Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Read online

  But as to the talent and the character and the original mind of the two glorious girls, we would have brooked no questioning of our concepts. Just after we passed through Acme, Pennsylvania, our talk turned from ourselves to these girls—from our inner yearnings for mature and adult experience to the particular objects toward which we were being led by these yearnings. We agreed that the quality we most valued in Nancy and Carol was their “critical” and “objective” view of life, their unwillingness to accept the standards of “the world.” I remember telling Jim that Nancy Gibault could always take a genuinely “disinterested” view of any matter—“disinterested in the best sense of the word.” And Jim assured me that, whatever else I might perceive about Carol, I would sense at once the originality of her mind and “the absence of anything commonplace or banal in her intellectual makeup.”

  It seems hard to believe now, but that was how we spoke to each other about our girls. That was what we thought we believed and felt about them then. And despite our change of opinions by the time we headed back to Kenyon, despite our complete and permanent disenchantment, despite their unkind treatment of us—as worldly and as commonplace as could be—I know now that those two girls were as near the concepts we had of them to begin with as any two girls their age might be, or should be. And I believe now that the decisions they made about us were the right decisions for them to make. I have only the vaguest notion of how Nancy Gibault has fared in later life. I know only that she went, back to St. Louis the following spring and was married that summer to Lon Havemeyer. But as for Carol Crawford, everybody with any interest in literary matters knows what became of her. Her novels are read everywhere. They have even been translated into Javanese. She is, in her way, even more successful than the boy who made the long pull from Harvard College to Hollywood.

  Probably I seem to be saying too much about things that I understood only long after the events of my story. But the need for the above digression seemed no less urgent to me than did that concerning the former owner of our car. In his case, the digression dealt mostly with events of a slightly earlier time. Here it has dealt with a wisdom acquired at a much later time. And now I find that I am still not quite finished with speaking of that later time and wisdom. Before seeing me again in the car that November night in 1939, picture me for just a moment—much changed in appearance and looking at you through gold-rimmed spectacles—behind the lectern in a classroom. I stand before the class as a kind of journeyman writer, a type of whom Trollope might have approved, but one who has known neither the financial success of the facile Harvard boy nor the reputation of Carol Crawford. Yet this man behind the lectern is a man who seems happy in the knowledge that he knows—or thinks he knows—what he is about. And from behind his lectern he is saying that any story that is written in the form of a memoir should give offense to no one, because before a writer can make a person he has known fit into such a story—or any story, for that matter—he must do more than change the real name of that person. He must inevitably do such violence to that person’s character that the so-called original is forever lost to the story.

  THE last lap of Jim’s and my all-night drive was the toughest. The night had begun as an unseasonably warm one. I recall that there were even a good many insects splattered on our windshield in the hours just after dark. But by the time we had got through Pittsburgh the sky was overcast and the temperature had begun to drop. Soon after 1 A.M. we noticed the first big, soft flakes of snow. I was driving at the time, and Jim was doing most of the talking. I raised one finger from the steering wheel to point out the snow to Jim, and he shook his head unhappily. But he went on talking. We had maintained our steady stream of talk during the first hours of the night partly to keep whoever was at the wheel from going to sleep, but from this point on it was more for the purpose of making us forget the threatening weather. We knew that a really heavy snowstorm could throw our holiday schedule completely out of gear. All night long we talked. Sometimes the snow fell thick and fast, but there were times, too, when it stopped altogether. There was a short period just before dawn when the snow turned to rain—a cold rain, worse than the snow, since it began to freeze on our windshield. By this time, however, we had passed through Philadelphia and we knew that somehow or other we would make it on to New York.

  We had left Kenyon at four o’clock in the afternoon, and at eight the next morning we came to the first traffic rotary outside New York, in New Jersey. A half an hour later we saw the skyline of the city, and at the sight of it we both fell silent. I think we were both conscious at that moment not so much of having arrived at our destination as of having only then put Kenyon College behind us. I remember feeling that if I glanced over my shoulder I might still see on the horizon the tower of Peirce Hall and the spires of Old Kenyon Dormitory. And in my mind’s eye I saw the other Douglass House boys—all seven of them—still lingering on the stone steps of the front stoop, leaning against the iron railing and against one another, staring after us. But more than that, after the image had gone I realized suddenly that I had pictured not seven but nine figures there before the house, and that among the other faces I had glimpsed my own face and that of Jim Prewitt. It seemed to me that we had been staring after ourselves with the same fixed, brooding expression in our eyes that I saw in the eyes of the other boys.

  NANCY Gibault was staying in a sort of girls’ hotel, or rooming house, on 114th Street. Before she came down from her room that Thanksgiving morning, she kept me waiting in the lobby for nearly forty-five minutes. No doubt she had planned this as a way of preparing me for worse things to come. As I sat there, I had ample time to reflect upon various dire possibilities. I wondered if she had been out terribly late the night before and, if so, with whom. I thought of the possibility that she was angry with me for not letting her know what day I would get there. (I had had to wait on my check from home, and there had not been time to let her know exactly when we would arrive.) I reflected, even, that there was a remote chance she had not wanted me to come at all. What didn’t occur to me was the possibility that all of these things were true. I sat in that dreary, overheated waiting room, still wearing my overcoat and holding my hat in my lap. When Nancy finally came down, she burst into laughter at the sight of me. I rose slowly from my chair and said angrily, “What are you laughing at? At how long I’ve waited?”

  “No, my dear,” she said, crossing the room to where I stood. “I was laughing at the way you were sitting there in your overcoat with your hat in your lap like a little boy.”

  “I’m sweating like a horse,” I said, and began unbuttoning my coat. By this time Nancy was standing directly in front of me, and I leaned forward to kiss her. She drew back with an expression of revulsion on her face.

  “Keep your coat on!” she commanded. Then she began giggling and backing away from me. “If you expect me to be seen with you,” she said, “you’ll go back to wherever you’re staying and shave that fuzz off your lip.”

  For three weeks I had been growing a mustache.

  I HAD not yet been to the hotel where Jim and I planned to stay. It was a place that Jim knew about, only three or four blocks from where Nancy was living, and I now set out for it on foot, carrying my suitcase. Our car had broken down just after we came up out of the Holland Tunnel. It had been knocking fiercely for the last hour of the trip, and we learned from the garageman with whom we left it that the crankcase was broken. It seems we had burned out a bearing, because we had forgotten to put any oil in the crankcase. I don’t think we realized at the time how lucky we were to find a garage open on Thanksgiving morning and, more than that, one that would have the car ready to run again by the following night.

  After I had shaved, I went back to Nancy’s place. She had gone upstairs again, but this time she did not keep me waiting so long. She came down wearing a small black hat and carrying a chesterfield coat. Back in St. Louis, she had seldom worn a hat when we went out together, and the sight of her in one now made me feel uncomfortab
le. We sat down together near the front bay window of that depressing room where I had waited so long, and we talked there for an hour, until it was time to meet Jim and Carol for lunch.

  While we talked that morning, Nancy did not tell me that Lon Havemeyer was in town from St. Louis, much less that she had spent all her waking hours with him during the past week. I could not have expected her to tell me at once that she was now engaged to marry him, instead of me, but I did feel afterward that she could have begun at once by telling me that she had been seeing Lon and that he was still in town. It would have kept me from feeling quite so much at sea during the first hours I was with her. Lon was at least seven or eight years older than Nancy, and for five or six years he had been escorting débutantes to parties in St. Louis. His family were of German origin and were as new to society there as members of Nancy’s family were old to it. The Havemeyers were also as rich nowadays as the Gibaults were poor. Just after Nancy graduated from Mary Institute, Lon had begun paying her attentions. They went about together a good deal while I was away at college, but between Nancy and me it had always been a great joke. To us, Lon was the essence of all that we were determined to get away from there at home. I don’t know what he was really like. I had heard an older cousin of mine say that Lon Havemeyer managed to give the impression of not being dry behind the ears but that the truth was he was “as slick as a newborn babe.” But I never exchanged two sentences with him in my life—not even during the miserable day and a half that I was to tug along with him and Nancy in New York.

  It may be that Nancy had not known that she was in love with Lon or that she was going to marry him until she saw me there, with the fuzz on my upper lip, that morning. Certainly I must have been an awful sight. Even after I had shaved my mustache, I was still the seedy-looking undergraduate in search of “mature experience.” It must have been a frightful embarrassment to her to have to go traipsing about the city with me on Thanksgiving Day. My hair was long, my clothes, though quite genteel, were unpressed, and even rather dirty, and for some reason I was wearing a pair of heavy brogans. Nancy had never seen me out of St. Louis before, and since she had seen me last, she had seen Manhattan. To be fair to her, though, she had seen something more important than that. She had, for better or for worse, seen herself.

  We had lunch with Jim and Carol at a little joint over near Columbia, and it was only after we had left them that Nancy told me Lon Havemeyer was in town and waiting that very moment to go with us to the Metropolitan Museum. I burst out laughing when she told me, and she laughed a little, too. I don’t remember when I fully realized the significance of Lon’s presence in New York. It wasn’t that afternoon, or that night, even. It was some time during the next day, which was Friday. I suppose that I should have realized it earlier and that I just wouldn’t. From the time we met Lon on the museum steps, he was with us almost continuously until the last half hour before I took my leave of Nancy the following night. Sometimes I would laugh to myself at the thought of this big German oaf’s trailing along with us through the galleries in the afternoon and then to the ballet that night. But I was also angry at Nancy from the start for having let him horn in on our holiday together, and at various moments I pulled her aside and expressed my anger. She would only look at me helplessly, shrug, and say “I couldn’t help it. You really have got to try to see that I couldn’t help it.”

  AFTER the ballet, we joined a group of people who seemed to be business acquaintances of Lon’s and went to a Russian night club—on Fourteenth Street, I think. (I don’t know exactly where it was, for I was lost in New York and kept asking Nancy what part of town we were in.) The next morning, about ten, Nancy and I took the subway down to the neighborhood of Fifty-seventh Street, where we met Lon for breakfast. Later we looked at pictures in some of the galleries. I don’t know what became of the afternoon. We saw an awful play that night. I know it was awful, but I don’t remember what it was. The events of that second day are almost entirely blotted from my memory. I only know that the mixture of anger and humiliation I felt kept me from ducking out long before the evening was over—a mixture of anger and humiliation and something else, something that I had begun to feel the day before when Nancy and I were having lunch with Jim and Carol Crawford.

  Friday night, I was somehow or other permitted to take Nancy home alone from the theater. We went in a taxi, and neither of us spoke until a few blocks before we reached 114th Street. Finally I said, “Nancy.” And Nancy burst into tears.

  “You won’t understand, and you will never forgive me,” she said through her tears, “but I am so terribly in love with him.”

  I didn’t say anything till we had gone another block. Then I said, “How have things gone at the art school?”

  Nancy blew her nose and turned her face to me, as she had not done when she spoke before. “Well, I’ve learned that I’m not an artist. They’ve made me see that.”

  “Oh,” I said. Then, “Does that make it necessary to—”

  “It makes everything in the world look different. If I could only have known in time to write you.”

  “When did you know?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know when I knew.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing you came to New York,” I said. “You almost made a bad mistake.”

  “No,” she said. “You mustn’t think I feel that about you.”

  “Oh, not about me,” I said quickly. “About being an artist. When we were at lunch yesterday, you know, with Jim and his girl, it came over me suddenly that you weren’t an artist. Just by looking at you I could tell.”

  “What a cruel thing to say,” she said quietly. All the emotion had gone out of her voice. “Only a child could be so cruel,” she said.

  When the taxi stopped in front of her place, I opened the door for her but didn’t get out, and neither of us said goodbye. I told the driver to wait until she was inside and then gave him the address of my hotel. When, five minutes later, I was getting out and paying the driver, I didn’t know how much to tip him. I gave him fifteen cents. He sat with his motor running for a moment, and then, just before he pulled away, he threw the dime and the nickel out on the sidewalk and called out to me at the top of his voice, “You brat!”

  THE meeting between Nancy and Carol was supposed to be one of the high points of our trip. The four of us ate lunch together that first day sitting in the front booth of a little place that was crowded with Columbia University students. Because this was at noon on Thanksgiving Day probably not too many restaurants in that neighborhood were open. But I felt that every student in the dark little lunchroom was exulting in his freedom from a certain turkey dinner somewhere, and from some particular family gathering. We four had to sit in the very front booth, which was actually no booth at all but a table and two benches set right in the window. Some people happened to be getting up from that table just as we came in, and Carol, who had brought us here, said, “Quick! We must take this one.” Nancy had raised up on her tiptoes and craned her neck, looking for a booth not quite so exposed.

  “I think there may be some people leaving back there,” she said.

  “No,” said Carol in a whisper. “Quick! In here.” And when we had sat down, she said, “There are some dreadful people I know back there. I’d rather die than have to talk to them.”

  Nancy and I sat with our backs almost against the plate-glass window. There was scarcely room for the two of us on the bench we shared. I am sure the same was true for Jim and Carol, and they faced us across a table so narrow that when our sandwiches were brought, the four plates could only be arranged in one straight row. There wasn’t much conversation while we ate, though Jim and I tried to make a few jokes about our drive through the snow and about how the car broke down. Once, in the middle of something Jim was saying, Carol suddenly ducked her head almost under the table. “Oh, God!” she gasped. “Just my luck!” Jim sat up straighter and started peering out into the street. Nancy and I looked over our shoulders. There wa
s a man walking along the sidewalk on the other side of the broad street.

  “You mean that man way over there?” Nancy asked.

  “Holy God, yes,” hissed Carol. “Do please stop looking around at him.”

  Nancy giggled. “Is he dreadful, too?” she asked.

  Carol straightened and took a sip of her coffee. “No, he’s not exactly dreadful. He’s the critic Melville Bland.” And after a moment: “He’s a full professor at Columbia. I was supposed to have dinner today with him and his stupid wife—she’s the playwright Dorothy Lewis and simply stupid—at some chichi place in the East Sixties, and I told them an awful lie about my going out to Connecticut for the day. I’d rather be shot than talk to either of them for five minutes.”

  I was sitting directly across the table from Carol. While we were there, I had ample opportunity to observe her, without her seeming to notice that I was doing so. My opportunity came each time anyone entered the restaurant or left it. For nobody could approach the glass front door, either from the street or from inside, without Carol’s fastening her eyes upon that person and seeming to take in every detail of his or her appearance. Here, I said to myself, is a real novelist observing people—objectively and critically. And I was favorably impressed by her obvious concern with literary personages; it showed how committed she was to a life of writing. Carol seemed to me just the girl that Jim had described. Her blond hair was not really flaxen. (It was golden, which is prettier but which doesn’t sound as interesting as flaxen.) It was long and carelessly arranged. I believe Jim was right about its being fixed in a knot on the back of her neck. Her whole appearance showed that she cared as little about it as either Jim or I did about ours . . . . Perhaps this was what one’s girl really ought to look like.