“If we go now,” Lewlyn, hardly the destroyer of Mom’s vision, said, “we won’t have to bother calling a cab. We can take the subway at Christopher Street. And probably get to Thirty-fourth before a cab.”
“It’s nice out,” Ira encouraged. “I just walked from the subway.”
“And we’ll have to go all the way to Seventh Avenue before we can hope to get a cab,” Lewlyn said to Edith. “Unless I call one from your apartment. Do you mind the walk, dear?”
“Oh, no, Lewlyn. Let’s just walk. It’s really just a short walk.”
“What about the valise? You want a hand?” Ira offered.
“Not now, thanks. I may take you up on that later. You’ve probably noticed valises have a way of getting heavier as time goes on.” He turned his kind gaze on Edith. “Are we ready?”
“I am. I’ll just lock the door and turn out the lights.” She got her keys out of her purse.
Scarcely anything more was said. They were on their way: out of the apartment, down the carpeted stairs, out of the house, into the night of the street, into the coolness of the night of the street, into the silence of Morton Street. On whose sidewalk Ira diffidently accompanied two people, because they had asked him to, and because he felt that something unknown waited upon his doing so, something distant and obscure he had to reach. And he had to behave, to walk, to appear, as if he were part of the scheme of things, though he didn’t know what it was, but only that their lives, their customs, their deportment, all of which they took for granted, and much he couldn’t even name, were ingredients of an evolving possibility.
Around the corner of Seventh Avenue he traveled with them, around the gas station, with the hands of the moon-faced clock in the window pointing almost to half past ten. By now Mom and Pop were getting ready to go to bed. Minnie was at a dance. Her folding cot beside Mom and Pop’s bed would be empty. His bed would be empty, too. He was here, on a school night, in the Village, putting up a cheerful front, keeping up with two professors — no, two Ph.D. lovers, college teachers, all the way American, walking to the Christopher Street subway kiosk, on the way to a ship, on the way to an ocean liner: a Cunarder, Lewlyn said. He was, he reminded them, from Pennsylvania: he had once been a Christian seminary student, once a priest, and was talking about courses in Greek, and how much they still meant to him. And she was his what? Mistress, a word he had heard Edith sometimes use: a hetaera from Silver City, New Mexico, where she said her father never carried a pistol, but dropped to the ground whenever the shooting started. At Berkeley, in California, she had pursued her graduate work. No, there were no more hetaeras in Berkeley — only in the dictionary. And he himself, on the valise side of Lewlyn, who so strongly carried it, he himself trailed all of Galitzia behind him, Jews and Jews and Jews, an ocean away that he had actually crossed in Mom’s arms: Galitzia and the Lower East Side and Irish Harlem: Jew-boy, Jew-boy, with these fine people. Forget it, forget! And remember it, remember. Why were you here? You swiped a silver-filigreed fountain pen, and gave it to your best friend, which was why you were here. You won a scholarship to Cornell, but your best friend was in New York, which was why you were here. Boy, you wouldn’t dare tell them: you wouldn’t dream of telling them about your fat heifer of a cousin you had fucked only last Monday, while your pious grandfather silently chanted in his bedroom, earnestly praying for his death. You wouldn’t dare use that f word with them. But still you were here with them. All you dared say was what everybody could see: that the night over Seventh Avenue was beginning to get chilly, that the subway entrance was only another block away.
Down the subway steps. And weren’t trains always perverse that way, when you weren’t in a hurry? The local pounded into the station just as Lewlyn dropped the nickel into the turnstile to let broadly smiling Ira onto the platform, and before the train stopped, he himself and valise were at the open door to join them. What a neat connection. The moment of haste gave them all a cause for small, diverting congratulations:
“Lewlyn’s luck,” he chuckled.
And in a few minutes, they were at 34th Street, standing up to await the door’s opening. They got off, and with playful, appreciative smile, Lewlyn turned over the valise to Ira’s keeping — and carrying.
It was heavy. And again Ira was impressed with how sinewy Lewlyn must be, enduring and strong his body under those tweeds, what stamina he must have. How many acres did he say you had to grow and harvest wheat for a college education? Did he say ten? The valise was heavy — in either hand. Ira began lagging behind. . wouldn’t betray how much of a strain the valise was. Ahead of him the two lovers walked — really as lovers now, perhaps because so few people were in evidence. Lewlyn’s arm was curved around the back of Edith’s waist. As if it were a movement in a dance, she leaned slightly against the arm encircling her back — and yet at the same time, stepped forward with a determined jauntiness, as if — Ira tried to disassociate the observing mind from the tugging arm — as if her sprightliness were genuine, arose without inner coercion or pretense. She was enjoying the occasion. Brave, wasn’t she, or behaving according to form. Proud. She was, wasn’t she? Ira tried to force his gait a little faster, and then, becoming just a bit out of breath, again allowed himself to lag.
They entered the long, white-tiled tunnel connecting the IRT subway station to the Hudson Tubes terminal. Long, long, white-walled cavern. Laboriously he passed through it, fixed grin on his face. Pale, fateful tiles slowly retreating on either side, on either side unreeling the glossy squares of their faces, yielding to other square faces that prolonged a passage nearly deserted, except for two lovers walking gracefully ahead of him. What did it mean? Did it mean anything? Two lovers about to part, trailed by himself with arms beginning to complain, hauling a burden that was beginning to weigh like a ton.
At last, at last, they reached the change booth and entrance of the stale-drafty platform of the Hudson Tubes.
Again Lewlyn paid their fares, and they entered a waiting and nearly vacant train, and sat down, with Edith between them.
“You’ve done yeoman service, Ira. Thanks.” Lewlyn took charge of the valise. He slid it between his legs. “We’ve made wonderful time, haven’t we?” He leaned forward slightly. “In another five minutes this train will be on its way.”
“Is it a long ride?” Ira asked.
“No, it’s very short — short and rather unpleasant. You ought to have a veil, Edith, against the dust.”
“Have one or take one,” she answered, as if to someone straight ahead.
He chuckled. “It hasn’t come to that, I hope. I’m honestly at a crossroads, Edith. I don’t need to repeat it. You’ll excuse us, Ira?”
“Oh, sure, sure.” Ira withdrew from audience, sat back.
“And I needn’t repeat,” Edith said, “that the basic flaw in the whole idea of uncommitted friendship is the assumption that men and women are the same. Are built the same, feel the same — react similarly. They don’t.”
“We agreed it was a risk we took.”
“But not each risking the same thing. Not each taking the same risk.”
Ira could hear, but didn’t venture to look, didn’t care to. Voice alone, Edith’s stony posture seen out of the corner of his eye, Lewlyn’s reasonable, dry, constrained voice conveyed a gravity understood without a glance, made a glance both impertinent and superfluous. Two, three passengers straggled in. The motorman came through the car bearing the control handle in his gloved hand, glanced at the three as he went by. And no sooner had he gone by than Lewlyn said earnestly: “But nothing has been settled, Edith, nothing has been decided. Whole lifetimes are at stake, your lifetime, mine, yes. Cecilia’s too. You realize that, I’m sure. I must be given a chance to consider choices. It would be absolute folly on my part not to.”