Now, late on a Sunday afternoon, having been in New York four days, and not yet having written his parents in the South, Eric moved through the tropical streets on his way to visit Cass and Richard. He was having a drink with them to celebrate his return.
“I’m glad you think it’s something to celebrate,” he had told Cass over the phone.
She laughed. “That’s not very nice. You sound as though you haven’t missed us at all.”
“Oh, I certainly want to see all of you. But I don’t know if I ever really missed the city very much. Did you ever notice how ugly it is?”
“It’s getting uglier all the time,” Cass said. “A perfect example of free enterprise gone mad.”
“I wanted to thank you,” he said, after a moment, “for writing me about Rufus.” And he thought, with a rather surprising and painful venom, Nobody else thought to do it.
“Well, I knew,” she said, “that you’d want to know.” Then there was a silence. “You never knew his sister, did you?”
“Well, I knew he had one. I never met her; she was just a kid in those days.”
“She’s not a kid now,” Cass said. “She’s going to be singing Sunday, down in the Village, with some friends of Rufus’s. For the first time. We promised to bring you along. Vivaldo will be there.”
He thought of Rufus. He did not know what to say. “She’s something like her brother, huh?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Yes and no.” Briefly: “You’ll see.” This brought them to another silence, and, after a few seconds, they hung up.
He entered their building, stepped into the elevator, and told the elevator man where he was going. He had forgotten the style of American elevator men, but now it came back to him. The elevator man, without a surly word, slammed the elevator gates shut and drove the car upward. The nature of his silence conveyed his disapproval of the Silenskis and all their friends and his vivid sense of being as good as they.
He rang the bell. Cass opened the door at once, looking as bright as the bright day.
“Eric!” She looked him over with the affectionate mockery he now remembered. “How nice you look with your hair so short!”
“How nice,” he returned, smiling, “you look with yours so long. Or was it always long. It’s that kind of thing a long absence makes you forget.”
“Let me look at you.” She pulled him into the apartment and closed the door. “You really look wonderful. Welcome home.” She leaned forward suddenly and kissed him on the cheek. “Is that the way they do it in Paris?”
“You have to kiss me on both cheeks,” he said, gravely.
“Oh.” She seemed slightly embarrassed but kissed him again. “Is that better?”
“Much,” he said. Then, “Where is everybody?” For the large living room was empty, and filled with the sound of the blues. It was the voice of a colored woman, the voice of Bessie Smith, and it hurled him, with violence, into the hot center of his past: It’s raining and it’s storming on the sea. I feel like somebody has shipwrecked poor me.
For a moment Cass looked as though she were sardonically echoing his question. She crossed the room and lowered the volume of the music slightly. “The children are over in the park with some friends of theirs. Richard’s in his study, working. But they should all be appearing almost any moment now.”
“Oh,” he said, “then I’m early. I’m sorry.”
“You aren’t early, you’re on time. And I’m glad. I was hoping to have a chance to talk to you alone before we go down to this jam session.”
“You’ve got a pretty agreeable jam session going on right now,” he said. Cass went over to the bar, and he threw himself down on the sofa. “It’s mighty nice and cool in here. It’s awful outside. I’d forgotten how hot New York could be.”
The large windows were open and the water stretched beyond the windows, very bright and peaceful, but murkier than the Mediterranean. The breeze that filled the room came directly from the water; seemed, almost, to bring with it the spice and stink of Europe and the murmur of Yves’ voice. Eric leaned back, held in a kind of peaceful melancholy, comforted by the beat of Bessie’s song, and looked over at Cass.
The sun surrounded her golden hair which was piled on top of her head and fell over her brow in girlish, somewhat too artless and incongruous curls. This was meant to soften a face, the principal quality of which had always been a spare, fragile boniness. There was a fine crisscross of wrinkles now around the large eyes; the sun revealed that she was wearing a little too much make-up. This, and something indefinably sorrowful in the line of her mouth and jaw, as she stood silently at the bar, looking down, made Eric feel that Cass was beginning to fade, to become brittle. Something icy had touched her.
“Do you want gin or vodka or bourbon or Scotch or beer? or tequila?” She looked up, smiling. Though the smile was genuine, it was weary. It did not contain the mischievous delight that he remembered. And there were tiny lines now around her neck, which he had never noticed before.
We’re getting old, he thought, and it damn sure didn’t take long.
“I think I’d better stick to whiskey. I get too drunk too fast on gin — and I don’t know what this evening holds.”
“Ah,” she said, “farsighted Eric! And what kind of whiskey?”
“In Paris, when we order whiskey — which, for a very long time, I didn’t dare to do — we always mean Scotch.”
“You loved Paris, didn’t you? You must have, you were gone so long. Tell me about it.”
She made two drinks and came and sat beside him. From far away, he heard the muffled cling! of a typewriter bell.
It’s a long old road, Bessie sang, but I’m going to find an end.
“It doesn’t seem so long,” he said, “now that I’m back.” He felt very shy now, for when Cass said You loved Paris he at once thought, Yves is there. “It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city — and — it was very good for me.”
“I see that. You seem much happier. There’s a kind of light around you.”
She said this very directly, with a rueful, conspiratorial smile: as though she knew the cause of his happiness, and rejoiced for him.
He dropped his eyes, but raised them again. “It’s just the sun,” he said, and they both laughed. Then, irrepressibly, “I was very happy there, though.”
“Well, you didn’t leave because you weren’t happy there any more?”
“No.” And when I get there, I’m going to shake hands with a friend. “A guy I know who thinks he has great psychic powers”—he sipped his whiskey, smiling—“Frenchman, persuaded me that I’d become a great star if I came home and did this play. And I just haven’t got the guts to go against the stars, to say nothing of arguing with a Frenchman. So.”
She laughed. “I didn’t know the French went in for things like that. I thought they were very logical.”