter man who turned his face from all women. They wouldn’t know and neither would she.

  Wake Up Glad

  TULLY’S WIFE, A hard-working woman who looked older than she was, what with four children and the cooking and washing that go with them, could not speak of her husband for any length of time without referring to the fact that he woke up glad. If she put a heavy store in small pleasures and blew them up all out of proportion—well, that could not be held against her. Sometimes it tired the neighbors and the people in the stores where she shopped; but mostly they were used to reiterated observations, and, aside from the youngsters who were coming back from overseas, their horizons were limited.