All things of the sea belong to Venus; pearls and shells and alchemists’ gold and kelp and the riggish smell of neap tides, the inshore water green, and purple further out and the joy of distances and the roar of falling masonry, all these are hers, but she doesn’t come out of the sea for all of us. She came for Coverly through the swinging door of a sandwich shop in the Forties where he had gone to get something to eat after classes at the MacIlhenney Institute. She was a thin, dark-haired girl named Betsey MacCaffery—raised in the badlands of northern Georgia—an orphan, her eyes red that night from crying. Coverly was the only customer in the shop. She brought him a glass of milk and a sandwich in an envelope and then went to the far end of the counter and began to wash glasses. Now and then she took a deep, tremulous breath—a sound that made her seem to Coverly, as she bent over the sink, tender and naked. When he had eaten half his sandwich he spoke to her:
“Why are you crying?”
“Oh Jesus,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t be here crying in front of strangers, but the boss just came in and found me smoking a cigarette and he gave me hell. There wasn’t anybody in the store. It’s always slow this late on rainy nights, but he can’t blame me for that, can he? I don’t have anything to do with the rain and I just can’t stand out there in the rain asking people to come in. Well, it was slow and there hadn’t been anybody in for nearly twenty—twenty-five or thirty minutes—and so I went out back and lighted a cigarette and then he came right in, sniffing like a pig, and gave me hell. He said these awful things about me.”
“You shouldn’t pay any attention to what he says.”
“You English?”
“No,” Coverly said. “I come from a place called St. Botolphs. It’s a small town, north of here.”
“The reason I asked was you don’t talk like the others. I come from a small town myself. I’m just a small-town girl. I guess maybe that’s the trouble with me. I don’t have this thick skin you need to get along with in the city. I had so much trouble this week. I just took this apartment with my girl friend. I have or perhaps I should say I had this girl friend, Helen Bent. I thought she was my true-blue friend; true-blue. She certainly led me to believe she was my best friend. Well, since we were such good friends it seemed sensible for us to take an apartment together. We were inseparable. That’s what people used to say about us. You can’t ask Betsey unless you ask Helen, they used to say. Those two are inseparable. Well, we took this apartment together, my girl friend and I. That was about a month ago; a month or six weeks. Well, just as soon as we got moved in and settled and about to enjoy ourselves I discover that the whole thing is just a scheme. The only reason she wants to share this apartment with me is so she can meet men there. Formerly she was living with her family out in Queens. Well, I don’t have any objections to having a boy friend now and then but it was only a one-room apartment and she was having them in every night and naturally it was very embarrassing for me. There were men going in and out of there so much that it didn’t seem like home to me. Why, sometimes when it was time for me to go home to my own apartment where I was paying rent and had all my own furniture I’d just feel so heavyhearted about busting in on her with one of her friends that I’d go and sit in a late movie. Well, I finally spoke to her. Helen, I said, this place doesn’t seem like home to me. There’s no sense in my paying rent, I said, if I have to take up residence in a movie house. Well, she certainly showed her true colors. Oh, the spiteful things she said. When I come home the next day she’s gone, television set and all. I was glad to see the last of her, of course, but I’m stuck with this apartment with nobody to share the rent and in a job like this I don’t have any occasion to make girl friends.”
She asked Coverly if he wanted anything more. It was nearly time to close and Coverly asked if he could walk her home.
“You sure come from a small town, all right,” she said. “Anybody could tell you come from a small town, asking if you can walk me home, but it so happens I just live five blocks from here and I do walk home and I don’t guess it would do me any harm, providing you don’t get fresh. I’ve had too much of freshness. You’ve got to promise that you won’t be fresh.”
“I promise,” Coverly said.
She talked on and on while she made the preparations for closing the store and when these were finished she put on a hat and coat and stepped with Coverly out into the rain. He was delighted with her company. What a citizen of New York, he thought—walking a counter girl home in the rain. As they approached her house she reminded him of his promise not to be fresh and he didn’t ask to come up, but he asked her to have dinner with him some night. “Well, I’d adore to,” she said. “Sunday’s my only night off but if Sunday’s all right with you I’d adore to have dinner with you on Sunday night. There’s this nice Italian restaurant right around the corner we can go to—I’ve never been there, but this former girl friend of mine told me it was very good—excellent cooking, and if you could pick me up at around seven …” Coverly watched her walk through the lighted hall to the inner door, a thin girl and not a very graceful one, feeling, as surely as the swan recognizes its mate, that he was in love.
Chapter Twenty-One
Northeaster (Leander wrote). Wind backed from SW. 3rd equinoctial disturbance of season. All in love is not larky and fractious.—In the attic the broken harp-string music of water dropping into pails and pans had begun and, feeling chilled and exposed to the somber view of the river in the rain, he put away his papers and went down the stairs. Sarah was in Travertine. Lulu was away. He went into the back parlor, where he was completely absorbed in building and lighting a fire—in watching how it caught, in sniffing the perfume of clean wood and feeling the heat as it reached his hands and then went through his clothes. When he was warm he went to the window to see the dark day. He was surprised to see a car turn in the gates and come up the drive. It was one of the old sedans from the taxi stand at the station.
The car stopped at the side door and he saw a woman lean forward and talk to the driver. He did not recognize the passenger—she was plain and gray-haired—and he guessed that she was one of Sarah’s friends. He watched her from the window. She opened the door of the car and walked up, through the thin curtain of rain that fell from the broken gutters, to the door. Leander was glad for any company and he went down the hall and opened the door before she rang.
He saw a very plain woman, her coat darkened at the shoulders with rain. Her face was long, her hat was trimmed gaily with hard white feathers, like the feathers that are used to balance badminton birds, and her coat was worn. Leander had seen, he thought, hundreds of her kind. They were the imprimatur of New England. Dutiful, pious and hardy, they seemed to have patterned their spirits after the weeds that grow in high pastures. They were the women, Leander thought, after whom the dirty boats of the mackerel fleet were named: Alice, Esther, Agnes, Maybelle and Ruth. That there should be feathers in her hat, that an ugly pin made of seashells should be pinned to her flat breast, that there should be anything feminine, any ornament on such a discouraging figure, seemed to Leander touching.