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

And I remember wondering at the time why this should be, for they had been amiable enough, her people, hadn’t been unfriendly, had tried to make me feel at ease, and yet they hadn’t been able to. I think I know now: It wasn’t because we were a boy and girl who were interested in each other that we felt this lack of constraint the moment we were away from them, it was because we were both of the same generation, and they were not.

There is an insurmountable wall, a barrier, between each generation, especially in the earlier stages of life. Children are so cut off from the grown-up world they are almost a species apart, a different breed of creature than the rest of the race. Very young people of our age, hers and mine, have no interests whatever in common with those who are in the next age group. Then as we progress up through the thirties, the barrier becomes less and less, until finally it has melted away altogether, and everyone is middle-aged alike. Twenty-five and forty-five seem alike to us now. But by that time a new barrier has formed, at the back instead of the front, and new very young are once more walled off from those who, only yesterday, were the very young themselves.

I asked her if she wanted to see a movie.

“No,” she said. “Let’s just walk instead. I saw the one at the Morningside a couple of days ago, and they haven’t changed it yet.”

We stopped in first at an ice-cream parlor on the corner of 116th Street. This had little tables separated from each other by lattices, up which clambered waxed-linen leaves and cretonne flowers. It also had an electric player piano at the back, forerunner of the later jukeboxes, and arched festoons of small, gaily colored light bulbs, curved like arabesques across the ceiling. There was a marble-topped soda fountain running the length of it at one side, but we sat down opposite one another at one of the little tables.

She made a selection, and I followed suit and ordered what she had.

These were called banana splits, as far as I can recall. They were served in oblong glass receptacles with stems on them, for no ordinary-size dish could have held everything that went into them. The holder was lined first with two half bananas, sliced lengthwise. On top of these were placed three mounds of ice cream in a row, green, white, and pink. Over these in turn was poured a chocolate syrup. Next were added chunks of pineapple and a sprinkling of chopped or grated nuts. The whole thing was surmounted by a feathery puff of whipped cream, and into this was stuck a maraschino cherry, dyeing the whipped cream red around it.

Beside each of these, for obvious reasons, was placed a glass of plain water.

That we found this concoction not only edible but even immensely enjoyable is only another illustration of the differences there are between the generations.

When we got up I left a tip on the table, more to impress her than for the sake of the waiter. I saw her eyes rest on it for a moment, as I had hoped they would.

After we left there, we walked over to Morningside Park, and through it along a softly lamplit pathway. It is a long but narrow park, no more than a block in depth at any point. That part of New York is built on two levels, and Morningside Heights, which runs along the western edge of the park, is perched high above Morningside Drive, which runs along the eastern edge. From it you can overlook all that part of the city which lies to the eastward, its rooftops and its lights.

We walked along slowly, our hands lightly linked and swinging low between us. I began to whistle “Kalua,” which had just come out a little while before, and after a while she accompanied me by humming it along with me. For years, whenever I heard “Kalua,” it brought back that first walk I took with her, and I could feel her fingers lightly twined in mine again, and see the lamplight falling over us again in blurry patches like slowly sifted, softly falling cornmeal.

She asked me where I lived, myself. I told her One-hundred-thirteenth Street.

“We’re just a block apart,” she noted. “Only, on different sides of the park.”

But New York then, in its residential zoning, was a snobbish, stratified sort of town, and the park did more than divide it physically, it divided it economically as well. That, however, was of no concern to us. That applied only to our elders.

We climbed the wide, easily sloping stairs that led to the upper level and came out at 116th Street, at that little rotunda with its bas-reliefs and circular stone seat-rest, and stood there a while, taking in the spread of the city’s lights below and outward from us, until the eye couldn’t follow them anymore, and lost them in the reaches of the night. But the young haven’t too much time to spend on mere inanimate beauty, they’re too immediately interested in each other.