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Willie paid for the drinks and they left the bar. Gretchen wondered how he could walk so erectly with a bad back.
Twilight made a lavender puzzle out of New York as they came out of the bar onto the street. The stone heat of the day had gentled down to a meadowed balminess and they walked against a soft breeze, hand in hand. The air was like a drift of pollen. A three-quarter moon, pale as china in the fading sky, sailed over the towered office buildings.
“You know what I like about you?” Willie said.
“What?”
“You didn’t say you wanted to go home and change your dress when I said we were going to a party.”
She didn’t feel she had to tell him she was wearing her best dress and had nothing to change to. It was cornflower-blue linen, buttoned all the way down the front, with short sleeves and a tight red cloth belt. She had changed into it when she had gone down to the Y.W.C.A. after lunch to get her bathing suit. Six ninety-five at Ohrbach’s. The only piece of clothing she had bought since she came to New York. “Will I shame you in front of your fine friends?” she said.
“A dozen of my fine friends will come up to you tonight and ask for your telephone number,” he said.
“Shall I give it to them?”
“Upon pain of death,” Willie said.
They went slowly up Fifth Avenue, looking in all the windows. Finchley’s was displaying tweed sports jackets. “I fancy myself in one of those,” Willie said. “Give me bulk. Abbott, the tweedy Squire.”
“You’re not tweedy,” Gretchen said. “I fancy you smooth.”
“Smooth I shall be,” Willie said.
They stopped a long time in front of Brentano’s and looked at the books. There was an arrangement of recent plays in the window. Odets, Hellman, Sherwood, Kaufman and Hart. “The literary life,” Willie said. “I have a confession to make. I’m writing a play. Like every other flak.”
“It will be in the window,” she said.
“Please God, it will be in the window,” he said. “Can you act?”
“I’m a one-part actress. The Mystery of Woman.”
“I am quoting,” he said. They laughed. They knew the laughter was foolish, but it was dear because it was for their own private joke.
When they reached Fifty-fifth Street, they turned off Fifth Avenue. Under the St. Regis canopy, a wedding party was disembarking from taxis. The bride was very young, very slender, a white tulip. The groom was a young infantry lieutenant, no hashmarks, no campaign ribbons, razor-nicked, peach-cheeked, untouched.
“Bless you, my children,” Willie said as they passed.
The bride smiled, a whitecap of joy, blew a kiss to them. “Thank you, sir,” said the lieutenant, restraining himself from throwing a salute, by the book.
“It’s a good night for a wedding,” Willie said as they walked on. “Temperature in the low eighties, visibility unlimited, no war on at the moment.”
The party was between Park and Lexington. As they crossed Park, at Fifty-fifth Street, a taxi swung around the corner and down toward Lexington. Mary Jane was sitting alone in the taxi. The taxi stopped midway down the street and Mary Jane got out and ran into a five-story building.
“Mary Jane,” Willie said. “See her?”
“Uhuh.” They were walking more slowly now.
Willie looked across at Gretchen, studying her face. “I have an idea,” he said. “Let’s have our own party.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Gretchen said.
“Company, about face,” he barked out. He made a smart military turn, clicking his heels. They started walking back toward Fifth Avenue. “I don’t cotton to the idea of all those guys asking for your telephone number,” he said.
She squeezed his hand. She was almost sure now that Willie had slept with Mary Jane, but she squeezed his hand just the same.
They went to the Oak Room Bar of the Plaza and had mint julep in frosted pewter mugs. “For Kentucky’s sake,” Willie explained. He didn’t mind mixing his drinks. Scotch, champagne, bourbon. “I am an exploder of myths,” he said.
After the mint juleps they left the Plaza and got onto a Fifth Avenue bus heading downtown. They sat on the top deck, in the open air. Willie took off his overseas cap with the two silver bars and the officer’s braid. The wind of the bus’s passage tumbled his hair, making him look younger than ever. Gretchen wanted to take his head and put it down on her breast and kiss the top of his head, but there were people all around them so she took his cap and ran her fingers along the braid and the two bars instead.
They got off the bus at Eighth Street and found a table on the sidewalk at the Brevoort and Willie ordered a Martini. “To improve my appetite,” he said. “Give notice to the gastric juices. Red Alert.”
The Algonquin, the Plaza, the Brevoort, a job, a captain. All in one day. It was a cornucopia of firsts.
They had melon and a small roast chicken for di
They weren’t talking much any more, just looking at each other across the table. If she couldn’t kiss him soon, Gretchen thought, they would carry her off to Bellevue.
Willie ordered brandy for both of them after the coffee. What with paying for lunch and all the eating and drinking of the evening, Gretchen figured that it must have cost Willie at least fifty dollars since noon. “Are you a rich man?” she asked, as he was paying the bill.
“Rich in spirit only,” Willie said. He turned his wallet upside down and six bills floated down onto the table. Two were for a hundred apiece, the rest were fives. “The complete Abbott fortune,” he said. “Shall I mention you in my will?”
Two hundred and twenty dollars. She was shocked at how little it was. She still had more than that in the bank herself, from Boylan’s eight hundred, and she never paid more than ninety-five cents for a meal. Her father’s blood? The thought made her uneasy.
She watched Willie gather up the bills and stuff them carelessly into his pocket. “The war taught me the value of money,” he said.
“Did you grow up rich?” she asked.
“My father was a customs inspector, on the Canadian border,” he said. “And honest. And there were six children. We lived like kings. Meat three times a week.”
“I worry about money,” she confessed. “I saw what not having any did to my mother.”
“Drink hearty,” Willie said. “You will not be your mother’s daughter. I will turn to my golden typewriter in the very near future.”
They finished their brandies. Gretchen was begi
“Is it the opinion of this meeting,” Willie said, as they stood up from the table and passed through the boxed hedges of the terrace onto the avenue, “that a drink is in order?”
“I’m not drinking any more tonight,” she said.
“Look to women for wisdom,” Willie said. “Earth mother. Priestesses of the oracle. Delphic pronouncements, truth cu
“We can walk to the Y.W.C.A. from here,” she said. “It’s only about fifteen minutes …”
The taxi braked to a halt and Willie opened the door and she got in.
“The Hotel Stanley,” Willie said to the driver as he got into the cab. “On Seventh Avenue.”
They kissed. Oasis of lips. Champagne, Scotch, Kentucky mint, red wine of Napa Valley in Spanish California, brandy, gift of France. She pushed his head down onto her breast and nuzzled into the thick silkiness of his hair. The hard bone of skull under it. “I’ve been wanting to do this all day,” she said. She held him against her, child soldier. He opened the top two buttons of her dress, his fingers swift, and kissed the cleft between her breasts. Over his cradled head, she could see the driver, his back toward her, busy with red lights, green lights, rash pedestrians, what the passengers do is the passengers’ business. His photograph stared at her from the lighted tag. A man of about forty with glaring, defiant eyes and kidney trouble, a man who had seen everything, who knew the whole city. Eli Lefkowitz, his name, prominently displayed by police order. She would remember his name forever. Eli Lefkowitz, unwatching charioteer of love.