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

Complete, intact in every detail: looping her tamoshanter around by its headband on the point of one finger. Much more than an illusion: a life-size cut-out, like those figures they sometimes stood up outside of theaters. So real that the checks of her coat hid the grubby brownstone doorway-facing behind where they were. So real that even the remembered position of her feet repeated itself on the brownstone doorstep, and they seemed to be standing there once again just as they once had: one planted flat out a little way before her so that the shank of her leg curved gracefully outward a little to reach it, the other bent backward behind her, and planted vertically against the sideward part of the doorway. And as I’d once noticed, when she thrust a door closed behind her with a little kick-back of her heel, here again she gave grace, not grotesqueness, to this odd little posture.

But then as I’d look and look, and look some more, longingly (not so much with love — for what did I know of love at nineteen? Or for that matter, what did I know of it at thirty-nine or forty-nine or fifty-nine? — as with some sense of isolation, of pinpointed and transfixed helplessness under the stars, of being left alone, unheard and unaided to face some final fated darkness and engulfment slowly advancing across the years toward me, that has hung over me all my life), the brownstone-facing would slowly peer back through the checks of her coat, the doorstep would be empty of her disparately placed feet, and I’d have to go on my way alone again. As all of us have to go alone, anywhere that we go, at any time and at any place.

The young, I think, feel loneliness far more acutely than the older do, for they have expected too much, they have expected everything. Those older never expect quite everything, or more than just a little at best, and when loneliness strikes, their lack of complete expectation in the first place dulls the sharp edge of it somewhat.

The spring came again, and then that warmed itself into early summer, and by now it was a year since I had first met her. I still thought of her very often, but I no longer thought of her all the time. Her immediacy had faded.

One night in June I was passing along Eighth Avenue again, and as the corner of One-hundred-fourteenth Street came abreast of me and opened up the side-street into view, it suddenly seemed to blaze up from one end to the other like a rippling straw-fire, an illusion produced by scores of light bulbs strung criss-cross from one side of the street to the other, and fidgeting in the slight breeze. Vehicular entry had been blocked off by a wooden traffic horse placed at the street entrance. People were banked on both sidewalks looking on, and between them, out in the middle, tightly packed couples were dancing. They were holding a block party on the street.

Block parties were nothing new. In fact, by this time they were already well on their way out. They had first originated about four years before, at the time of the mass demobilization, when each individual block celebrated the return to its midst of those young men who had seen service overseas by holding a community homecoming party in their honor out in the street (because that was the only place that could conveniently accommodate all the participants).

But this was the early summer of 1923, not 1919 any longer; the last soldiers had finished coming back long ago; the only ones left were regulars, on garrison duty along the Rhine, at the Koblenz bridgehead. Another thing: The climate of public opinion had noticeably changed in the meantime. The naive fervor of the first postwar year or two had now given place to that cynicism toward all things military and patriotic that characterized the remainder of the decade. So the occasion for this particular party must have been something else: a church benefit or charity affair of some kind.

I moved in among the onlookers and stood there with my shoes tipping over the edge of the curb, watching. The music wasn’t very good, but it was enthusiastic and noisy, and that was the mood the crowd was in, so that was all that mattered. They were probably amateurs who lived on the block themselves, and each one had brought his particular instrument down into the street with him, and joined forces with the others. But they were so uneven they were almost good, because the music of the moment was supposed to be played in just that sort of jagged, uneven time, anyway. I can still remember them blaring and blatting away at two of the current favorites: “Dearest, You’re the Nearest to my Heart” and “Down, Down Among the Sleepy Hills of Ten, Ten, Tennessee.”

Then as I stood there on the lip of the curbing, taking it all in, she was suddenly there in front of me. I never knew afterward which direction she’d come from, because I didn’t have time to see. She was just suddenly there, that was all, and I was looking at Vera again.