All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories, Page 3

  The red-haired doorman at No. 7 Gracie Square stretched out his arms and pretended he was going to capture Cindy. This happened morning after morning, and she put up with it patiently.

  “Taxi!” people wailed. “Taxi!” But there were no taxis. Or if one came along there was somebody in it. The doorman of No. 10 stood in the middle of East End Avenue and blew his whistle at nothing. On a balcony five stories above the street, a man lying on his back with his hips in the air was being put through his morning exercises by a Swedish masseur. The tired middle-aged legs went up and down like pistons. Like pistons, the elevators rose and fell in all the buildings overlooking the park, bringing the maids and laundresses up, taking men with briefcases down. The stationery store and the cleaners were now open. So was the luncheonette.

  The two little girls stopped, took each other by the hand, and looked carefully both ways before they crossed the car tunnel at No. 10. On the river walk Laurie saw an acquaintance and ran on ahead. Poor Cindy! At her back was the park — very agreeable to play in when she went there with her mother or the kindergarten class, but also frequented by rough boys with water pistols and full of bushes it could be hiding in — and on her right was the deep pit alongside No. 10; it could be down there, below the sidewalk and waiting to spring out when she came along. She did not look to see if it was there but kept well over to the other side, next to the outer railing and the river. A tug with four empty barges was nosing its way upstream. The Simpsons’ cook waved to Cindy from their kitchen window, which looked out on the river walk, and Cindy waved back.

  In the days when George used to take Laurie to kindergarten because she was too small to walk to school by herself, he had noticed her — a big woman with blond braids in a crown around her head. And one day he said, “Shall we wave to her and see what happens?” Sometimes her back was turned to the window and she didn’t know that Cindy and Laurie were there. They did not ever think of her except when they saw her, and if they had met her face to face she would have had to do all the talking.

  Laurie was waiting at the Eighty-third Street gate. “Come on,” she said.

  “Stupid-head,” Cindy said.

  They went into the school building together, ignoring the big girls in camel’s-hair coats who held the door open for them. But it wasn’t like Jimmy the elevator man; they knew the big girls were there.

  Sitting on the floor of her cubby, with her gym sneakers under her bottom and her cheek against her green plaid coat, Cindy felt safe. But Miss Nichols kept trying to get her to come out. The sandbox, the blocks, the crayons — Cindy said no to them all, and sucked her thumb. So Miss Nichols sat down on a little chair and took Cindy on her lap.

  “If there was a ( )?” Cindy asked finally.

  In a soft coaxing voice Miss Nichols said, “If there was a what?”

  Cindy wouldn’t say what.

  THE fire engines raced down Eighty-sixth Street, sirens shrieking and horns blowing, swung south through a red light, and came to a stop by the alarm box on the corner of East End Avenue and Gracie Square. The firemen jumped down and stood talking in the middle of the street. The hoses remained neatly folded and the ladders horizontal. It was the second false alarm that night from this same box. A county fair wouldn’t have made more commotion under their windows but it had happened too often and George and Iris Carrington went on sleeping peacefully, flat on their backs, like stone figures on a medieval tomb.

  IN the trash basket on the corner by the park gates there was a copy of the Daily News which said, in big letters, “TIGER ESCAPES,” but that was a different tiger; that tiger escaped from a circus in Jamestown, Rhode Island.

  “WHAT is it?” Iris asked, in the flower shop. “Why are you pulling at my skirt?”

  The flower-shop woman (pink-blond hair, Viennese accent) offered Cindy a green carnation, and she refused to take it. “You don’t like flowers?” the woman asked, coyly, and the tiger kept on looking at Cindy from behind some big, wide rubbery green leaves. “She’s shy,” the flower-shop woman said.

  “Not usually,” Iris said. “I don’t know what’s got into her today.”

  She gave the woman some money, and the woman gave her some money and some flowers, and then she and Cindy went outside, but Cindy was afraid to look behind her. If the tiger was following them, it was better not to know. For half a block she had a tingling sensation in the center of her back, between her shoulder blades. But then, looking across the street, she saw that the tiger was not back there in the flower shop. It must have left when they did, and now it was looking at her from the round hole in a cement mixer.

  The lights changed from red to green, and Iris took her hand and started to cross over.

  “I want to go that way,” Cindy said, holding back, until the light changed again. Since she was never allowed on the street alone, she was not really afraid of meeting the tiger all by herself. But what if some day it should walk into the elevator when Jimmy wasn’t looking, and get off at their floor, and hide behind Laurie’s bicycle and the scooters. And what if the front door opened and somebody came out and pressed the elevator button and the tiger got inside when they weren’t looking. And what if —

  “Oh, please don’t hold back, Cindy! I’m late as anything!”

  So, dangerous as it was, she allowed herself to be hurried along home.

  TAP, tap, tap …

  In the night this was, just after Iris and George had got to sleep.

  “Oh, no!” Iris moaned.

  But it was. When he opened the door, there she stood.

  TAP, tap …

  That same night, two hours later. Sound asleep but able to walk and talk, he put on his bathrobe and followed her down the hall. Stretched out beside her, he tried to go on sleeping but he couldn’t. He said, “What were you dreaming about this time?”

  “Sea-things.”

  “What kind of seedlings?”

  “Sea-things under the sea.”

  “Things that wiggled?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something was after you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad. Go to sleep.”

  TAP, tap …

  This time as he heaved himself up, Iris said to him, “You lie still.”

  She got up and opened the door to the hall and said, “Cindy, we’re tired and we need our sleep. I want you to go back to your bed and stay there.”

  Then they both lay awake, listening to the silence at the other end of the hall.

  “I CAME out of the building,” Iris said, “and I had three letters that Jimmy had given me, and it was raining hard, and the wind whipped them right out of my hand.”

  He took a sip of his drink and then said, “Did you get them?”

  “I got two of them. One was from the Richards children, thanking me for the toys I sent when Lonnie was in the hospital. And one was a note from Mrs. Mills. I never did find the third. It was a small envelope, and the handwriting was Society.”

  “A birthday party for Cindy.”

  “No. It was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. George Carrington. Cocktail party, probably.”

  He glanced at the windows. It was already dark. Then, the eternal optimist (also remembering the time he found the button that flew off her coat and rolled under a parked car on Eighty-fifth Street): “Which way did it blow? I’ll look for it tomorrow.”

  “Oh, there’s no use. You can see by the others. They were reduced to pulp by the rain, in just that minute. And anyway, I did look, this afternoon.”

  In the morning, he took the Seventy-ninth Street crosstown bus instead of the Eighty-sixth, so that he could look for the invitation that blew away. No luck. The invitation had already passed through a furnace in the Department of Sanitation building on Ninety-first Street and now, in the form of ashes, was floating down the East River on a garbage scow, on its way out to sea.

  The sender, rebuffed in this first tentative effort to get to know the Carringtons better, did not try again. She had met them
at a dinner party, and liked them both. She was old enough to be Iris’s mother, and it puzzled her that a young woman who seemed to be well bred and was quite lovely looking and adored Middlemarch should turn out to have no manners, but she didn’t brood about it. New York is full of pleasant young couples, and if one chooses to ignore your invitation the chances are another won’t.

  “DID you hear Laurie in the night?” Iris said.

  “No. Did Laurie have a nightmare?”

  “Yes. I thought you were awake.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He got up out of bed and went into the children’s rooms and turned on the radiators so they wouldn’t catch cold. Laurie was sitting up in bed reading.

  “Mommy says you had a bad dream last night.”

  “There were three dreams,” she said, in an overdistinct voice, as if she were a grown woman at a committee meeting. “The first dream was about Miss Stevenson. I dreamed she wasn’t nice to me. She was like the wicked witch.”

  “Miss Stevenson loves you.”

  “And the second dream was about snakes. They were all over the floor. It was like a rug made up of snakes, and very icky, and there was a giant, and Cathy and I were against him, and he was trying to shut me in the room where the snakes were, and one of the snakes bit me, but he wasn’t the kind of snake that kills you, he was just a mean snake, and so it didn’t hurt. And the third dream was a happy dream. I was with Cathy and we were skating together and pulling our mommies by strings.”

  WITH his safety razor ready to begin a downward sweep, George Carrington studied the lathered face in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. He shook his head. There was a fatal flaw in his character: Nobody was ever as real to him as he was to himself. If people knew how little he cared whether they lived or died, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him.

  THE dog moved back and forth between the two ends of the apartment, on good terms with everybody. She was in the dining room at mealtimes, and in the kitchen when Iris was getting dinner (when quite often something tasty fell off the edge of the kitchen table), and she was there again just after dinner, in case the plates were put on the floor for her to lick before they went into the dishwasher. In the late afternoon, for an hour before it was time for her can of beef-and-beef-byproducts, she sat with her front paws crossed, facing the kitchen clock, a reminding statue. After she had been fed, she went to the living room and lay down before the unlit log fire in the fireplace and slept until bedtime. In the morning, she followed Iris back and forth through room after room, until Iris was dressed and ready to take her out. “Must you nag me so?” Iris cried, but the dog was not intimidated. There was something they were in agreement about, though only one of them could have put it in words: It is a crime against Nature to keep a hunting dog in the city. George sometimes gave her a slap on her haunches when she picked up food in the gutter or lunged at another dog. And if she jerked on her leash he jerked back, harder. But with Iris she could do anything — she could even stand under the canopy and refuse to go anywhere because it was raining.

  Walking by the river, below Eightieth Street, it wasn’t necessary to keep her on a leash, and while Iris went on ahead Puppy sniffed at the godforsaken grass and weeds that grew between the cement walk and the East River Drive. Then she overtook Iris, at full speed, overshot the mark, and came charging back, showing her teeth in a grin. Three or four times she did this, as a rule — with Iris applauding and congratulating her and cheering her on. It may be a crime against Nature to keep a hunting dog in the city, but this one was happy anyway.

  AFTER a series of dreams in which people started out as one person and ended up another and he found that there was no provision for getting from where he was to where he wanted to go and it grew later and later and even after the boat had left he still went on packing his clothes and what he thought was his topcoat turned out to belong to a friend he had not seen for seventeen years and naked strangers came and went, he woke and thought he heard a soft tapping on the bedroom door. But when he got up and opened it there was no one there.

  “Was that Cindy?” Iris asked as he got back into bed.

  “No. I thought I heard her, but I must have imagined it.”

  “I thought I heard her too,” Iris said, and turned over.

  At breakfast he said, “Did you have any bad dreams last night?” but Cindy was making a lake in the middle of her oatmeal and didn’t answer.

  “I thought I heard you tapping on our door,” he said. “You didn’t dream about a wolf, or a tiger, or a big black dog?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said.

  “YOU’LL never guess what I just saw from the bedroom window,” Iris said.

  He put down his book.

  “A police wagon drove down Eighty-fourth Street and stopped, and two policemen with guns got out and went into a building and didn’t come out. And after a long while two more policemen came and they went into the building and pretty soon they all came out with a big man with black hair, handcuffed. Right there on Eighty-fourth Street, two doors from the corner.”

  “Nice neighborhood we live in,” he said.

  “DADDY, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” came into his dreams without waking him, and what did wake him was the heaving of the other bed as Iris got up and hurried toward the bedroom door.

  “It was Cindy,” she said when she came back.

  “Dream?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I heard her but went on dreaming myself.”

  “She doesn’t usually cry out like that.”

  “Laurie used to.”

  Why all these dreams, he wondered, and drifted gently back to sleep, as if he already knew the answer. She turned and turned, and finally, after three-quarters of an hour, got up and filled the hot-water bottle. What for days had been merely a half-formed thought in the back of her mind was now suddenly, in the middle of the night, making her rigid with anxiety. She needed to talk, and couldn’t bring herself to wake him. What she wanted to say was they were making a mistake in bringing the children up in New York City. Or even in America. There was too much that there was no way to protect them from, and the only sensible thing would be to pull up stakes now, before Laurie reached adolescence. They could sublet the apartment until the lease ran out, and take a house somewhere in the South of France, near Aix perhaps, and the children could go to a French school, and they could all go skiing in Switzerland in the winter, and Cindy could have her own horse, and they both would acquire a good French accent, and be allowed to grow up slowly, in the ordinary way, and not be jaded by one premature experience after another, before they were old enough to understand any of it.

  With the warmth at her back, and the comforting feeling that she had found the hole in the net, gradually she fell asleep too.

  But when she brought the matter up two days later he looked at her blankly. He did not oppose her idea but neither did he accept it, and so her hands were tied.

  AS usual, the fathers’ part in the Christmas program had to be rehearsed beforehand. In the small practice room on the sixth floor of the school, their masculinity — their grey flannel or dark-blue pin-striped suits, their size 9, 10, 11, 11½, and 12 shoes, their gold cufflinks, the odor that emanated from their bodies and from their freshly shaved cheeks, their simple assurance, based on, among other things, the Social Register and the size of their income — was incongruous. They were handed sheets of music as they came in, and the room was crammed with folding chairs, all facing the ancient grand piano. With the two tall windows at their backs they were missing the snow, which was a pity. It went up, down, diagonally, and in centrifugal motion — all at once. The fact that no two of the star-shaped crystals were the same was a miracle, of course, but it was a miracle that everybody has long since grown accustomed to. The light outside the windows was cold and grey.

  “Since there aren’t very many of you,” the music teacher said, “you’ll have to make up for it by singing enthusiasticall
y.” She was young, in her late twenties, and had difficulty keeping discipline in the classroom; the girls took advantage of her good nature, and never stopped talking and gave her their complete attention. She sat down at the piano now and played the opening bars of “O come, O come, Emmanuel / And ransom captive I-i-i-zrah-el …”

  Somebody in the second row exclaimed, “Oh God!” under his breath. The music was set too high for men’s voices.

  “The girls will sing the first stanza, you fathers the second —”

  The door opened and two more fathers came in.

  “— and all will sing the third.”

  With help from the piano (which they would not have downstairs in the school auditorium) they achieved an approximation of the tune, and the emphasis sometimes fell in the right place. They did their best, but the nineteenth-century words and the ninth-century plainsong did not go well together. Also, one of the fathers had a good strong clear voice, which only made the others more self-conscious and apologetic. They would have been happier without him.

  The music teacher made a flip remark. They all laughed and began again. Their number was added to continually as the door opened and let in the sounds from the hall. Soon there were no more vacant chairs; the latecomers had to stand. The snow was now noticeably heavier, and the singing had more volume. Though they were at some pains to convey, by their remarks to one another and their easy laughter, that this was not an occasion to be taken seriously, nevertheless the fact that they were here was proof of the contrary; they all had offices where they should have been and salaries they were not at this moment doing anything to earn. Twenty-seven men with, at first glance, a look of sameness about them, a round, composite, youngish, unrevealing, New York face. Under closer inspection, this broke down. Not all the eyes were blue, nor were the fathers all in their middle and late thirties. The thin-faced man at the end of the second row could not have been a broker or a lawyer or in advertising. The man next to him had survived incarceration in a Nazi prison camp. There was one Negro. Here and there a head that was not thickly covered with hair. Their speaking voices varied, but not so much as they conceivably might have — no Texas drawl, for instance. And all the fingernails were clean, all the shoes were shined, all the linen was fresh.