Evergreen (44 page)

She had on a white silk blouse and her gold-and-pearl brooch. “Of course, it’s Eric’s birthday.”

“Look what you’ve got!” Teddy shouted as soon as they came into the hall. “Look what you’ve got!”

An enormous carton lay on its side and half in, half out, was a bright red perfect car. It was big enough to sit in and pedal. It had headlights and a brass horn and bucket seats like a racing car.

Eric’s heart stopped. “For me. You bought this for me.”

“I didn’t, silly!” Teddy said. “My present’s still wrapped up in the dining room with your others.”

“It’s from Macy’s in New York,” Gran said. She turned to Gramp. “I thought it was those folding chairs you ordered, so I opened it.”

“Couldn’t you have—?”

“Teddy was with me. We opened it together and then it was too late.”

“I see,” Gramp said. “Well, you’ll enjoy the car, I’m sure. Better go up and wash your hands and change. Well be having dinner soon.”

“I’ll go home and put on my suit,” Teddy said. “My mother says I have to wear my good suit because it’s Eric’s birthday.”

“Yes, of course. Be back at six, Teddy,” Gran said.

Eric shook his head. “I can’t believe it.”

“What can’t you believe?” his grandmother asked.

“The puppy George and this car, all in one day.”

“Ah, but you haven’t seen everything yet!” Gran said gaily. “Go on up, dear, will you?”

His suit and clean underwear had been laid out on the bed. His Sunday shoes stood under the bed. He was so happy, so excited! The dog, the red car with the headlights from Macy in New York! He didn’t know Macy but it surely was nice of him to send a present like that.
“Wheeeeeee,”
he said and turned a somersault on the rug near the bathroom, and then another and another, four of them before he reached the farther wall with a thump. He wondered where he would keep the car. In the garage, perhaps? He wanted to find out right now.

His grandparents’ adjoining rooms were at the end of the hall. He could barely hear them talking. It was a very quiet house. “Don’t ever call from one room to another,” his grandmother always said. “If it’s important enough to tell me, it’s important enough for you to walk where I am.”

He went down the hall. They were talking quietly in Gramp’s room. Suddenly his grandmother’s voice grew louder and he heard her say, “But I couldn’t secrete it! How could I when Teddy was there? He would have told Eric. I’m sorry, James. It couldn’t be helped.”

“I thought they had agreed that it was for the child’s own good that there be no contact. It’s too confusing, too unsettling! They agreed, didn’t they? So why don’t they keep their agreement?”

“Well, they have kept it, really. I suppose they feel that a gift isn’t—oh, I don’t know, they must feel some need to give something.”

“Awfully ostentatious! It must have cost a hundred dollars.”

“I’m sure it must. Well, I’ll write an acknowledgment and let it go at that. But I do feel a little sorry for them, James.”

“I have one concern, and that’s for Eric,” his grandfather said firmly.

“Well, of course.”

There was a rustling, as of someone rising from a chair. Eric scurried back to his room.

Why were they annoyed with Macy for sending the car? That was funny. Such a beautiful car! Better than anything Teddy had. And that was good, because sometimes Teddy made him angry. “Don’t you feel awful not having any father and mother?” he would say. Well, he didn’t feel awful at all. He had everything he wanted, Gramp and Gran gave him everything he wanted and they loved him. And he didn’t feel awful at all! He stuck out his tongue at an imaginary Teddy. You haven’t got a car like this, Teddy! And you haven’t got a dog like George, either!

But it was a funny thing about Macy. He remembered
last winter he’d got a pair of skates from him and it wasn’t even Christmas. Gramp had said something to Gran. He’d thought then that they weren’t pleased about the skates, but afterward he’d forgotten about it. Anyway, he had the skates and now he had the car and it didn’t matter really. Only, it was funny.

There were steak, fried onions and biscuits and all his favorite things. Teddy had given him a kite. Gran and Gramp had bought a sailboat that came up to his waist; he could sail it on the lake. Mrs. Mather had made a chocolate cake with white icing and seven candles. No, eight, because there had to be one to grow on. First she turned off the lights in the dining room. Then she brought it in with the candles flaring and everyone singing “Happy Birthday.” Eric blew out the candles and cut the first slice.

“What did you wish?” Teddy wanted to know, but Gran said, “If you tell it won’t come true,” so he wouldn’t tell. He really didn’t know what he wished; there was nothing he wanted except that he knew he wanted it always to be now. Just the way everything was now.

“You must thank Mrs. Mather for the beautiful cake,” Gran said. “Go into the kitchen after dinner and thank her.”

So he went in to thank her and she bent down and kissed him. “Bless your heart,” she said.

Then he and Teddy rode the red car. They took turns up and down the hall, while Gran and Gramp went to listen to Gabriel Heatter with the war news on the radio, the way they did every night. Every time Eric passed the door they looked up and smiled at him, his grandmother from the chair by the window where she sat with her shawl around her, for the house was chilly and they were saving heat. “A good citizen should,” his grandfather said. He himself sat upright, intent on the news, in his own wing chair that smelled of leather-dressing, a clean sharp smell that was like Gramp’s shaving lotion; his own smell that he always used, in the chair where he always sat.

Presently it was time for bed. Teddy’s father came for him from across the road. And Eric went up to bed. Gran kissed him and folded the sheet around his shoulders.

“It was a lovely birthday, wasn’t it?” she said, and turned out the light.

He lay there all warm and sort of floating away. It wasn’t entirely dark yet. He could partly see the late spring evening past the window, and partly imagine the familiar landscape: the yard and the lawn, the hemlock grove, the thickets where you could be an Indian and the lake beyond. Peepers set up a sharp, sweet call, one note over and over. A bird, thinking perhaps that it was morning, whistled once and was still. Tomorrow he would find the phoebe and ride in the car, and sail the boat. He would have to get string, a terribly long, long string for the boat. Then he would eat up what was left of the birthday cake. Seven. Today I was seven. Sev—

The peepers throbbed.

Joseph and his reflection traveled down Madison Avenue together, going back to the office. Whenever he looked away from the afternoon press of taxis and buses, whenever a glass door swung open or a flame of opalescent sunlight struck a window, he saw a vigorous man in a gray suit walking fast, swinging his arms. He hadn’t realized how high his arms swung.

He was in good shape. Didn’t look his age. In the morning, after waking automatically at six, he did his calisthenics. He watched his diet, although not stringently: he didn’t run to fat. Anna was envious; she would go for days on cottage cheese and salads to keep thin. A little weight wouldn’t hurt her, he always said, and was told that his tastes were old-fashioned. Well, at fifty-five, why shouldn’t they be?

Still, that wasn’t old these days. It was hard to think that his father had been only two years older when he died, worn away, shuffling and bereft of will. That was the main thing, will. You got old when you lost it.

He ought to be, and he was, thankful down to the marrow that he hadn’t lost his. He’d been able to build again from the ruins, or at least to make a promising start. It wasn’t given to everyone to have a second chance. Poor Solly. Ruth was living now in three rooms that Joseph had let her have in that very first apartment house on the Heights, the one for which Anna had borrowed the money.
That house, he admitted with amusement, was a foolish kind of talisman to him. He didn’t suppose he’d ever sell it. Anyway, Ruth was living there. She paid a small rent. He would have given it to her for nothing, but she wouldn’t accept that and he admired her refusal. He would have done the same if the circumstances had been reversed. God forbid.

Waiting at Fifty-sixth Street for the light to change, he was shocked into a reminder of sadness by a window that still displayed the black-bordered photograph of Roosevelt, dead two weeks. It was a personal grief, the death of this President. A solemn grief: the funeral train from Georgia, the slow march down Pennsylvania Avenue, the horse with stirrups reversed. Symbolism of the fallen warrior. A brave man. He felt he would miss that man, his fine confident voice on the radio.

Yet there were people who had hated him … and not the very rich alone, those who thought of him as a traitor to his class! Joseph knew a workman who had lost twin sons in the war; he blamed Roosevelt, said we should never have gotten into the war. But that was nonsense; frantic, bitter, ranting. Understandable, but ranting all the same. Malone had lost a son-in-law, Irene’s husband, killed at Iwo Jima, and now Irene had come back home with her two babies … not an easy thing for the Malones, what with teen-agers of their own still at home, but they never complained.

Irene’s boy looked like Eric, or what they could remember of Eric when he was two. Joseph felt his mouth twist. Always that small involuntary twisting when certain things came to mind.

Don’t think of them, then. Don’t think of what can’t be helped.

The light changed and the crowd poured across the street. Crowds looked different today from the ones you used to see in midtown New York. For one thing, they were larger. The city was so crowded that you couldn’t get into a restaurant, couldn’t get a hotel room. He’d had an
architect come in from Pittsburgh last week and they’d had to put him up at home. People were jamming the shops; people who’d never had anything before the war were coming in to the fancy stores with cash to buy furs and pianos and diamond watches, never even asking the price of anything!

For me too, Joseph thought, and in a very limited way, it’s been like the twenties all over. The land they had scrimped for during the late thirties—when Anna said they were crazy to go into real estate again—had doubled and tripled. They’d built three hundred houses for the workers at the Great Gulf Aviation plant on Long Island, just rolled them out in rows on the old potato fields and sold every one in eight weeks’ time.

Then they had moved on and done it again.

Yes, like the twenties, except for a steadier caution. He’d never again feel as confident—and ignorant—as he had back then. He knew now what can happen.

Knew also what a terrible thing it is that there is so much wealth to be made out of human blood
.

Still, that was the way of things. Now his desk and his head were full of plans again for undertakings they would start as soon as the war was over. They said it was only a matter of months.… Suburban shopping centers, he reflected; he ought to get to some of the big stores before anybody else did.

They had a good office now. Maroon carpet. Nice prints. Dignified, but not lavish. Anna would see to that. He smiled. She was always restraining him, Anna was, and she was probably right. Not that they could have afforded anything too rich anyway, the rent was so high. They were in a very good building, a prestigious address near Grand Central. Convenient for commuting, too, now that they’d got the house.

Let’s see. Three months to the closing and a couple more to fix it up. They ought to be in by the end of September.

Anna hadn’t wanted a house, but then, Anna never wanted very much of anything. She had her friends and her
Friday afternoon concerts again, now that they had a few dollars to spare for things like that. She had her women’s committees for half a dozen charities. And when she wasn’t doing any of these, she read.

But he had been wanting a house for a long time. When the Malones bought a place in Larchmont a year ago he’d made up his mind. They had spent every fall and winter Sunday driving around Westchester. He reflected how perverse it is that when you haven’t got a cent all you see are things you wish you could have; now that he had a good down payment and could afford something decent, they couldn’t seem to find it. Maybe because they didn’t really know what they were looking for? And then two weeks ago on one of those warm, windy days of April, they’d come upon this house and Anna had gone crazy over it.

He couldn’t understand her. It was a big old place, probably in its eightieth year, with twelve—he’d counted in dismay and disbelief—twelve gables and three chimneys. It had a spiral staircase, a turret, six carved marble fireplaces, even in the bedrooms, and a porch fringed with wooden lace. Name of heaven! Even the young man from the real estate agency had looked doubtful. Not a very good salesman. Brand-new and inexperienced, to wear his doubts on his face!

“What style do you call this?” Joseph had demanded of him.

“Well, sir, they tell me it’s an authentic type, Gothic Victorian. I’d have called it gingerbread, myself. This was the Lovejoy family home,” he had explained. “One of the oldest families in the area.” And, irrelevantly, “I’m not from here, I’m from Buffalo. But I’m told they once owned a couple of hundred acres. The last one of the Lovejoys has a house over there, over the rise; you can’t see it unless you go upstairs and look out over the trees. He wants to sell this old place off with two acres.”