by Belva Plain
“I should imagine not. He’s independent, if he’s anything at all.”
Uncle David paused, looking thoughtful. In a moment he would fumble with the pipe, preparing what he had to say. He struck a match and blew it out.
“Yes, yes, it’s a strange business, this man-woman thing. Making a choice, I mean. How does one ever know? And one’s whole life is in the balance.” He struck another match, lit the pipe, puffed, and removed the pipe. “Maybe that’s why I never married. My sister, your grandmother, how much do you remember of her, Hennie?”
You never knew what unexpected direction a conversation with Uncle David might take. He could be exasperating.
“Not much. She used to sing a German song when I was very little: ‘Du Bist wie eine Blume.’ ”
“ ‘You Are Like a Flower.’ She remembered that from her own childhood. Yes, a remarkable woman. She had tremendous courage, as I always tell you.”
And I don’t need to hear it again, Hennie thought.
“Maybe you didn’t know she had made the wrong marriage. She lived in misery with your grandfather for years.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, I don’t suppose there’s much use in resurrecting these things. It’s just that sometimes one remembers, and it can be painful to remember.”
Her mind was filled with today, the cold, glittering afternoon, and he was talking about people long dead. His tone was rueful, which she did not want, because it did not match the energy within her.
The old man began to clean his pen on a rag. His forehead was thoughtful; his hands went round and round. After a minute or two he remarked, “I suppose you find him very handsome?”
She was startled. “Who?”
“Why, Roth of course, who else? You didn’t think I meant Walter Werner, did you?”
“Well, you were talking about my grandfather.” She laughed, then answered lightly, “Oh, yes, don’t you think so too?”
“I do. And so does every woman who comes in sight of him, Hennie.”
“What can you mean?”
“What I say. All the women run after him. I’ve known him a while, you see, and I—”
“Am I running after him?” Hennie’s face prickled with the sudden heat of an intense blush. “Do you really think I would run after anyone, Uncle David?”
“No, you’re not bold enough, my dear.”
Not bold. But tenacious, Papa says. You never give up, in your quiet way.
“Other women are bold enough, though, Hennie. And that’s the trouble.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me, Uncle David.” Something hardened in her. Fear or anger, or both.
“He has too much charm for his own good. Some people are born like that. It’s as if they had a magnet in them.”
The glitter of light beyond the window hurt her eyes. She moved the chair.
“I don’t see what difference all that makes,” she said.
Don’t you? Don’t you?
“What if other women look at him? He can’t help that, can he?”
Again there was that slow business with the pipe. He does that because he has to think of an answer. And she waited.
“You see how it is, Hennie. There are men who can’t resist. They can’t be faithful to one woman. Yes, they love their wives, but still they can’t resist.”
“And you think …” Her voice was queer, falsetto. “You think Dan is like that?”
“Yes, I do. Don’t go falling in love with him, Hennie. Please don’t.”
She was silent, stricken, disbelieving.
“Are you in love with him, Hennie?”
She was still silent.
“He won’t do for you. I must tell you. Listen to me, Hennie, my dear. He loves women too much. That’s his failing.”
“After all the fine things you said about him!”
“Yes, and they were all true. But what I’m telling you now is true too.”
“Now you tell me! Why just now?”
“I never thought before that it would be necessary.”
She despised him, sitting there with his pipe and his pen and his skeleton on the shelf. He was old, and old people hated the young when they looked at them and realized what they had missed, what it was now too late for them to have.…
“I see that you’re angry at me.”
“I am. You have no right. You’re spoiling … spoiling,” she stammered.
“I don’t want you to be hurt, that’s all,” Uncle David said gently.
“I won’t be hurt. Or is there something else you’re not telling me?”
That Dan had committed some crime … no, no, impossible.
“There’s nothing more, I swear, but what I’ve said. Believe me, Hennie, I’m telling you something your mother wouldn’t tell you. She wouldn’t think it ‘nice.’ But I know that an unfaithful husband would break your heart. There are many women who can live with that, but I don’t think you could.” The old man gave her a smile, which she did not return. “Let me not make too much of this, though. A man comes to call a few times … that doesn’t mean you’ll be married. I only wanted to warn you. No harm done, I hope.”
She would not look at him. How dare he? A man was falling in love with her, she was certain of it. She drew herself up, smoothing her skirt; the womanly gesture reassured her.
Old man, old man, what do you know?
Oh, the damp first air of spring, the damp soft air! The Italian organ-grinder played “Santa Lucia” with passionate longing, grinding it out from one street into the next. Girls played hopscotch and boys shot marbles on the sidewalks. Dan and Hennie rode a tandem bicycle, singing, through Central Park. They walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and watched the sailing ships come up the river.
“Imagine! Around the Horn from China!” Hennie cried.
Dark yellow men on the deck, men in miniature from where they stood far above in the wind on the bridge, were hauling rope. She turned to face Dan.
“What does it make you think of? Tea? Silk? Red lacquer?”
He bent down to her. Tall as he was, he always had to lean down. “Of you. I can see myself in your eyes. Did you know they’ve got green in them?”
“Dan! They’re brown.”
Staring back into his eyes, she could see herself reflected. She was easy with him now; it seemed impossible that she could ever have been wary. He had done that for her.
“But there’s green all the same,” he insisted. “Not like any other eyes I’ve ever seen. You’re not like any girl I’ve ever known, either.”
She countered cheerfully. “How many have you known?”
Banter, light and happy, while the heart pounds.
“Oh, dozens. Hundreds, maybe. No, seriously, Hennie, you’re different from all of them. I’m in love with you. You know that, don’t you?”
She wanted to prolong the marvel of suspense. “You hardly know me!”
“Four months, almost. That’s long enough. Anyway, I know my own mind. The question is, do you?”
“Do I—”
“Know your own mind? Love me?”
The wind almost bore her faint voice away.
“I love you.”
“Darling Hennie.” His lips moved on her cheek. “We’ll have good years together, a good life. Darling Hennie.”
How wrong you were, Uncle David.
“You are seeing so much of Daniel Roth,” Angelique remarked one day.
“Not just of him! I told you, there are always seven or eight of us together when we go skating or riding. Friends of his, other teachers.” She elaborated. “They’re a sort of club—for cycling—and sports.”
Her mother looked at her doubtfully. “Well, of course, I know you wouldn’t go about with any young man unchaperoned.”
Dan was not used to chaperonage. Among East Side intellectuals, teachers, and writers, that sort of thing was ridiculed. So it became necessary for her to lie at home.
Oh, if they knew what was
going on! She thought of that rent-strike meeting at which he had spoken with such passionate and righteous conviction, a hero on the platform. Standing there in the crowd, looking up at him, she’d had a flash, an incongruous picture of her parents and herself at the dinner table in Florence’s house: the timid maid passing the platters, Walter’s pink-shaven cheeks above the stiff collar, an array of silver forks.
She had, of course, known her people in the classroom, but had had to imagine where they lived. Now she saw.
“The rent for those foul holes is twelve dollars a month,” Dan told her. “Sure, they get a lodger who pays sixty-five cents a week, but bread is fifteen cents a day at least, milk four cents a quart, a pound of meat twelve cents. No wonder they eat so many pickles. They’re cheap and they fill you up.”
She came to know every miserable street. Her sharpened vision picked out details that had once been only a blur. Listening to Dan, she felt a new rise of surging, painful indignation. Strange that she had perhaps heard the same words often enough in the mouth of Uncle David, but never with this immediacy.
“It’s like Zola,” she observed.
“You’ve read Zola? That’s pretty daring for a girl your age.” He spoke with admiration.
They walked through Bottle Alley onto Mulberry Street. Rags blew on the clotheslines overhead; a hawker offered a worn coat for fifty cents; on a plank laid across two ash barrels, piles of fish lay rotting in the sun, as spring warmed into summer. Here no organ-grinders played, for there was no one to throw pennies to them.
“Look,” Dan said, “at that boy reading there on the stoop. There’s no place inside for him to do his schoolwork. Frustrating. I am frustrated as a teacher.”
Riding the Second Avenue elevated, they could see into the second-floor rooms where the “sweaters” worked.
“Like animals in stalls,” Dan said. “Tubercular old men, and children who soon will be, cooped up together. See the belt on your dress?”
Hennie looked down at the narrow belt.
“It came from a place like that. Somebody working ten or twelve hours a day for five dollars a week or less made it.”
“I know. I have a friend, Olga …”
Oh, it was wrong! Wrong! And Mama complains that it’s not easy to be poor, as if she had any idea what being poor is.
Between Grand Street and East Broadway lay a scrap of park, gray cement between the gray tenements, with some benches under a scrawny tree that drooped in the heat of fading summer. They sat for a while without speaking. Dan looked off into the distance. She wondered what he could be seeing in that arid place.
“I’m proud of you, Dan,” she said, suddenly very moved.
“Proud? What have I done? I’ve done nothing yet.”
He took her hand. The warmth of their two hands sent soft waves sweeping through her body. She felt the warmth of her own hair on her neck, was aware of her breasts, and thought of their bodies entwined.
“We’ve known each other almost a year,” she said. “It seems longer.”
The sky dimmed. Dan pulled his hand away.
“It’s late. We can’t just keep sitting here,” he said, almost angrily.
“Why not? It’s peaceful.”
“Because. Your parents will be asking questions.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t mean that. There’s no sense looking for trouble.”
They walked slowly, lingering. The streets were emptying, children were called in, horses clumped back to the stables.
Hennie pointed. “That’s your street, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” After a moment, Dan said, “I’d ask you in … but I have the lab in back of a machine shop, and a room upstairs … it’s a mess.”
She was silent.
“The room is, I mean. The lab I keep spick-and-span. Couldn’t work otherwise.”
Her heart was heavy and despondent, with all the warm glow cooled. Yet she had to say something; what she said must be neutral and light.
“You know, I’ve never really understood what you do in the lab.”
“Oh, one thing and another, as the ideas come.”
“I don’t even know what electricity is!”
“Don’t let that worry you. Nobody knows what it is. We can use it, make transformers and generators, do things with it, but what it is …” He shrugged. “If you’re religious, you can say God made it. Otherwise, you can just say it’s some sort of energy rushing around the universe, and let it go at that.”
She thought: As if I really care about electricity or whether God made it or anything except—what I care about.
They arrived at her house. He stood looking at her.
“I wish we could go home together,” he said. “I’m so sick of always leaving you here. Kissing you quickly before anyone sees, walking home alone. It’s such a waste. I wish we could be in a room together with a closed door.”
She wanted to ask: “Yes, when?” But she kept still. Her eyes filled with quick tears.
“It’s only money. I’m afraid of the future, of having nothing for you. Every damned thing is money,” he said bitterly. “Even love costs money in this damned world.”
She wanted to shut his words out. Like a key, they opened a door onto a gloomy space into which she did not want to look.
“We’ll find a way,” she said. “I’m sure we will.”
Alfie came into her room. Thirteen now, he was becoming a person, a Mensch, as the Germans said. Sometimes, especially when their parents were out of the house, he would wander into her room and lie on the floor on his stomach, doing homework while she read. He could say surprising things, too, showing a power of observation with which his parents did not credit him.
“I heard Mama and Pa talking about you last Sunday,” he informed her.
Brushing her hair, she could see him in the mirror. He had given himself an expression of importance.
“Mama wants Pa to speak up to you.”
“Speak up? About what?” She turned quickly, knowing.
“You know what. About Dan.”
“Mr. Roth, you mean. You’re not grown up enough to call him Dan.”
Why did she chastise the boy? You kill the messenger who brings the bad news, that’s why.
“Aw,” he said, “I can call him Dan if I want to. Don’t you want to hear what they said? Then I won’t tell you.”
“I’m sorry, Alfie. Tell me, please.”
Mollified, he explained, “Well, Pa said, ‘No, that’s a foolish tactic. Let the thing wear itself out,’ or something like that. And he said, ‘The girl’s bewitched, anybody can see it.’ And he said, ‘Nothing will probably come of it anyway.’ And Mama said, ‘Yes, but it’s been a year, he’s wasting her time.’ ”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Mama said you really have been looking so much prettier lately. And she said that Florence could introduce you to lots of people, but you always say no. Do you?”
“I suppose I do.”
She felt a weakness, an inner trembling. Soon they would really begin to press her for an explanation.
Alfie’s humorous eyes crinkled with curiosity. “Because you’re in love, that’s why. You let him kiss you, I’ll bet.” And he gave his sputtering laugh.
He is thinking about what comes after kissing, just as I do.
“Alfie! Don’t be fresh.”
“I don’t care if you kiss him, you know. I like him. He’s smart. I hate school, but I wouldn’t mind being in his class, you know?”
“He is very smart. He invented something, some kind of light, or tube or something that burns longer than they ever did before.”
“Really? He must be rich, then.”
“Oh, no, he got almost nothing for it.”
“Then he was cheated. He shouldn’t have sold outright. An income is what you want.”
“Alfie, I don’t mean to insult you, but you don’t know anything about business. You’re only thirteen.”
; “A ten-year-old would know better than that!”
“Well, anyway, Dan doesn’t do these things for money. He does them for the pleasure, for curiosity about the way the world works. He’s a true scientist.”
“You going to marry him, Hennie?”
She had a need to talk about what had filled her all these months with such joy and such expectancy.
“I want to trust you, Alfie. Can I trust you? I’ve not told anyone.”
He was pleased. “Not Florence?”
“No. Only you. Because I know you won’t tell till I’m ready.”
“I won’t tell. Are you going to marry him, then?”
“Yes,” she said softly.
“When?”
“I don’t know … soon.”
There was deep loneliness in the room after Alfie went out, a sadness deeper than the melancholy of separation, because tonight for the first time it was tinged with fear. She tried to comfort herself with sleep, but sleep only brought a terrifying dream. Dan was standing beside her in some place with a vaulted ceiling, full of crashing music and echoes; he was opening his lips, saying something she could not hear; he had to repeat it over and over before she understood.
“I will never marry you, Hennie,” he was saying, while behind his shoulder Uncle David nodded mournfully and wisely.
2
Hennie put the book away. It was no use trying to concentrate. Her eyes, looking into the farthest distance, came to rest on the fringe of spring-green leafage that screened the stone gleam of the mansions on Fifth Avenue, across the park. The weather was fine and fresh; a spirited breeze rippled through the shrubbery; everything was new and restless and beautiful, making you want everything. She had a feeling of panic: This was all being wasted. Days like this were slipping by, and she was doing nothing with them.
People passed. An old man and his wife walked arm in arm, with their homely faces turned to the sun. Big dirty boys jostled and shoved, on the way home from school; raucous and laughing, one doubled over, holding his stomach.
On the opposite bench sat a young woman; it was plain, in spite of her concealing, modest coat, that she was expecting a baby.
She’s not much older than I am, Hennie thought. Perhaps not older at all, and from what I can see of her face when she looks up from the magazine, she’s no beauty.
