“Just easy. That’s it. Walk off.” Ira tightened his grip of her arm. “Now!” And they stepped onto the sidewalk.
A quick glance upward in the direction of the freed cantilever floating up again: “Hey, fellers. Downstairs, fellers. You ain’t suppose to be up there. That’s against the law.” The usher in plum uniform hanging partway out of the fire-exit door, with neck twisted and face skyward calling to three black visages above like a cluster of coconuts suddenly cracking open from grave witness, while higher still on the third balcony the projectionist in undershirt gaped down, at a loss. “Hey, what’re you doin’, wise guys?” he directed censure downward. “Yous can get locked up fer dat.”
The avenue, the avenue at last, the higher airs — he helped her with her coat, as she juggled her purse, plunged arms into his, as he juggled his briefcase, while all the time the two hurried toward the thronged avenue at the corner that meant safety, meant deliverance. Once there, they lost themselves among window shoppers and strollers and the hurrying, dodging ambitious individuals, holiday-homeward-bound, weaving with purpose. In seconds he and Stella were anonymous, in seconds blending with the crowd, liberated, noncommittal among the crowd walking briskly toward 14th Street.
Ira puffed with relief. “Wow!” She was breathless too, giggled, busy trying to rub grime from her hand — and still constrained to whisper. “Mama’s right, ye know, Ira. It’s just like what she keeps saying. That’s all the shvartze and the Portorickies think about. But I’ve never had a razor and a knife at me before. Was I scared.”
“Same here.”
“All I could think of was if Mama knew where I was — o-oh, what could have happened.”
“I know. And I took you up there.” He tried to make amends. “How the hell was I going to know one of those sonsofbitches saw me?”
“So where was the usher?”
“Yeah, where? Maybe they didged up the way we did. I don’t know.”
“A babbeh waked up for us, like Mama says in Jewish.”
“Yeah. That scream you let out helped too.”
“Was I scared. You think they all had a razor blade, a knife?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if they really meant it. When you called ’em niggers, I thought, oh, we’re lost.”
“I just couldn’t help it. And you know what, Ira? Now I wanna cry.”
“I don’t blame you. Go ahead. Want my handkerchief? You got one?”
“In my coat pocket.” She sniffled, plied the handkerchief while she leaned against him, walking. “First I laugh and then I cry.”
“It’s okay, Stella, it’s okay. We’re outta the woods.” He stroked her back soothingly.
“I told you,” she said without rancor, “let’s go into a telephone booth.” She suddenly laughed, wiped tears from her cheeks.
“I should have listened. I’ll never try that again.” What kind of new tenderness seemed to flow from the cloth of her coat, from the soft girlish shoulders beneath the coat through his hand, to his arm, his mind. Jesus, he had felt that only once before about her: when he had come so prodigiously the night he humped her, with Mamie snoring spasmodically nearby. He had kissed her that time — tenderly. No wonder the kid wanted to cry, after what he had put her through just now. No wonder. “You all right now?”
“Yeah. I’m all right.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’ll be over soon. It’s even over now.” Her bland cheeks wreathed, though she blinked, and her voice was still wrung. “It’s over now. How fast everything becomes then. When I look at Mama, or Tanta Leah, your mother, or the other tantas, I keep thinking they must have all grown up just waiting for a khusin, you know what I mean? Even Hannah. Is Minnie like that, too?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re her brother.”
“Yeah, but you know how it is. She has her secrets.”
“Like I have mine. Do I look all right?” She tilted her face. “Tell me honest. It was so dirty, everything up there. I can use where I cried in my handkerchief to wipe my face.” She was amused.
“No, no, you look fine. Say, you look all right,” he complimented. “You look all right.” She was really rather pretty, with her blond hair peeping out of the black cloche, short throat, fresh, fair skin of round cheeks heightened in color now, blue eyes, shallow, yes, behind glasses, and short girlish lips parted, plump, no, “adolescent” was the right word, adolescent phase, and kind of cute. He had never thought of her that way — just something to bend to his will, really bend, simpering pudding-compliant, implicitly at his disposal — his tubby, juvenile Trilby — and why? He surmised why: a collegian he, and schoolgirl she: not mettlesome like Hannah, but ungifted, held in low esteem at home, a cinch, a drippy cinch for the picking — or the pricking. Cynical? Sure.
He had previously honed his perfidy on Minnie. Consider the mitigating circumstance: he tolerated Stella’s drivel — long enough to achieve his ends. But never had he been tender, except for that momentary impulse — and maybe even then he was bestowing a token remuneration for supreme consummation. Till now. And now? So that’s what he wanted — his mouth watered at the new perception of himself, the perverse evolution of desire. Skew of screw — that’s what tenderness meant to him before something impressionable, half-formed, pathetic, susceptible, ductile, fawning: extension of the evening they sat opposite each other on the love seat at the bris in Flushing, extension of the initiation, when he first stuck his tongue into her mouth, seduced her, reduced her to trail him in a trance down the steps of the glary cellar.
Now Edith knew all about him too. Christ, he wasn’t worth living. “Let’s get you down the subway. You won’t be too late.”
“I’ll tell Mama what you told me. We had a party before the holiday. You going to go uptown too?”
“Not right away. I’m going to walk — no,” he contradicted himself, annoyed. “I’ve got to call up that lady. Jesus, what she must be thinking.” He felt stunned, disoriented.
“You’re not going there?”
“I better just call.”
“Why?”
“Guess.”
“You should be happy. She should be happy. She made a doctor’s appointment. If she made a doctor’s appointment—”
“She must have canceled that long ago,” Ira interrupted irritably. “Say, what would you have done if I had to take you there? What would you have told Mamie? It might have taken a long time — longer than this.”
“I couldn’t — I wouldn’t go. Only on Saturday. I could say I was going for a walk on 116th Street.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Why?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“Maybe if you told me you were gonna be here for that, I could have told Mama about a party — I don’t know,” she said with unusual animation. “Look, Ira, I’m a girl, and I’m already over it. All right, razor blades, knives, those guys, they scared me. But you — I don’t mean you didn’t get scared too. But now, you should be happy. We got away. And look at the trouble you saved. You thought I was pregnant. And I’m not. You thought you would have to take me to that lady. And she would take me to the doctor—”
“I know! I know! All right.”
He looked straight ahead, determined to encourage her forward movement through the crowd, then, dissatisfied with progress, steered her along Broadway.
“How did you remember that toilet up there from all those years?” she asked curiously.
“Will I ever forget it?”
“They must not have cleaned it for a — was it clean when you worked there?”