really…'
She was so close, so poor, so young, so frail, deserted, courageous, lonely… He put out his hands in a groping, blind gesture and took her head delicately in his hands and kissed her.
Her lips were soft and firm and a little damp from the mist.
Then she slapped him. The noise echoed meanly under the stone steps. His cheek felt a little numb. How strong she is, he thought dazedly, for such a frail-looking girl.
'What made you think,' she said coldly, 'that you could kiss me?'
'I… I don't know,' he said, putting his hand to his cheek to assuage the smarting, then pulling it away, ashamed of showing that much weakness at a moment like this. 'I… I just did.'
'You do that with your other girls,' Hope said crisply. 'Not with me.'
'I don't do it with other girls,' Noah said unhappily.
'Oh,' Hope said. 'Only with me. I'm sorry I looked so easy.'
'Oh, no,' said Noah, mourning within him. 'That isn't what I mean.' Oh, God, he thought, if only there were some way to explain to her how I feel. Now she thinks I am a lecherous fool on the loose from the corner drug- store, quick to grab any girl who'll let me. He swallowed dryly, the words clotted in his throat.
'Oh,' he said, weakly. 'I'm so sorry.'
'I suppose you think,' the girl began cuttingly, 'you're so wonderfully attractive, so bright, so superior, that any girl would just fall all over herself to let you paw her…'
'Oh, God.' He backed away painfully, and nearly stumbled against the two steps that led down from the cement yard.
'I never in all my days,' said the girl, 'have come across such an arrogant, opinionated, self-satisfied young man.'
'Stop…' Noah groaned. 'I can't stand it.'
'I'll say good night now,' the girl said bitingly. 'Mr. Ackerman.'
'Oh, no,' he whispered. 'Not now. You can't.'
She moved the iron gate with a tentative, forbidding gesture, and the hinges creaked in his ears.
'Please,' he begged, 'listen to me…'
'Good night.' With a single, swift movement, she was behind the gate. It slammed shut and locked. She did not look back, but opened the wooden door to the house and went through it. Noah stared stupidly at the two dark doors, the iron and the wood, then slowly turned, and brokenly started down the street.
He had gone thirty yards, holding his hat absently in his hand, not noticing that the rain had begun again and a fine drizzle was soaking his hair, when he stopped. He looked around him uneasily, then turned and went back towards the girl's house. There was a light on there now, behind the barred window on the street level, and even through the drawn blinds he could see a shadow moving about within.
He walked up to the window, took a deep breath and tapped at it. After a moment, the blind was drawn aside and he could see Hope's face peering out. He put his face as close to the window as he could and made vague, senseless gestures to indicate that he wanted to talk to her. She shook her head irritably and waved to him to go away, but he said, quite loudly, with his lips close to the window, 'Open the door. I've got to talk to you. I'm lost. Lost. LOST!'
He saw her peering at him doubtfully through the rain-streaked glass. Then she grinned and disappeared. A moment later he heard the inside door being opened, and then she was at the gate. Involuntarily, he sighed.
'Ah,' he said, 'I'm so glad to see you.'
'Don't you know your way?' she asked.
'I am lost,' he said. 'No one will ever find me again.' She chuckled.
'You're a terrible fool,' she said, 'aren't you?'
'Yes,' he said humbly. 'Terrible.'
'Well,' she said, very serious now, on the other side of the locked gate, 'you walk two blocks to your left and you wait for the trolley, the one that comes from your left, and you take that to Eastern Parkway and then…'
Her voice swept on, making a small music out of the directions for escaping to the larger world, and Noah noticed as she stood there that she had taken off her shoes and was much smaller than he had realized, much more delicate, and more dear.
'Are you listening to me?' she asked.
'I want to tell you something,' he said loudly. 'I am not arrogant, I am not opinionated…'
'Sssh,' she said, 'my aunt's asleep.'
'I am shy,' he whispered, 'and I don't have a single opinion in the whole world, and I don't know why I kissed you. I… I just couldn't help it.'
'Not so loud,' she said. 'My aunt.'
'I was trying to impress you,' he whispered. 'I don't know any Continental women. I wanted to pretend to you that I was very smart and very sophisticated. I was afraid that if I was just myself you wouldn't look at me. It's been a very confusing night,' he whispered brokenly. 'I don't remember ever going through anything so confusing. You were perfectly right to slap me. Perfectly. A lesson,' he said, leaning against the gate, his face cold against the iron, close to her face. 'A very good lesson. I… I can't say what I feel about you at the moment. Some other time, maybe, but…' He stopped. 'Are you Roger's girl?' he asked.
'No,' she said. 'I'm not anybody's girl.'
He laughed, an insane, creaking laugh.
'My aunt,' she warned.
'Well,' he whispered, 'the trolley to Eastern Parkway. Good night. Thank you. Good night.'
But he didn't move. They stared at each other in the shadowy, watery light from the lamp-post.
'Oh, Lord,' he said softly, full of anguish, 'you don't know, you just don't know.'
He heard the lock of the gate opening, and then the gate was open and he had taken the one step in. They kissed, but it wasn't like the first kiss. Somewhere within him something was thundering, but he couldn't help feeling that perhaps, in the middle of it, she would step back and hit him again.
She moved slowly away from him, looking at him with a dark smile. 'Don't get lost,' she said, 'on the way home.'
'The trolley,' he whispered, 'the trolley to Eastern Parkway and then… I love you,' he said. 'I love you.'
'Good night,' she said. 'Thanks for taking me home.'
He stepped back and the gate closed between them. She turned and padded gently through the door in her stockinged feet. Then the door was shut and the street was empty. He started towards the trolley car. It didn't occur to him until he was at the door of his own room nearly two hours later that he had never before in all his twenty-one years said 'I love you' to anyone.
In the next two months Noah and Hope wrote each other forty-two letters. They worked near each other and met every day for lunch and almost every night for dinner, and they slipped away from their jobs on sunny afternoons to walk along the docks and watch the ships passing in and out of the harbour. Noah made the long, shuttling trip back and forth to Brooklyn thirty-seven times in the two months, but their real life was carried through the United States mails.
Sitting next to her, in no matter how dark and private a place, he could only manage to say 'You're so pretty,' or 'I love the way you smile,' or 'Will you go to the movies with me on Sunday night?' But with the heady freedom of blank paper, and through the impersonal agency of the letter-carrier, he could write, 'Your beauty is with me day and night. When I look out in the morning at the sky, it is clearer because I know it is covering you, too; when I look up the river at the bridge, I believe it is a stronger bridge because you have once walked across it with me; when I look at my own face in the mirror, it seems to me it is a better face, because you have kissed it the night before.'
And Hope, who had a dry, New England severity in her makeup that prevented her from offering any but the most guarded and reticent expressions of love in person, would write…
'You have just left the house and I think of you walking down the empty street and waiting in the spring darkness for the trolley car, and riding in the train to your home. I will stay up with you tonight while you make your journey through the city. Darling, as you travel, I sit here in the sleeping house, with one lamp on, and think of all the things I believe about you. I believe that you are good and strong and just, and I believe that I love you. I
