In the Absence of Angels (5 page)

Already, he twitted himself, he was developing the spots of the returning alumnus. The secret conviction that inwardly, outer decay to the contrary, one had preserved a personal ebullience better than most, the benignant surveying glance with its flavor of
“si la jeunesse savait”
— he had them all. Smiling to himself he turned in at the doorway of Jefferson Hall, and making another turn to the reception room on the right, met the slightly worn facsimiles of his youth full on.

They were gathered around the mantel, most of them, talking in voices at once hearty and tentative, glasses in hand. Drinks to melt the integument of twenty years and more — of course. From the group a man detached himself to come forward and pump his hand.

“Davy! Why, Davy Spanner!” The lost face of Banks coalesced at once in his recognition, fatally undistinguished, except for the insistent, hortatory manner that had battened on the years. He had been business manager of the crew.

Banks conveyed him toward the others like a trophy.

“Look who’s here!” he crowed. “Our little coxie!”

Grinning a little stiffly, Spanner acknowledged, not without pleasure, the nickname paternally bestowed on him long ago by these men who had all been so much bigger than he, who had chaffingly, unmaliciously treated him as their mascot perhaps, because of his size, but had unswervingly followed his direction. As a group they were still physically impressive, carrying extra weight fairly well on their long bones.

They gathered around to greet him. With the unfortunate sobriety of the latecomer, he noted, accepting a drink, that they were all, although not yet tipsy, a little relaxed, a trifle suffused, with the larger-than-life voices and gestures of men who had had a few. A table set buffet style in a corner, and a coffee urn, had apparently not yet been touched. Downing his first drink, he took another, and plunged into the babble of expected questions, the “where you been all these years?” — the “what’re you doing now?” — the “whereabouts you living?” One by one he remembered them all, even to the little personal tricks and ways they had had in the locker-room. Bates, whose enormous sweaty feet had been a loud joke with them all, was almost completely bald now, as was Goetschius, the polite quiet boy from upstate, who, politely as ever, bent his tonsure over Banks’ pictures of his house, his family.

Reassuringly, they all looked pretty good, as he thought he did himself, but he wondered if they knew any better than he did what had impelled them to come. “Horse” Chernowski, who stood nearest him, had driven up from Pennsylvania, beckoned on, Spanner wondered, by what urge to reasseverate the past? In his ill-cut, too thick tweeds, his great shoulders swollen needlessly by shoulder pads, the hocklike wrist bones projecting from the cuffs —his nickname fitted him still. He had been their dumb baby, stronger than any of the others, but dull of reaction; once they had lost a race because of his slowness in going over the side when he had jammed his slide.

“Ah, my God, Davy,” said Chernowski delightedly, “do you remember the cops picking us up for speeding after the big day — the night we drove back from Poughkeepsie?”

“Yes. Sure I remember,” said Spanner, but he hadn’t, until then. From across the room he saw Anderson, the stroke, nursing his drink at the mantel, staring at him ruefully, almost comprehendingly; encountering that blue gaze which had faced him steadily, in the inarticulate intimacy of three years of grueling practice, faraway incident, and triumph, there was much that he did remember.

Handsome, intelligent son of a family which had contributed both money and achievement to the college for more than one generation, Anderson had more perfectly straddled the continuum of campus approval that stretched between “grind” and “hero” than anyone Spanner had known. Spanner remembered him, effortlessly debonair and assured, burnished hair spotlighted over the satin knee breeches of his costume as Archer in
The Beaux’ Stratagem,
or stripped and white-lipped, holding Spanner’s gaze with his own as the water seared past the shell. Although he had been as perilously near the prototype of campus hero as one could be without stuffiness or lampoonery, there had never been any of the glib sheen of the fair-haired boy about him, nothing in the just courtesy of his manner except the measurable flow of a certain
noblesse oblige.

He crossed now to Spanner, and took, rather than shook, Spanner’s hand.

“Davy!” he said. “Well, Davy!”

The crisp intonation had the same ease, the ruddy hair had merely faded to tan, the eyes stared down at him now straight as ever, but from between lids with the faint, flawed pink of the steady drinker, and Spanner saw now that there was in his posture the controlled waver, the scarcely perceptible imbalance of the man who is always quietly, competently drunk.

“You look fine, Davy,” he said, smiling.

“You look fine too, Bob.”

“Sure. Oh sure,” he said, with a wry, self-derisive grimace. He indicated with his drink. “Look at us. Everyone looks fine. Householders all. Hard to believe we were the gents who took it full in the belly — depression, social consciousness.” His accent was a little slurred now. “And wars and pestilence,” he said more firmly. “Even if we were a little late for that.” He downed his drink.

“You in the war, Bob?” said Spanner, somewhat lamely.

“Me? Not me,” he said. “My kids were. Lost one — over Germany.” He walked over to the buffet, poured himself a drink, and was back, swiftly. “Sounds antiquated already, doesn’t it? Over Germany. We’re back to saying ‘in Germany’ now.” He went on quickly, as if he had a speech in mind that he would hold back if he thought it over.

“Remember the house I used to belong to? ‘Bleak House,’ they used to call it, sometimes, remember? The one that got into the news in the thirties because they hung a swastika over the door. Or maybe somebody hung it on
them
.” He drank again. “Could have been either way,” he said.

Spanner nodded. He had begun to be sick of the word “remember”; it seemed as if everyone, including his self of the night before, was intent on poking up through the golden unsplit waters of his youth the sudden sharp fin of some submerged reality, undefined, but about to become clear.

“They were a nice bunch of fellows in our time,” said Spanner.

“You know …Davy ...” Anderson said. His voice trailed off. The fellow was apologetic; in his straight blue look there was a hint of guilt, of shame, as if he too, the previous night, had half dreamed and pondered, but unlike Spanner had met the dark occupant of his dreamings face to face.

“I wanted them to take you in,” Anderson said. “A few of us together could have pushed it through — but all the others made such a God-damned stink about it, we gave in. I suppose you heard.” He looked at Spanner, mistaking the latter’s unresponsiveness for accusation perhaps, and went on.

“If we hadn’t all been so damned unseeing, so sure of ourselves in those days ...” He broke off. “Ah well,” he said, “that’s water over the dam.” And grasping Spanner’s shoulders, he looked down at him in an unsteady bid for forgiveness, just before he released him with a brotherly slap on the back, and turned away, embarrassed. Standing there, it was as if Spanner felt the flat of it, not between his shoulder blades, but stinging on his suddenly hot cheek — that sharp slap of revelation.

A
T A QUARTER OF
eight, young Miss Abel was prodded out of sleep as usual by the harsh clanging of the bell in the church around the corner. It went on for as much as forty or fifty times, each clank plummeting instantly into silence, as if someone were beating iron against a stone. She did not get up at once, but lay there, seeing herself rise with the precision of a somnambulist, go from bathroom to kitchenette in the blind actions which would dissolve the sediment of sleep still in her eyes, in her bones. In her throat, a sick resistance to the day had already begun its familiar mounting, the pulse of a constant ache on which sleep had put only a delusory quietus. Lying there, she wondered which unwitting day of the past had been the one on which she must have exchanged the bright morning dower of childhood, that indolent assurance that the day was a nimbus of possibilities, for this heavy ache that collected in the throat like a catarrhal reminder that as yesterday was dusty, so would be today.

There had been nothing in her childhood, certainly, to warrant that early dowered expectancy, nothing in the girlhood spent in her mother’s rooming house near that part of the Delaware River consecrated to the Marcus Hook refineries, where the great fungoid tanks bloomed oppressively over all, draining the frontal streets like theirs, which were neither country lanes nor town blocks, but only in-between passageways where the privet died hardily, without either pavement or neon to console one for its death. In that bland, unimpassioned climate the days had been blurred exhalations of the factories, the river and the people, dragging on into a darkness that was like the fainter, sooted, interchangeable breath of all of these. Perhaps the days had rung with expectancy for her, nevertheless, because from the first, for as long as she could remember, she had been so sure of getting out, away. As, of course, she had.

She swung sideways out of bed and clamped her feet on the floor, rose and trundled to the bathroom, the kitchenette. Boiled coffee was the quickest and most economical; watching the grounds spray and settle on the bubbling water, she took comfort from the small action. Everywhere in New York now toasters clicked, clocks rang, and people rising under the weight of the new day took heart from each little milestone of routine, like children, walking past a strange paling, who touch placatingly every third picket, hoping this will bring them through safe.

Fumbling without choice for one of the two dresses of the daily requisite black, she peered out the window into the alley beyond. The slick gray arms of the dwarfed tree, which grew, anonymous and mineral, from its humus of dust and concrete, were charitably fuzzed with light, and above them the water tanks and girders of the roofs beyond stood out against the fine yellow morning, clarified and glistening. Night could still down the city, absorbing it for all its rhinestone effrontery, but the mornings crept in like applicants for jobs, nuzzling humbly against the masked granite, saying hopefully, “Do you suppose …is there anything to be made of me?”

Behind her, except for the unmade bed, the room had the fierce, wooden neatness of the solitary, beginning householder. She turned from the window and made up the bed swiftly so that the immobile room might greet her so, with all its rigid charm of permanence, at nightfall. Now there was nothing out of place except the letter from her mother, read and left crumpled on the table the night before.

None of the rooms in the house at Marcus Hook had ever really belonged to her mother, her sister Pauline or herself. The changing needs of the roomers came first — the workmen who had a wife coming or a wife leaving, the spinsters who made a religion of drafts and the devotional bath, the elderly male and female waifs who had to “retrench” farther and farther back into the cheapest recesses of the house; until the final retrenchment, to the home of a relative, could be delayed no longer.

The family, forever shifting, took what was left over. The best times would have been when the three of them slept in the big front sitting-room together, had not these also been the bad periods when the larger rooms went begging, and they and the most unimportant, delinquent roomer were almost on the same footing. But at all times, mornings the kitchen was never clear of “privilegers,” evenings the parlor creaked and sighed with those for whom solitude was the worst of privileges. And late at night when, in no matter what bed or room one might be, there was still the padding in the corridors, the leakage of faucets, then the house rumored its livelihood most plainly of all, having no being other than in the sneaked murmurs, the soft crepitations of strangers.

She sipped the coffee, ate a roll, smoothing out her mother’s letter. “Mrs. Tregarthen, she lived in New York once, says you are down in a terrible neighborhood and for the same money you could get into a business girls club. The Tregarthens still have the sitting-room thank God. I am so glad you are fixed in the Section Manager job, all that time you studied was not wasted after all. They say even the elevator girls have to be college now. You must be on your feet a lot too, be sure you have the proper shoes. Will you use the store discount and buy Pauline a white dress for graduation, size 14, something not fancy I can dye later. Let me know how much. I am so glad of the discount.”

No use to explain again to her mother that she could only buy dark “employee” clothes for herself on the discount. She would send Pauline the dress and take care of the difference herself. All the four years of her scholarship her mother had worked to help her out, in mingled pride and worry over this queer chick who asked nothing better than to waste her real good looks over the books, after something, God knows what all, except that you could be sure it was something that couldn’t be touched or twisted to use, and at best could only be taught. Her mother had been right. The year she was graduated Ph.D.’s were a dime a dozen, and the colleges had still less use for Miss Abel, A.B. She had learned that “getting out” meant, sooner or later, having to “get in” somewhere else. But her mother was pleased, now that she was fixed in her job. And glad of the discount.

Now that she was ready, she stared possessively at the safe shell of the room, all she had been able to salvage of her dream of solitary, inviolate pursuit. Each morning she had to resist the binding urge to stay, nestled in familiarity. She forced herself to put her hand on the knob of the outer door, meanwhile contrarily building up the temptation of the ideal day. Projecting herself into the reassuring feel of the chair, she saw herself settled there for hours, retreated into the subtle stream of a book, hugging emotions siphoned through another’s words, immolating herself happily on the altar of a problem, an impasse, which might be dropped as one awakens from a dream, with the closing of the book. She wrenched the door open quickly and shut it behind her, giving it a shake to test the lock.