Years of Grace · Part III · II · Chapter 3 2 2 (1/2)

II

The heat of the September day still pervaded the city streets as Jane descended from the top of the Fifth Avenue bus and turned, a trifle uncertainly, under the arch, to walk south and west across Washington Square. Jane had had very little experience in looking after herself and she always felt a trifle uncertain when wandering alone in strange places. Earlier that very afternoon, in emerging from the Bay State Limited, she had found the congested turmoil of the Grand Central Station a little overwhelming. It had seemed quite an adventure to choose a black porter and follow him as he threaded his way through the crowded concourse and out past the swinging doors through the traffic of Forty-Second Street to the lobby of the Belmont Hotel.

Jane had felt just a little queer, as she stood alone at the desk, her luggage at her feet, signing the register and asking for a single room and bath for the night. It was perfectly ridiculous⁠—she was thirty-six years old⁠—but Jane really couldn’t remember ever having spent a night alone at a hotel before. She was very glad that Flora and Mr. Furness would join her at noon next day and greatly relieved to discover that a letter from Agnes was waiting for her, confirming her invitation to dinner and containing explicit directions as to how to reach the Greenwich Village flat.

“Come at six,” Agnes had written. “I get out of Macy’s at five-thirty and I’ll be there before you.”

She was perhaps a trifle early, reflected Jane, as she paused in the path to reassure herself as to just which direction was west. She had allowed too much time for the bus ride through the afternoon traffic. She had been glad to get out of her hotel bedroom. Once her bag was unpacked, there was nothing to do there but stare through the dingy lace curtain, which had seemed at once curiously starched and soiled, at the taxis and streetcars that congested Forty-Second Street and the crowds of suburbanites who were pouring into the entrance of the Grand Central Station. She had watched the station clock for fifteen minutes and when the hands pointed to five she had left the room.

Washington Square, thought Jane, gazing curiously about her, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It didn’t look like the cradle from which a city’s aristocracy had sprung. There was a nice old row of redbrick houses at the north end, but many of them seemed rather gone to seed and dilapidated, and the grass in the Square was worn down to hard-caked mud and the elm trees were leafless, and the shirt-sleeved men and shawled women on the benches and the dirty little dark-eyed children who were playing marbles and hopscotch on the path were the kind that you would only see “west of Clark Street” at home.

Jane left the Square at the southwest corner and, referring once more to the written directions that Agnes had given her, plunged into the congestion of the city streets. This was a funny place to choose to live in, thought Jane, as she pushed through a group of pale-faced little girls, skipping rope on the sidewalk. It was a funny place to choose in which to bring up a child. A group of shabby young men, hanging about the entrance of a corner saloon, commented favourably on her appearance as she approached them. Jane held her chin high and passed on in disdain. The green baize door swung open to admit an elderly hobo and Jane caught a whiff, across the stale heat of the pavement, of the acrid damp odour of beer. She thought the disreputable bar looked rather cool and dark and inviting from the glare of the city street. She could quite understand why the group of shabby young men liked to linger there.

At the next corner she stood amazed and delighted at the sight that met her eye. A curving vista of narrow street, flanked by tall redbrick houses trellised with iron fire escapes. The fire escapes were festooned with varicoloured washing and all the windows were wide open and the windowsills were hung with bedding. From nearly every window a dark-haired woman and a couple of children were hanging out, leaning on the bedding and gazing down at the street beneath them. The street itself was crowded with push carts and fruit stands. Great piles of golden oranges and yellow bananas were displayed for sale. Clothing hung fluttering from improvised frame scaffolds. A fish vendor was crying his wares at her elbow. The front steps of all the houses were crowded with people laughing and talking together and shouting to the purchasers that clustered about the open-air booths. The dingy store on the corner had a sign in its dirty window, “Ice⁠—kindling⁠—coal and charcoal.” A little olive-faced girl came out of it balancing an old peach basket on her head. It contained a melting lump of ice. She skipped gaily down the street and vanished into a basement entrance. The store on the opposite corner had a foreign sign in the doorway. “Ravioli. Qui si vende Pasta Caruso. Speciahtà in Pasta Fresca.” Jane was suddenly enchanted with Greenwich Village. Still⁠—it was a funny place to choose in which to bring up a child.

Presently she came to Agnes’s corner. Charlton Street was quite broad and paved with cobblestones. A car-track ran down the centre of the street. The houses on both sides were built of red brick, with white frame doorways. Nice white-panelled front doors with fanlights above them and brass knobs and knockers, some brightly polished. The windows were all square-paned and many of the houses had green window-boxes. The plants in them were drab and shrivelled, however, in the city heat. Jane did not see a single flower.

Agnes’s house was in the centre of the block. It looked just like all the others. There was a sign in the downstairs front window, “Furnished Room. Gents Preferred.” Jane mounted the front steps and regarded the empty hole, where a doorbell had once hung, for a moment in perplexity. Then she pushed open the front door. She found herself in a small white-panelled vestibule, carpeted with yellow linoleum. Three mailboxes met her eye and on the middle one a card, “Mr. and Mrs. James Trent.” She pushed the electric bell beneath the mailbox and, after a minute or two in which absolutely nothing happened, she opened the inner door. The odour of cooking cabbage instantly assailed her nostrils. The entrance to the first apartment was on her left hand. A white-panelled door, soiled with countless fingerprints. A straight, steep staircase, with uncarpeted wooden treads, led to the upper floors. Jane slowly ascended the stairs into comparative darkness. The odour of cooking cabbage grew fainter. At the front end of the upper corridor was a second white-panelled door. Jane knocked at it tentatively. She heard, immediately, the sound of masculine footsteps and the airy notes of a masculine whistle, a fragment of “La Donna e mobile” from Rigoletto. The door was suddenly opened by a young man. He stood smiling at her on the threshold. A rather charming young man, with tousled dark hair and an open collar, who looked, Jane thought from the dusk of the corridor, with his quizzical eyebrows and his pointed ears and his ironical smile, exactly like a faun.

“Come in,” he said pleasantly.

“I⁠—I’m looking for Mrs. James Trent,” said Jane.

“Come in,” the young man repeated. Jane stepped, a little hesitantly, over the threshold. “You must be Jane.” His smile deepened into a grin of appreciation. “You don’t look at all as I thought you would. Come in and sit down. Agnes will be home any minute.” Then, as she continued to stare at him in perplexity, “I’m Jimmy.”

Jane’s eyes widened with astonishment. This boy, Jimmy⁠—Agnes’s husband? He did not look a day over twenty-five. Jane knew he was thirty-four, however.

“Oh⁠—how do you do?” she said. “Yes⁠—I’m Jane.”

Agnes’s living-room was pleasantly old-fashioned. The ceiling was high and was decorated with a rococo design in plaster that looked, Jane thought, like the top of a wedding cake. A charming Victorian mantel of white marble dominated one end of the room. It was adorned with a bas-relief of cupids holding horns of plenty in their chubby arms. The cupids were dusty and the hearth was discoloured and the fireplace was filled with sheets of musical manuscript, torn in twain. Two tall chintz-hung windows looked over Charlton Street and a battered davenport sofa was placed beneath them. The sofa was strewn with other sheets of music, and a violin lay on a pile of disordered cushions in one corner. The top of the mantelpiece was piled with books, and a high white bookcase, filled with heterogeneous volumes, occupied one end of the room. A small gate-legged table, covered with a clean linen cloth, stood near the hearth, with an armchair on one side of it and a child’s Shaker rocker on the other. Through the half-open folding-doors across from the fireplace Jane caught a glimpse of a little room that was evidently a nursery. The floor was strewn with toys and a white iron crib stood near the window.

“Sit down,” said Jimmy, throwing an armful of music from the sofa to the floor. “Hot as hell, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid I’m very early,” said Jane, sitting down in the armchair.

“No. Agnes is late,” said Jimmy. He was standing before the Victorian mantel, still regarding her with an appreciative grin. “You look as cool as a cucumber in that blue silk. Maybe I ought to put on my coat.”

“Oh, no,” said Jane politely. She hadn’t noticed his shirtsleeves until that moment.

“Well, anyway, a necktie,” persisted Jimmy engagingly, fingering his open collar.

“You look very nice and Byronic as you are,” smiled Jane.

“I know I do,” said Jimmy rather surprisingly. “I get away with a lot of that Byron stuff. But just the same I think I owe that French frock a cravat.” He walked across the room as he spoke and, opening a door, disappeared into the inner recesses of the apartment.

Jane, left to herself, began to inspect the room once more without rising from her chair. Her eyes wandered to the high bookcase. She recognized some old Bryn Mawr books that had adorned, for two years, the walls of her Pembroke study. The two small blue volumes of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The green Globe editions of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. The Buxton Forman Keats and Shelley. The Mermaid Series of Elizabethan dramatists. And the long dark red line of Matthew Arnold and Pater.

The sound of running water from the interior of the apartment distracted her attention. Jimmy was a great surprise. She had never thought that he would be like that. She glanced at the sheets of music on the sofa. The one on top of the pile was half-filled with pencilled notations. He must have been writing music. Evidently he was a composer on the side. Agnes had never mentioned that.

The door to the inner rooms opened suddenly and Jimmy reappeared, freshly washed and brushed, his collar rebut-toned, and a soft blue necktie bringing out the colour in his smiling eyes. He picked up his coat from the back of the sofa and put it on with a sigh.

“What men do for women!” he murmured as he adjusted his collar.

“What women do for men!” laughed Jane. “This dress is French, but it’s fearfully hot.”

“I bet you didn’t put it on for me!” grinned Jimmy. Jane’s blush acknowledged the home thrust. “You just wanted to show Agnes how well you’d withstood the assaults of time.”

Jane had thought Agnes might think the dress was pretty. Not that Agnes ever noticed clothes, of course.

“You must have been an infant prodigy,” went on Jimmy. He was sitting on the sofa now, his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed flatteringly on her face.

“Why?” asked Jane unguardedly.

“To have been Agnes’s classmate,” said Jimmy promptly.

Jane frowned. She didn’t like that. She didn’t like it at all. That was no way for Agnes’s husband to speak of Agnes.

“I wish she’d come home,” she said with severity.

“Do you?” smiled Jimmy. “Well, she will soon. She stops at the Play School every evening to bring home the child. It began again last week, thank God! Another day of vacation and I should have committed infanticide.”

Jane did not reply to this sally. She continued to look, very seriously, at Jimmy. But he rattled on, ignoring her silence.

“A Play School is a wonderful invention. It takes children off their parents’ hands for nine hours a day. I call it immoral⁠—but very convenient. So much immorality is merely convenience, isn’t it? We resort to it, faute de mieux. Saloons and play schools and brothels⁠—they’re all cheap compromises, forced on us by civilization. In an ideal Utopia I suppose we’d all drink and love and bring up our children at home. Do it and like it⁠—though that seems rather a contradiction in terms. Progressive education is really only one of many symptoms of decadence. It’s a sign of the fall of the empire.” He paused abruptly and looked charmingly over at Jane, as if waiting for her applause. Jane felt an inexplicable impulse not to applaud him.

“That’s all very clever,” she said quickly. “But of course it isn’t true.”

Jimmy burst into amiable laughter.

“So you are a pricker of bubbles, are you, Jane?” he asked amusedly. “You certainly don’t look it. Are you a defender of the truth and no lover of dialectic for dialectic’s sake? Do beautiful rainbow-coloured bubbles, all made up of watery ideas and soapy vocabulary, floating airily, without foundation, in the void, mean nothing in your life?”

“Very little,” said Jane severely. “I’m a very practical person.”

“I seem to be a creature of one idea this afternoon,” said Jimmy lightly, “but I can only repeat⁠—you don’t look it! The picture you present, as you sit in that armchair, Jane, is far from practical⁠—”

As he spoke, Jane heard with relief the sound of a latchkey in the outer door.

“That’s Agnes!” she cried, springing to her feet.

“It must be,” said Jimmy, rising reluctantly to his.

The door opened quickly, and Agnes, hand in hand with her five-year-old daughter, stood beaming on the threshold. Just the same old Agnes, with her funny freckled face and her clever cheerful smile! No⁠—somehow a slightly plumper, rather more solid Agnes, with a certain maturity of gesture and authority of eye! Jane clasped her in her arms. It was not until the embrace was over that she noticed how grey Agnes’s hair had grown. It showed quite plainly under her broad hat-brim. Jane sank on her knees before the child. She looked a little pale and peaked, Jane thought, but she was Agnes all o’er again⁠—the little Agnes that Jane had known in the first grades of Miss Milgrim’s School! How preposterous⁠—how ridiculous⁠—to see that little Agnes once more in the flesh! How absurdly touching! Jane clasped the child gently in her arms.

“Agnes!” she cried. “She’s precious! She’s just like you!”

“Unfortunately,” remarked Agnes with mock criticism. “When she might have favoured her fascinating father! Whatever you may say against Jimmy, Jane, you have to admit he has looks. In six years of matrimony they’ve never palled on me.”

“Don’t talk like that, Agnes,” remonstrated Jimmy promptly. “You make me feel superficial. I’ve much more than looks. I’ve all the social graces. I’ve been exhibiting them for Jane’s benefit for the last twenty minutes and I leave it to her if my face is my fortune! I’ve many more important assets.”

“How about it, Jane?” said Agnes, smiling. “Did he make the grade?” Behind the smile Jane detected a gleam of real concern in Agnes’s glance. She suddenly recalled that winter afternoon, sixteen years ago, when she had first displayed Stephen to Agnes in Mr. Ward’s library on Pine Street. Handsome young Stephen, flushed from the winter cold! She remembered her own dismay at the unspoken verdict of “cotillion partner” in Agnes’s honest eyes.

“Y-yes,” she said slowly, with a twinkle, rising to her feet, still holding the child’s hand in hers. “I think he did⁠—for a first impression.”