unwanted parting of the spirit and the heart. The man’s footsteps sounded as he crossed the parking lot to the sidewalk, and then they were lost. In the station, a telephone began to ring. The ringing was loud, evenly spaced, and unanswered. Someone wanted to know about the next train to Albany, but Mr. Flanagan, the stationmaster, had gone home an hour ago. He had turned on all his lights before he went away. They burned in the empty waiting room. They burned, tin-shaded, at intervals up and down the platform and with the peculiar sadness of dim and purposeless lights. They lighted the Hawaiian dancer, the couple drinking a toast, the rubber heel.
“I’ve never been here before,” she said. “I thought it would look different. I didn’t think it would look so shabby. Let’s get out of the light. Go over there.”
His legs felt sore. All his strength was gone. “Go on,” she said.
North of the station there were a freight house and a coal-yard and an inlet where the butcher and the baker and the man who ran the service station moored the dinghies, from which they fished on Sundays, sunk now to the gunwales with the rain. As he walked toward the freight house, he saw a movement on the ground and heard a scraping sound, and then he saw a rat take its head out of a paper bag and regard him. The rat seized the bag in its teeth and dragged it into a culvert.
“Stop,” she said. “Turn around. Oh, I ought to feel sorry for you. Look at your poor face. But you don’t know what I’ve been through. I’m afraid to go out in the daylight. I’m afraid the blue sky will fall down on me. I’m like poor Chicken-Licken. I only feel like myself when it begins to get dark. But still and all I’m better than you. I still have good dreams sometimes. I dream about picnics and heaven and the brotherhood of man, and about castles in the moonlight and a river with willow trees all along the edge of it and foreign cities, and after all I know more about love than you.”
He heard from off the dark river the drone of an outboard motor, a sound that drew slowly behind it across the dark water such a burden of clear, sweet memories of gone summers and gone pleasures that it made his flesh crawl, and he thought of dark in the mountains and the children singing. “They never wanted to cure me,” she said. “They…”
The noise of a train coming down from the north drowned out her voice, but she went on talking. The noise filled his ears, and the windows where people ate, drank, slept, and read flew past. When the train had passed beyond the bridge, the noise grew distant, and he heard her screaming at him, “Kneel down! Kneel down! Do what I say. Kneel down!”
He got to his knees. He bent his head. “There,” she said. “You see, if you do what I say, I won’t harm you, because I really don’t want to harm you, I want to help you, but when I see your face it sometimes seems to me that I can’t help you. Sometimes it seems to me that if I were good and loving and sane?oh, much better than I am?sometimes it seems to me that if I were all these things and young and beautiful, too, and if I called to show you the right way, you wouldn’t heed me. Oh, I’m better than you, I’m better than you, and I shouldn’t waste my time or spoil my life like this. Put your face in the dirt. Put your face in the dirt! Do what I say. Put your face in the dirt.”
He fell forward in the filth. The coal skinned his face. He stretched out on the ground, weeping. “Now I feel better,” she said. “Now I can wash my hands of you, I can wash my hands of all this, because you see there is some kindness, some saneness in me that I can find and use. I can wash my hands.” Then he heard her footsteps go away from him, over the rubble. He heard the clearer and more distant sound they made on the hard surface of the platform. He heard them diminish. He raised his head. He saw her climb the stairs of the wooden footbridge and cross it and go down to the other platform, where her figure in the dim light looked small, common, and harmless. He raised himself out of the dust?warily at first, until he saw by her attitude, her looks, that she had forgotten him; that she had completed what she had wanted to do, and that he was safe. He got to his feet and picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen and walked home. JUST ONE MORE TIME
There is no sense in looking for trouble, but in any big, true picture of the city where we all live there is surely room for one more word on the diehards, the hangers-on, the people who never got along and who never gave up, the insatiables that we have all known at one time or another. I mean the shoestring aristocrats of the upper East Side?the elegant, charming, and shabby men who work for brokerage houses, and their high-flown wives, with their thrift-shop minks and their ash-can fur pieces, their alligator shoes and their snotty ways with doormen and with the cashiers in supermarkets, their gold jewelry and their dregs of Je Reviens and Chanel. I’m thinking of the Beers now?Alfreda and Bob?who lived in the East Side apartment house that Bob’s father used to own, surrounded by sailing trophies, autographed photographs of President Hoover, Spanish furniture, and other relics of the golden age. It wasn’t much of a place, really?large and dark?but it was more than they could afford; you could tell by the faces of the doormen and the elevator operators when you told them where you were going. I suppose they were always two or three months behind with the rent and had nothing to spare for tips. Of course, Alfreda had been to school in Fiesole. Her father, like Bob’s, had lost millions and millions and millions of dollars. All her memories were thickly inlaid with patines of bright gold: yester-year’s high bridge stakes, and how difficult it was to get the Daimler started on a rainy day, and picnics on the Brandywine with the Du Pont girls.
She was a good-looking woman?long-faced and with that New England fairness that seems to state a tenuous racial claim to privilege. She looked imperturbable. When they were on their uppers, she worked?first at the Steuben glass store, on Fifth Avenue, and then she went to Jensen’s, where she got into trouble by insisting on her right to smoke. She went from there to Bonwit’s, and from Bonwit’s to Bendel’s. Schwarz’s took her on one Christmas, and she was on the street-floor glove counter at Saks the next Easter. She had a couple of children between jobs and she used to leave them in the care of an old Scotchwoman?an old family retainer from the good days?who seemed just as unable as the Beers to make an advantageous adjustment to change.
They were the kind of people that you met continually at railroad stations and cocktail parties. I mean Sunday-night railroad stations; weekend and season’s-end places like the junction at Hyannis or Remington; places like the station at Lake George, or Aiken and Greenville in the early spring; places like Westhampton, the Nantucket steamer, Stonington, and Bar Harbor; or, to go farther afield, places like Paddington Station, Rome, and the Antwerp night boat. “Hello! Hello!” they called across the crowd of travelers, and there he would be, in his white raincoat, with his stick and his Homburg, and there she was, in her mink or her ash-can fur piece. And in some ways the cocktail parties where your paths crossed were not so different, after all, from the depots, junctions, and boat trains where you met. They were the kind of party where the company is never very numerous and the liquor is never very good?parties where, as you drink and talk, you feel a palpable lassitude overtaking any natural social ardor, as if the ties of family, society, school, and place that held the group together were dissolving like the
