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

But New York then, in its residential zoning, was a snobbish, stratified sort of town, and the park did more than divide it physically, it divided it economically as well. That, however, was of no concern to us. That applied only to our elders.

We climbed the wide, easily sloping stairs that led to the upper level and came out at 116th Street, at that little rotunda with its bas-reliefs and circular stone seat-rest, and stood there a while, taking in the spread of the city’s lights below and outward from us, until the eye couldn’t follow them anymore, and lost them in the reaches of the night. But the young haven’t too much time to spend on mere inanimate beauty, they’re too immediately interested in each other.

We turned away and walked down Morningside Heights a block or two, and opposite, where there was a little French church standing, called Notre Dame de Lourdes, I think. We sat down together on a bench without saying a word, and moved close.

And from that night on, whenever we met, we always met at that one particular bench and never any other. I used to wonder at times, later, who had been sitting there after we did, who had met there once we stopped going to it, and if they were young like we were, and if they were happy: what their stories were, and how they turned out in the end. They never knew about us, we never knew about them. For park benches can’t talk.

We kissed, and nestled close, and (I suppose) laughed together about something now and then. The pattern never changes throughout time. Then presently and very tentatively I crossed the line from the innocuous to the more innate.

The first time she let it pass unnoticed, either not wanting to seem too edgy and ready to take offense, or else mistakenly thinking it had been unintentional and the wiser thing to do was not to call attention to it, and I, misconstruing, repeated it. This time she caught my hand and held it fast, but in such a minor-keyed way that it is difficult to put it into exact words. For she didn’t brush it off or fling it aside peremptorily, but held it still with hers, almost where it had been but not quite, so that her gesture couldn’t be mistaken for collaboration, only for the deterrent it was.

“Don’t do that,” she said in a low-spoken voice that was all the more inflexible for that reason. I’ll get up from here if you do.

“And I don’t want to,” she went on after a moment. “I like you, and I like being here with you.”

I kept quiet, feeling that it was not up to me to do the talking. And even if it had been, not knowing what there would have been to say, the thing was so self-explanatory. In my own mind I unjustly put her into the position of having to excuse or at least explain herself, when it should have been the other way around. But she seemed to accept the role without questioning its fairness.

“I know how some girls feel about it,” she said thoughtfully. “ ‘Oh, it’s just this once, with this one boy. Then it’ll never happen again.’ But it does happen again. If you didn’t stop the first time, then you never will the second. And before you know, it’s with another boy. And then another boy. And pretty soon, with any boy at all.”

Made uncomfortable, I gave a slight pull to my hand, and she released it, and I drew it away.

“I want to get married someday,” she explained. “And when I do, I don’t want to have anything to hide.” And tracing the point of her shoe thoughtfully along the ground in little patterns and watching it as she did so, she went on: “I wouldn’t want to stand up in a church, and know that somewhere some other man was laughing at my husband behind his back. I wouldn’t be entitled to wear a bridal veil, it would be a lie before God.” Then she asked me point blank: “Would you want to marry somebody that had been with everybody else before that?”

She stopped and waited for my answer.

I hated to have to give her the answer, because it vindicated her own argument so.

“No,” I said grudgingly, at last.

I wondered if her mother had instilled this into her, if they had had a talk about it, for it must have come from somewhere to be so strong and clear-sighted in her, but I didn’t think it was right to openly ask her.

But almost as if she had read my mind, she added: “I don’t need anybody else to tell me. I’ve had it all thought out from the time I was fourteen, already. From the time I first knew about things like that. Or knew a little about them, anyway. I made up my mind that when I got older, no matter how much I cared for a fellow, it wasn’t going to be that way.

“It don’t have to be that way,” she reiterated, unshakably. “No matter how much in love a girl and a fellow are, it still don’t have to be that way.”

I remember thinking that, as she spoke, the slight dent in the grammar only added to, didn’t detract from, the beautiful sincerity of her conviction.

I looked at her in a new way now, commending her, esteeming her, for the values she adhered to. Nineteen is basically idealistic, far more than the after-years are, and in spite of its young blood would rather have an ideal it can look up to, that keeps itself just beyond reach of the everyday grubbing fingers.

She probably translated the look. I saw her smile with quiet contentment, as if that were the way she had hoped to be looked at. Then, as if to make up for any crestfallenness I might have felt, she stroked me lightly but affectionately along the side of the face with the tips of her fingers. And bunching her lips and poising them, commanded me winningly, “Now let me have a kiss.”

After I’d taken her back to her own door and then gone home myself, I thought about it. I’d been very intent in the first place: I could tell that easily enough, as I took off my clothing piece by piece to get ready for bed. But that wasn’t the important thing, that was just a reflex, little better than a muscle-spasm. I sat down in a chair first, to quiet down before I tried to sleep, and I turned the whole thing over in my mind.

The important thing about her refusal was the vastly longer term of life and the far more indelible imprint it gave to our relationship. It changed what would have been an overnight thing into a more or less permanent affinity, at least as far as the foreseeable future was concerned. On the one hand there would have been a few short weeks of furtive, overheated meetings, and then oblivion. No name to remember, no face to recall. On the other hand, there was an uncurtailed succession of joyous, daily encounters, sprightly, open and unashamed, and though immature perhaps, in every sense a budding love affair. And an imperishable print on the memory. She stayed with me ever since. I still remember her name, and some of the things she said, and some of the clothes she wore, and some of the ways she looked. There’s a sort of inverse ratio at work there.

Women, even very young girl-women (which amounts to the same thing), must walk a precarious tightrope. If they fall off, into somebody’s waiting arms, they almost always lose him in the end. If they stay on, even though he’s been kept at a distance, they capture some part of him.

I think I dimly sensed this to some extent, even that very first night as I sat there and thought it over. But if I didn’t then, I certainly realize it now, as I look back from forty years away. For I must have had some girl fully, must have had my first girl fully, then or not long after. But not a trace of recollection remains. Yet Vera still stays in my mind. The very fact that I’m writing this is proof enough of that.

That first-night incident on the bench set the whole pattern from then on for our little sentimental interlude. (And I suppose it was little, but it was a valid one nevertheless; seventeen and nineteen can’t have a bravura romance.) It was understood between us without speaking about it any further, it was crystallized, that that was the way it was going to be. And that was the way it was. And I myself wanted it that way now just as much as she did. She personified that to me now, she was its identification. She wore a halo, as far as I was concerned. Youthful and jaunty and informal, but a halo just the same.