Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I came out of there with a sullen scowl on my face, but actually it no longer hurt. That had been last year’s grief and heartache. I was already starting on the way up again myself by now. I had no time for last year’s grief, I was too taken up in this year’s hopes and plans. And there was this note of consolation to be derived from it too: Whoever had stolen it, had stolen it as much from Irwin as from me. It had, in actuality, been stolen twice over. The biter had been bitten in turn.

It no longer hurt.

Everyone has a first-time love, and remembers it afterward, always, forever. I had a first-time love too, and I remember mine:

There was a fellow named Frank Van Craig, a year or possibly two years older than I, who lived a few doors up the street from me. I called him Frankie, as might be expected at that time of our lives, and we were more or less inseparable, although we had only got to know each other a fairly short while before this.

His father was a retired detective of police, who lived on his pension, and the mother had died some years before, leaving this forlorn little masculine menage of three (there was a younger brother, still of school age) to get along as best they could. Frankie used to speak of his father patronizingly as “the old man.” But gruff and taciturn as the father was, embittered by his loss and withdrawn into his shell, there must have been some deep-felt if unspoken bond between the two of them, for more than once, when I’d stop by for Frankie, I used to see him kiss his father respectfully and filially on the forehead before leaving. It touched me oddly, and I used to think about it afterward each time I saw it happen, for I had no father, and even if I had had, I couldn’t visualize myself kissing him like that; it didn’t seem right between two men. But Frankie was my friend, and I was too loyal to entertain even a secret disapproval of him.

Frankie had a job in a machine- or tool-shop, but that was merely his way of earning a living. His real avocation was amateur boxing. He spent every spare moment at it that he could: evenings after his job, Saturdays, holidays. And he was good. I used to go down with him sometimes to the gym where he trained and watch him work out: spar with partners, punch the bag, chin the parallel bars, skip rope, and all the rest. Then when we’d come away afterward, I used to walk along beside him with a feeling almost akin to adulation, proud to have him for a friend.

It was this feeling that had first brought us together, in what amounted on my part, at least in the beginning, to a mild but unmistakable case of hero-worship. He had the athletic prowess and the rough-and-readiness of disposition that I would have given anything to have had myself, and that I could tell was going to be lacking in me for the rest of my life; otherwise, it would already have appeared by this time. Then when this preliminary phase blew over as I became habituated to him, we became fast friends on a more evenly reciprocal basis, for there were things about me that I could sense he, in his turn, looked up to and wished he had.

At any rate, we were strolling along Eighth Avenue one evening side by side, under the lattice-work of the El, when a very pretty girl of about my age, who was coming from the opposite direction, gave him a smile of recognition, stopped beside us and said hello to him. She was blonde, with a fair, milk-and-roses Irish complexion and hazel eyes lively as spinning pinwheels. Her pale hair was smooth and cut evenly all around at ear-tip level, with just a clean, fresh-looking part running up one side of it to break the monotony of its evenness.

After a few words had been exchanged, he introduced us with a characteristically gruff amiability. “Con, meet Vera,” he said. “Vera, meet Con.” But our eyes had already become very well acquainted by this time.

“Hello Con,” she said, and smiled.

“Hello Vera,” I said, and smiled back.

Now that I’d met her I remember becoming more diffident than before I’d met her, and having less to say. (I’d already been talking to her before the introduction.) But she didn’t seem to notice, and he on his part, obviously unattached, showed no constraint.

We stood and chatted for a while and then we parted and went our ways, on a note of laughter at something that he’d said at the end.

But I looked back toward her several times, and once, I saw her do it, too, and somehow I knew it was meant for me and not for him.

“You know her well?” was the first thing I asked him.

“She lives around here,” he answered indifferently, implying, I think, that she was too familiar a part of his surroundings to be of any great interest to him.

Then he turned around and pointed out the house. “Right over there. That one on the corner. See it?”

It was a six-story, old-law, tenement building, one of an almost unbroken line that stretched along both sides of Eighth, from the top of the park well up into the Hundred-and-forties. Its top-floor windows were flush with the quadruple trackbeds of the Elevated, two for locals, two for expresses — two for downtown, two for up.

“She lives on the top floor,” he went on. “I been up there. I went up and met her family once, when I first started to know her. Her family are nice ’nd friendly.”

“Didn’t you ever go back again?”

“Na,” he said, blasé. “What for?”

I wondered about this. There just wasn’t any amatory attraction there, that was obvious. I couldn’t understand it, with a girl as appealing and magnetic as she’d seemed to me. But each one to his own inclinations I suppose, even at that age.

“What’s her last name?” I asked. “You didn’t give it.”

“Her old man’s name is Gaffney,” he said. “I know, because I’ve met him.” I didn’t know what he meant by that at first. Then he went on to explain: “She likes to call herself Hamilton, though; she says it was her grandmother’s name and she’s entitled to use it if she wants.”

“Why?” I wondered.

“I danno; maybe she thinks it’s classier.”

I could understand that discontent with a name. I’d experienced it a little myself. I’d been fiercely proud of my surname always. Only, all through my boyhood I’d kept wishing they’d given me a curt and sturdier first name, something like the other boys had, “Jim” or “Tom” or “Jack,” not “Cornell,” a family name, originally). But it was too late to do anything about it now. The only improvement possible was by abbreviation. And even there I was handicapped. “Corny” was unappealing, even though the slang descriptive for “stale” hadn’t yet come into use. “Connie” was unthinkable. All that was left was “Con,” which always sounded flat to me for some reason.

“Hey!” he jeered explosively, belatedly becoming aware, I suppose, of the number of questions I’d been asking. “What happened? Did you get stuck on her already?”

“How could I have got stuck on her?” I protested uncomfortably. “I only just now met her.”

But I knew I was lying; I knew I had.

The next evening, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t stop by Frankie’s place to have him come out with me. His company had suddenly become unwanted. Instead, I went around to Eighth Avenue by myself. As if to get my courage up sufficiently, I passed and repassed the doorway I had seen her go into, and finally took up my post in a closed-up store inset, across the way, and hopefully and watchfully began my first love-wait.

The love-wait — that sweet, and sometimes bittersweet, preliminary to each new meeting, which can be sanguine, sad, jealous, impatient, hurtful, angry, or even end in a heated quarrel; and which I have sometimes thought has more in it of the true essence of the love affair — is the better part by far of the two, than the actual meeting itself that follows and ends it. For the latter is often humdrum, a let-down by comparison. Its opening remarks are certainly never brilliant, or even worth the making, most of the time. And the little things they say, and the little things they do, are quite commonplace after all, after the anticipatory reveries of the love-wait.