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

But I didn’t want it to happen. I did, but I didn’t. And I made the didn’t master the did. She had me accustomed now, conditioned now. I wanted her this way, the way she was, the way she had been on the bench that night. I had this image of her. I wanted to keep it, I didn’t want to take anything away from it. (I didn’t realize until years later that that’s all there are, are our images of things. There are no realities. There are only the hundred different approximations of reality that are our images of it, no two the same, from man to man, from case to case, from place to place.)

There was a breathless springtime charm about her this way, a fragile sway she exerted over me, which would have been gone at a touch. Maybe a more heated, more grown love would have taken its place. But only for a while. Then that would have gone too, as it always does in such cases. And nothing would have been left. Not the first, not the second.

It wasn’t a mere matter of purity or non-purity. Even that young, I wasn’t narrow-minded. That was a mere cuticle-distinction.

It was partly possessive: You have something that belongs to you, that you value, like a bright new necktie or a leather wallet or a chrome lighter with your initials on it, and you don’t want to get a stain on it, you don’t want to deface it.

There was part self-esteem in it, I think. Your girl had to be better than any other girl around, or what was the use of her being your girl? You were so good yourself that you rated only the best, nothing less would do. Caesar’s sweetheart.

But it was idealistic, mostly. If you’re not going to be idealistic at that age, you’re never going to be idealistic at all.

I don’t know. I didn’t know then, I still don’t now. Who can explain the heart, the mind, the things they make you do?

I dropped one foot down to the step below, and took my arms off her.

“You better get inside, Vera.” I said. “You better say good-night to me.”

And then I said again, “You better hurry up and get inside, Vera.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me good-night first?” she said softly.

“No, say it from up there. Not down here.”

She went up the three or four remaining steps to the level, and took her key out and opened the door with it. Then she turned and looked at me as she went in. I saw her put the backs of a couple of her fingers across her lips, then she tipped them toward me in a secretive kissing sign. Still looking at me to the last, she slowly drew the door closed past her face, very slowly and very softly, almost without a sound.

She didn’t come to the bench the next afternoon. I waited there for her for several hours, with that slowly fading afterglow you’re left with on the day after a party, wanting to share it with her by talking the whole thing over, but she didn’t come. Finally, when the early winter twilight had closed down and turned the whole world into a sooty, charcoal line drawing, all of black and gray, I got up and left, knowing she wasn’t coming anymore this late, and knowing just as surely I’d see her the following day. I didn’t even stop by her house to find out what had kept her away, because I felt sure it was nothing more than a case of her being overtired from the night before, and of having slept late as a result.

But the next day she didn’t come again, either, and I wondered about it. I wondered if she’d stayed out too late with me to suit her family, and they were keeping her away from me for a few days to show their disapproval. But they hadn’t been home yet themselves, to all appearances, when I’d brought her back.

Then I wondered if something had happened at the party that had offended or displeased her, something that she hadn’t told me about. But I remembered how she’d danced in exuberance out on the sidewalk after we’d left, so it didn’t seem likely it was that.

The third time she disappointed me, it was already the start of a new week, the party was already three or four days in back of us now, and I didn’t wait any longer. The only possible explanation left was that she’d been taken ill; she might have caught cold that night, she’d been thinly dressed and it had been stingingly cold from what I remembered. And if she was ill, I wanted her at least to know I’d asked for her, and not let her think I’d been completely indifferent. So after a forlorn half-hour’s token vigil on the bench, with no real anticipation even at the start, I got up again and went over to her house to see if I could find out anything.

I don’t recall any longer whether I made two visits over there on two successive days, on the first of which I merely loitered about in front of the place, in hopes either of catching sight of her or else of questioning somebody who might possibly know her (such as the little girl who had carried her message the night of the party), and on the second of which I finally went all the way up the stairs as far as her door; or whether the two telescoped themselves into one and the same occasion. But I do know that, all else having failed, I finally stood at the top of the six flights of stairs and I finally knocked at her door.

After a moment’s wait I heard a single heavy crunch of the flooring just on the other side of it; I imagine the one board that had been trodden on creaked, while all the rest of them did not.

A voice asked: “Who’s that?” A woman’s, but that was all I recognized about it.

“Me,” I said. “Vera’s friend, Con.” (To my own ears, it sounded like a faltering quaver that came out of me.)

The door opened, and her mother stood there.

Her face wasn’t friendly. I couldn’t decipher exactly what was on it at first, but it was set in bleak, grim lines and no smile broke on it.

“And is it Vera you’re asking after?” she said, and I can still remember the thick Irish twist of speech she gave it.

I nodded and swallowed a lump of self-consciousness in my throat.

Her voice grew louder and warmer, but not the warmth of congeniality, the warmth of glittering, spark-flying resentment. “You have the nerve to come here and ask for her? You have the nerve to come here to this door? You?”

She kept getting louder by the minute.

“I should think you’d have the decency to stay home, and not show your face around here. Isn’t it enough you’ve done? Well, isn’t it?” And she clamped her hands to the sides of her head, as when you’re trying to stifle some terrible recollection.

I drew back a step, stunned, congealed with consternation. Only one explanation was able to cross my mind. I knew nothing had happened on the stairs that night. But maybe they didn’t, maybe they thought something had. And if they did, what way was there I could ever—

“Now go on about your business!” she said sternly. The expression “Get lost” had not yet come into general parlance, but she used an approximation of it. “Take yourself off,” I think it was.

By that time I was partly down the stairs already, and then had stopped again and half-turned around to her to hear the rest of it out.

“Stay away from here. There’s no Vera here for you.”

The door gave a cataclysmic bang, and that was the end of it. There was no Vera there for me.

I have often wondered since why it was such a long time after that before I ran into Frankie again. Maybe it actually wasn’t, but it seemed so at the time. Weeks, if not quite months. But our paths didn’t happen to cross, I guess, for we each had differing interests by now. The hero-worship stage was long a thing of the past. I had probably grown out of it by myself; I don’t think my friendship with Vera had anything to do with ending it. And I hadn’t sought him out, because it had never occurred to me that he might be in a better position than I to pick up the neighborhood rumors and gossip, his ear being closer attuned to it than mine, in a way.