He didn’t want to blame anyone. Why should he feel that they had bred him to a disappointment? He was bitter because he couldn’t inherit the glory they unwittingly advertised. He couldn’t be part of their brotherhood but he wanted to be among them. A nostalgia for solidarity. Why was his father’s pain involved?
He turned away from the city. He had abused the streets with praise. He had expected too much from certain cast-iron fences, special absurd turrets, staircases to the mountain, early-morning views of bridges on the St. Lawrence. He was tired of the mystery he had tried to impute to public squares and gardens. He was tired of the atmosphere in which he tried to involve Peel Street and boarding-house mansions. The city refused to rest quietly under the gauze of melancholy he had draped over the buildings. It reasserted its indifference.
He stood very still.
New York City. He lived in the tower of World Student House. His window overlooked the Hudson River. He was relieved that it wasn’t his city and he didn’t have to record its ugly magnificence. He walked on whatever streets he wanted and he didn’t have to put their names in stories. New York had already been sung. And by great voices. This freed him to stare and taste at will. Everybody spoke a kind of English, no resentment, he could talk to people everywhere. He wandered in the early-morning markets. He asked the names of the fish, stiff and silver in boxes of ice. He attended more of his seminars.
He saw the most beautiful person and pursued her. Shell.
Book III
1
Her middle name was Marshell, after her mother’s people, but they called her Shell.
Her ancestors crossed the ocean early enough to insure her mother membership in the DAR. The family produced two undistinguished senators and a number of very good traders. For the past seventy-five years all the males (excepting the utterly stupid) have attended Williams. Shell was the second youngest in a family of four. Her older brother was one of the unfortunates who did not make Williams. To compound his shame he ran off with a Baptist and made his father bitterly happy when he quarrelled with his wife over their children’s education.
Shell grew up in a large white house on the outskirts of Hartford, where her maternal great-grandfather had founded a successful bank. There were a stone fountain in the garden, many acres of land, and a stream which her father stocked with trout. After the younger son made a reasonable marriage and moved to Pittsburgh, Shell and her sister were bought two horses. A stable was built, a miniature reproduction of the house itself. Her father was fond of building miniatures of his house. Scattered through the trees there were a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, a doll’s house, and a bird roost, all copies of the original one, which (they reminded their weekend guests) was for humans.
The affairs of the house were conducted with much ritual and decorum. Both the mother and father, deep readers of American history and collectors of colonial furniture, took some pride in never having been tempted to visit Europe.
Every spring Shell was in charge of floating cut flowers in the stone fountain. She took the business of being a girl very seriously. She thought her sister was too rough, wondered why her mother raised her voice, was hurt when she contradicted her husband. Not only did she believe in fairy tales, she experimented with peas under her mattress.
She hated her hair, which was black, thick, and long. After a washing it could not be managed and she was called “Zulu.” But she would not cut it, thinking perhaps of ladders let down from tower windows. She didn’t like her body. It was not a princess’s body, she was sure. It wasn’t growing in the right places. She envied her younger sister’s breasts, her straight auburn hair. She attacked hers with a brush and did not begin to count until she had done at least two hundred strokes. She was appalled when one of her sister’s boyfriends tried to kiss her.
“Why?” she demanded.
The boy didn’t know why. He had expected to be accepted or refused, not examined.
“Because you’re pretty.…”
He said it like a question. Shell turned and ran. The grass seemed suddenly white, the trees white. She dropped the flowers meant for the fountain because they were white and dirty as bones. She was a spider on a field of ash.
“Primavera,” said Breavman when he heard the story. “Not Botticelli — Giacometti.”
“You won’t let me keep anything ugly, will you?”
“No.”
Besides, Breavman could not resist adding to his memory the picture of a delicate American girl running through the woods, scattering wild flowers.
Shell loved the early morning. She asked for the room with the big east window which had been the nursery. She was allowed to choose her own wallpaper. The sun crept over the calico bedspread. It was her miracle.
Apparently life was not all Robert Frost and Little Women.
One Sunday morning she was in her mother’s bed. They were listening to a children’s programme. Gobs of snow, the size of seeded dandelions, were drifting diagonally across the many-paned windows. Shell’s hair, gathered by a black ribbon, lay tame and smooth over her chest. Her mother was fingering it.
On the air a child was singing a simplified aria.
“Daddy’s so silly. He says you’re all growing up so fast that the house will be too big.”
“He’ll never leave his fish and chickens.”
Her mother’s fingers had been leisurely twining and intertwining but now only the thumb and forefinger were at work, a few strands of hair between them. The movement was that with which the bargain hunter tests the fabric of a lapel, but more rhythmical and prolonged.
She was smiling faintly and looking straight into Shell’s face but Shell could
