"Yes, indeed." In fact the last thing he felt prepared to comment on were the olfactory mysteries of women. His mother smelled of talcum powder, that was all he knew about it. He would never buy her cologne.
"Do you think she'd like it?"
"Is it...? Gee, Mary Ellen, you've got me." He took the cologne from her. Its shape and feel resembled a Vitalis bottle, but the liquid was green. "I was thinking of something a little more ... But if you like it..."
"I do like it, but there are other more special things." She smiled. "Things I can't afford."
"Like what?"
"Imported perfumes. From France."
"Could you show me some?"
"She
is
special."
He could only bring himself to nod. This deceit seemed ludicrous to him, and it was mortifying. He'd only wanted to conceal how foolish he felt, and how at sea. He was sick of the worship of his mother's circle of Good Shepherd biddies. He was sick of the goggle-eyed deference of the nuns and the chipper camaraderie of the priests who hailed him as if he was one of them. Upon his release from the Chinese prison he'd felt a great exhilaration, but that had faded and the confines of Inwood had been pressing in on him. Was the army his only way out? No wonder he was depressed. If anything, his rediscovery of our friendship only heightened this feeling because, after all, I was gone. Other people our age, even including the few old friends who were still around the parish, were uniformly stiff and uneasy in his presence. When he dared go into the neighborhood tavern, men bought him drinks and waited for his war stories. He'd bought his mother a television set when he'd first come home so that she could watch him on Edward R. Murrow, but in the weeks since his leave began, he'd watched it continually from the time it went on the air in the afternoon. He'd gone to Macy's looking for Mary Ellen partly out of his desperate but unadmitted loneliness, but more because he couldn't stay at home another day watching the antics of Kukla, Fran and Ollie.
"Here's one." Mary Ellen placed a tiny green vial in front of him. "It's called
Je Reviens.
That means 'I remember.'"
"It's French?"
"Parisian."
"Not a whole lot of it, is there?"
"She would just use a wee bit. It's the most wonderful perfume we sell. You'd know what I mean if you could smell it, but we don't open these. The assumption is, anyone who can afford it knows what it smells like."
"How much?"
"Forty dollars."
"For that little bottle?"
She nodded and laughed, and then started to put it away.
"I'll take it."
Mary Ellen looked up at him. "You're kidding."
"No, I'll take it. You convinced me."
"I wasn't trying to."
"You're a good salesgirl.',' Michael reached for his wallet. "Very good."
"You'll take her breath away, I promise you. My goodness." He saw that he'd taken hers away. He handed her a fifty-dollar bill. "Can I get it gift-wrapped someplace?"
"Downstairs, beside the credit desk, just bring your receipt."
Mary Ellen turned away to write up the sale. She put the boxed perfume in a bag and brought it back to Michael. By then he'd had a chance to think of what to say. "Listen, Mary Ellen, I see how busy you are and everything, but I think it would be nice to shoot the breeze a bit, don't you? I mean, what a coincidence, running into each other like this."
"You look good, Michael. I'm glad. I'm glad things worked out for you." She handed him his bag, then lowered her eyes. "I prayed for you." She looked up quickly. "We all did."
"I know. I think that's why I made it."
They stared at each other and for a moment the bustle around them faded and they were aware only of each other. Michael felt both that they'd been very close friends once, which was not the case, and that he'd never seen her before. Her beauty seemed unreal to him, as if she were one of the store's perfect manikins. But for that instant her feeling, that worry, tinged perhaps with grief and also with the awe he'd grown accustomed to by then, communicated powerfully. She too saw him as a hero, and he sensed that she was drawn to him.
"Anyway, I was wondering how I could see you? Or when?"
Her eyes fell to the bag she'd just given him; what about his girlfriend?
He lowered the bag and deflected the problem it implied. "Or do you work around the clock?"
She laughed. "Not today. I work till six."
"Do you live in Inwood still?"
She nodded. He knew that she still lived with her parents on Isham Street.
"Well, I could ride the train home with you. I'm staying with my mother for a few weeks."
"I'd heard that."
"I have some other shopping to do. I could wait until you got off."
"That would be lovely, Michael."
"Maybe I could buy you dinner."
She stared at him, trying to read his expression, and she said nothing.
He spent the rest of the afternoon sipping coffee in an Automat. He watched the food-windows as if they were television sets.
At a few minutes before six he was back, but Mary Ellen was no longer behind the counter. For a moment he panicked, thinking she'd changed her mind and had slipped away. But then someone touched his elbow.
When he turned he was surprised to find not the glamorous woman with ruby lips, rouged cheeks and shaded eyes, and high-fashion dress, but the Inwood girl, in sweater and skirt, he'd known since they were children. She wore no makeup and her hair was in a ponytail. This second transformation stunned him even more than the first, and now he saw for the first time how truly beautiful she was. And also how familiar. Anxiety drained out of him. "My goodness," he said.
"You didn't think I go around like that, did you?"
"You didn't dress down for me?" He asked this ingenuously. He thought that if she had any appetite for him at all, it would be due to his uniform. It was why he'd worn it.
She shook her head. "Do you mind?"
"Heavens no!" He took her coat out of her arms and helped her into it. "Now I don't have to take you to the Rainbow Room."
It was dark and cold outside, but the sidewalks of Herald Square were crowded with shoppers. Men and women were holding each other and children were craning to see the scenes of Santa's Village in Macy's windows. A Salvation Army lady was ringing her bell, and from loudspeakers hidden above the elf-ridden window displays Bing Crosby was singing, "I'll be home for Christmas."
Michael had an impulse to take Mary Ellen's arm, but he checked it. He was nearly overwhelmed with the feeling that this was a moment he'd have dreamed of if he'd dared. A deep need of which he'd been inchoately aware was for that instant filled, and he felt suddenly free of his morose listlessness. It was possible for him to be inside such a scene, however contingently, a man with a woman on the streets of New York at Christmas. And not a mere man, but a soldier. For our generation the epitome of romance was the GI with his girl, and in our fantasies they were always either at the docks saying farewell or on those streets with snows falling and Christmas coming.
He bent toward her. "I meant what I said about dinner."
"I think that would be nice. I've already called my mother."
He laughed. What a pair they were! Sophisticated Manhattanites? Inwood Irish Catholics checking in with Ma. He was relieved, though, because she wasn't checking in with a man.
"Where would you like to go?" He asked.
"I'd like to walk first, wouldn't you? Have you walked up Fifth Avenue? Have you seen the decorations?"
"No."
"Michael, really! And you call yourself a New Yorker!"
"And I've never been to the Statue of Liberty either."
They kept their distance from each other as they cut across Broadway toward Fifth Avenue. They knew they were enacting a classic scene. The Christmas carols that wafted magically above them might have been the film score. They passed Santa Clauses and more bellringers. The laden shoppers were good-humored for a change and the mounted policemen at each intersection seemed a very emblem of the benign and joyous season. At Saks Mary Ellen pressed against the windows which displayed animated scenes of life in an Alpine village. "I think ours are better, don't you?"
Michael had barely noticed the Macy's windows, but it was his impression that they had nothing to compare with these lifelike mechanical figures that chopped wood and drove sleighs and toted baskets. Still he agreed with her vigorously.
At Fifty-second Street they crossed into Rockefeller Center to see the tree. They stood on the parapet above the skating rink, aware of the gliding couples and the smooth music, but their gazes were fixed upon the huge spruce decked so abundantly in gaudy lights that the tree itself, its limbs and needles and cones, had no substance. They had been raised to think of this scene, the tree and the rink, as enshrining Christmas every bit as much as the parish nativity, and it would fall short to say that they gave themselves over utterly to the prescribed sentimental enchantment.
"You know something?" Michael said.
She looked up at him. Lo and behold the first snowflakes began to fall at that moment. The film score swelled. Not even in his imagination would he have dared conjure an effect like that.
"I'll never look at this tree again," he said, his voice lowered, "without thinking of you."
Michael could read her. She was a young woman who had left other girls her age in the dust. She was smarter and more ambitious and not prepared for a moment to settle for the hemmed-in life of the old neighborhood. But she hadn't left it yet. She was like the princess of Inwood, but that had brought with it a grave problem: where were the princes? If they had energy or ambition of their own, they were gone. Michael knew that the boys who remained and with whom she might have been expected to make a life were nice enough. They were her friends and the sons of her parents' friends. But they had already settled for a world she found too small. She didn't know what she wanted, but she knew what she didn't want. And now here was Michael Maguire whom she'd always liked and who had always been so accessible. But he had become a legend, having shown such largeness of soul, such nobility, that it shamed her for having all those years taken his friendship for granted. He was like an apparition, a reincarnation, like one resurrected. And he had just said the most wonderful thing that anyone had ever said to her. The feeling was so unexpected, so poignant and sharp that she could hardly breathe, and this is what it was: here is my prince. She didn't forget for a moment that he had a girlfriend already, but that only sharpened her reaction to him.
At dinner in the Rockefeller Center Cafe just off the ice-skating rink, intermittently watching the pairs coast by in their languid ovals beyond the glass wall, they found their tongues. Each discovered in the other the all-too-familiar sense of hesitation, poised as both were on the very threshold of life. "I feel," she said passionately, "as if the world is about to open up for me and give me everything I've ever wanted. Only the secret word needs to be said, and I know what it is!"
"But you haven't said it."
She shook her head and sipped her beer. "Not yet."
"What are you waiting for?" He was ingenuous. She answered him with her stare. Michael knew, and he was taken aback by the knowledge. He said, "You are a bold girl."
"So I'm told. It's regarded as my failing."
"Not by me."
"But what if I was truly bold?"
"And did what?"
"Asked you to tell me about your time away."
"In prison?"
"Yes."
After a moment he said, "A Chinese government official came to our camp once and told us that World War Three had begun, and that the Russians had blown up New York with an atom bomb."
Mary Ellen was aghast. "Why did they do that?"
Michael shrugged. "Just to knock us down some more. He said the U.S. had surrendered."
"Did you believe it?"
"Do you believe things that happen to you in nightmares? After a while, when we didn't hear any more about it, I guess I decided it was just another turn of the screw. But by then I knew that it
could
happen and that was pretty awful too. The Reds do have the bomb. And they believe the ends justify the means. I think they're capable of anything." Michael checked himself. He had no interest in sounding like Senator McCarthy. He picked up the bowl of sugar cubes. "There was a period when they kept me alone, although mostly I was with other guys. But the time they kept me alone nearly did me in. I had to think of things to keep my mind occupied, like keeping track of the days. My cell had a dirt floor, and so every morning under a corner of my mat I'd scratch the date. I kept it up for seven months and eleven days when they put me back in the camp. And you know what? I had the date right!" He laughed, and his elation came back to him. What a triumph that had been. "And another thing I did was to try to memorize the squares and cubes of the numbers up to a hundred."
"Did you do it?"
He laughed again and nodded. "The square of your age is 441, and the cube is 9,261. What I wanted to do was figure out a system, like a table or a formula that would simplify the multiplication. But I never could."
"But you just did that all in your head?"
"Yep." He dropped the sugar cube into his coffee, then tapped his forehead. "You wouldn't believe the gobbledygook I've got up there."
"Monsignor Riordan told my mother you read the Bible a lot."
He shrugged and said, defending himself from the implicit charge of piety, "It was all I had. The New Testament, actually." He smiled. "That's not what I mean by gobbledygook."
"I'm surprised they let you keep it."
"They took it away during my time in solitary. You never knew what was coming with those guys. When they gave it back, I was afraid they would take it again, so I memorized a lot of it."
"But they let you keep it."
"Naturally. I think once you've protected yourself from something, it doesn't happen."
She thought about that. "You had to protect yourself against so many things..."