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

The spring came again, and then that warmed itself into early summer, and by now it was a year since I had first met her. I still thought of her very often, but I no longer thought of her all the time. Her immediacy had faded.

One night in June I was passing along Eighth Avenue again, and as the corner of One-hundred-fourteenth Street came abreast of me and opened up the side-street into view, it suddenly seemed to blaze up from one end to the other like a rippling straw-fire, an illusion produced by scores of light bulbs strung criss-cross from one side of the street to the other, and fidgeting in the slight breeze. Vehicular entry had been blocked off by a wooden traffic horse placed at the street entrance. People were banked on both sidewalks looking on, and between them, out in the middle, tightly packed couples were dancing. They were holding a block party on the street.

Block parties were nothing new. In fact, by this time they were already well on their way out. They had first originated about four years before, at the time of the mass demobilization, when each individual block celebrated the return to its midst of those young men who had seen service overseas by holding a community homecoming party in their honor out in the street (because that was the only place that could conveniently accommodate all the participants).

But this was the early summer of 1923, not 1919 any longer; the last soldiers had finished coming back long ago; the only ones left were regulars, on garrison duty along the Rhine, at the Koblenz bridgehead. Another thing: The climate of public opinion had noticeably changed in the meantime. The naive fervor of the first postwar year or two had now given place to that cynicism toward all things military and patriotic that characterized the remainder of the decade. So the occasion for this particular party must have been something else: a church benefit or charity affair of some kind.

I moved in among the onlookers and stood there with my shoes tipping over the edge of the curb, watching. The music wasn’t very good, but it was enthusiastic and noisy, and that was the mood the crowd was in, so that was all that mattered. They were probably amateurs who lived on the block themselves, and each one had brought his particular instrument down into the street with him, and joined forces with the others. But they were so uneven they were almost good, because the music of the moment was supposed to be played in just that sort of jagged, uneven time, anyway. I can still remember them blaring and blatting away at two of the current favorites: “Dearest, You’re the Nearest to my Heart” and “Down, Down Among the Sleepy Hills of Ten, Ten, Tennessee.”

Then as I stood there on the lip of the curbing, taking it all in, she was suddenly there in front of me. I never knew afterward which direction she’d come from, because I didn’t have time to see. She was just suddenly there, that was all, and I was looking at Vera again.

She hadn’t changed much. The even-all-around cut might have been missing from her hair, but I can’t be sure, for I didn’t look up at it, just looked at her. She had on a fresh, summery little dress, orchid in color, that much I seem to remember. It was both gauzy and crisp at the same time, most likely what they call organdy.

But there was one thing I did notice clearly, as we looked straight into one another’s eyes, one thing that hadn’t been there before. There was a little diagonal crevice, like a nick or slit, traced downward from the inside corner of each eye, slanted like an accent mark and just as brief as one. It couldn’t have been called a crease, for she was too young to have creases yet. It wasn’t a furrow either, it wasn’t deep enough for that.

Studying her, I wondered what had caused it. Tear-tracks, maybe, from excessive crying? No, not tears alone. Tears maybe, but something else as well. Long, sleepless nights of brooding, of frustration and rebellion.

If they grew longer, deeper, I sensed somehow they would change the expression of her face, give her eyes a hardened, crafty aspect. But it was too soon to do that yet. All they were so far was a mark of hurt; they gave her eyes an apprehensive, reproachful look.

I don’t know what we said first. Probably I said her name, and she said mine.

Then she moved her mouth upward toward me a little, and we kissed.

“It’s been an awful long time I last saw you,” I said, skipping the “since” in the hurry of my speech. Tactless, without meaning to be. But what else could I have said? I hadn’t seen her just yesterday.

“I’ve been away,” she said reticently.

I wondered if she knew I knew. I hoped she didn’t. I would have liked to tell her that I didn’t know, but I couldn’t figure out a way that wouldn’t tell her that I did know.

“Working,” she added even more reticently.

“You still live here on the block?” I asked her.

She answered that with less constraint. “Not anymore,” she said. “I just came around tonight to see what the old neighborhood looked like.”

Then, as if to break the chain-continuity of questions, she suddenly suggested: “Dance with me. It’s too hard to try to talk with all that noise they’re making.”

I stepped down to the asphalt roadbed she was standing on, which had been powdered over with something to make it less abrasive to the dancers’ feet.

We moved a few steps, a few steps only, and then even that was taken away from me.

A girl came jostling and thrusting her way through the mangle of dancers, someone I had never seen before. She touched Vera on the back or something, I couldn’t see what it was, to attract her attention.

“What’re you doing?” she demanded in a tone of urgency. “Don’t you know they’re waiting for us?”

“I just met an old friend,” Vera told her happily, and she indicated me with her head, about to introduce us.

The other girl brushed that aside, as if to say: This is no time for that now. She didn’t even look toward me.

“This is the second time they’ve sent me out to look for you,” she went on rebukingly. “How much longer you going to be? You must have seen everything you wanted to by now. What’s there to see around here, anyway? They won’t like it if you keep them waiting much longer.”

“All right, I’m coming,” Vera said with a sort of passivity, as though she were used to being told what to do.

“I guess I have to go now,” she said, turning to me, with a regretful little smile that, whether she meant it or not, was a pleasant balm to my feelings.

She turned aside from my still-upheld arms and followed the other girl back through the crowd. And after a moment, I went after the two of them, more slowly.

Once up on the sidewalk and in the clear, they broke into a choppy little quick-step that girls sometimes use, not quite a run but more than a walk, Vera still a trifle in back of the other one.

“But when am I going to see you again?” I called out after her, bewildered by the rapidity with which I’d found her, only to lose her again.

She turned her head around, but without breaking stride in the little jogging trot she was engaged in, and called back reassuringly: “Real soon, Con. And that’s a promise.”

Then they both made the turn of the corner and whisked from sight. I went down there after them, not to try to stop them, for I knew that wouldn’t have worked, but simply to see if I could get a look at who it was they were hurrying so to join.

As I put my head around the corner, a pale-stockinged after-leg was drawing from sight into a car that was standing there, and then the car door cracked shut with that flat sound they always have.

It was standing, oh I don’t know, about ten yards along from the corner, and there were a number of men in it, exactly how many I couldn’t tell, maybe three, possibly four, but certainly more than just two to pair off with the girls. They were older men, not youths my own and Vera’s age. This was more a matter of outline than anything else, since I couldn’t see their faces to the slightest degree, but the impression of maturity was unmistakable. The massiveness of their shoulders gave it to me, and the breadth of the backs of their necks, and they were all alike wearing rather too dressy snap-brim felt hats (and this was already June). One of them was smoking a cigar, I saw it glow for a moment in the darkness under the roof of the car, and the livid concentric swirl it made was much larger than a mere cigarette ember would have been, particularly if seen from a distance like that.