In the past, the distant past — and this goes back, my child, to a time when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron, all the way back at least to 1948, do you remember the blizzard that January? It was centuries ago. It was the time of the Great Brooklyn Renaissance, perhaps you may recall the legend of the Uncertain Knight who rode out of West End Avenue carrying a black tin watercolor box under his arm, coming into the Valley of Pratt where he met the Lady Edna Belle. My Ebie's hair is like a golden helmet/Poured molten, shaped to fit/Haphazardly/And yet despite — the ode ended there, because there were no words. Not then. Not as yet. No words to express what I felt for Ebie, the incredible awakening I knew in her arms and, yes, between her legs. Yes, that was a very real part of it, it had to be, I had known only one other girl before Ebie — Liz McPherson, known to every young and budding Studs Lonigan along 96th Street. She lived near Lexington Avenue, but the crosstown walk never fazed any of us, through the park's transverse path and over the hill to grandmother's house we went, grandmother being Liz who shared a room with her baby sister. The infant would lie asleep in her crib beside Liz's narrow bed where we made fitfully inexperienced love, with sometimes two or more other young bucks waiting outside the closed door in the tenement kitchen. Poor Liz, I wonder what ever became of her; Liz the Whore, we ungallantly called her.
When Ebie told me about the boy who limped, I was furious at first. I conjured the image of a Brooklyn Liz, far removed from 96th Street, but sisters under the skin, a long line of cock-in-hand suitors outside her apartment door. Donald was his name, had been his name; apparently the affair had run its course several months before we met in Bertie's, l'affaire de sa jeunesse: emblazon the motto on a field argent, two bronze balls pendant beneath a sinister hand couped at the wrist, holding erect a cane. I went to church the day she told me, I had not been inside a confessional since I was fifteen, and I was there to confess not my own sin, but the sin of a girl I deeply loved, or thought I loved, a girl who had become in six short months — this was May of 1948, I can still remember the day, bright with spring sunshine, a bird chirping incessantly in the budding tree just outside the stained glass window above the confession box, Bless me, Father, for I have sinned — a girl who had become in half a year my only reason for existence.
The priest spoke with a faint Italian accent, there was in his voice the echo of an ancient race, but in his words there was no wisdom. I left the church unsatisfied, the bird still chirping its inane song, the sun bright in an opaque sky, I could not understand why she had not waited for me to come along, why she had foolishly given herself to this boy who limped. I tried to tell Uncle Benny about it that night, the telephone beckoning, knowing that Ebie was waiting for my call in her Myrtle Avenue apartment, or at least hoping she was waiting. But I couldn't tell him. I sat there in the living room with him, we were both sitting on the piano bench, side by side, our hands separately clasped and hanging between our respective knees, like two old men in the park, staring solemnly at pigeons. But I could not tell him that the girl I loved had been living with some goddamn cripple for five months, how could I tell this to Uncle Benny or to anyone, for that matter? So we talked about my studies, Uncle Benny was always fascinated by the theory of art, and I told him I was having trouble with one of my instructors, I was sure the man disliked me, and Uncle Benny told me there would be instructors all through my life who took a dim view of me, or vice versa, and the thing to do with them was simply face the fact that it would be difficult, but to do my best, do my work the best way I knew how, and get through it somehow, that was the important thing. And we sat there on the piano bench with the question of Ebie hanging on the air, unresolved, unspoken. I nodded and said, Yeah, but Uncle Benny this guy is a real son of a bitch, and Uncle Benny said, That only means you've got to work harder, Jimbo, you've got to get what you can out of the course, despite the way he feels about you, you've got to rely on what's inside yourself, Jimbo, there's lots of good stuff inside you. Yeah, I said, and nodded. Sure, Uncle Benny said, and nodded. After a while, I got up and thanked him, and went into my room. I could hear my mother in her bedroom next door, already beginning the litany of Hello Mary, Mother of God. I threw myself down on the bed, and tried to figure out what I should do. I decided two things. First, I decided I could never let go of Ebie Dearborn because I loved her too much, and second, I decided I would extract from her a promise that Donald Who Limped was to be the last of her little adventures, that James Randolph Driscoll was now on the scene having ridden long and hard from West End Avenue, and he was on the scene to stay, and she had better get that through her golden-helmet head. I was still furious when I told it to her in the curtain-rustling stillness of her bedroom later that night. She sat in a straight-backed chair near the window, the curtains stirring behind her with each fresh spring breeze, unsmiling, sitting as straight-backed as the chair. When I was through, she started to say something but the goddamn elevated express roared by and we were caught in a moment of mechanical suspense, waiting for the train to pass, waiting for the room to be still again.
In a sense, that day in 1948 was the beginning. Oh yes, Norman Sheppard said only this afternoon that there are no endings in life, and perhaps he was right, perhaps there are no beginnings as well — but for me, it was a beginning, and I think it was for Ebie, too. For me, for us, it was the start of a gradual loss of identity. If the love we made was a little death, then the love we knew was a littler death still, this loss of self, this certain overlapping of person upon person, blending, merging, no longer Ebie and no longer me, a single unit responding and reacting in rare empathy, osmotically perhaps, or perhaps symbiotically because, yes, we surely fed upon each other and sustained each other and became each other, inseparable, indistinguishable, one.
Who can remember, can I remember, any of my own responses as apart from Ebie's? Reconstruct all of the events that led to our marriage in 1950, arrange them in sequence and what can I remember that does not include Ebie? Once I walked alone in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge and wrote in my head a suspense story for Alfred Hitchcock, spies chasing counterspies over wet cobblestones and under dripping metal cross-supports, but the heroine of that movie (running through the rain, blond hair stringy and wet, head snapping back over her shoulder to steal a quick glance at God knew what awful pursuer) was Ebie Dearborn, all was Ebie Dearborn. And once I sat alone in the living room of the West End Avenue apartment, the winter afternoon waning, and tapped out a melody on the old Chickering, note by faltering note, using only one hand, but the symphony was Ebie Dearborn, all was Ebie Dearborn. You were wrong, Norman Sheppard; there are beginnings, and there are endings as well, and I have known them both. I can remember the day our Fainting in Coils instructor (Lewis Carroll's chapter was big with the students at Pratt, who quite rightfully thought of themselves as very inside concerning art and the art world and things artistic) took us to see the bona fide studio of a bona fide artist named Bernardo Casamorte, whose name we later learned meant "house of the dead," hilariously inappropriate after what we had seen. Casamorte lived on West 18th Street in a skylighted loft that had once been a hat factory. Hat molds, some of which he had decorated with grinning faces, most of which he had left unadorned, still rested on every flat surface in the place, cluttering the room. In order to stand or sit, the class — there were thirty of us — had to move molds, or easels, or finished and unfinished canvases, or palettes, or pots of paint and glue, or soiled clothing draped or tossed or hanging, or the remains of breakfast. There were seven cats in the place, and a large boxer who had dipped his snout in vermilion, and who gave the appearance of a comic strip drunk with illuminated nose. There was also a mistress-model who slunk around the loft in an electric-blue silk dressing gown while Casamorte gave us his lecture on what it was like to earn a living as a painter, a premise we seriously doubted on the evidence presented. We kept hoping the mistress-model would do a little posing for him while we were there; she was a dark brunette with enormous breasts swelling the gown; she held the gown closed with her folded arms, its sash having been misplaced in the general disorder of the joint. We decided afterwards, Ebie and I, that the loft was in reality a stage set designed and built by Pratt, and that Casamorte, his busty model-mistress, his seven cats, and his drunken boxer were all actors hired by the school for this special outing each year. This was the only class Ebie and I shared together, by dispensation, since she was a full year ahead of me. She was much better in oils than I was, I never could get the hang of oils. She had a fine sure touch with pigment, she really might have become a good artist if she'd stuck with it. In Vermont now, even in Vermont where she has all the time in the world, she never paints anymore. Never. It is as if everything in her has gone dead as well.