She was mad. He did not allow himself to use the word again. He held it back desperately like a man who is afraid to whisper lest he end by shouting.
He rode out to the cemetery with Villani and the priest, behind the limousine with Max, Elena, Philip, and Mrs Villani. During the burial he sheltered himself under a tree, hanging back from the others at the graveside in the full blast of the sun. When the shoveling of the earth began he walked back to the car. The chauffeur was waiting on the running board at the edge of the stonedust driveway. The glow of the sun in the locust trees gave a yellowish shine to his uniform. He had white hair, his eyes were bloodshot and his long lips impatiently drawn as he endured the heat moment by moment and breath by breath. Soon Villani and the priest came up. The priest was a Pole, stout and pale. He gave a push to his black Homburg, lit up, drawing deeply, and let the smoke out between his small teeth. Pulling out a handkerchief, he wiped his face and neck and the back of his hands.
“You’re a relative, huh?” he said, addressing Leventhal for the first time.
Villani answered for him. “He’s the man’s brother, Father.”
“Ah, yeah, tough deal.” His fingers, virtually nailless and curving at the tips, pinched the cigarette. He looked keenly into the sky, creasing the thick white skin of his forehead, and made a remark about the heat. The family were now approaching the cars and the chauffeurs started up the motors.
“Too hot back there for three,” said Leventhal, and climbed into the front seat. He wanted to avoid the priest. Touching the heated metal of the handle, he said mentally, “So long, kid,” and peered out of the moving window at the yellow and brown of the large-grained soil and at the two booted men working their shovels. He occasionally saw Max in the back seat of the Cadillac and tried to recall Elena, persistently picturing how she had looked on the way to the grave, walking between Max and Villani, the fullness of her figure in the black dress, the grip of her hands on each arm, the jerking of her head. Poor Max, what was he going to do with her? And what about Philip? “I’d take him in a minute,” he thought.
He did not say good-by to the family. It was after sunset when he reached the ferry. The boat went slowly over the sluggish harbor. The splash of a larger vessel reached it and Leventhal caught a glimpse of the murky orange of a hull, like the apparition of a furnace on the water. The searchlight on the bridge passed over it and it was lost in a moment, put out. But its giant wading was still audible seaward in the hot, black air.
After getting off the subway he delayed going home. He stopped in the park. The crowd was extraordinarily thick tonight. The same band of revivalists was on the curb. A woman was singing. Her voice and the accompaniment of the organ were very dim, only a few notes emerging from the immense, interminable mutter. He searched for a long time before he found a seat near the pond where a few half-naked children were splashing. The trees were swathed in stifling dust, and the stars were faint and sparse through the pall. The benches formed a dense, double human wheel; the paths were thronged. There was an overwhelming human closeness and thickness, and Leventhal was penetrated by a sense not merely of the crowd in this park but of innumerable millions, crossing, touching, pressing. What was that story he had once read about Hell cracking open on account of the rage of the god of the sea, and all the souls, crammed together, looking out? But these were alive, this young couple with bare arms, this woman late in pregnancy, sauntering, this bootblack hauling his box by the long strap.
Leventhal fell to thinking that to his father what had happened in Staten Island today would be incomprehensible. In Hartford the old man used to point at the baskets of flowers in the doorways and remark how many foreign children, Italian or Irish, died. He was amazed at the size of the families, at the numbers born and dying. How strange if he could know that his own grandson was one of these, buried in a Catholic cemetery. With flowers, like the others. And baptized. It occurred to Leventhal for the first time that Elena must have had him baptized. And that a son of his was a workingman, indistinguishable from those who came to the store to buy socks, caps, and shirts. He would not have understood it.
Heartsick and tired, Leventhal started home at ten o’clock. He did not think of Allbee till he began to go up, and then quickened his step. Twisting the key, he threw the door back with a bang and turned on the lights. On the couch in the dining-room, sheets, bathrobe, and towel were twisted together. There was half a glass of milk on the floor.
He went back to the front room and stretched out on the bed, intending to rest awhile before taking off his clothes and shutting off the lights. He put his hand to his face with a groan. Almost at once he fell asleep.
During the night he heard a noise and sat up. The lights were still burning. Someone was in the flat. He went softly into the dark kitchen. The dining-room door was open, and by the window he saw Allbee undressing. He stood in his underpants, pulling his shirt over his head. The fear that Leventhal felt, though deep, lasted only a second, a single thrust. His indignation, too, was short lived. He returned to the front room and took off his clothes. Switching off the lights, he went toward his bed through the dark, mumbling, “Go, stay — it’s all the same to me.” He was in a state of indifference akin to numbness, and he lay down more conscious of the heat than of any emotion in himself.
16
MR MILLIKAN, who attended to make-up at the printer”s, was representing the firm at an all-industry conference, and Leventhal, at midday, had to go to the shop in Brooklyn Heights to replace him.
He waited on the subway platform in the dead brown air, feeling spent. He did not know how he was going to get through the day. The train rolled up and he sat down spiritlessly under the slow-wheeling fan that stirred the heat. Again and again he thought about the child’s death. So soon closed over, covered up. So soon. He repeated it involuntarily while his head rocked with the bucketing of the cars in the long pull under the river that ended below the St George Hotel. He left the train and rode up to the street level in the elevator.
Millikan had made up four pages, leaving him four more. The work went slowly; he became drowsy and made mistakes and tedious recounts. Toward four o’clock, he began to drop off. “It’s the machine,” he thought. The presses were upstairs and they ran without interruption all day. He took time out for a walk. It was curious that he should feel so dull and heavy, and yet at the same time so apprehensive.
He went into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. The chairs were standing on the tables and a boy with a red, bluff head and freckled, rolling shoulders was mopping the tiles. The waitress made a detour of the advancing line of dirty water to ask Leventhal to move out of the way. He drank his coffee at the counter, wiped his mouth on the oblong of a paper napkin he did not bother to unfold, loitered through the lobby of the St George, examining a few magazines, and returned to the shop. Contemplating the pages with their blank spaces, he sighed and picked up the scissors. The presses had stopped before he was done. At half-past six he pasted his last strip and rubbed his hands clean with a piece of wastepaper.
On his way to dinner, he stopped at his flat to look in the mailbox. There was a note from Mary saying that she was writing a long letter which she expected to mail in a day or two. Disappointed, he slipped the note into his shirt pocket. He did not go upstairs. Near the corner he met Nunez, in his dungarees and straw hat, carrying a webbed market bag full of groceries.