At the sight of Libby, Paul had been visited with a definite burst of pleasure. Gradually, however, he became irritated because she had decked herself out. Why? Actually she was wearing only a simple black suit with a tight jacket and a full skirt, but its fetchingness — acknowledged by its owner in her very gait — was in the way it made so apparent the delicacy of her shoulders and neck. Despite her dripping nose and the weather, she had worn no blouse, so that one was of course touched by the wistful fragility revealed in the wide neck of the jacket. The wad of Kleenex in her white glove (there to inform his parents of sanitoriums and hospital bills) only made more glamorous her tiny garnet earrings and bracelet. They proceeded through the lobby to the entrance of the Oak Room, and when Paul looked at her again, he looked deeply, intently, for some sign of the college girl he had planned to marry: the straight shoulder-length black hair, the pale lips, the over-used eyes, the winterized, libraryized, studentized Libby. What he found instead was something that bothered him, something that he could only think of as aspiration.
Yet as they spotted Uncle Jerry, and moved into the dining room, Paul put his mouth to her hair. He explained her little display of prosperity and polish to himself as an attempt to impress some Herz. That his mother and father dreaded her so for their son, led her, he knew, to begin to wonder what kind of ogre she might actually be. He knew this, and he knew how much protection his intended needed. He said into her ear, “My wife,” feeling a little ripple of well-being as the word passed from his lips.
“Husband,” Libby whispered, and that thrilled him too. Oh Libby had come a long long way from being a sorority sister to being a woman. He, Paul, had lifted her up from childhood with him. Now — the thought had a peculiar forcefulness as Libby swished up to Uncle Jerry — now she was all his!
Uncle Jerry’s daughter Claire was Paul’s age. It had always been expected in the family that because they had been born within a month of each other they should like each other. But even during the flirtation they had carried on in the closing months of their seventeenth year, there had been little affection between them. Following an evening when they had taken off their clothes and stood glaring, breathlessly, at one another, Paul had gone on to college and high literature, and Claire to a promiscuity at Syracuse, stories of which had reached Paul’s ears every Monday morning, sixty miles away at Cornell. But with dinner at the Plaza — snow fell on the carriages out the window, beyond Libby’s hair — all was changed. Claire seemed to be taking a special delight in showing Paul how matronly she had become, and how human. With her whole being she listened to the remarks of her husband, an average crew-cut sort of I.B.M. machine, who had taken away from Syracuse an M.A. in Business Administration, and hot Claire Herz. The firm he was with was splitting stock or changing hands, or something that Paul was not following; whatever, Claire responded as though he was singing exquisite tenor. Once Paul thought he saw her eyes shut when her husband spoke about a large loan a Mr. Richmond was floating. She might have been visualizing it aloft. Finally she discovered Libby and her clothes; and Libby, it seemed, discovered herself.
“I never usually go to Carita,” Libby said, measuring Claire’s response, “because you have to wait so long.”
“They do do a wonderful job,” Claire said. “It’s so lovely.”
“It’s only the second time I’ve been there.”
Claire lifted a finger as though to touch Libby’s crown, and Paul realized that they were not talking about Libby’s clothes; Carita was where she had had her hair set. He had imagined that she had fixed it herself before the bathroom mirror in Queens. His astonishment led him into a grave contemplation of the future. All his thinking of the last few days had been grave in tone, and large in scope. He was no longer thinking ahead strictly in terms of semesters and summers.
In the meantime the young women had proceeded into a discussion of Delman’s shoes. Finally, Libby excused herself and went off to the powder room — doubtless, thought Paul, to work her eyes up a little more.
Claire put her hand on her cousin’s. “She’s wonderful, Paul. I think she’s the most wonderful thing that could have happened to you. She’s so charming, and so alive, and so pretty. Her skin, her hair …”
“We wish you all the luck,” Claire’s husband said, and he snapped his head at Paul, meaning it. “I think we have to go home, hon,” he said to his stout, good-looking young wife.
“Baby-sitters,” Claire said. She spoke wearily, but it was an affect; she was obviously charmed by her own maternal obligations. She rose, a matron at twenty-one. She went around to her father, who pushed back his chair and rose too. At fifty-five Uncle Jerry might have been her beau; he stood straight and was dressed like his son-in-law in a narrow suit and a narrow tie. All that marred his crisp good looks was a distressing willingness in the eyes.
When Claire and her husband had left, he said, “Harold is a fine boy. A very solid boy.”
“He seems very nice.” Paul tried to concentrate on his uncle instead of himself; he was divided in his feelings about Libby’s return to the table. When she had gotten up to leave he had actually felt relief, so uncertain was he about what she might say next. And he seemed to have become uncertain on the basis of her not setting her hair at home! He waited for her to return with a conscious ambivalence.
“He’s especially fine for Claire,” Jerry said. “He holds her in check. You may not have known it, but she had an exuberant streak in her in college.”
“Yes?”
“Paul, she was a very promiscuous girl at Syracuse. She could have made a mess of herself. When I left Selma,” Jerry said, “she lost a father image, there’s no doubt about that. But had I stayed longer, she would have lost it anyway. Worse things might have happened.” Paul wondered, until Jerry told him. “None of us,” his uncle said, “are without incestuous feelings. And it isn’t the feelings, you see — it’s how you act them out.”
Jerry seemed to feel that he had explained something; Paul only felt the desperate sordid decency of admitting to such motives. “This young man,” Jerry was saying, “he’s no whiz, no spectacular ball of fire. But he’s steady and he’s a mensch, and he’s done wonders for Claire. You ought to see her with that baby. She relates so beautifully it could make you cry.”
“I’ll bet she’s fine.”
“She’s become an outstanding mother.”
“Yes,” Paul said, “I’m glad we all had a chance to be together.”
“I’m glad we all had a chance to meet Libby. I think you’ve got a fine girl.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank yourself. It’s not often young people know what they want. It’s not often you find a young person who’s discovered the essentials. They run around and play around — like Claire — trying each other out. It’s not a healthy thing, what’s happening with this generation. They ‘get laid,’ they ‘screw,’ ” he said, “and those expressions express just about what they do. A lot of grabbing and pawing, Paul, but very little touching. But I see your Libby and I see Claire now, and they look like two girls who know what that means, to touch.” Uncle Jerry’s eyes were wet suddenly. In the cultivated atmosphere of the dining room, with a steak sizzling at the next table and the candlelight shimmering on the long curtains, and outside the white flakes falling on the park, Jerry was not able to prevent the tears from sliding down his face. After he dried them, Paul expected he might see a pale spot where his uncle’s coloring had been rubbed off by the napkin. Uncle Jerry, forever struggling up for air in the dark sea of maladjustment and poor mental health, had shed two tears for Love. Love was the name painted on the ship that would come along and pull him safely to shore. It had rescued his daughter, and now he was telling Paul it had rescued him, and one sunny day perhaps it would come along and rescue Jerry too. He would find a woman who was not a mother-figure, like the oversized Selma, nor a daughter-figure, like the short-lived twenty-seven-year-old; just a woman who could touch him.