She nodded. But she didn’t go to the window to see for herself, as he had.
“I’ll get your coat,” he said.
He put it over her shoulders, leaving the armholes empty.
“That’s good enough,” he said. “Come on, just you and me together.”
He put out the lights and locked the door, and they walked down the street side by side. Until they’d come to another. And then they followed that. Until they’d come to another. And then they followed that in turn. Slowly the lights grew more numerous, the walks more peopled. And presently they were in the very heartblood of the town, vivacious, virile.
“Shall I take you to a picture show?” He tried to tempt her. “Clara Kimball Young, or Eddie Polo, or Sessue Hayakawa? Or maybe a Max Linder funny?”
She shook her head. “They’re just make-believe. They’re just shadows on the wall, for little boys and girls. I’m too big a girl now.”
“And a sad-hearted one,” he murmured half audibly.
They walked on a little farther, like two lost souls, hand-linked, in the crowd.
They came to a busy intersection, and looked about.
“I wonder what that building is?”
She didn’t say she wondered too.
They crossed to the opposite side.
“Shall we go down this way? See where this leads to?”
The grounds slowly dipped, so that they obtained a fuller perspective, out before them.
“Look,” he said. “Look at the lights. Isn’t that beautiful?”
“All towns are beautiful at night, when they’re lit up,” she said wistfully
He laughed a little. “You almost sound as though we don’t live here ourselves. As though — this were some place we were just passing through.”
She didn’t answer. But her eyes avoided his for a moment, a thing they rarely did.
They found a park, though they didn’t know what it was called.
“Let’s go in here and sit down,” he suggested. “Break our walk before we start back.”
They sat down upon a bench, and he circled his arm around her shoulders, as any husband would at such a time, in fondness and in oneness and in languid understanding.
In the moonlight, the clouds were like clotted cheese in the sky.
He saw her looking upward, and on her face was a haunted loneliness, a forlornness, that wrung his heart. Vacant, aching eyes, looking for something up there above that was not to be found down here.
“What are you looking for up there?” he whispered. “What? Tell me.”
“I’m pretending that it’s Central Park, down here where we’re sitting,” she breathed. “And while I keep my face up like this, I can see the little lake tucked in the corner where the Sherman statue is. And on that side, the lights of the Plaza Hotel against the sky. The Vanderbilt mansion is there, but much lower down, just edging out in back of it. And over on this other side, the tall thin Netherland Hotel, and then the Savoy. I’m sitting here with my best beau — no, it isn’t you, it’s poor old Lance, poor reliable old Lance — and I’m not much interested in him. But Papa and Mamma are up that way, just about that far, waiting for me at home, on Seventy-ninth Street. And after awhile Lance’ll walk me over — just to there, just that far — and we’ll both get on one of the double-decker Fifth Avenue buses that keep running back and forth just over the park wall there, and he’ll take me home.
“Home,” she repeated softly. And then again, scarcely to be heard, “Home.”
“But when I bring my face down again, to here, I only get this faraway town.”
He tightened his arm about her in helpless consolation.
“Talk to me about it,” she begged piteously. “I want to hear about it again.”
“What’ll I say?”
“I want to hear the names of it again. The names I used to know. The names of — home.”
“I didn’t know you — missed it so,” he faltered.
“Everyone has to love someplace,” she said defiantly. “And that’s the place I love. Oh, let them laugh and let them sneer, with their ‘to visit but not to live there.’ Oh, I know it’s big, and it’s supposed to be stony-hearted, and it’s hard to think of it that way. For others maybe, not for me. It’s the place I was born, it’s the place I was raised; I’ll always be a part of it, and it’ll always be a part of me. It’s my hometown. It’s my New York. There’s no other place, in this whole wide world, that can ever take its place in my heart. New York — when I say it soft and low, it seems to bring it closer — New York. Just a whisper and it’s here again — New York...”
“Sh-h-h-h,” he tried to soothe her. “Close your eyes. I’ll say the names that bring it back to you. I’ll try to say the names you want to hear.
“Behind us — don’t turn and look, or you’ll make it go away — but over our shoulders, over that way, that’s where Central Park West is. The Century Theatre. And the Columbus Circle. Reisenweber’s. Then you come back along this way, toward where we are, that’s Fifty-ninth Street. There are the Spanish Flats. Remember the Spanish Flats? Or if you keep going west, you come to the San Juan Hill district, the colored folks’ district. Then there are the roofed stairs going up to the Ninth Avenue El. See them? One on each side of the street.”
“Fifty-ninth Street,” she murmured. “Forty-second, Thirty-fourth, Twenty-third. Madison Square, and the Madison Square Garden. Fourteenth Street. Union Square. Luchow’s. The green crosstown cars. The red and yellow ones that run on Broadway and Third Avenue. The Second Avenue El, and the Third, and the Sixth. With that lonely spur that runs as far as Central Park, and then has no place further to go. (Does anyone ever use it?) The subway trains, packed with salesgirls and stenographers, and businessmen and workingmen and all the world. Always going so fast, but always going nowhere, I guess. Uptown, and down, and around, and back home again. The Bronx Express, the Van Cortlandt Park Express, the Sea Beach line to Coney...
“Say the names of some of the stations over to me. Let me hear the way they sound again. There’s a kind of poetry even in the names of the stations. The poetry of the familiar — and the faraway. And if you miss one, I’ll try to help you put it in.”
Litany of the dispossessed. “There’s Battery Place, and then there’s Rector Street. There’s Cortlandt, and there’s Chambers. There’s Fourteenth, Pennsylvania—”
“You left out Franklin, you left out Canal.”
“But those are for locals, I’m giving the expresses.”
“Go back to Chambers and start over,” she said wistfully. “Go more slowly. Don’t make them go by so fast.”
He started over. “I’ll begin at Wall Street this time, that was the branch I always took. Wall Street, Fulton Street—”
She turned suddenly and hid her face against his breast, and her sobbing was so close and hot it shook his own frame as well.
“Don’t,” he tried to console her. “Don’t. Come on, let’s get up now. I’ll take you home.”
She shook her head despairingly, even while her sobs were slowly lessening. “No,” she contradicted with infinite poignancy, “no you won’t. You’ll take me back to a furnished flat in a faraway town. But you won’t, no, you won’t — take me home.”
2
He got a five-dollar advance in August. On the twentieth. And the same day that he came home and told her about the advance...
“I’m getting five dollars more a week, starting on Monday.” He shrugged elaborately. “And I didn’t even ask for it. What do you think of that? Ponds just happened to be going by, behind me, one time this morning, and I turned my head and gave him a great big smile. Not because it was him; that was the way I felt. I would have smiled at anybody who happened to be passing near me just then. He smiled back, and then all of a sudden he stopped and said, ‘How much are you drawing again, Marshall?’ Then when I told him, he let his hand come down on my shoulder for a minute and he said, ‘Starting Monday it’s fifty. I’m going to speak to the cashier.’ ”