Departure (19 page)

At that time, my brother and I had a newspaper route, which netted us fifteen dollars on good weeks and which we both conducted after school. Before we were finished on this particular day, my brother knew that childish things were behind me and that there were more than material reasons for the deep and saintly sadness in which I had wrapped myself.

“What's eating you?” he asked me, and I told him about it. It had been a gentle day, a sweet day. We delivered our papers for the most part in five-story tenement houses, and my brother's idea of equity was for me to take the top three floors while he took the bottom two; being a year and a half older than I and some sixty pounds heavier, he could enforce this edict, but out of a basic concept of equal rights, I fought him on every house. Today, however, I accepted. There was a flavor to suffering; my whole heart was filled with music.

“I'm in love,” I said.

“What?”

“In love,” I said. “In love with a woman.”

“No?”

“Yes,” I said, with dignity that couldn't fail to impress him. “Deeply in love.”

“When did this happen?” His respectful curiosity combined interest and a touch of admiration.

“Today.”

“All at once?”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw her in my English class, and I knew it.”

“How could you know it?”

“The way I feel.”

“You mean like taking the top three floors?” my brother asked hopefully.

“That's only a part of it. My own suffering is of no consequence any longer, because now I'm consecrated to something bigger than I am.”

My brother nodded and watched me intently. “How
do
you feel?” he asked.

“Noble.”

“Not sick?”

“Not with physical sickness. It isn't something I can explain to you.”

“I guess not,” he agreed. “What's her name?”

“Thelma Naille.”

“Thelma?”

“Thelma,” I repeated, savoring the sound of it, the joy of it, the inflection of it.

“You're sure?”

“Of course I'm sure.”

“That's a strange name,” my brother said. “She doesn't lisp or anything?”

“She has a voice like music.”

“Oh. Does she know about this?”

“Naturally not,” I said—almost sorry that I had taken him into my confidence at all. However, it was necessary. Being in love was going to complicate my life; that I realized from the very beginning, and I couldn't have become a cross-country runner without my brother knowing what the motivating forces were.

At that time, we both went to George Washington High School, which is at the upper end of Manhattan Island. School let out at three; we finished our newspaper route at six, and then, since we had no mother, we prepared supper, ate it with my father, who came home from work about seven, did our homework and turned in. Love alone threw new drains on my energy. With the cross-country running, only a holy devotion permitted me to operate …

My brother was waiting for me when I came out of the English class the next day.

“Which one?” he wanted to know, and I pointed her out.

“The tall one?”

“She's not so tall.”

“She's five feet nine inches if she's an inch.”

“Oh, no. No. Never. Anyway, I'm five feet eight myself.”

“Five six,” my brother said coldly.

“Not with heels. Anyway, the rate of growth is different in different people. I'm just hitting my stride. She's all finished. Growing, I mean.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, how tall can a girl get?”

“If you can keep on growing, so can she. That's logical.”

I conquered the chill of fear that stole over my heart. He was understandably bitter; I held no resentment against him; I was filled with an inner purity and I let some of it shine through.

“You look sick,” my brother said. “I hope you're all right. She didn't even look at you.”

“She doesn't know me.”

“Well, why don't you introduce yourself?”

“I can't until I have some achievement to lay at her feet. I'm no one. Did you see how beautiful she is? Anyone would be in love with her. That's natural.”

“I'm not in love with her,” my brother said.

“Anyway—”

“What do you mean by laying an achievement at her feet?” my brother asked. “Are you going to buy something for her?”

I walked away. It was no use talking to him about this; it was no use talking to anyone. It was something I had to contain within me until I had won my struggle to make myself worthy. For a week I brooded about that. The football season was too far gone, and anyway I weighed only one fourteen, and football was a long-term project with all sorts of special skills required. Love, I was beginning to discover, was not something that stood still; it was a dynamic force that moved a person to immediate action, and when the week was over, I turned out for the track squad. After all, how many football players ever made an Olympic?

“Your feet are too big,” the coach told me.

“For what?” I had gotten along very well with them until then.

“For sprinting.”

“I don't suppose my feet will grow much more, and I intend to.”

“We can't wait,” the coach said.

“Don't you want to try me?” I pleaded.

“It's no use,” the coach said patiently. “You can't sprint with such feet.”

“Well, isn't there something where you don't have to sprint?”

“Your feet are against you. If you jumped, it would be just the same. Also, you're small and light—and that's bad for discus or shot. If you want to try for cross-country, you can.”

“Cross-country?”

“That's right. You spend a year at that, and then maybe the rest of you will catch up with your feet. It's good training, if your heart is all right.”

My heart was all right, and at three o'clock I was shivering in my underclothes in Van Cortlandt Park. It was a cold, bleak fall day, and a hundred other boys shivered with me. Then we started out, and for the next half hour, over hill and dale, we ran a course of two and a half miles. It may be that education, in probing the bypaths of knowledge, has discovered something crueler and more senseless than a cross-country run; if so, I missed it. I don't know what upheld the rest of the squad, but love carried me through pantingly to the end. I showered and joined my brother on the route, an hour and half late.

This time I couldn't make the top three floors, and I told him why.

“You mean you're going up there and run two and a half miles every afternoon?” he demanded.

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“For her.”

“You mean she asked you to do this?”

“How could she ask me when I've never spoken to her?”

“Who asked you then?”

“No one.”

“You're crazy,” my brother said, which was what I might have expected, his mind being capable of rising no higher above the dirt. For the rest of that week, there was a certain bitterness of feeling between us, something I sensed only vaguely, since all my acute perceptions were blurred by a fog of constant weariness. If ever in the history of western romance love was stretched to a breaking point, that was it, and it seems to me that it is a real tribute to the gentle passion that both my devotion and I survived. However, my survival was a tough-and-go business; if I did not walk in darkness, I certainly walked in a gray haze, and my classroom response became, if not downright idiotic, at least far from alert. More than before, I realized that I would have to become the best cross-country runner America had ever produced to redeem a faltering, tired, incoherent young man in the eyes of the woman I loved.

Somehow, the five weekdays passed, and without a complete loss of the saintly gentleness that was the most manifest outward indication of my passion. The cross I bore was made no lighter by my brother's grim curiosity; in a completely scientific manner, he experimented with my new tolerance. I came late to work, but I certainly did my share.

The paper we delivered was an afternoon paper, except on Sundays, when it came out in the morning. That meant we had to dig ourselves out of bed at 3
A.M.
, stagger over to the assembly room, and collate mountains of newsprint. By seven or seven-thirty in the morning, we were through with the delivery and could go home and catch a nap. Ordinarily, I would be tired enough, but the cross-country team—and whoever was the diabolical brain behind it—decided to hold a conditioning run on Saturday, five miles instead of two and a half; and when Sunday morning finally rolled around my accumulated fatigue was something to see. My brother's respect was tinged with awe by now, and there was almost a quality of gentleness in his suggestion that I go home and sleep most of the day.

“No,” I said wistfully. “It would be nice, but I can't. I'm going to her house.”

“You mean you've met her, you've talked to her? She invited you over?”

“Not exactly.”

“You mean you're just going over and introduce yourself,” my brother nodded admiringly.

“Not exactly that either. I'm just going to stand outside her house.”

“Until she comes out?”

“Yes—yes, that's it,” I agreed.

“Don't you think you ought to get some sleep first?” my brother suggested.

“I can't take the chance.”

“What chance?”

I didn't try to explain, because there are some things you can't explain. Her house was a fourteen-story building on Riverside Drive. It awed me and overwhelmed me; it widened the gap; it made me search my memory for any evidence that America was a country where cross-country running was even nominally honored. And to make things more difficult, the house had two entrances, one on the Drive and one on the side street. There was no bench from which I could observe both entrances, so I had to take up my vigil on a windy street corner, reflecting morosely on the fact that even if the rest of me grew, I was not treating my feet in a manner calculated either to keep them at their present size or preserve them for sprinting.

There are cold places on earth; there are places that have a whole literature of coldness woven around them; they do not compare with a street corner on Riverside Drive on a cloudy November morning. That is a special cold; a nice, wet, penetrating cold that increases slowly enough for you to perish with a minimum of pain. By twelve o'clock I had finished with my consecration to life and had newly consecrated myself to death. There was a new poignancy to the realization that I would die here like this, on her very doorstep—a communal one, true enough, but hers too—and that she would not know. Yet wouldn't she have to know? When she looked at my pale white face, the ice rimming my lashes, wouldn't something tell her, and wouldn't she regret that never by word or sign had she indicated anything to me?

It was about that time my brother appeared. He had a brown bag under his arm. “I brought you some lunch,” he said.

“Thank you,” I murmured. “It was sweet of you and good of you to think of me, but food doesn't matter.”

“What?”

“I didn't mean to hurt your feelings,” I said gently.

“That's all right,” my brother nodded. He was beginning to realize that with love, you felt your way with an open mind. “Try a salami sandwich. Suppose we go over to a bench and sit down.”

“No—we can't.”

“Why not?”

“I have to watch both entrances, and you have to stand here to see them.”

“Won't she look for you when she comes out?”

I shook my head. “She doesn't know I'm here.”

“What?”

“You keep saying
what.
I think you don't understand what this means to me.”

“No, I guess I don't.”

“How could she know I'm here,” I asked my brother, “when I never spoke to her?”

“Then what are you waiting here for?”

“For her to come out,” I answered simply, eating the sandwich.

“And then?”

“Then I see her.”

“But you see her every day, don't you?”

“Yes.”

My brother looked at me searchingly. “Oh,” he said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. But suppose she doesn't come out?”

“She has to come out sooner or later.”

“Why?” my brother demanded, parading the cold vista of logic. “On a day like this, she would be very smart to stay at home. She could stay at home and read the funnies. Maybe she's even got a party up there and all kinds of people are coming in to visit her.”

“Stop that.”

“I'm only trying to be logical,” my brother said.

“You don't know how you're hurting me. If you knew, you wouldn't talk like that.”

Indicating that if I thought so little of his advice, I could maintain my vigil alone, he left me to my meditations and to the incredible combination of damp wind that blew in two directions at the same time. The top of me wasn't so bad; I had a woolen cap and a short coat we used to call a Mackinaw; but my feet suffered. It was ironical to consider that it might be
her
fault that I would never be a sprinter; even the question of plain and simple walking began to raise doubts in my mind.

The sun had set behind the Palisades and the policeman on the beat was beginning to eye me uncertainly when my brother appeared again.

“Still no sign of her?” he said.

“I'm above anything you can say.”

“All right. But Pop thinks you ought to come home.”

“You didn't tell him?”

“Not exactly.”

“How could you?”

“It's all right,” my brother assured me.

“How could it be all right? How could a man Pop's age know what I'm going through? Even you can't understand it.”