Summer Crossing (3 page)

Grady, stretching her brown naked legs, tossed her head. “I would swim ashore.”

“Maybe I’m not up on you as I used to be. I’ve been away so much. But how could you turn down Europe, McNeil? Or is that rude? I mean, am I intruding on your secret?”

“There isn’t a secret,” she said, partly aggravated, partly enlivened with the knowledge that perhaps there was. “Not a real one. It’s more, well, a privacy, a small privacy I should like to keep awhile longer, oh not always, but a week, a day, simply a few hours: you know, like a present you keep hidden in a drawer: it will be given away soon enough, but for a while you want it all to yourself.” Though she had expressed her feeling inexpertly, she glanced at Peter’s face, sure of seeing there a reflection of his inveterate understanding; but she found only an alarming absence of expression: he seemed faded out, as though the sudden exposure to sun had drained him of all color, and, aware presently that he’d heard nothing
she had said, she tapped him on the shoulder. “I was wondering,” he said, blinking his eyes, “I was wondering if there is, after all, a final reward in unpopularity?”

It was a question with some history; but Grady, who had learned the answer from Peter’s own life, was surprised, even a little shocked to hear him ask it so wistfully and, indeed, ask it at all. Peter had never been popular, it was true, not at school or at the club, not with any of the people they were, as he put it, condemned to know; and yet it was this very condition which had so sworn them together, for Grady, who cared not one way or the other, loved Peter, and had joined him in his outside realm quite as though she belonged there for the same reason he did: Peter, to be sure, had taught her that she was no more liked than himself: they were too fine, it was not their moment, this era of the adolescent, their appreciation he said would come at a future time. Grady had never bothered about it; in that sense, she saw, thinking back over what seemed now a ridiculous problem, she’d never been unpopular: it was just that she’d never made an effort, not felt deeply that to be liked was of importance. Whereas Peter had cared exceedingly. All their childhood she’d helped her friend build, drafty though it was, a sandcastle of protection. Such castles should deteriorate of natural and happy processes. That for Peter his should still exist was simply extraordinary. Grady,
though she still had use for their file of privately humorous references, for the sad anecdotes and tender coinages they shared, wanted no part of the castle: that applauded hour, the golden moment Peter had promised, did he not know that it was now?

“I know,” he said, as if, having divined this thought of hers, he now replied to it. “Nevertheless.” I know. Nevertheless. He sighed over his motto. “I suppose you imagined I was joking. About the university. Really, I was kicked out; not for saying the wrong thing, but for saying perhaps the too-right thing: both would appear to be objectionable.” The exuberant quality that so suited him rearranged his mischief-maker face. “I’m glad about you,” he said inexplicably, but with such a waterfall of warmth that Grady pressed her cheek near his. “If I said that I was in love with you, that would be incestuous, wouldn’t it, McNeil?” All-ashore gongs were clanging through the ship, and ashes of shadow, spilt by sudden cloud-shades, heaped the deck. Grady for an instant felt the oddest loss: poor Peter, he knew her even less, she realized, than Apple, and yet, because he was her only friend, she wanted to tell him: not now, sometime. And what would he say? Because he was Peter, she trusted him to love her more: if not, then let the sea usurp their castle, not the one they’d built to keep life out, it was already gone, at least
for her, but another, that one sheltering friendships and promises.

As the sun flooded out, he stood up and pulled her to her feet, saying, “And where shall we be gala tonight?” but Grady, who every moment meant to explain that she could not keep a date with him, let it pass again, for, as they descended the steps, a steward, brassy with the shininess of a gong, called his warning to them, and later, confronted with the activity of Lucy’s farewell, she forgot altogether.

Fanfaring a handkerchief, and embracing her daughters fitfully, Lucy followed them to the gangplank; once she’d seen them down the canvas tunnel, she hurried out on the deck and watched for their appearance beyond the green fence; when she saw them, all clustered together and gazing dazedly, she started flagging the handkerchief to show them where she was, but her arm grew strangely weak and, overtaken by a guilty sensation of incompleteness, of having left something unfinished, undone, she let it fall to her side. The handkerchief came to her eyes in earnest, and the image of Grady (she loved her! Before God she had loved Grady as much as the child would let her) bubbled in the blur; there were stricken days, difficult days, and though Grady was as different from her as she had been from her own mother, head-sure and harder, she still was not a woman, but a girl, a
child, and it was a terrible mistake, they could not leave her here, she could not leave her child unfinished, incomplete, she would have to hurry, she would have to tell Lamont they mustn’t go. But before she could move he had closed his arms around her; he was waving down to the children; and then she was waving too.

Broadway is a street; it is also a neighborhood, an atmosphere. From the time she was thirteen, and during all those winters at Miss Risdale’s classes, Grady had made, even if it meant skipping school, as it often did, secret and weekly expeditions into this atmosphere, the attraction at first being band-shows at the Paramount, the Strand, curious movies that never played the theaters east of Fifth or in Stamford and Greenwich. In the last year, however, she had liked only to walk around or stand on street-corners with crowds moving about her. She would stay all afternoon and sometimes until it was dark. But it was never dark there: the lights that had been running all day grew yellow at dusk, white at night, and the faces, those dream-trapped faces, revealed their most to her then. Anonymity was part of the pleasure, but while she was no longer Grady McNeil, she did not
know who it was that replaced her, and the tallest fires of her excitement burned with a fuel she could not name. She never mentioned it to anyone, those pearl-eyed perfumed Negroes, those men, silk- or sailor-shirted, toughs or pale-toothed and lavender-suited, those men that watched, smiled, followed: which way are you going? Some faces, like the lady who changed money at Nick’s Amusements, are faces that belong nowhere, are green shadows under green eyeshades, evening effigies embalmed and floating in the caramel-sweet air. Hurry. Doorway megaphones, frenziedly hurling into the glare sad roars of rhythm, accelerate the senses to collapse: run—out of the white into the real, the sexless, the jazzless, the joyful dark: these infatuating terrors she had told to no one.

On a side street off Broadway and not far from the Roxy Theatre there was an open-air parking lot. A lonesome, wasted-looking area, it lay there the only substantial sight on a block of popcorn emporiums and turtle shops. There was a sign at the entrance which said
NEMO PARKING
. It was expensive, and altogether inconvenient, but earlier in the year, after the McNeils had closed their apartment and opened the house in Connecticut, Grady had started leaving her car there whenever she drove into town.

Sometime in April a young man had come to work at the parking lot. His name was Clyde Manzer.

•  •  •

Before Grady reached the parking lot she was already looking for him: on dull mornings he occasionally wandered around in the neighborhood or sat in a local Automat drinking coffee. But he was nowhere to be seen; nor did she find him when she reached the lot itself. It was noon and a hot smell of gasoline came off the gravel. Though obviously he was not there she crossed the lot calling his name impatiently; the relief of Lucy’s sailing, the year or hour she had waited to see him, all the things that had buoyed her through the morning seemed at once to have fallen out from under her; she finally gave up and stood quietly despondent in the throbbing glare. Then she remembered that sometimes he took naps in one of the cars.

Her own car, a blue Buick convertible with her initials on the Connecticut license-plate, was the last in line, and while she was still searching several cars away she realized she was going to find him there. He was asleep in the backseat. Although the top was lowered, she had not seen him before because he was scrunched down out of view. The radio hummed faintly with news of the day, and there was a detective story open on his lap. Of many magics, one is watching a beloved sleep: free of eyes and awareness, you for a sweet
moment hold the heart of him; helpless, he is then all, and however irrationally, you have trusted him to be, man-pure, child-tender. Grady leaned, looking over him, her hair falling a little in her eyes. The young man she looked at, he was somebody of about twenty-three, was neither handsome nor homely; indeed, it would have been difficult to walk in New York and not see reminders of him every few steps, although, being out in the open all day, he was very much more weathered than most. But there was an air of well-built suppleness about him, and his hair, black with small curls, fit him like a neat cap of Persian lamb. His nose was slightly broken, and this gave his face, which, with its rustic flush, was not without a certain quick-witted force, an exaggerated virility. His eyelids trembled, and Grady, feeling the heart of him slip through her fingers, tensed for their opening. “Clyde,” she whispered.

He was not the first lover she had known. Two years before, when she was sixteen and had first had the car, she had driven around in Connecticut a reserved young couple from New York who were looking for a house. By the time they found the house, a small nice one on the grounds of a country club and side by side with a little lake, this couple, the Boltons,
were devoted to her, and Grady, for her part, seemed obsessed: she supervised the moving, she made their rock-garden, found them a servant, and on Saturdays she played golf with Steve or helped him mow the lawn: Janet Bolton, a reserved harmless pretty girl directly out of Bryn Mawr, was five months pregnant and so disinclined toward the strenuous. Steve was a lawyer, and, as he was with a firm that did business with her father, the Boltons were often asked to Old Tree, the name with which the McNeils had dignified their acreage: Steve used the pool there, and the tennis courts, and there was a home that had belonged to Apple that Mr. McNeil gave him more or less on his own. Peter Bell was rather nonplussed; and so were Grady’s few other friends, for she saw only the Boltons, or, to her way of thinking, she saw only Steve; and, although all the time they spent together was not sufficient, she took now and then to riding his commuter’s train with him into the city: waiting to take the train home with him in the evening she wandered from one Broadway movie to another. But there was no peace for her; she could not understand why that first joy she had felt should have turned to pain and now to misery. He knew. She was certain that he knew; his eyes, watching her as she crossed a room, as she swam toward him in the pool, those eyes knew and were not displeased: so, along with her love, she learned something
of hate, for Steve Bolton knew, and would do nothing to help her. It was then that every day was contrary, a treading down of ants, a pinching of firefly wings, rages, so it seemed, against all that was as helpless as her helpless and despised self. And she took to wearing the thinnest dresses she could buy, dresses so thin that every leaf-shadow or wind-ripple was a coolness that stroked her; but she would not eat, she liked only to drink Coca-Cola and smoke cigarettes and drive her car, and she became so flat and skinny that the thin dresses blew all around her.

Steve Bolton was in the habit of taking a swim before breakfast in the little lake beside his house, and Grady, who had discovered this, could not get it out of her head: she awoke mornings imagining him at the edge of the lake standing among the water reeds like a strange dawn gold bird. One morning she went there. A small pine grove grew near the lake and it was here that she hid herself, lying flat on the dew-damp needles. A gloom of autumn mist drifted on the lake: of course he was not coming, she had waited too long, summer had gone without her even noticing. Then she saw him on the path: casual, whistling, a cigarette in one hand, a towel in the other; he was wearing only a dressing-gown, which, when he reached the lake, he pulled off and threw on a rock. It was as though at last her star had fallen, one that, striking earth,
turned not black but burned more bluely still: half-kneeling now, her arms lifted outward, as if to touch, to salute him while he waded there growing fairy-tale tall, it seemed, and lengthening toward her until, with the barest warning, he sank into the deep below the reeds: Grady, a cry escaping despite everything, slipped back against a tree, embracing it as though it were some portion of his love, some part of his splendor.

Janet Bolton’s baby was born at the end of the season: the autumn, pheasant-speckled week before the McNeils closed Old Tree and moved back to their winter quarters in town. Janet Bolton was pretty desperate; she had almost lost the baby twice, and her nurse, after winning some sort of dance contest, had become increasingly irreverent: most of the time she didn’t bother with appearing, so, if it had not been for Grady, Janet would not have known what to do. Grady would come over and make a little lunch and give the house a quick dust; there was one duty she approached always with elation: that is, she liked to collect Steve’s laundry and hang up his clothes. The day the baby was born Grady found Janet doubled up and screaming. Whenever she had reason to be, Grady was always surprised at how fondly concerned her feelings for Janet actually were: a trifle of a person, like a seashell that might be picked up and, because of its pink frilled
perfection, kept to admire but never put among a collector’s serious treasures: unimportance was both her charm and her protection, for it was impossible to feel, as Grady certainly didn’t, threatened by or jealous of her. But on the morning that Grady walked in and heard her screaming she felt a satisfaction which, while not meant to be cruel, at least prevented her from going at once to give aid, for it was as if all the torments she herself knew were triumphantly transposed into expression by these moments of Janet Bolton’s agony. When at length she brought herself to do the necessary things she did them very well; she called the doctor, took Janet to the hospital, then rang up Steve in New York.