Nothing to him. There never was anything to the boy next door. He was too close to you to see him clearly. Nothing dashing, nothing romantic. That always came from a distance. But he was clean-cut, that was the point. How had she missed seeing that at the mill, even when he first walked in, even before she knew? Well, when they were just a ticket to you, and a pair of feet, how were you going to see anything?
They talked about it, their home town, for a while, voices low, eyes dreamily lidded. They brought it close, in through the window, into the very room with them. They pushed New York, hanging around in the night outside, back, far back and away. The Paramount clock, riding the night sky somewhere beyond the window, receded, and instead they could almost hear the steeple bell of the little white church down by the square softly, sweetly, tolling the hour. Saying, “Sleep. I’m looking after you. You’re home where you belong. Sleep. You’re safe, I’m keeping watch over you—”
They talked about it for a while; slow in starting and self-conscious at first, awkwardly. Then faster, more fluently as they warmed to it, and forgetting who they were and what they were; not talking any more for one another but each one for himself. Till there was just one running stream between them, just one flow of reminiscence into which they dropped their neatly-interspersed memories with rhythmic alternation.
“That plank sidewalk in front of Marcus’ Department Store, with the board that used to tip up if you walked too close to the edge; I bet they haven’t fixed that yet!”
“And Pop Gregory’s candy store, remember? The names he used to think up for his specialties — ‘De Luxe Oriental Delight Sundae’—”
“The Elite Drugstore, down on lower Main, that was another great one—”
“Morning glories on the porch-sheds—”
“Hammocks on all the front porches in the summer, in the evening, swinging lazy, and a glass of lemonade on the floor under you. With you was it lemonade? With me it was always—”
“And at night no music. A hush. You could hear a pin drop.”
“And Jefferson High, all spick and span, spotless granite and a block long. I used to think it was the biggest building in the world. Did you go to Jefferson High?”
“Sure, everyone goes to Jefferson High, I guess. Those polished stone bevels alongside the front steps, I used to slide down them standing up every time I came out.”
“I did too. I bet you had Miss Elliott. Did you have Miss Elliott in Advanced English?”
“Sure, everyone has Miss Elliott in Advanced English. You have to.”
Something hurt her a little bit, for a minute. The boy next door, and I’ve met him two thousand miles away and five years too late. The boy next door, the boy I was supposed to know and never did.
“Folks saying good morning to you from all the way over on the other side of the street, even if you’d never set eyes on them before in your life, and they never had you.”
“And no music, after dark came. No slide-trombones that go in and out, and bray. Only crickets and things like that. No music. No music, ever.”
“Thick, deep, fluffy snow in the winter, topping everything like marshmallow—”
“But in the spring—! Oh I could skip it in the winter, in the fall, and even in the summer. But in the spring! Those pale pink things used to come out in the trees, and you’d walk down the street like through a whiff of Dorothy Gray’s apple-blossom stuff—”
“People that knew you from the time you were a kid, all up and down the line. People that took an interest in you. That stopped at the door with jellies if you were sick. That would have gladly lent you money, when you got a little older, if you happened to be broke—”
“And look at us now.” Her head dropped into her folded arms on the tabletop as suddenly as though her neck had been broken.
Twice, three times, her fist struck lightly at the tabletop, in futility. “Home,” he heard her say smotheredly. “Home, where I belong — I want to see my Mom again—”
He was standing over her when she looked up again. He hadn’t touched her, but she knew he’d started to, he’d put out his hand and tried to when she wasn’t looking, and then didn’t know how to go ahead, had given the idea up. She could tell by the lame way he was holding his hand.
She smiled and tried to blot her eyes by blinking them, to keep him from seeing they were wet.
“Give us a cigarette,” she said huskily. “I always have one after I cry. I don’t know what got me. I haven’t cried for company like that in years.”
He wasn’t having any of that. He didn’t give her the cigarette, to help her pretend she was tough again. “Why don’t you go back?” he said. He seemed again a little older. Maybe now it was that she’d grown a little younger in turn. The city made you old. Home, you stayed young at home. And even when you thought of home, that made you a little younger, for a little while.
She wasn’t going to answer. He came back to it again. She saw that he had a one-track mind when he once got started on anything. “Why don’t you? Why don’t you go on home?”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried?” she asked him sullenly. “I’ve priced the fare until I know it backwards. I’ve been down there so many times to inquire, I know the bus schedule by heart. There’s only one through once a day, and that leaves at six in the morning. There’s an evening one you can take, but you have to stop overnight in Chicago. And overnight — in Chicago or anywhere else — you lose your nerve; you’d only turn around and come back again. I know; don’t ask me why, I know. Once I even got as far as the terminal, had my bag all packed next to me, sat there waiting for them to open the gates. I couldn’t make it; I backed out at the last minute. Turned my ticket in, and dragged myself back here.”
“But why? Why can’t you go, if you want to that bad? What’s holding you?”
“Because I didn’t make good. I didn’t make the grade. They think I’m in a big Broadway flash-production. I’m just a taxi; just a hired duffle-bag you push around the floor. See that piece of paper there, with nothing on it but ‘Dear Mom’? That’s part of the reason; the stuff I’ve been writing home to them. Now I haven’t got the courage to go back and face them all and admit that I’m a flop. It takes plenty, and I haven’t got enough.”
“But they’re your folks, they’re your own people; they’d understand, they’d be the first to try to make it easy on you, to buck you up.”
“I know; I could tell Mom anything. It isn’t that. It’s all the friends and neighbors. She’s probably been bragging to them about me for years, reading my letters, you know how it goes. Sure, Mom and the other girls would stand by me, they wouldn’t say a word; but it would hurt them just the same. I don’t want to do that. I always wanted to go back and make them proud of me. Now I’ve got to go back and make them feel sorry for me. There’s a big difference there.” She looked up at him, shook her head. “But that’s only part of the reason. That isn’t the main reason at all.”
“Then what is?”
“I can’t tell you. You’d only laugh at me. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Why would I laugh? Why wouldn’t I understand? I’m from home too, aren’t I? I’m here in the city just like you.”
“Then here it is,” she said. “It’s the city itself. You think of it as just a place on the map, don’t you? I think of it as a personal enemy, and I know I’m right. The city’s bad; it gets you down. It’s got a half-nelson on me right now, and that’s what’s holding me, that’s why I can’t get away.”
“But houses, stone and cement buildings, they haven’t got arms, they can’t reach out and hold you back, if you want to go.”