He took her to the sidewalk café at the Brevoort, where nobody had taken her for years and which she now decided was the finest restaurant she’d ever been to in her life. Sitting at that elegant table as the final glow of sunset gave way to darkness, with their heads just visible to passers-by beyond the neat little potted shrubs, she kept hoping someone she knew would walk past and see them there: she even hoped for strangers to notice them and to wonder, enviously, who they were.
Then he took her home to his own place, which turned out to be a spacious apartment on Gramercy Park that was filled with wonders. Its walls were heavy with books and with dark paintings of kinds and periods that she wouldn’t ordinarily have responded to, except that each was so clearly a gem in its own right, framed in gilt and lighted with a little museum lamp. “This is a Poussin,” he was saying, “and this over here is a Murillo, one of the early Murillos. I’ve always liked the Spaniards of that school; of course I expect you know a good deal more about these things than I do.” But the pictures were only the beginning: every piece of furniture was a valuable-looking antique – Moorish and Italian and French – and there were two charmingly roughhewn three-legged chairs that were primitive relics of Elizabethan England. The mementos of his years in the Orient included a heavy ivory-hafted sword that he called a “Burmese dar,” and one long wall of his bedroom was emblazoned with a great bright tapestry that he explained was a “purdah.” “If you follow the figures in it, you see, it tells a kind of pictorial narrative: it’s meant to portray the rite of exhuming and reinterring the fingerbones of Buddha. Whole thing’s a bit garish by our standards, I’m afraid, the colors and whatnot; that’s why I’ve consigned it here to the bedroom.” He was standing in the bedroom doorway when he said this, pouring brandy into two snifters, and he looked up briefly and shyly while she studied the purdah. “Hate to part with it, though. It was given me with a good deal of ceremony when I left the colony, as a sort of token.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s garish at all,” she said, accepting one of the snifters. “I think it’s beautiful.” Then she moved delicately past him to re-explore the other rooms, while he hovered close behind her. “Really,” she said. “Really, Sterling, this whole apartment is beautiful. All your things are so different from each
other, and yet you’ve managed to make them all harmonize. Oh, that’s not the right word; that sounds like an interior decorator or something. What I mean is that you’ve made everything – made everything
whole
. You’ve achieved – you’ve achieved—” But Sterling Nelson gave her no chance to finish telling him what he had achieved. He had taken the brandy glass away from her and set it down on a table; he had taken her by the shoulder and turned her around and kissed her hard and full on the mouth.
Within a very few weeks his apartment had become the warm center of her world. There were difficulties – it would have been too good to be true if there hadn’t been – but there were times when it seemed that no difficulties in the world could fail to be resolved if only good fortune allowed her to stay with this wise, calm, splendid man.
The main difficulty was that Sterling Nelson had a wife in England from whom he wasn’t yet technically divorced, and he sometimes talked of the brief voyage he would have to make next fall to make it final. She never knew what to say when he mentioned that, but he always managed to make it clear that the whole business was a matter of tiresome legal details, to be taken care of and dismissed with as much dispatch as possible.
Another difficulty, at least at first, was Bobby. She knew it was only natural for Bobby to resent her spending so much time away from home, and she understood too that Sterling, with no children of his own, might find himself uncomfortable in the presence of a child. Even so, it troubled her that they were so awkward with each other. Bobby was always good about saying “Hello, Mr. Nelson” and “Goodnight, Mr. Nelson,” and it always pleased her to see them solemnly shake hands, man to man; but one evening Bobby made a terrible scene. He had been tense and irritable all afternoon, claiming his stomach hurt, and
he kept getting in her way while she was trying to dress; then he sat down in the middle of the floor and started to cry and said: “I don’t
want
you to go out!”
She didn’t know whether to scold or mollify him; she tried both, which only made him worse. “I
hate
Mr. Nelson!” he cried, fighting her off when she tried to put her arms around him, and he was still in the full heat of his rage when Sterling came in and stood watching, looking bewildered.
“Sterling, I’m sorry about this. He’s just – he’s upset because I’m – because we’re—”
But Bobby, hiding his face in shame at being seen in tears, scrambled up and ran tragically to his room and slammed the door behind him.
Sterling sat down uneasily. “Is he sick?”
“No, I don’t think so. He said his stomach hurt, but I think it’s mostly just a tantrum.” And she looked helplessly toward the slammed door.
“Bit old for that sort of nonsense, isn’t he?” Sterling said.
“I suppose he is; I don’t know. But the point is I
have
been spending a lot of time apart from him, and he feels – I think he feels neglected.”
“Mm,” Sterling said, shifting his feet and folding his hands in his lap. “Well. In any case I expect Mrs. what’s-her-name can look after him tonight, can’t she? The woman who sits with him?”
“I suppose so.” But she still yearned toward the silent bedroom door. She could picture him flung face down across his bed, exhausted and ashamed and alone in the deepening shadows, too miserable now even to cry, and she knew he would be waiting for her. “Sterling,” she said, “why don’t you fix yourself a drink, and I’ll just go in and talk to him. I won’t be a minute.”
“ ‘Talk’ to him? I must say I fail to see the point of that, Alice. Wouldn’t you just be starting up the whole silly business again?”
And then her own voice came close to tears: “Oh, Sterling,
please
try to understand.” It was the nearest thing to a quarrel they’d ever had, and as her voice rose before his blinking face she was touched with panic: what if he
couldn’t
understand? “I
can’t
just leave him in there, don’t you see? Oh, if he had a father it’d be different, but I’m all he has in the
world –
can’t you see that?”
In the end they took him out to dinner with them, to the Brevoort. He had washed his face and put on his best clothes, and in the aftermath of hysteria he was by turns chagrined and over-exhilarated. At first they couldn’t get a word out of him: he hung his head and kept avoiding Sterling’s patient, kindly eyes; then all at once he started talking as if he would never stop. He had made a mess of his dinner plate, mixing everything together with his fork into an unsightly mush, and he explained this procedure at shrill and elaborate length.
“I don’t really like peas, you see,” he said, “and I don’t like this kind of potatoes and I don’t much like this kind of gravy, so you see what I do is, I just mix them all up together and then they don’t taste so bad. I always do that whenever I get a whole bunch of different kinds of food I don’t like, and it makes everything taste a whole lot better. Just mix ’em all up together, and you don’t even taste the things you don’t like. I mean it tastes
good
this way …” He went on and on, while Sterling stoically endured the monologue, while Alice tried ineffectually to quiet him down and people at neighboring tables glanced over in open irritation at the spectacle of such an ill-behaved little boy.
He didn’t stop talking all the way home, except to break away from them on the sidewalk to demonstrate his prowess at leapfrogging fire hydrants; he didn’t stop talking, in fact, until Alice
had managed to get him into bed and put out his light and shut his door.
Then she said, “Oh, Sterling, thank you so much. I know it was awful for you but you were – really, you were wonderful.”
And after that, Bobby became more and more a participant. They didn’t take him to the Brevoort again, but they began going to the Brevoort less frequently themselves. More often Alice would fix dinner for the three of them at home, and they’d usually wait until Bobby was in bed before going to Sterling’s place. Sterling didn’t seem to mind; he was consistently kind and fatherly and stern without ever being harsh, and he seemed to enjoy the increasing evidence of Bobby’s attachment to him. One evening he brought an illustrated book for boys,
British Submarine Service in the Great War
, and Bobby sat silent and spellbound, turning the pages, while Sterling explained the pictures and told tantalizingly cryptic anecdotes about his own submarine service. And Alice, watching them from the kitchen doorway, allowed herself to indulge in a happy daydream of the three of them together forever, of Bobby grown tall and disciplined and calling Sterling “Dad.”
When the heat of the city grew unbearable that summer, Sterling sent them both away for a week to a cool lake in New Jersey, where they learned – or almost learned – to catch perch and sunfish with the rod and reel that Sterling had equipped them with, and where they sat for hours under a great shade tree while Alice read aloud from Sterling’s volume of
Great Expectations
. And when the vacation was over and she felt that neither she nor Bobby could face the wretched city school system again, it was Sterling, one unforgettable night in his bedroom, who first suggested she might consider moving out to Scarsdale. He knew about Scarsdale because one of the items his company imported was lead-casement windows, which had
enjoyed a vogue in the wealthier, Tudor-style homes of that town before the Depression. “Matter of fact we’re still doing a fair amount of business out there,” he said. “Seems to be a little isolated pocket of prosperity. In any case I understand the schools are first rate; be a good thing for Bobby. And of course the town itself is charming – green grass and fresh air and all that; get you away from all the bother of the city.”
“It sounds lovely,” she said, “but I’m afraid I could never afford it. George keeps saying I’m ‘living beyond my means’ as it is.”
“Well, but some of the rentals aren’t as high as you might think, Alice; it’s a curious thing. Some of the older houses along the Post Road are rather rundown, and they’re vacant – as long as they’re vacant the owners are losing money, willing to lease them quite cheaply. It’s a thing you might be wise to look into.”
“You make it sound so easy.” But that was one of the wonderful things about Sterling Nelson: he could make any difficult thing sound easy, and the only other man she had ever known who could do that was Willard Slade. All the others, George, for example, had made easy things sound difficult.
“Might well be simpler than you think,” he said, sitting up on the edge of the bed and reaching for his dressing gown. “Pay a reasonable price and still have all the advantages.” He walked across the room to get a cigarette and refill their brandy glasses, and when he came back, she allowed herself a thrill of girlish pleasure at how handsome he looked in his dressing gown. On any other man it would have been a bathrobe, but the way Sterling wore it made it a dressing gown. He sat on the edge of the bed again and looked at her, still silently inquiring if a move to Scarsdale mightn’t be a good idea. And because his eyes were so considerate she was emboldened to tell him why the plan held
so little appeal for her. She reached out and smoothed the silken lapels over the hairs on his chest.
“But Scarsdale’s so far away,” she said, “and I don’t think I could bear being that far away from you.”
And instead of betraying even the faintest sign of distaste at this confession, he took her in his arms and kissed her as though it had been the very thing he’d hoped she would say. “Actually,” he said against her ear, “that brings up something else I thought I might suggest. Point is, there’s really no reason why we’d have to be apart.”
Then he released her, letting her sink back into the pillows, while he began to explain his plan. His lease here on Gramercy Park was soon to expire, and he’d realized for some time that he’d be unwise to renew it – the place was really too expensive, and he would be still less able to afford it after his costly trip to England; in other words it was only sensible for him to find a new place to live, and he wondered – “It’s only a suggestion, mind you; just something I thought we might discuss” – he wondered if she might consent to their moving out to Scarsdale together. Mightn’t it turn out to be a good thing for both of them? For all three of them? And there would, of course, be a distinct economic advantage – sharing the expenses, and so on. Oh, it was only a suggestion, but how did it strike her?
“Sterling,” she said. “Oh, how do you
think
it strikes me? Don’t you know it’s the most wonderful, beautiful idea I’ve ever heard? Whatever made you think I’d – how could you possibly have thought I’d say no?”
He looked pleased but also deeply serious. “Well,” he said, “it’s not as if I could offer you a formal proposal of marriage. Point is, I can’t do that; at least—” and here he squeezed her hand “at least not yet. Not until this England business is cleared up. All I can offer you now is – well, myself, and my love.”
And she spent the rest of the night assuring him that she would never ask for anything more.
Within a few weeks the house had been found and rented, and the Neptune Moving and Storage Company had been contracted to move the contents of their two apartments out to Scarsdale. Alice and Bobby rode out on the train in the early afternoon of the moving day, to be there in plenty of time before the van arrived. And as she stood on the front porch, watching the great truck approach through the trees along the Post Road, she was almost ill because she could scarcely contain her happiness.
First came a barrel of china and kitchenware, and the men tracked bits of excelsior across the floor as she guided them through to the rear of the house. Then they began unloading her furniture – the ugly, once expensive sofa and upholstered chairs, the unwieldy parts of the big dining room table and the mahogany dresser with the drawer that didn’t work – plain, middle-class things that she and George had bought for New Rochelle, things now grown shabby with the lonely years in Bethel and New York, things that looked somehow all the more forlorn for being heavily bumped and hauled through the Scarsdale sunshine. The men were mincingly gentle with the Majestic radio, but they didn’t quite know how to deal with her sculpture, which she steered into the garage that was to serve as her studio. Then came several trunks and any number of sloppy cardboard boxes filled with odds and ends and Bobby’s toys; that was all there was of their own belongings, and the great padded cavern of the moving van was still far from empty: the rest of the load was Sterling Nelson’s treasure.