Extreme Magic (8 page)

The cab swung into the line of cars at the side entrance to Grand Central. Eleanor bent over the basket and took out the baby. “You take the basket, Dad.” Then, as if forced by the motion of the cab, she reached over and thrust the bundle of baby onto Helene’s narrow brown crepe lap, and held it there until Helene grasped it diffidently with her suede gloves.

“She isn’t—she won’t wet, will she?” said Helene.

A porter opened the door. Eleanor followed her mother and father out and then reached back into the cab. “I’ll take her now.” She stood there hugging the bundle, feeling it close, a round comforting cyst of love and possession.

Making her way through the snarled mess of traffic on the curb, Aunt Ruth came and stood beside her. “Remember what I told you!” she called to the departing driver, wagging her finger at him.

“What did you tell him?” said Eleanor.

“Hah! What I told him!” Her aunt shrugged, the blunt Russian shrug of inevitability, her shrewd eyes ruminant over the outthrust chin, the spread hands. “Can I fix life? Life in Brooklyn on sixty dollars a week? I’m only a medical doctor!” She pushed her hat forward on her braids. “Here! Give me that baby!” She whipped the baby from Eleanor’s grasp and held it with authority, looking speculatively at Eleanor. “Go on! Walk ahead with them!” She grinned. “Don’t I make a fine nurse? Expensive, too!”

Down at the train, Eleanor stood at the door of the roomette while the other women, jammed inside, divided their ardor for the miniature between the baby and the telescoped comforts of the cubicle. At the end of the corridor, money and a pantomime of cordiality passed between her father and the car porter. Her father came back down the aisle, solid gray man, refuge of childhood, grown shorter than she. She stared down at his shoulder, rigid, her eyes unfocused, restraining herself from laying her head upon it.

“All taken care of,” he said. “He’s got the formula in the icebox and he’ll take care of getting you off in the morning. Wish you could have stayed longer, darling.” He pressed an envelope into her hand. “Buy yourself something. Or the baby.” He patted her shoulder. “No…now never mind now. This is between you and me.”

“Guess we better say good-by, dear,” said her mother, emerging from the roomette with the others. Doors slammed, passengers swirled around them. They kissed in a circle, nibbling and diffident.

Aunt Ruth did not kiss her, but took Eleanor’s hands and looked at her, holding on to them. She felt her aunt’s hands moving softly on her own. The cousins watched brightly.

“What’s this, what’s this?” said her aunt. She raised Eleanor’s hands, first one, then the other, as if weighing them in a scale, rubbed her own strong, diagnostic thumb back and forth over Eleanor’s right hand, looking down at it. They all looked down at it. It was noticeably more spatulate, coarser-skinned than the left, and the middle knuckles were thickened.

“So…,” said her aunt. “So-o…,” and her enveloping stare had in it that warmth, tinged with resignation, which she offered indiscriminately to cabmen, to nieces, to life. “So…, the ‘rabbi’s daughter’ is washing dishes!” And she nodded, in requiem.

“Prescription?” said Eleanor, smiling wryly back.

“No prescription!” said her aunt. “In my office I see hundreds of girls like you. And there is no little pink pill to fit.” She shrugged, and then whirled on the others. “Come. Come on.” They were gone, in a last-minute flurry of ejaculations. As the train began to wheel past the platform, Eleanor caught a blurred glimpse of their faces, her parents and aunt in anxious trio, the two cousins neatly together.

People were still passing by the door of the roomette, and a woman in one group paused to admire the baby, frilly in the delicately lined basket, “Ah, look!” she cooed. “Sweet! How old is she?”

“Three months.”

“It is a she?”

Eleanor nodded.

“Sweet!” the woman said again, shaking her head admiringly, and went on down the aisle. Now the picture was madonna-perfect, Eleanor knew—the harsh, tintype lighting centraled down on her and the child, glowing in the viscous paneling that was grained to look like wood, highlighted in the absurd plush-cum-metal fixtures of this sedulously planned manger. She shut the door.

The baby began to whimper. She made it comfortable for the night, diapering it quickly, clipping the pins in the square folds, raising the joined ankles in a routine that was like a jigging ballet of the fingers. Only after she had made herself ready for the night, hanging the dress quickly behind a curtain, after she had slipped the last prewarmed bottle out of its case and was holding the baby close as it fed, watching the three-cornered pulse of the soft spot winking in and out on the downy head—only then did she let herself look closely at her two hands.

The difference between them was not enough to attract casual notice, but enough, when once pointed out, for anyone to see. She remembered Stengel’s strictures on practicing with the less able left one. “Don’t think you can gloss over, Miss. It shows!” But that the scrubbing hand, the working hand, would really “show” was her first intimation that the daily makeshift could become cumulative, could leave its imprint on the flesh with a crude symbolism as dully real, as conventionally laughable, as the first wrinkle, the first gray hair.

She turned out the light and stared into the rushing dark. The physical change was nothing, she told herself, was easily repaired; what she feared almost to phrase was the death by postponement, the slow uneventful death of impulse. “Hundreds of girls like you,” she thought, fearing for the first time the compromises that could arrive upon one unaware, not in the heroic renunciations, but erosive, gradual, in the slow chip-chipping of circumstance. Outside the window the hills of the Hudson Valley loomed and receded, rose up, piled, and slunk again into foothills. For a long time before she fell asleep she probed the dark for their withdrawing shapes, as if drama and purpose receded with them.

In the morning the porter roused her at six, returning an iced bottle of formula, and one warmed and made ready. She rose with a granular sense of return to the real, which lightened as she attended to the baby and dressed. Energized, she saw herself conquering whatever niche Dan had found for them, revitalizing the unknown house as she had other houses, with all the artifices of her New York chic, squeezing ragouts from the tiny salary spent cagily at the A & P, enjoying the baby instead of seeing her in the groggy focus of a thousand tasks. She saw herself caught up at odd hours in the old exaltation of practice, even if they had to hire a mute piano, line a room with cork. Nothing was impossible to the young, bogey-dispersing morning.

The station ran past the window, such a long one, sliding through the greasy lemon-colored lights, that she was almost afraid they were not going to stop, or that it was the wrong one, until she saw Dan’s instantly known contour, jointed, thin, and his face, raised anxiously to the train windows with the vulnerability of people who do not know they are observed. She saw him for a minute as other passengers, brushing their teeth hastily in the washrooms, might look out and see him, a young man, interesting because he was alone on the platform, a nice young man in a thick jacket and heavy work pants, with a face full of willingness and anticipation. Who would get off for him?

As she waited in the jumble of baggage at the car’s end, she warned herself that emotion was forever contriving toward moments which, when achieved, were not single and high as they ought to have been, but often splintered slowly—just walked away on the little centrifugal feet of detail. She remembered how she had mulled before their wedding night, how she had been unable to see beyond the single devouring picture of their two figures turning, turning toward one another. It had all happened, it had all been there, but memory could not recall it so, retaining instead, with the pedantic fidelity of some poet whose interminable listings recorded obliquely the face of the beloved but never invoked it, a whole rosary of irrelevancies, in the telling of which the two figures merged and were lost. Again she had the sense of life pushing her on by minute, imperceptible steps whose trend would not be discerned until it was too late, as the tide might encroach upon the late swimmer, making a sea of the sand he left behind.

“Dan!” she called. “Dan!”

He ran toward her. She wanted to run too, to leap out of the hemming baggage and fall against him, rejoined. Instead, she and the bags and the basket were jockeyed off the platform by the obsequious porter, and she found herself on the gray boards of the station, her feet still rocking with the leftover rhythm of the train, holding the basket clumsily between her and Dan, while the train washed off hoarsely behind them. He took the basket from her, set it down, and they clung and kissed, but in all that ragged movement, the moment subdivided and dispersed.

“Good Lord, how big she is!” he said, poking at the baby with a shy, awkward hand.

“Mmm. Tremendous!” They laughed together, looking down.

“Your shoes—what on earth?” she said. They were huge, laced to the ankle, the square tips inches high, like blocks of wood on the narrow clerkly feet she remembered.

“Safety shoes. You have to wear them around a foundry. Pretty handy if a casting drops on your toe.”

“Very swagger.” She smiled up at him, her throat full of all there was to tell—how, in the country, she had spoken to no one but the groceryman for so long that she had begun to monologue to the baby; how she had built up the first furnace fire piece by piece, crouching before it in awe and a sort of pride, hoping, as she shifted the damper chains, that she was pulling the right one; how the boy who was to mow the lawn had never come, and how at last she had taken a scythe to the knee-deep, insistent grass and then grimly, jaggedly, had mown. But now, seeing his face dented with fatigue, she saw too his grilling neophyte’s day at the foundry, the evenings when he must have dragged hopefully through ads and houses, subjecting his worn wallet and male ingenuousness to the soiled witcheries of how many landlords, of how many narrow-faced householders tipping back in their porch chairs, patting tenderly at their bellies, who would suck at their teeth and look him over. “You permanent here, mister?” Ashamed of her city-bred heroisms, she said nothing.

“You look wonderful,” he said. “Wonderful.”

“Oh.” She looked down. “A far cry from.”

“I borrowed a car from one of the men, so we can go over in style.” He swung the basket gaily under one arm. “Let’s have breakfast first, though.”

“Yes, let’s.” She was not eager to get to the house.

They breakfasted in a quick-lunch place on the pallid, smudged street where the car was parked, and she waited, drinking a second cup of coffee from a grainy white mug while Dan went back to the station to get the trunk. The mug had an indistinct blue V on it in the middle of a faded blue line running around the rim; it had probably come secondhand from somewhere else. The fork she had used had a faint brassiness showing through its nickel-colored tines and was marked “Hotel Ten Eyck, Albany,” although this was not Albany. Even the restaurant, on whose white, baked look the people made gray transient blurs which slid and departed, had the familiar melancholy which pervaded such places because they were composed everywhere, in a hundred towns, of the same elements, but were never lingered in or personally known. This town would be like that too; one would be able to stand in the whirling center of the five-and-dime and fancy oneself in a score of other places where the streets had angled perhaps a little differently and the bank had been not opposite the post office, but a block down. There would not even be a need for fancy because, irretrievably here, one was still in all the resembling towns, and going along these streets one would catch oneself nodding to faces known surely, plumbed at a glance, since these were overtones of faces in all the other towns that had been and were to be.

They drove through the streets, which raised an expectation she knew to be doomed, but cherished until it should be dampened by knowledge. Small houses succeeded one another, gray, coffee-colored, a few white ones, many with two doors and two sets of steps.

“Marlborough Road,” she said. “My God.”

“Ours is Ravenswood Avenue.”

“No!”

“Slicker!” he said. “Ah, darling, I can’t believe you’re here.” His free arm tightened and she slid down on his shoulder. The car made a few more turns, stopped in the middle of a block, and was still.

The house, one of the white ones, had two close-set doors, but the two flights of steps were set at opposite ends of the ledge of porch, as if some craving for a privacy but doubtfully maintained within had leaked outside. Hereabouts, in houses with the cramped deadness of diagrams, was the special ugliness created by people who would keep themselves a toehold above the slums by the exercise of a terrible, ardent neatness which had erupted into the foolish or the grotesque—the two niggling paths in the common driveway, the large trellis arching pompously over nothing. On Sundays they would emerge, the fathers and mothers, dressed soberly, even threadbare, but dragging children outfitted like angelic visitants from the country of the rich, in poke bonnets and suitees of pink and mauve, larded triumphantly with fur.

As Dan bent over the lock of one of the doors, he seemed to her like a man warding off a blow.

“Is the gas on?” she said hurriedly. “I’ve got one more bottle.”

He nodded. “It heats with gas, you know. That’s why I took it. They have cheap natural gas up here.” He pushed the door open, and the alien, anti-people smell of an empty house came out toward them.

“I know. You said. Wait till I tell you about me and the furnace in the other place.” Her voice died away as, finally, they were inside.

He put the basket on the floor beside him. “Well,” he said, “this am it.”

“Why, there’s the sofa!” she said. “It’s so funny to see everything—just two days ago in Erie, and now here.” Her hand delayed on the familiar pillows, as if on the shoulder of a friend. Then, although a glance had told her that no festoonings of the imagination were going to change this place, there was nothing to do but look.