The Early Stories (57 page)

“Big
—bed!
”

“O.K.”

“Ogay.”

Adjusting to the lack of light, he perceived that the bottle, nested in a crumpled sheet, was drained. Little Jane had been standing in her crib, one foot on the edge, as if in ballet school. For two weeks she had been gathering nerve for the time she would climb the crib's wall and drop free outside. He lifted her out, breathing “Ooh,
heavy
,” and took her to the wide low bed made of two beds. She clung to the fuzzy blanket—with milk, her main soporific.

Beside her on the bed, he began their story. “Once upon a time, in the big, big woods—” She flipped ecstatically at the known cadence. “Now, you relax. There was a tiny little creature name of Barry Mouse.”

“Mouff!” she cried, and sat straight up, as if she had heard one. She looked down at him for confirmation.

“Barry Mouse,” he said. “And one day, when Barry Mouse was walking through the woods, he came to a great big tree, and in the top of the great big tree what do you think there was?”

At last she yielded to the insistent pressure of his hand and fell back, her heavy blond head sinking into the pillow. He repeated, “What do you think there was?”

“Owl.”

“That's right. Up at the top of the tree there was an owl, and the owl said, ‘I'm going to eat you, Barry Mouse.' And Barry Mouse said, ‘No, no.' So Owl said, ‘O.K., then why don't you
hop
on my
back
and we'll
fly
to the
moon?
' And so Barry Mouse hopped on Owl's back and awaay they went—”

Jane turned on her side, so her great face was an inch from his. She giggled and drummed her feet against his abdomen, solidly. Neither Lee nor his wife, who shared the one bedtime story, had ever worked out what happened on the moon. Once the owl and the mouse were aloft, their imaginations collapsed. Knowing his voice daren't stop now, when the child's state was possibly transitional and he felt as if he were bringing to his lips an absolutely brimful glass of liquid, he continued with some nonsense about cinnamon trees and Chinese maidens, no longer bothering to keep within the child's vocabulary. Little Jane began touching his face with her open mouth, a sure sign she was sleepy. “Hey,” he murmured when one boneless moist kiss landed directly on his lips. “Jane is so sleepy,” he said, “because Daddy is sleepy, and Mommy is sleepy, and Bear is ssleepy, and Doll is sssleeepy.…”

She lay quiet, her face in shadow, her fine straight yellow hair fanned across the pillow. Neither he nor his wife was blond; they had brown hair, rat-color. There was little blondness in either family: just Jane's Aunt Ruth, and Lee's sister, Margaret, eight years older than he and married before he had left grade school. She had been the good one of the children and he the bright, difficult one.

Presuming his daughter asleep, he lifted himself on one elbow. She kicked his belly, rolled onto her back, and said in a voice loud with drowsiness, “Baaiy Mouff.”

Stroking her strange hair, he began again, “Once upon a time, in the deep, deep woods, there lived a little creature …” This time, he seemed to succeed.

As he lowered her into her crib, her eyes opened. He said, “O.K.?”

She pronounced beautifully, “O.K.”

“Gee, she's practically epileptic with energy,” he said, blinded by the brilliant light of the room where his wife had remained.

“She's a good child,” Jane affirmed, speaking out of her thoughts while left alone rather than in answer to his remark. “Your dessert is on the table.” She had kept hers intact on the sofa beside her, so they could eat their raspberry whip together. She also had beside her an orange-juice glass half full of vermouth.

When the clock said seven-fifty, he said, “Why don't you run off to the movie? You never have any fun.”

“All right,” she said. “Go ahead. Go.”

“No, I don't mean that. I mean you should go.” Still, he smiled.

“You can go as a reward for putting her to sleep.”

“Venus, I don't
want
to go,” he said, without great emphasis, since at that moment he was rustling through the paper. He had difficulty finding the theatre section, and decided. “No, if you're too tired, no one will. I can't leave you. You need me too much.”

“If you want to, go; don't torment me about it,” she said, drawing on her vermouth and staring into
The New Republic
.

“Do you think,” he asked, “when Jane is sixteen, she'll go around in the back seat of Chevrolets and leave her poor old daddy?”

“I hope so,” Jane said.

“Will she have your bosom?”

“She'll think it's her own.”

He earnestly tried to visualize his daughter matured, and saw little but a charm bracelet on a slim, fair wrist. The forearms of teen-age girls tapered amazingly, toward little cages of bird bones. Charm bracelets were
démodé
already, he supposed.

Lee, committed to a long leisured evening at home, of the type that seemed precious on the nights when they had to go out, was unnerved by its wide opportunities. He nibbled at the reading matter closest to hand—an article, “Is the Individual a Thing of the Past?,” and last Sunday's comic section. At
Alley Oop
he checked himself and went into the kitchen. Thinking of the oatmeal cookies habitual in his parents' home, he opened the cupboard and found four kinds of sugar and seven of cereal, five infants' and two adults'. Jane was always buying some esoteric grind of sugar for a pastrymaking project, then discovering she couldn't use it. He smiled at this foible and carried his smile like an egg on a spoon into the living room, where his wife saw it but of course not the point of it, that it was a smile generated by love of her. He leaned his forehead against the bookcase, by the anthology shelf, and considered all the poetry he had once read evaporating in him, a vast dying sea.

As he stood there, his father floated from behind and possessed him, occupying specifically the curved area of the jawbone. He understood perfectly why that tall stoical man was a Mason, church-council member, and Scout-troop leader, always with an excuse for leaving the house.

Jane, concentrating all the pleasures her day had withheld into the hour remaining before she became too drowsy to think, put Bach on the record-player. As she did so, her back and arms made angles reminding him of her more angular, less drowsy college self.

When she returned to the sofa, he asked, “What makes you so pretty?” Then, having to answer it himself, he said, “Childbearing.”

Preoccupied with some dim speckled thinker in her magazine, she fondled the remark briefly and set it aside, mistakenly judging it to be a piece of an obscure, ill-tempered substance—him “getting at” her. He poured a little vermouth for himself and struck a pose by the mantel, trying to find with his legs and shoulders angles equivalent in effect to those she had made putting on the record. As she sat there, studious, he circumscribed her, every detail, with the tidal thought
Mine, mine
. She wasn't watching. She thought she knew what to expect from him, tonight at least.

Later
, he resolved, and, in a mood of resolution, read straight through the Jones Very section of F. O. Matthiessen's anthology of American poetry. The poet's stubborn sensibility aroused a readerly stubbornness; when Lee had finished, it was too late, the hour had slipped by. By the clock it was ten-thirty; for his wife, having risen with little Jane, it was after one. Her lids were pink. This was one of those days when you sow and not reap.

Two hissing, clattering elves working a minor fairy-tale transposition, together they lifted the crib containing the sleeping girl and carried it into the living room, and shut the doors. Instead of undressing, Jane picked up odds and ends of his—spare shoes and the socks he had worn yesterday and the tie he had worn today. Next she went into the bathroom and emerged wearing a cotton nightie. In bed beside him she read a page of
Swann's Way
and fell asleep under the harsh light. He turned it off and thought furiously, the family's second insomniac. The heat of Jane's body made the bed stuffy. He hated these low beds; he lay miles below the ceiling, deep in the pit. The radiator, hidden in the windowsill by his head, breathed lavishly. High above, through a net of crosses, a few stars strove where the brownish glow of New York's night sky gave out. The child cried once, but, thank God, in her sleep.

He recalled what he always forgot in the interval of day, his insomnia game. Last night he had finished
D
in a burst of glory: Yvonne Dionne, Zuleika Dobson. He let the new letter be
G
. Senator Albert Gore. Benny Goodman, Constance Garnett,
David
Garnett, Edvard Grieg. Goethe was Wolfgang and Gorki was Maxim. Farley Granger, Graham Greene (or Greta Garbo,
or
George Gobel), Henry Green.
I
was always difficult. You kept thinking of Ilka Chase. He wrestled and turned and cursed his wife, her heedless rump way on his side. To ward off the temptation to nudge her awake, he padded after a glass of water, grimacing into the
mirror. As he returned his head to the cooled pillow, it came to him, first name and surname both at once: Ira Gershwin. Ira Gershwin: he savored it before proceeding. John Galsworthy, Kathryn Grayson … Lou Gehrig, poor devil …

He and Jane walked along a dirt road, in high, open-field country, like the farm owned by Mark, his mother's brother. He was glad that Jane was seeing the place, because while he was growing up it had given him a sense of wealth to have an uncle attached to a hundred such well-kept acres. His relationship with Jane seemed to be at that stage when it was important for each side of the betrothal to produce external signs of respectability. “But
I
am even richer,” he abruptly announced. She appeared not to notice. They walked companionably but in silence, and seemed responsible for the person with them, a female their height. Lee gathered the impression, despite a veil against his eyes, that this extra girl was blonde and sturdy and docile. His sense of her sullenness may have been nothing but his anxiety to win her approval, reflected. Though her features were hard to make out, the emotion he bore her was precise: the coppery, gratified, somewhat adrift feeling he would get when physically near girls he admired in high school. The wind had darkened and grown purposeful.

Jane went back, though the countryside remained the same, and he was dousing, with a lawn hose attached to the side of the house, the body of this third person. Her head rested on the ground; he held her ankles and slowly, easily turned the light, stiff mass, to wet every area. It was important that water wash over every bit of skin. He was careful; the task, like rinsing the suds off of an automobile, was absorbing, rather than pleasant or unpleasant.

A Gift from the City
 

Like most happy people, they came from well inland. Amid this city's mysteries, they had grown very close. When the phone on his desk rang, he knew it was she. “Jim? Say. Something awful has happened.”

“What?” His voice had contracted and sounded smaller. He pictured his wife and small daughter attacked by teen-agers, derelicts, coal men, beneath the slender sparse trees of Tenth Street; oh, if only love were not immaterial! If only there were such a thing as enchantment, and he could draw, with a stick, a circle of safety around them that would hold, though they were on Tenth near Sixth and he forty blocks north.

“I guess it shouldn't be awful but it's so upsetting. Martha and I were in the apartment, we had just come back from the park, and I was making tea for her tea party—”

“Nnn. And?”

“And the doorbell rang. And I didn't know who could be calling, but I pressed the buzzer and went to the stairs, and there was this young Negro. It seemed strange, but then he looked awfully frightened and really smaller than I am. So I stood at the banister and he stood on the middle of the stairs, and he told me this story about how he had brought his family up from North Carolina in somebody else's truck and they had found a landlord who was giving them a room but they had no furniture or food. I couldn't understand half of what he said.” Her voice broke here.