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

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.