FullReads

Young women of the Upper West Side whose fathers were in Broad Street or in wholesale silk, young women with marquetry tables, with pictures in shadow boxes in their drawing rooms, and too many servants belowstairs, had been complimented when Bates took them to dinner. But this woman who worked, who had the tension wrinkle between her brows, listened and let him struggle.

“We can’t talk here. Please walk up a block with me,” he begged.

She came but she continued to inspect him. Once they were out of the hysteria of the Subway crowd, the ache of his embarrassment was relieved, and on a block of dead old brownstone houses embalmed among loft buildings he stopped and laughed aloud.

“I’ve been talking like an idiot. The crowd flustered me. And it was so different from the greeting I’d always planned. May I come and call on you sometimes, and present myself as a correct old bachelor, and ask you properly to go to dinner? Will you forgive me for having been so clumsy?”

She answered gravely: “No, you weren’t. You were nice. You spoke as though you meant it. I was glad. No one in New York ever speaks to me as though he meant anything—except giving dictation. ”

He came close to saying: “What does the chump with the foolish spectacles mean?”

He saved himself by a flying mental leap as she went on: “And I like your laugh. I will go to dinner with you tonight if you wish. ”

“Thank you a lot. Where would you like to go? And shall we go to a movie or something to kill time before dinner?”

“You won’t—I’m not doing wrong, am I? I really feel as if I knew you. Do you despise me for tagging obediently along when I’m told to?”

“Oh! Despise—You’re saving a solitary man’s life! Where—”

“Any place that isn’t too much like a tea room. I go to tea rooms twice a day. I am ashamed every time I see a boiled egg, and I’ve estimated that if the strips of Japanese toweling I’ve dined over were placed end to end they would reach from Elkhart to Rajputana. ”

“I know. I wish we could go to a family dinner—not a smart one but an old-fashioned one, with mashed turnips, and Mother saying: ‘Now eat your nice parsnips; little girls that can’t eat parsnips can’t eat mince pie. ’”

“Oh, there aren’t any families any more. You are nice!”

She was smiling directly at him, and he wanted to tuck her hand under his arm, but he didn’t, and they went to a movie till seven. They did not talk during it. She was relaxed, her small tired hands curled together in her lap. He chose the balcony of the Firenze Room in the Grand Royal Hotel for dinner, because from its quiet leisure you can watch gay people and hear distant music. He ordered a dinner composed of such unnecessary things as hors d’oeuvres, which she wouldn’t have in tea rooms. He did not order wine.

When the waiter was gone and they faced each other, with no walking, no movies, no stir of the streets to occupy them, they were silent. He was struggling enormously to find something to say, and finding nothing beyond the sound observation that winters are cold. She glanced over the balcony rail at a bouncing pink-and-silver girl dining below with three elephantishly skittish men in evening clothes. She seemed far easier than he. He couldn’t get himself to be masterful. He examined the crest on a fork and carefully scratched three triangles on the cloth, and ran his watch chain between his fingers, and told himself not to fidget, and arranged two forks and a spoon in an unfeasible fortification of his water glass, and delicately scratched his ear and made a knot in his watch chain, and dropped a fork with an alarming clang, and burst out: