by Belva Plain
“I’m twenty-four. You seem older than eighteen. You’re very, very serious.”
“I guess I am. It’s one of my faults.”
“Why, whoever tells you that?”
“Oh—people.”
He considered. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. Living is a serious enough business, God knows. Especially living around here. Did you know they found out later there were three babies left in that building that day? They found the bodies after the fire had burned itself out.”
Hennie shuddered, and he went on, “I get in a rage when I think of people getting rich out of owning such rat holes! I want to tear them all down or blow them all up!” He broke off. “Excuse me. I want to change the world. I make myself ridiculous.”
She said gently, “You’re not ridiculous at all.”
“Yes, I am. I’m listening to myself talking too much. That’s odd, too, because I’m often criticized for being too silent. But when I get excited about something, then I don’t know when to stop talking.”
Florence taught: Always allow a man to talk about himself. Encourage him. Men love that. And feeling ashamed of using such a trick, Hennie said, “I like to hear you. Tell me about yourself.”
“There’s nothing much to tell. Anyway, I wouldn’t know how to begin.”
“At the beginning. Where you grew up.”
He laughed. “Let’s say I was surrounded by cigars. The trash cans on the sidewalks were always full of tobacco leaves. But my father wasn’t a cigar maker, he was a tailor. My mother was dead. I don’t remember her.”
He stopped, as if the sudden memory had halted him. She thought she saw, in the pained contraction of his forehead, something more than a natural regret over a mother. He knew a fundamental melancholy. It surprised her that she could so quickly recognize something of herself in a stranger, different as they were, his face so mobile and hers so quiet.
“That’s not all,” she said, wanting to recall him from wherever he was.
“What else do you want me to tell you?”
“You could tell me what you wanted to be.”
“Be! Well, there was a while there when I had some grandiose ideas about music. When I was a kid, my piano teacher used to praise me, so I began to have a silly vision of myself at a concert grand, you know, dressed in white tie and tails—me, in a tailcoat! Taking bows, with the audience on its feet, going wild.” He frowned. “Anyway, I got over that. Well, I didn’t want to be a lawyer—all that haggling and arguing—and, unlike half the boys in the neighborhood, I didn’t want to be a doctor, either. But I did like science. I did chores in a chemistry lab one summer and that decided me. So I went to City College and now I’m a science teacher.” He made a small, embarrassed grimace. “I do my little experiments on the side.”
“What do you do?”
It was working, Florence was right. A man wanted to talk about himself.
“You’ve heard of Charles Brush?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“He developed the carbon arc light. I like to study things like that and the power of electrical resonance and … oh, many things … it’s hard to explain.”
“Don’t try. You might as well talk to me in Bulgarian.”
He laughed. “Well, it’s just that I admire men who have ideas, men like Edison and Bell—you know. I’ve got notebooks filled with ideas, most of them not much use, probably. Though I did invent something pretty good once.… I’m boring you.”
“Of course you’re not! What was the invention?”
“It was an electric arc lamp that could burn longer than the old ones.”
“What happened to it?”
“It’s being manufactured. I got five hundred dollars for it. A friend of mine has a cousin, a lawyer, and he sold it for me. The five hundred came in handy right then, helped make my father’s dying a little more comfortable.” Dan’s jaw tightened. Then he turned to her with an apologetic smile. “I still have crazy dreams that I’ll discover something marvelous, like sending messages around the world by air, or maybe using electrical machines to diagnose disease. Crazy, you know. Who am I, after all?”
“It’s not crazy. You’re only twenty-four. You can’t tell yet what you’ll do.”
“It’s no matter if I never do. At least I can do some good by teaching, I hope. There’s so much intelligence here on these streets, waiting to be unlocked and set free! It would be easier, though, one could do so much more in the school if the life outside were better. That’s where science comes in, science and socialism.”
“You’re not a socialist!” Hennie had never met an actual socialist.
“My sentiments are. Not officially. I don’t care about politics, which would shock the political types at these tables. I’m not with any party. I just like to get out and try to do things that need doing.”
“You really do remind me of Uncle David.”
“Oh-ho, that’s a real compliment! I can’t begin to tell you what I think of him. Honest, simple, good. You know, sometimes I think he has second sight, that man, and can read your mind. Well, I don’t actually mean that, but he is rare, that you have to say. Rare.”
“I think so too. In the family, you know,” Hennie said shyly, “they think he’s awfully odd. You should hear the discussions at our house! My father and my sister’s husband always vote Republican, you see. They think Uncle David’s a wild-eyed radical, but I don’t find him so.”
“Then your family must find you odd, too, and radical?”
“I think they do. They love me, but I think they do.”
“Is it lonely for you in your house, then? I imagine it must be.”
“Yes. A little.”
They looked candidly at one another. They made solemn appraisal, eye to eye. The contact must have lasted a minute, a long time for eyes to meet without turning away. And Hennie had an extraordinary sense of startling reality, sharp and clear, as if she had just waked up to that reality, which made trivial and insignificant whatever she had known until then.
Dan pushed his chair back. “Come,” he said, “it’s late, and I don’t want your parents to be furious that I kept you out.”
The night had deepened. It was beautiful, with fantastic dark blue clouds in the pale sky, a night to walk and walk and not go home. Here and there, at the street corners, a knot of youths jostled and smoked wherever the light from a candy store fanned out onto the sidewalk. On the top step of a meeting hall an orator was exhorting a small crowd.
“Christian mission to the Jews,” Dan remarked.
“Let’s stop, it should be interesting.”
“No.” Dan was firm. He led her by the elbow. “It can get very nasty. There’s always somebody who’s roused to fury one way or the other. I wouldn’t want you to be there. As for me, I never could understand all this passion about religion. A lot of foolishness, don’t you think so?”
“No.” No “tricks” anymore, nothing but the truth.
He asked her curiously, “You’re a believer, then?”
“Yes … there has to be something.” She looked up. The clouds were dispersing, opening the wide sky to a million stars. “All of that, and we down here, can’t be accidents. Beethoven, or men like your Edison, can’t be just accidents.”
He was looking down at her now, paying gentle attention to her; the look on his face, the lovely night, the solemn subject, all filled her.
“Are you observant, then, Hennie?”
“Yes, but not like Uncle David. He’s Orthodox. We go to Temple Emanu-El.”
“I’ve left all that behind me, but if ever I were to be observant, I’d have to be Orthodox.”
They had reached the entrance of Hennie’s building. A wind rose, rustling the last leaves from the trees. Dan looked up and down the street.
“I wonder,” he said slowly, “how anyone can believe in Him. Such misery. And the worst of all are the wars.”
“Those are not God’s fault, but ours,” she said. “Yo
u should talk to Uncle David. You admire him so much.”
“I do, I do. Yes, it’s a good thing to be a believer—if one can. And it suits you, Hennie.” He turned her face up to the light. “Such a kind face. And lovely eyes, grave eyes. I want to see you again. May I?”
There was such a catch in her throat that she could only nod.
“I shall call on your parents. They will expect that. Good night then, Hennie.”
She fled upstairs. Tears came to her eyes, the softest, most bewildering tears.
He is like nobody else in all the world.
“Do you remember when we talked about Dan Roth, Uncle David? Well, I’ve met him. It was two weeks ago when he came to the Thanksgiving festival, and I’ve seen him twice since then. We went to the Aquarium and to Central Park last Sunday.” She heard her voice, faster and higher in pitch than usual.
The old man’s untidy eyebrows rose. “He came to call on you? Met your parents?”
“Of course. How else would I get to go walking out with him?”
“Whatever did they talk about?”
“Oh, things. Nothing much, just the usual polite things.”
But there had been questions, leading questions, and it had all come out, about the tailor father, and the struggle, and teaching school. Angelique had asked the most questions, so courteous always, with the small smile and the nodding head.
And Dan had been the same, answering with the same small smiles and nods, a proper minuet of nodding heads, so that you would have thought they must be despising each other, and yet neither, afterward, had said anything except “He’s an intelligent young man” and “Your parents are gracious people.”
“He has invited me to the opera. I don’t think Mama wants me to go, but she can’t very well refuse, since he invited me in her presence.”
Uncle David took the pipe out of his mouth. “What you’re telling me is that your parents—your mother—didn’t like him.”
“Of course they would prefer someone like Walter.”
It was what they had not said after Dan had left, the words they had not used that mattered: family background, meaning, at bottom, money. Money for things to handle and hold, as when Angelique moves the candelabra after dinner or fingers her pearls.
“They do make quite a contrast, don’t they, Daniel Roth and my brother-in-law?”
Uncle David’s response was a surprise. “There is, after all, nothing that wrong about Walter Werner.”
“I didn’t mean that there was, but I do prefer Dan’s sort of man.”
“Oh, I agree. Yet things—people—are not all that simple.”
The remark was trite, a statement of the obvious. Still, there was a strange ring to it.
* * *
They went to hear Rigoletto. Florence and Walter, undoubtedly at Angelique’s instigation, went with them. Walter had insisted on providing the four seats in the fifth row at the center.
“I sit in the top balcony, when I don’t stand,” Dan remarked.
Above them, the Diamond Horseshoe glittered and spangled; there was much back-and-forth motion up there, visits among the boxes, late arrivals and second-act departures.
“That’s Mrs. Astor,” Florence said, offering her opera glasses to view a large, bejeweled lady.
Dan whispered, “Now I know where the expression ‘Astor’s pet horse’ comes from.”
Hennie laughed and was grateful that he had whispered. The remark would have been a dreadful affront to Florence, for whom the Mrs. Astors of the world were objects of veneration.
Later, Walter took them all to supper at Delmonico’s. Although Hennie had at first refused to borrow her sister’s evening cloak, she was now relieved that her mother had made her accept it, for the room was a flower garden of satins and velvets, and of white shoulders belonging to women so exquisite, it was hard not to stare. Hennie had been there only twice before.
“Well, what do you think of it?” Walter asked. He had a paternal manner toward Hennie. His eyes, magnified by his glasses, were penetrating.
Disliking him, she blurted, “I’m not sure what I think, Walter. It doesn’t seem quite real to me.”
And he had laughed, with that cool, not unfriendly laugh, the head tilted, considering her as though she had said something witty.
And she went on—why did she persist?—“Oh, it’s beautiful, but it’s like a play, do you see what I mean, as if everyone were acting a part. A play or a ceremony.”
“Now that,” Florence said, irked, but certainly not as sharp-toned as she would have been if Dan, the outsider, had not been there, “that is really nonsense, Hennie.”
Dan came to Hennie’s defense. “I understand exactly what Hennie means by ‘unreal.’ Yes, I do.” And he looked around. The lofty space was filled with animation: laughter, swirling dresses, popping champagne corks, scurrying waiters, lavish furs draped on the backs of chairs. He continued slowly, “There’s a sense of true value, of truth worth, among the workers. There’s so much waste here, more food than can be eaten, more and too much of everything. I have been determined all my life never to fall into the trap of wanting luxury. Once you begin, there’s no end to what you will find necessary, even when you don’t deserve it.”
His head went up as he said it. There was not a man in the room to compare with him. Hennie had not failed to notice the women who had glanced at Dan when he walked in, their glances lingering an extra fraction of a second. People looked at him, not at her. And for an instant something cold fell in her chest, a weight, cold and heavy, so that she had to force herself to raise it.
“You must remember,” Walter admonished, “that these people worked for what they have, or their parents or grandparents did. And they do provide employment. They keep the country moving.”
Dan was stubborn. “Spending on armaments, that’s what really keeps the country moving, as you put it.”
“You don’t think we should be armed?” asked Walter.
And Hennie thought, as she felt an accumulating tension, why are we talking like this?
“We are spending like madmen,” Dan said. “Still, there are hopeful signs.” He went on, “That a blind despot like the Czar should call for a limitation of armaments is hopeful.”
The dialogue was a ball, thrown and immediately returned.
Walter replied, “I wouldn’t place too much hope in that. I don’t trust them in Europe, any of them.”
“Without some trust in the good intentions of one’s fellow man there can be no future.”
“If we are all to disarm, just as we are, that must mean everyone is satisfied with things as they are. Do you suppose France is content to let Germany keep Alsace-Lorraine? In my opinion, Germany has no right to it.”
When Dan raised his eyebrows, Walter laughed, a slight superior laugh.
“Do I surprise you? You must be thinking that because my parents are German-born, I am a Germanophile? No, I assure you. I am of another generation.”
“German, French, or whatnot, it makes no difference. They are all murdering thieves.”
Dan’s voice, although low, resounded. People at the adjacent table looked, and looked away. And Dan continued.
“Yes, the common man is taxed to pay for their monstrous weapons, advanced models, year after year, with money that could be used for electrification, clean power, to take the load off the human back. I myself, in my small way, have been working on—” He stopped. “I’m sorry. This isn’t the time or place.”
But Walter insisted, “You have to have weapons.” His neat mouth firmed. “It’s naive to think otherwise. Would you put your life’s savings on the table and leave the front door open?”
“You have to make a beginning,” Dan responded.
Now Florence intervened. “Mr. Roth is right, Walter. It isn’t the time for all this serious talk. We’ve come to enjoy ourselves.”
“Call me Dan. And scold me. I began it.”
“I will call you Dan, but I will not scold you.�
�� Florence smiled charmingly. “I think you have a very interesting point of view, and I’d like to hear more sometime. But right now, I don’t mind telling you, I’m starved. Shall we order?”
Let us have no rough edges. Smooth. Smooth. She was right to do that, Hennie knew. But Dan was right too.
Water and oil don’t mix. They would never like each other, any of them.
The winter blossomed. The ice-cold sky reflected its pure blue in the snow meadows of Central Park, and the tinkling bells of jolly sleighs sounded in the streets, while snow sprayed under the runners. At the St. Nicholas Rink, Hennie, in new striped woolen stockings, whirled with Dan: a couple together, striding and sliding in rhythm.
Oh, enchanted city! Every passerby smiled approval. The man on the freezing corner, who sold a flower for Hennie’s lapel, handed it over as if it were a gift. At the settlement, her most rowdy, unmanageable children were really only normal rascals, after all. People were so friendly, so good. One could love everyone.
“It shows on your face,” Olga said one evening, after an English class.
“What shows?” Hennie pretended not to understand, but she knew quite well; she had told Olga, having had to tell someone, and this girl—with the poor thin, white-faced young husband bent all day over a sewing machine—knew about love.
At night, Hennie sat at her window and dreamed. She had such longing for him, for his thick hair, shining as animal fur, for his sad mouth, his rounded eyelids, his beautiful hands. Such longing.
“It’s been a long time since you were here,” Uncle David said. “What have you been doing?”
She wanted to seem casual. “I’ve been seeing your friend Daniel Roth.”
“Oh? Where do you go together?”
“Walking. Skating. We went to the opera with Florence and Walter. Heard Rigoletto. It was marvelous.”
“Ah, yes … and how did it work out?”
Uncle David had a way of fixing you with his gaze, demanding an honest answer. So, dropping the careless manner, she replied, “Walter insisted on buying the seats and Dan didn’t like that very much.”
