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

Anyway, one day we came along on opposite sides of the same street, he going one way, I the other. He threw up his arm to me, I flung up mine to him, and he crossed over to me. Or we met in the middle, whichever it was.

We made a couple of general remarks, mostly about his current boxing activities (he was still in the amateur category, he told me, but about ready to become pro; all he needed was to find the right manager). Then he suddenly said: “That was tough about your friend, wasn’t it?”

I must have sensed something serious was about to come up; I quickly became alerted, even before the conversation had gotten any further. “Vera? What was tough? What was?” I asked tautly.

“About her getting caught up with like that.”

“Caught up with how?” I insisted.

“What are you, serious?” he said impatiently. “I thought you knew about it. The whole block knows. How come you don’t know about it, when you been going around with her so much lately? Practically steady.”

“All of a sudden I didn’t see her anymore,” I tried to explain. “She dropped out of sight, and I couldn’t find out why. Nobody told me.”

“I could’a’ told you,” he said. “Why di’ntya come to me?”

“Well, what is it?” I urged. “What?”

“She was picked up,” he said flatly.

I didn’t understand at first; I thought he meant a flirtatious pickup, by some stranger on the street.

“Picked up by some fellow? She wasn’t that kind. I know her too well.”

“I don’t mean picked up by some fellow. Picked up by the cops. She was taken in.”

I felt as though one of his best punches had hit me squarely between the eyes. All I could see for a minute were swirls in front of them. Like a pair of those disks with alternate black and white circular lines that keep spinning into a common center, but they never come to an end, they always keep right on coming.

“For what?” I managed to get out when they’d finally thinned somewhat and started to fade away. “What for?”

I guess he could see by my face the kind of effect he had had on me; it seemed to make him feel regretful that he’d told me. “Don’t take it like that,” he said contritely. “I wounna told you, if I knew it was going to get you like that.”

“But why?” was all I kept saying, tearful without any tears, querulous, resentful, all those things at once. “What’d she do? They can’t just come along like that and haul anybody in they want to.”

He didn’t stop to argue that with me; evidently he felt the facts did it for him. “You know the old lady she worked for part-time, the rich old lady on West End Avenue—? She ever tell you about her?”

“Yeah, I knew she worked for her,” I said marginally.

“The old lady put in a complaint about her to the cops. She called them up and told them there was an expensive fur coat missing out of her closet, and she accused Vera of swiping it. So they went over there to Vera’s place, looking for it, at eight o’clock in the morning. She was still in bed, but they found it folded up underneath her mattress.”

“She had one she was paying for on time—” I tried to say in her defense.

“Na,” he said juridically. “The old lady identified it, it had the same labels on it.”

“Then what’d they do?” I faltered, sickish in the throat with backed-up salty fluid.

“They made her get dressed, and they took her with them. She claimed she just borrowed it to wear for one night, and was going to bring it right back the next day. The trouble was she couldn’t prove that, because they caught up with her too quick and she still had it in the room with her when they got there.”

An excruciating little mental image crossed my mind, of her coming out the street-doorway of her house, that same doorway where she hadn’t wanted the neighbors to see her “all dressed up,” but now with two men alongside her, people looking on from windows and from the steps, holding her head down, and with tears probably, tears almost certainly, gliding down her shame-flushed face.

“But if the old lady got her coat back, why didn’t she just let her go?” I wailed querulously.

“She wanted to teach her a lesson, I guess. She said she’d been very good to Vera, and Vera had repaid her by stealing from her behind her back.” And he interpolated sagely: “You know, them old ladies can be very mean sometimes, especially when it comes to losing something like a fur coat.”

“I know,” I assented mournfully. To both of us, I suppose, a woman of forty would have been what we considered an old lady.

“She was sore, and she wouldn’t drop the charges. They brung Vera up before a magistrate — I doanno if it was in juvenile court or where, but I guess it was there, because she’s still a minor — and he committed her to a reformatory for six months. She’s up there now, at some farm they got upstate.”

And he added, quite unnecessarily, “That’s why you haven’t seen her around anymore.”

After a wordless pause of several moments, I started to move away from him.

“Hey, come back here,” he said. “Come back here.” He was trying to be sympathetic, consolatory, in a gruff sort of way, which was the only way he knew how.

I kept on going, drifting away from him.

Then he tried to come after me and rejoin me. I didn’t see him because I didn’t turn to look, but I knew he was, because I could tell by the sound of his feet, coming along behind me. I motioned to him with a backward pass of my hand to leave me alone, to go on off.

I didn’t want him to see my face.

I felt like a dog that’s just had its paw stepped on real hard, and it goes limping off on three feet and is leery of everyone, doesn’t want anyone to come near it for a while. The only thing I didn’t do was whimper like one.

All the winter long I’d pass there now and then, and every time I passed I’d seem to see her standing there in the doorway. Just the way I’d seen her standing sometimes when we’d met by her door instead of at the park bench.

Complete, intact in every detail: looping her tamoshanter around by its headband on the point of one finger. Much more than an illusion: a life-size cut-out, like those figures they sometimes stood up outside of theaters. So real that the checks of her coat hid the grubby brownstone doorway-facing behind where they were. So real that even the remembered position of her feet repeated itself on the brownstone doorstep, and they seemed to be standing there once again just as they once had: one planted flat out a little way before her so that the shank of her leg curved gracefully outward a little to reach it, the other bent backward behind her, and planted vertically against the sideward part of the doorway. And as I’d once noticed, when she thrust a door closed behind her with a little kick-back of her heel, here again she gave grace, not grotesqueness, to this odd little posture.

But then as I’d look and look, and look some more, longingly (not so much with love — for what did I know of love at nineteen? Or for that matter, what did I know of it at thirty-nine or forty-nine or fifty-nine? — as with some sense of isolation, of pinpointed and transfixed helplessness under the stars, of being left alone, unheard and unaided to face some final fated darkness and engulfment slowly advancing across the years toward me, that has hung over me all my life), the brownstone-facing would slowly peer back through the checks of her coat, the doorstep would be empty of her disparately placed feet, and I’d have to go on my way alone again. As all of us have to go alone, anywhere that we go, at any time and at any place.

The young, I think, feel loneliness far more acutely than the older do, for they have expected too much, they have expected everything. Those older never expect quite everything, or more than just a little at best, and when loneliness strikes, their lack of complete expectation in the first place dulls the sharp edge of it somewhat.