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

“Con!” she said, in a high-pitched voice that was almost a little scream. She nearly dropped the columnar bags, but reclasped them just in time. “How did you get up here?”

“I walked up,” I answered in perfect seriousness, without stopping to think, and they all laughed at that, herself included, as though I’d intended it to be very funny.

“I never thought I’d find you up here,” she said next. “You’re the last one!”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that; and afraid that, if I asked her, the answer might turn out to be unwelcome, I didn’t ask.

“How did you know where it was?” she went on. “How did you know this was the right place?”

My instinct told me it might not be in my own best interest to bring Frankie’s name into this, or recall him to her mind any more than was strictly necessary. She’d known him before she had me, after all. So I simply and untruthfully said: “I asked somebody in the house,” and that seemed to content her.

I had a fleeting impression, as I watched her expression and listened to the intonation of what she was saying to me, that she was enjoying, rather than otherwise, having her entire family as spectators to this little meeting of ours, and auditors to its accompanying dialogue, liked having their attention fixed on her the way it was. But if she enjoyed it, I didn’t, quite the opposite, and this nerved me to summon up courage to come out with what had brought me up there in the first place.

“Vera,” I said nervously, “would you like to come for a walk with me?”

She didn’t answer directly, but said “Wait’ll I take these back where they belong first,” and picking up the two cumbersome bags, which she had set down upon a table, she left the room with them. She was gone for some time, longer than would have been necessary simply to carry them back to the kitchen and set them down there, so I began to imagine she had stopped off in her own room on the way, to tidy her hair or something of the sort. Then when she came back, I saw that she had removed both the checked coat and the tamoshanter she had been wearing, and my hopes were dashed.

After a lame pause, I finally asked her a second time: “Vera, wouldn’t you like to come for a walk?”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said, and I saw her exchange a look with her mother.

The latter remarked cryptically, “You run along. I’ll do them for you tonight, and you can do them tomorrow night instead.”

Whereupon Vera hurried back inside again, throwing me an auspicious “I’ll be ready in a minute, Con,” over her shoulder, and this time, when she returned, was once more in coat and tamoshanter, and ready to leave.

I said the required polite and stilted good-byes, she opened the door, and a minute later we were free and by ourselves on the other side of it.

“It was my turn to do the dishes tonight,” she told me as we went scrabbling down the stairs, she running her hand along the banister railing, I on the outside with her other hand in mine.

The moment we were by ourselves, the moment the door had closed behind us, perfect ease and naturalness came back to me again, and to Vera too, though she hadn’t felt herself to be on exhibition as I had: One didn’t have to weigh one’s words, they just came flowing out in any kind of order, and yet inevitably they were the right words, without the trouble of trying to make them so beforehand. One didn’t have to execute each smallest move or gesture twice, once in the mind and once in the actuality, they too flowed unchecked in perfect unstudiedness. There were no questions that required answers, none were put and none were given, there were just confidences streaming out and blending.

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.”