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

In the meantime, in spite of the conversation having been an easy one to carry on, since it had dealt exclusively with me, I kept wondering what there would be to talk about next, once this topic was over, and hoping that another elevated train would go clattering by momentarily and bring me a brief respite. It would be impossible to continue a conversation until after the front windows had stopped rattling. But none did. It seemed as though, just when you wanted them, they became few and far between.

At this point there was a twitching-about of the doorknob from the outside, the door was pushed open, and Vera came in. She’d evidently been to the store for groceries. She hugged two very large brown paper bags in one arm, and since these came up past one side of her face and hid it, she did not see me at first.

She rounded her cheeks, blew out her breath, and said something about the stairs. That they were enough to kill you, I think it was. But in a good-natured, not ill-humored way. She closed the door by pushing a heel back against it, without turning.

I remember thinking how graceful and debonair was the little flirt and swirl this movement created in the loose-hanging checked coat she had on, as I watched her do it. Then she turned her head suddenly, so that the obscuring bags were swept to one side, and saw me.

“Con!” she said, in a high-pitched voice that was almost a little scream. She nearly dropped the columnar bags, but reclasped them just in time. “How did you get up here?”

“I walked up,” I answered in perfect seriousness, without stopping to think, and they all laughed at that, herself included, as though I’d intended it to be very funny.

“I never thought I’d find you up here,” she said next. “You’re the last one!”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that; and afraid that, if I asked her, the answer might turn out to be unwelcome, I didn’t ask.

“How did you know where it was?” she went on. “How did you know this was the right place?”

My instinct told me it might not be in my own best interest to bring Frankie’s name into this, or recall him to her mind any more than was strictly necessary. She’d known him before she had me, after all. So I simply and untruthfully said: “I asked somebody in the house,” and that seemed to content her.

I had a fleeting impression, as I watched her expression and listened to the intonation of what she was saying to me, that she was enjoying, rather than otherwise, having her entire family as spectators to this little meeting of ours, and auditors to its accompanying dialogue, liked having their attention fixed on her the way it was. But if she enjoyed it, I didn’t, quite the opposite, and this nerved me to summon up courage to come out with what had brought me up there in the first place.

“Vera,” I said nervously, “would you like to come for a walk with me?”

She didn’t answer directly, but said “Wait’ll I take these back where they belong first,” and picking up the two cumbersome bags, which she had set down upon a table, she left the room with them. She was gone for some time, longer than would have been necessary simply to carry them back to the kitchen and set them down there, so I began to imagine she had stopped off in her own room on the way, to tidy her hair or something of the sort. Then when she came back, I saw that she had removed both the checked coat and the tamoshanter she had been wearing, and my hopes were dashed.

After a lame pause, I finally asked her a second time: “Vera, wouldn’t you like to come for a walk?”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said, and I saw her exchange a look with her mother.

The latter remarked cryptically, “You run along. I’ll do them for you tonight, and you can do them tomorrow night instead.”

Whereupon Vera hurried back inside again, throwing me an auspicious “I’ll be ready in a minute, Con,” over her shoulder, and this time, when she returned, was once more in coat and tamoshanter, and ready to leave.

I said the required polite and stilted good-byes, she opened the door, and a minute later we were free and by ourselves on the other side of it.

“It was my turn to do the dishes tonight,” she told me as we went scrabbling down the stairs, she running her hand along the banister railing, I on the outside with her other hand in mine.

The moment we were by ourselves, the moment the door had closed behind us, perfect ease and naturalness came back to me again, and to Vera too, though she hadn’t felt herself to be on exhibition as I had: One didn’t have to weigh one’s words, they just came flowing out in any kind of order, and yet inevitably they were the right words, without the trouble of trying to make them so beforehand. One didn’t have to execute each smallest move or gesture twice, once in the mind and once in the actuality, they too flowed unchecked in perfect unstudiedness. There were no questions that required answers, none were put and none were given, there were just confidences streaming out and blending.