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

Vera’s father stood there. Or at least, a middle-aged man did, and I assumed he was her father. He had on a gray woolen undershirt and a pair of trousers secured over it by suspenders. He must have been relaxing in a chair en deshabille when the knock disturbed him, for he was reslinging one of them over his shoulder as he stood there. He had a ruddy-complexioned face, and although he was by no means a good-looking man, he was a good-natured-looking one.

If he protruded somewhat in the middle, it was not excessively so, not more than to be expected in a man of his (to my young mind) multiplicity of years. He certainly was not corpulent. I would have stood there indefinitely, without being able to open my mouth, if he hadn’t spoken first.

Frankie’s bombastic retreat was still in progress, and the sound of it reached his ears.

“What’s that going on down there?” he wanted to know. Stepping to the railing, he bent over and tried to peer down the well.

“It must be somebody on one of the lower floors in a hurry to go out,” I said meekly. It was technically the truth anyway, even if a subterfuge of it.

Then Frankie gained the street, and silence descended once more.

Coming back to the door and turning to me, the man asked, with a sort of jovial severity, “Well, young fellow, and what can I do for you?”

After a swallow to wet my throat first, I managed to get out: “Excuse me, is Vera in?” And then added, somewhat redundantly: “I’m a friend of hers.”

“Oh, are you now?” he said with a chuckle. “Well, come on in, then. Glad to see you.”

And before I realized it, I was on the inside, guided by his hand. The door had closed, and hundreds of her family seemed to be staring at me from all directions. Then the motes of momentary panic subsided in front of my eyes, and they condensed into no more than three or four people.

She wasn’t there; I found that out almost at once. For the first moment or two I kept hoping she was merely out of sight in one of the other rooms, and would come in when she heard the increased tempo of their voices, but since she didn’t, and they didn’t call in to her, I finally had to resign myself to the fact that she wasn’t in the flat at all. I’d have to face the music by myself as best I could.

In addition to her father, there were two other members of the family present; one was her mother, and the other presumably an aunt, but it took me some little time to differentiate between them. There was also a little girl in the room, of about nine or ten, whom they neglected to identify. I couldn’t make out whether she was a smaller sister of Vera’s, or the aunt’s child, or just some neighbor’s youngster given the freedom of the flat. In any case, at my advanced age I considered her beneath notice.

My impressions of her mother are not nearly as clear as they are of her father, possibly because he was the one who came to the door and who I saw first, and without anyone else to distract my attention. I have a vague recollection of a tall but spare woman, with dark hair quite unlike Vera’s, with an overtone of gray already about it at the outside, where it had a tendency to fuzz and fly up in gauzy little swatches that you could see the light through (the grayness therefore might have been only an illusion), and she would frequently put her hand to it and try to bring it back down to order, but it would never obey for long. Of the aunt, I have no surviving impressions whatever.

I sat down in the middle of all of them. They were probably actually spread about at random the way people usually are in a room, but it felt as if they were sitting around me in a complete circle, eyeing me critically and weighing me in the balance. I felt very constrained and ill at ease, and kept wishing I could sink through the floor, chair and all. It had been the worst possible timing on my part, too, I kept telling myself. If I’d just waited a few minutes longer and not listened to Frankie, I could have met Vera by herself, intercepted her when she came back and kept out of all this.

I’d already been smoking, sparingly but steadily, for some months past, and I’d already found it to be good as a bracer in moments of difficulty or stress. There was a package in my pocket right as I sat there, but I was afraid to take it out in front of them. I wanted to make a good impression, and I cannily told myself that if they thought me too knowing or advanced for my years they might discourage my trying to see any more of her.

As soon as I’d given my name, her father said: “Oh, sure. Con, is that you? We’ve heard about you from Veronica.”

(He called her Veronica, I noticed, never Vera. I couldn’t, if I’d wanted to; there was something too stiff and distant about the name.)

And her mother, nodding approvingly, added: “Yes, she told us about meeting you.”

Hearing this made me feel quite good, though it did nothing to alleviate my present misery. It showed she was interested, if nothing else, and it augured well for the future.

The next and natural question from her father was, what did I do, what sort of work?

I told him, with a slight touch of contrition, that I was going to college. This seemed to impress him, to my surprise. I had thought they might turn up their noses at me for not being an honest working-man. “Are you, now?” he said. “A college sthudent.”

“I’m just a first-year man,” I explained, again a little penitently. I had had impressed on my mind only too well the low opinion held about us by upperclassmen. “Freshman class, Frosh they call us. Then after that come sophomores. Then juniors. Then you’re a senior.”

Vera’s mother clucked her tongue at this, and I wasn’t quite sure how to translate the little sound accurately. I think it was intended as sympathy for all that hard work ahead.

“And what are you taking up?” her father asked. “What are you going to be after you get out?”

“Journalism,” I said. “I want to be a writer.”

“That’s a hard job,” he said forebodingly.

I tried to explain that I meant free-lance writing and not newspaper writing, that I was just majoring in journalism because that was the closest thing to it. But he didn’t seem to follow that too well; he seemed content to remain with his original conception. And turning to Vera’s mother, he said, “I think that’s the first college sthudent Veronica’s ever known, isn’t it?”

She tactfully interposed: “Well, she’s very young yet.”

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.