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When they got out of the movie house, they still didn’t want to leave each other, so he walked her all the way down to the Y.W.C.A., among silent, empty buildings which looked like fortresses that had fallen, no quarter shown.
Dawn was breaking as they kissed in front of the Y.W.C.A. Willie looked with loathing at the dark bulk of the building, one lamp on at the entrance, lighting proper young ladies out on the town to their proper beds. “Do you think that in the entire, glorious history of this structure,” he said, “that anybody got laid here?”
“I doubt it,” she said.
“It sends shivers down your spine, doesn’t it?” he said gloomily. He shook his head, “Don Juan,” he said. “The corseted lover. Call me schmuck.”
“Don’t take it so hard,” she said. “There’re other nights.”
“Like when?”
“Like tonight,” she said.
“Like tonight,” he repeated soberly. “I can live through the day. I suppose. I’ll spend the hours in good works. Like looking for a hotel room. It may be in Coney Island or Babylon or Pelham Bay, but I’ll find a room. For Captain and Mrs. Abbott. Bring along a valise, for Queen Victoria. Fill it with old copies of Time, in case we get bored and want something to read.”
A last kiss and he strode off, small and defeated in the fresh dawn light. It was a lucky thing he would still be in uniform tonight. In civilian clothes, she doubted that any desk clerk would believe he was old enough to be married.
When he had disappeared, she climbed the steps and went demurely into the Y.W.C.A. The old lady at the desk leered at her knowingly, but Gretchen took her key and said, “Good night,” as though the dawn coming in through the windows was merely a clever optical illusion.
Chapter 8
I
As Clothilde washed his hair, he sat in Uncle Harold’s and Tante Elsa’s big bathtub, steaming in the hot water, his eyes closed, drowsing, like an animal su
The deft fingers massaged his scalp, caressed the back of his neck through foaming, perfumed suds. Clothilde had bought a special soap for him in the drugstore with her own money. Sandalwood. When Uncle Harold came back, he’d have to go back to good old Ivory, five cents a cake. Uncle Harold would suspect something was up if he smelled the sandalwood.
“Now, rinse, Tommy,” Clothilde said.
Tom lay back in the water and stayed under as her fingers worked vigorously through his hair, rinsing out the suds. He came up blowing.
“Now your nails,” Clothilde said. She kneeled beside the tub and scrubbed with the nail brush at the black grease ground into the skin of his hands and under his nails. Clothilde was naked and her dark hair was down, falling in a cascade over her low, full breasts. Even kneeling humbly, she didn’t look like anybody’s servant.
His hands were pink, his nails rosy, as Clothilde scrubbed away, her wedding ring glistening in foam. Clothilde put the brush on the rim of the tub, after a last meticulous examination. “Now the rest,” she said.
He stood up in the bath. She rose from her knees and began to soap him down. She had wide, firm hips and strong legs. Her skin was dark and with her flattish nose, wide cheek bones, and long straight hair she looked like pictures he had seen in history books of Indian girls greeting the first white settlers in the forest. There was a scar on her right arm, a jagged crescent of white. Her husband had hit her with a piece of kindling. Long ago, she said. In Canada. She didn’t want to talk about her husband. When he looked at her something fu
Motherly hands touched him lightly, lovingly, doing unmotherly things. Between his buttocks, slipperiness of scented soap, between his thighs, promises. An orchestra in his balls. Woodwinds and flutes. Hearing Tante Elsa’s phonograph blaring all the time, he had come to love Wagner. “We are finally civilizing the little fox.” Tante Elsa had said, proud of her unexpected cultural influence.
“Now the feet,” Clothilde said.
He obediently put a foot up on the rim of the tub, like a horse being shod. Bending, careless of her hair, she soaped between his toes and used a washcloth devotedly, as though she were burnishing church silver. He learned that even his toes could give him pleasure.
She finished with his other foot and he stood there, glistening in the steam. She looked at him, studying him. “A boy’s body,” she said. “You look like Saint Sebastian. Without the arrows.” She wasn’t joking. She never joked. It was the first intimation of his life that his body might have a value beyond its functions. He knew that he was strong and quick and that his body was good for games and fighting, but it had never occurred to him that it would delight anybody just to look at it. He was a little ashamed that he had no hair yet on his chest and that it was so sparse down below.
With a quick motion of her hands, she did her hair up in a knot on top of her head. Then she stepped into the bathtub, too. She took the bar of soap and the suds began to glisten on her skin. She soaped herself all over methodically, without coquetry. Then they slid down into the tub together and lay quietly with their arms around each other.
If Uncle Harold and Tante Elsa and the two girls fell sick and died in Saratoga, he would stay in this house in Elysium forever.
When the water began to cool they got out of the tub and Clothilde took one of the big special towels of Tante Elsa and dried him off. While she was scrubbing out the tub, he went into the Jordaches’ bedroom and lay down on the freshly made crisp bed.
Bees buzzed outside the screened windows, green shades against the sun made a grotto of the bedroom, the bureau against the wall was a ship on a green sea. He would burn a thousand crosses for one such afternoon.
She came padding in, her hair down now, for another occasion. On her face the soft, distant, darkly concentrated expression he had come to look for, yearn for.
She lay down beside him. Wave of sandalwood. Her hand reached out for him, carefully. The touch of love, cherishing him, an act apart from all other acts, profoundly apart from the giggly high-school lust of the twins and the professional excitement of the woman on McKinley Street back in Port Philip. It was incredible to him that anyone could want to touch him like that.
Sweetly, gently, he took her while the bees foraged in the window boxes. He waited for her, adept now, taught, well and quickly taught, by that wide Indian body, and when it was over, they lay back side by side and he knew that he would do anything for her, anything, any time.
“Stay here.” A last kiss under the throat. “I will call you when I am ready.”
She slipped out of the bed and he heard her in the bathroom, dressing, then going softly down the stairs toward the kitchen. He lay there, staring up at the ceiling, all gratitude, and all bitterness. He hated being sixteen years old. He could no nothing for her. He could accept her rich offering of herself, he could sneak into her room at night, but he couldn’t even take her for a walk in the park or give her a scarf as a gift, because a tongue might wag, or Tante Elsa’s sharp eye might search out the new color in the warped bureau drawer in the room behind the kitchen. He couldn’t take her away from this grinding house in which she slaved. If only he were twenty …
Saint Sebastian.
She came silently into the room. “Come eat,” she said.
He spoke from the bed. “When I’m twenty,” he said, “I’m coming here and taking you away.”