It seemed to her that he was deliberately debasing their relationship and forcing her into the humiliating position of buying him the ring, but she was mistaken; the idea had never occurred to him.
“Do you want me to buy you the ring, Emile?”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t thinking about that. It just caught my eye. You know how things catch your eye.”
“I’ll buy it for you.”
“No, no, forget about it.”
They had dinner in a restaurant and went to a movie. Walking back to the hotel he bought a newspaper, and he sat reading it in her room while she undressed and brushed her hair. “I’m hungry,” he said suddenly. His tone was petulant. “At home I get a bowl of cornflakes or a sandwich, something before I go to bed.” He stood up, put his hands on his stomach and shouted, “I’m hungry. I just don’t get enough to eat in these restaurants. I’m still growing. I have to have three big meals a day and sometimes something in between!”
“Well, why don’t you go down and get something to eat?”
“Well.”
“Do you need money?”
“Sort of.”
“Here,” she said. “Here’s some money. Go down and get some supper.”
He went out, but he didn’t return. At midnight she locked the door and went to sleep. In the morning she dressed, went to the jeweler’s and bought the ring. “Oh, I remember you,” the clerk said, “I saw you last night. I saw you standing outside the door when your son came in to ask the price.” It was a blow, and she supposed she could be seen flinching. She thought that perhaps the winter dark and the pale light in the street had made her seem old. “You’re a very generous mother,” the clerk said when he took her check and passed her the box. She called Emile’s room and when he came down she gave him the ring. His pleasure and gratitude were not, she thought, mercenary and crass but only a natural response to the ancient tokens of love, the immemorial power of stones and fine gold. It was a foggy afternoon, all the planes were grounded, and they went back on the train, sitting in different cars.
He sat by the window, watching the landscape. Somewhere south of Boston the train passed a suburban tract of houses. They were new, and although the architects and the gardeners had rung a few changes here and there, the effect was monotonous. What interested him was that rising in the center of the development was a large, ugly, loaf-shaped and colorless escarpment of granite. The roads must circumvent it expensively. Its sides were too steep to hold the foundations of a house. It seemed, in its uselessness, triumphantly obdurate and perverse. It was the only form on the landscape that had not succumbed to change. It could not be dynamited. It could not be quarried and carried away piecemeal. It was useless, and it was invincible. Some boys his age were climbing the steep face, and he guessed this was their last refuge.
It was late and it was getting cold, and he could remember the sense of the season and the hour when it was time to leave off playing and go home to study. Near where he lived there was a similar rock, and he had climbed it on winter afternoons, to smoke cigarettes and talk with his friends about the future. He could remember grasping for handholds on the steep face, and how the rough stone pulled at his best school clothes, but what he remembered most clearly was how once his feet were on the ground, he had a sense of awakening to a whole new life, the arrival at a new state of consciousness, as clearly unlike his past as sleep is unlike waking. Standing at the foot of the cliff at that hour and season—about to go home and study but not yet on the path—he would stare at the yards and the trees and the lighted houses with a galvanic sense of discovery. How forceful and interesting the world had seemed in the early winter light! How new it all seemed! He must have been familiar with every window, roof, tree and landmark in the place, but he felt as if he were seeing it all for the first time.
How old he had grown since then.
They met ten days or two weeks later, in a New York hotel. She was there first and ordered some whisky and roast-beef sandwiches. When he came in, she poured herself a drink and made one for him, and he ate both the sandwiches she had ordered. She was wearing a bracelet, made of silver bells, that she had bought long ago in Casablanca. She had been given a Mediterranean cruise as a Christmas present by a rich elderly cousin, and in her travels she had never been able to escape a genuine and oppressive sense of gratitude to the old lady. When she saw Lisbon she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see Lisbon! When she saw Rhodes she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see Rhodes! Standing in the Casbah at dusk she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see how purple the skies are above Africa! Remembering this she gave the silver bells a shake.
“Do you have to wear that bracelet?” he asked.
“Of course not,” she said.
“I hate that kind of junky stuff,” he said. “You’ve got lots of nice jewelry—those sapphires. I don’t see why you want to wear junk. Those bells are driving me crazy. Every time you move they jingle. They get on my nerves.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. She took off the bracelet. He seemed ashamed or confused by his harshness; he had never before been harsh or callous with her.
“Sometimes I wonder why it happened to me like this,” he said. “I mean, I couldn’t have had anything better, I know. You’re beautiful and you’re fascinating—you’re the most fascinating woman I ever saw—but sometimes I wonder—wondered—why it should happen to me this way. I mean, some fellows, right away they get a pretty young girl, she lives next door, their folks are friendly, they go to the same schools, the same dances, they go dancing together, they fall in love and get married. But I guess that’s not for poor people. No pretty girls live next door to me. There aren’t any pretty girls on my street. Oh, I’m glad it happened to me the way it did, but I can’t stop wondering what it would have been like some other way. I mean like in Nantucket that weekend. That was the big football weekend, and I was thinking, there we were, all alone in that gloomy old house—that was a real gloomy place, rainy and everything—while some fellows were driving in convertibles to the football game.”
“I must seem terribly old.”
“Oh, no. No, you don’t. It isn’t that. . . . Only once. That was in Nantucket, too. It was raining in the night. It began to rain and you got up to shut the window.”
“And I seemed terribly old?”
“Just for a minute. . . . Not really. But you see, you’re used to comfort, you’re different. Two cars, plenty of clothes. I’m just a poor kid.”
“Does it matter?”
“Oh, I know you think it doesn’t, but it does. When you go into a restaurant you never look at the prices. Now, your husband, he can buy you all these things. He can buy you anything you want, he’s loaded, but I’m just a poor kid. I guess I’m sort of a lone wolf. I guess most poor people are. I’ll never live in a house like yours. I’ll never get to join a country club. I’ll never have a place at the beach. And I’m still hungry,” he said, looking at the empty sandwich plate. “I’m still growing, you know. I have to have lunch. I don’t want to seem ungrateful or anything but I’m hungry.”
“You go down to the dining room, darling,” she said, “and get some lunch. Here’s five dollars.” She kissed him and then as soon as he was gone she left the hotel herself.
Chapter XXIV
She wandered around the streets—she had no place to go—wondering what had been the first in the chain of events that had brought her to where she was. The barking of a dog, the dream of a castle or her boredom at Mrs. Wishing’s dance. She went home, and regard this lovely woman then, getting off the train in Proxmire Manor. See what she does. See what happens to her.