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

We met every day from then on, without missing one. But not always at the same time. For my schedule of classes was zigzag, no two days alike, and since it was all Greek to her anyway, no matter how often I tried to have her memorize it, she always got to the bench before I did in order to be sure to be on time.

I’d see her doll-sized figure from a distance. As I came closer she’d jump to her feet and fling her arms wide in pantomimic welcome, while I’d break into a headlong run, and as I reached her, I tossed my books carelessly over to the side in order to have both arms free for the hug that would follow.

There was something of the antic in this. We both recognized it and we both would have been willing to admit it. But the underlying emotion was bona fide enough; it was just that we didn’t know how to handle it, so we parodied it. If we were too young to actually be in love, to know how to be in love, then we were certainly smitten with one another, infatuated with one another, that much was sure.

We’d sit there for hours sometimes, oblivious of the needling cold, huddled closely together, sometimes my coat around the two of us, our breaths forming bladder-shapes of vapor like the dialogue-balloons cartoonists draw coming out of their characters’ mouths.

We talked a lot. I don’t remember about what; the language of the young. You forget that language very quickly; within a few short years it’s a foreign tongue, the knack for it is completely gone. Sometimes, though, we were quiet and tenderly pensive.

I used to get home at all hours. I ate alone almost every night now; everyone else had usually finished by the time I showed up. But I’d find something put aside and kept warm for me. What it was I never knew half the time, I was so wrapped up in retrospect repetitions of what had just taken place. I don’t recall that my family ever voiced any remonstrances about it. They seem to have been very lenient in this respect. Maybe being the only male, even though a very unseasoned one, in a household of two doting women had something to do with it.

This routine went on daily for about two or three months, as the season began its final climb to the holidays at the top of the year and 1922 slowly blended into 1923. Then a fly landed in the honey, from a totally unexpected quarter. I came home one evening and my mother remarked: “Hetty Lambert called up today while you were out.”

This was a life-long friend of my mother’s. They had been schoolgirl chums, and the intimacy had continued uninterrupted into the married lives of both. Hetty had been well-to-do in her own right even as a youngster (my mother had told me), and she had married a man in the silk-import business who was in turn exceedingly well off, so she must have been a very wealthy woman.

For my part, from my pre-twenty point of view, I found her musty and dowdy. When she wasn’t spending whole mornings clipping coupons in a bank vault, she was spending afternoons visiting with her dead in the family mausoleum. Their one recreation, she and her husband, was a lifetime box at the Metropolitan Opera, but since he invariably fell asleep in it, even that was wasted. She used to do her own marketing for the table personally, squeezing produce, with an elderly chauffeur following her around with a basket to put them in, and if she thought the weight was a bit short or the price a few cents too high she would fume to the high heavens, until they let her have it her way for the sake of peace and quiet.

“What’d she have to say?” I said, totally uninterested but dutifully willing to appear to listen for the sake of the high regard my mother seemed to hold her in.

“Thursday of next week is her daughter’s birthday. Janet’s giving a little party for her friends, and she wants you to come.”

“Oh, no I’m not!” I promptly burst out. “That’s the last place I’m going. You don’t get me there, not on your life!” And so on, at great length.

“I don’t see why you feel that way,” my mother remonstrated mildly, when I had finally come to a stop. “You’ve gone every year, since you were both children. You went last year.”

“Last year was different.” Meaning I’d been a year younger then. And mainly, I hadn’t known Vera then.

Then, perhaps thinking this might be an added inducement, she went on reassuringly: “Hetty and her husband aren’t going to be there. They’re going out for the evening, and turning over the whole apartment to Janet and her friends.”

But this was no inducement whatever as far as I was concerned. I found Janet about as appealing — romantically speaking — as an overstuffed chair with broken-down springs, whether her mother was present or not. No mutual dislike felt by two boys toward one another (or by two girls toward one another, for that matter) can ever quite equal in wholehearted intensity the very occasional and very rare dislike felt toward one another by a boy and girl, when it does happen to come along. And that was the case with us. We had a beautiful, inbred ill will toward one another, due most likely to having been thrown so constantly at each other’s heads when we were both small children.

There wasn’t a thing about her that suited me. Her laugh resembled a sneer. Her most inconsequential remark had a cutting edge, but you only realized it sometime after the cuticle had slowly started peeling back. Her clothes were probably costly, but she always managed to do something to them that spoiled the looks of them. Just by being in them, I guess. Her manners weren’t bad, for only one reason. She didn’t have any at all. She was the only young girl I had ever seen who crumbled her rolls up into pieces at a dinner-party table and then threw them at every boy around her. Not just momentarily, but throughout each and every course, until they became miserable trying to eat without getting hit.

Even the way she kissed was a form of snobbish superiority. She didn’t kiss with her mouth at all. She tilted her nose in the air and pushed her cheek up against the recipient somewhere just below the eardrum. I hadn’t kissed her since we were twelve, but I had watched her kiss her mother and her older married sister, and she did it that way even with them.

All in all, though it was difficult for me then (and now) to find an exact verbal synonym for the word “brat,” a pictorial one was easy to come by. It was simply Janet. She was the perfect spoiled rich brat.

“You’ll have to call her up, one way or the other,” my mother said, still trying to persuade me. “You can’t just ignore it. Even if you’re not fond of Janet,” she pointed out, “you may have a good time. There may be somebody there you’ll like.”

A sudden inspiration hit me. You bet there will be somebody there I like, I promised myself. I’ll see to it that there is!

I made the courtesy call back, as required. The maid answered first, and then called Janet to the phone.

“ ’lo,” Janet said, in that sulky voice that was a characteristic of hers.

“ ’lo,” I answered, equally uncordial.

Neither of us ever used our given names to one another any more than was strictly necessary: another sign of fondness.

“Are you coming?” she asked briefly.

“Yeah,” I answered. Then my voice took on an added degree of animation. “Listen,” I said.

“What?” she asked, as lifeless as ever.

“Can I bring somebody with me?”

“A boy?” she asked, and her voice perked up a little.

“Nah, not a boy,” I said disgustedly. Who’d ever heard of taking another fellow along with you to a party? “A girl.”

“Oh,” she said, and her voice deflated again. Then after a moment’s reflection she agreed, without any great show of enthusiasm. “I s’pose so. There was one girl short at the table, anyhow.”