by Sarah Blake
“He is not,” Kitty chided softly. “He cannot. We won’t let him.”
Priss was silent.
Kitty put her hand out to touch Priss to stop her from turning the knife over and over on the cloth. Priss stilled.
“It’s worse right now. It’s always worse right now,” she said. “Something triggers the memory, and then he’s gone.”
“How do you mean?”
“Gone in the past.”
“What memory?”
“He won’t say. He’s never said. I just know he’s lost.”
Kitty didn’t speak.
“This age.” Priss looked up at Kitty, at last.
“How do you mean?”
Priss shook her head. “I’m fifty-five. And I’m only just now beginning to understand.”
“Understand what, Priss?”
Priss shook her head slowly. “I was sitting in my car the other day, waiting for Dunc’s train and watching the children playing across the way in the little playground down in the village. And the mothers sitting there on the bench. So unsuspecting. They don’t know how young they are. How beautiful. How alive.”
Kitty reached across the table and covered her friend’s hand.
“I wanted to roll down the car window and call to them—” Priss faltered.
“Priss,” Kitty said, a little frightened.
“Take it.” Priss’s voice broke. “I wanted to cry out to all of them sitting there, so unsuspecting. Take this in your hands and don’t let go. Grab hold.”
“Mrs. Milton.” The waitress put Kitty’s plate in front of her.
Hurriedly, Priss wiped her eyes.
“Mrs. Houghton.”
Priss nodded her thanks but remained quiet in front of the plate, looking down.
“There’s only the one life, Kitty,” she whispered sadly. “Just the one chance at it. And you can either get it right. Or wrong. And we never know, do we, as we’re spinning along in it. We never know. And then one day, there you are—”
She raised her eyes to look at Kitty across the table, and all Kitty could do was nod.
* * *
“MUM!”
Kitty shook herself, turning toward Joan, who came in glowing but sopping wet. Her dress had streaks of rain running through the skirt. Never mind, thought Kitty. She wasn’t the one to be photographed. The girl who had been assigned to their needs came into the room with a thick white towel, and Joan scrubbed her arms dry luxuriantly.
“Hello, Mum.” Evelyn appeared in the doorway of the blue salon, dry and perfectly at ease, having taken a taxi, and followed by Sarah Pratt, the mother of the groom.
“I heard she took a job at Brentano’s,” Sarah Pratt was saying. “Even though the wedding is only two months off.”
“Who did?” Kitty fixed a smile. Sarah had never learned the simple principle of beginnings, middles, and endings. Every conversation started willy-nilly and then, often, never ended.
“So you’re lucky,” observed Sarah Pratt, hugging Kitty.
Kitty nodded, though she wondered what it was Sarah envied now.
“Who took a job?” she asked.
“Emmy Lord.”
“Ah,” Kitty said, understanding. “How thoughtless.”
“What is?” Joan slid her arm into her mother’s elbow.
“Emmy Lord went to work just at the time her mother most needs her for the wedding preparations.”
“But it’s the training program,” Evelyn remarked. “She has to do it.”
“It’s self-indulgent is what it is,” Sarah commented. “Emmy Lord doesn’t need to work to begin with, and certainly not six weeks before her own wedding.”
“But she may want to,” said Joan, dropping the towel on the back of the little chaise.
“Oh, want—” Kitty dismissed the idea, her eyes on Mr. Bacharach strolling toward them, his hand outstretched.
Joan arched her eyebrow at Evelyn, who smiled back.
“Evelyn,” Kitty said, turning. “The dress is ready for you.”
It was important for Mum to have it all perfectly in order, Joan thought, and Evelyn was perfect and in order. And best of all—Joan crossed her arms, watching her sister being shown to the dressing room, and nodding and smiling at the courtly little man who took all the bridal photographs that appeared every Sunday in the Times—Evelyn was in love. When one spread open the two pages at the end of the paper and studied the girls staring back from their poised black-and-white photos, the girls from the Upper East Side, from Greenwich and Oyster Bay—Miss Barr to Mrs. Lathrop, Miss Schuyler to Mrs. Southworth—one couldn’t be sure of that. But the Pratts were old friends, and from Greenwich, the other side of Long Island Sound, friends who, like the Miltons, had decamped from Old New York in the thirties in search of trees and lawns an hour’s train ride from the city.
One might have thought Dickie would fall in love with Joanie—she was the eldest—but Dick’s eyes had slid right across the elder Milton to her twelve-year-old sister and never let go. Evelyn grew up in the shade of Dickie’s eyes, unfurling slowly toward him as she too went off to Farmington, tossing her head at him when he asked her to the prom at Yale, but then writing him every single day he was in Korea—and so it seemed the only answer, when he returned from the war, really, had been yes.
This lent a satisfying inevitability to their story, as though it had been written long ago, the words meant for each other suggesting two souls raised in the same waters swimming blindly into each other’s arms and, now having arrived there, breaking open in a joy not untinged by triumph. Watching Evelyn and Dickie together, Kitty always thought, it was as though they had won a race. Her youngest daughter was nearly always flushed these days, and full to the brim with certainty. She had done well, Kitty thought. Good for her.
“Perfect.” Kitty smiled at her younger daughter, who emerged now, smooth in the white satin, her tiny waist caught up and held by the dress, the lovely curve of her shoulders allowed to slope and disappear into the long shimmering sleeves.
“Yes,” Joan agreed, smiling at Evelyn, who held both arms in front of her, turning in the mirror to see the fold of her train swish behind on the pale carpet.
Outside, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the drops upon the window glass glittered and slid down the pane. And Joan was singly, startlingly grateful.
Sixteen
THE MEMORY OF THE girl leaning over the balcony at Pennsylvania Station in that moment before her sister grabbed her arm had returned to Len again and again over the next few weeks, overtaking him like snatches of a song he didn’t know he’d heard. He wondered if he’d ever see her again and was certain that he wouldn’t. He recalled the small pulse that beat at the center of her throat while she lay on the floor of the station before coming to. He remembered the feel of her hand under his. Love, the movies would have you believe, struck like lightning. He had thought the movies lied.
Instead, he felt, sitting at his desk and then moving through the heat of Manhattan each day, the movies didn’t tell it deep enough. He’d been struck dumb, cut in two—and wanted to be struck and struck again. He shook himself and looked back down at the company reports splayed before him.
Unlike his partner Jack Higginson, whose disdain had been palpable that day in Mr. Milton’s office, Ogden Milton clearly had his eye on building capital through a man’s brainpower, regardless of his pedigree. And in the scant months that Len had been at the firm, Ogden Milton had made clear his regard, casting a growing and persistent light on him. He was the one to watch for, everyone knew it, and now as the summer swung fully on through the month of June, Len felt the expansive freedom of room to grow and decided he would take Mr. Milton up on the suggestion he had tossed to Len at the end of their first meeting. If he could get Milton to give him the green light, he’d show the older man what Len felt sure was a path to a broad and lucrative highway of possibility.
So one day toward the end of the month, he followed Mrs. Meecham down i
nto the room where the files of all Milton Higginson’s transactions were stored and nodded politely at her instructions—of course nothing may be removed, Mr. Levy—and smiled as she left him where he stood in the middle of the filing cabinets lining all four walls. There must be dozens of companies in here that would fit the bill, he thought. Len had a clear idea of the kind of company he would suggest to Mr. Milton: midsized, out of Manhattan, with solid returns. The kind of company that might want to reward its workers, run by men who saw themselves as forward-thinking, beneficent—canny but kind. He pulled open the cabinet nearest him, reached in, and took out an armful of folders, then tucked them under his arm, carefully turning off the light, and shutting the door behind him.
From then on, he spent the hot Friday afternoons at his desk high above Manhattan after most of the men had left to catch their trains bound for Fire Island, Rhode Island, Fishers Island, any island, he joked to Reg, but Coney Island, a solitary typewriter sounding down the hall like a sulky tap dancer on an empty stage, one of the secretaries at her job. He paged through the records of banks Milton Higginson had cultivated, of trusts the firm had advised, of companies raised from the seed of an idea (there was, in the folder connected to one of the largest utility companies in the country, a napkin from the Excelsior Hotel with Ogden’s notes in blue ink) to their full impressive height. Ogden Milton had been everywhere: Germany in 1927 and in 1929, on FDR’s advisory board in 1932, all the while steering the firm toward lucrative waters through the Crash, the bank crisis, and into the Depression. Len was able to read the history of the firm and see just where the man had been brilliant and just where, in Len’s opinion, he’d stopped short. The history of the firm was a history of restrained success, of moderation—steady growth rather than vision. Reading the files and the notes Ogden had written in the margins, Len came face-to-face with the man he had been, the man whom Len, too, wanted to be. Though better. Smarter. Richer.
In the evenings, Len and Reg met after work and went anywhere they could to find the cool marbled bars, riding the El train out to the beach, moving in search of breezes and air. Reg had one of the new Polaroid cameras, and he’d aim it and shoot, just like the ads said. So it was often that the two men walked through the hot city, wordless as Reg held the camera up to his eye. Since he’d come home, there was a restless, waiting quiet about Reg that was new to Len, as though he hovered in the night hour just before daybreak, just before birdsong broke it and the sound of the first car’s engine moved away down a street. Sometimes Len saw what Reg saw, the woman on the stoop, her child sitting between her legs, the two of them exhausted, watching the street, the man standing very straight in line for the bus. But often, it seemed to Len that Reg was shooting pictures of nothing, a child turning to see him on the street, a man staring.
They would return at the end of a night and Reg would tack up the pictures neatly, continuing the line across the living room wall.
“They don’t like you,” Len said, pointing to one Reg had taken of three teenage boys after baseball practice, their mitts hanging off their bats like hunter’s trophies, the look in their eyes unmistakable.
“No,” Reg agreed, his hands on his hips, “they don’t like what they’re looking at.”
“You’re going to get hurt,” Len warned.
Reg didn’t answer.
“What are you going to do with these, anyway?” Len asked.
“Use them.”
“For?”
Reg looked at him and shook his head. “Don’t know yet. Just collecting.”
“Then what?”
Reg grinned. “Showtime.”
“Be careful, Reg.” Len grew quiet beside him. “These guys don’t matter.” He waved his hand at the wall of Polaroids. “None of them matter.”
“They do, though.” Reg pushed a corner straight. “That’s the point.”
* * *
ONE FRIDAY NIGHT toward the end of June, the heat in their apartment drove them downstairs in search of a beer and some air, and into Washington Square Park, where the smart fish who swam within the netting of streets and open doorways and hot cafés and crowded jazz bars and the six-storied, slope-shouldered brick buildings that hunched above Bleecker and Macdougal, Hudson, Greene, and Gansevoort streets and made up the Village gathered. And on warm nights like this one, the silent stone fountain that rarely played in the middle of the square bloomed with men and girls in clumps and stems, talking, smoking, and arguing, endlessly arguing. You could feel it, Reg thought, as they walked, feel the push, the drive on those to say it—to find the words that got what was happening. What was happening? A new world was coming into view. Now was the time to say it. Here we are. While the rest of the country was crowding into phone booths or jalopies in the summer days, stretching upon white beaches, sipping cream sodas on chrome stools, here on the streets of the Village and in smoky New York rooms they danced and they talked, and the talk was of sex, or the Russians, Miles Davis, or Freud, Cassius Clay’s fights, Peyton Place, and the cheapest joint to find cold beer and hot clams.
The two walked across Broadway, then Houston, in a stream of other people out in the airless night, light and music spilling onto the sidewalks from the cafés and bars into the thick heat that slid itself over and around any moving body, through the string lights of Little Italy, then Chinatown, and the Bowery, where a trumpet was playing fast and loud above the traffic on the corner in front of the Five Spot, and Reg pulled open the door. Inside it was hot and crowded and the smell of whiskey and sweat reached them through the haze of smoke drifting listless overhead. They stood a minute on the threshold in the darkened room where there weren’t any tables, and it was too hot down there, so they turned around and kept walking.
It was then that Len remembered Moss Milton’s invitation.
By the time they got there, the party had pushed out onto the stoop of 29 West Twelfth. Ornette Coleman’s horn snaked plaintive and insistent in the air around them as Reg and Len picked their way up the steps and through the open front door. A throng of people stood in the hallway outside the first-floor apartment. Just to their right, a blonde with sharp-cut bangs leaned her head against a tall black man while his hands stroked her bare arms, whispering. Her eyes closed and she smiled; the two were utterly alone in the crowd.
The big front room was filled and hot with bodies, though the door to the garden was flung wide open.
There were girls from the Lower East Side and from Park Avenue, men who’d come straight from the office, a drummer Reg recognized from the Blue Note, and several uptown gesticulating wildcats mixed with the still, serious, bespectacled radicals that peppered every downtown room. There was booze and smoke, bare skin and flushed faces, and Coleman’s horn sliding round and through.
Reg caught sight of a man he remembered from college, though he didn’t know his name. The man had been in a singing group, Reg remembered, those men who’d stop and form a semicircle just to hear the sound of their own voices after dinner on a rainy night in October, or May, who’d look at one another and then burst into song in the middle of one of the cavernous halls of Harvard, the stone ceiling overarching as they traded notes around the air, just singing to sing. Reg would cross the marble hall, not stopping, irritated by their taking over, pushed by the voices out of the room.
Though one night they’d occupied the end of a narrow corridor outside the main reading room in the library and were blocking the passage. There were twelve of them, and in a circle, like a huddle, their backs to Reg. And this man here stood at the center, giving notes and waiting for a singer’s reply. He’d shake his head and give the note again, and again the singer would try. There, his body seemed to nod when the singer got the note right. There it is.
And then he stepped back, and they fanned around him, watching. He gave another nod, and “Ol’ Man River” spun up on the staff of the men’s voices into the dome above. Reg stopped in the shadow of the portico, listening to eleven white men singing, their voices takin
g on the South, the imagined South, full of its darkies and its cotton, and they sang the sorrow, but without the terror. The past, a tragedy upon a stage, distant as an idea of terror, one thing they could imagine, but did not hold inside. And this man, the leader, was building the harmony like a mason—note by note, until they reached the final note, single and pure, all the parts of the song come together at last, in that single word, along.
Reg had turned and walked back through the library, past the men at the long tables in the reading room, past the librarians, out the back doors. He hated them in that moment, hated them all, these men who thought they understood, because they sang it, because they knew the notes.
Though the note, the last note, with all twelve voices holding it, had been beautiful.
Here was that man, that leader, Reg realized, as he and Len pushed forward into the sweating men and flushed girls, now roaming around the smoky room with a bottle and plastic cups, who turned and caught sight of both of them.
“Good god,” Moss said, his eyes widening, “the photographer.”
Reg started.
“And Levy?” Moss looked up at Len. “Len Levy?”
He deposited the bottle on a table and shook Len’s hand. “How marvelous,” he exclaimed, and turned back to Reg, curious, his hand outstretched.
“Moss Milton,” he introduced himself. “You look familiar.”
“Reg Pauling.” Reg shook his hand.
“Weren’t you at Harvard?”
“I was,” said Reg.
“Class of ’fifty-three?” Moss grinned.
Reg nodded, smiling back.
“Me too,” said Moss. “I’ll be goddamned.”
The three stood a minute.
“Well, well, what’ll you have to drink?”
“I need a beer,” Len said.
“Two,” agreed Reg. “At least. Each.”
“Easy to fix,” said Moss, and headed for the kitchen.
I’ll be goddamned, he thought again as he pulled the lever on the icebox. That was why he thought he’d known him that day at the White Horse. Reg Pauling was one of the lone black men in the class at Harvard and famous for his quiet. Liked to keep to himself, everyone said. Though now, Moss saw that it must have been that no one spoke to him, that Reg had been kept to himself, because the hand that had shaken his just now and the eyes that turned on him were strong and interested and open. In the mirror over the sink, he saw that Len was shaking his head at something Reg had said, and the easy silence between the two of them was clear. Moss dropped his eyes.
