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

This love-wait can be carried out only by the boy or the man, for if the girl or the woman carries it out, she somehow detracts by just so much from it and from herself: from the desirability of meeting her, from the uncertainty as to whether she will appear or not, turning a mystic wistful expectancy, the borderline between absence and presence, into a flat, casual, commonplace meeting. Like the difference between a kiss and a handshake.

El trains would trundle by at intervals with a noise like low-volume thunder and cast strange parallelograms and Grecian-key friezes of light along the upper faces of the shrouded buildings, like the burning tatters of a kite’s tail, streaming evenly along in the breezeless night. A little more often, one of the squared-off high-topped autos of the early twenties would skirt over the gutters and through the enfilading iron girders that supported the structure above, with only an imminent collision to stop for, since there were no traffic lights yet this far uptown.

And on the sidewalks, more numerous still than either of the others, people on foot passed back and forth, as they’d always done on sidewalks, I suppose, since cities were first built, and as they’d continue to do long after the elevated trains and the high-topped cars were gone.

Once another girl showed up unexpectedly, and scurried up the few entrance-steps that led into the doorway, and I thought it was she, and almost started forward from where I was standing to sprint across the street and catch her before she went in. But then she stopped and turned for a moment, to say something to someone on the sidewalk behind her, and I saw her face and saw it wasn’t, and sank back again upon my heels.

As the evening grew later, a sharp-edged wind sprang up, with the feel of cold rain in it. One of these supple, sinuous winds, able to round corners and make circles and eddies along the ground. It made me miserable, made me stamp my feet continuously and duck my chin down into the upturned collar of my coat, but I still wouldn’t give up and go away. Until at last it was so late that I knew she wouldn’t appear, or be able to linger with me if she did. Finally I turned and trudged off disconsolately, hands in pockets and downcast eyes on the sidewalk before me.

The following night the rain-threat of the night before had become an actuality, but that didn’t keep me from my vigil. When you’re eighteen and newly in love, what’s rain? It didn’t bother me as much as the wind had the night before, since it couldn’t get into the niche of the store-entrance I had made my own, and the protective shed of the elevated-structure even kept the roadway of the street comparatively dry, though not the sidewalks, for there was an open canal above each one. The rain made the street seem gayer, not more dismal than it was at other times, for all these wet surfaces caught the lights more vividly and held them longer, as they went by. The rain was like an artist’s palette, and these blobs of color, these smears of red and green and white and yellow and orange, hid the sooty grayness the street had in the light of day.

But at last I could see that, whatever the reason the night before, the weather would keep her in tonight. I had to turn and go away again, after standing a good deal less time.

The night after that, I reverted to my old habit and sought out Frankie. I wanted his advice. Or at least his reassurance that she actually did live there.

“Remember that girl you introduced me to couple days ago?” I blurted out almost as soon as we’d come out of his place.

“Vera? Sure,” he said. “What about her?”

“Does she really live there, where you showed me?”

“Of course she does,” he assured me. “Why would I lie about it?”

“Well, I hung around there all last night, and she never showed up, and I hung around all the night before—” I started to say it before I’d thought twice. I hadn’t intended to tell him that part of it, but simply to find out if he’d seen her himself or knew her whereabouts. But once it was out, it was out, and too late to do anything about it. You’re not anxious to tell even your closest friends about frustrations like that.

“In all that rain?” he chuckled, a wide grin overspreading his face.

“What’s rain?” I said negligently.

This comment struck him as very funny, for some reason that I failed to see. He began to laugh uproariously, even bending over to slap himself on the kneecap, and he kept repeating incessantly: “Holy mackerel! Are you stuck on her! Waiting in the rain. No, you’re not stuck on her, not much! Waiting in the rain.”

“I wasn’t in the rain,” I corrected with cold dignity. “Maybe it was raining, but I wasn’t in it.”

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.