On Green Dolphin Street Read online

  “Did you ever hear of a young man named Emmett Till?” said Frank.

  “I don’t believe so,” said Trench, as Mary took his elbow and guided him away.

  “You’d have liked him. Your kinda guy.” Frank Renzo watched Trench depart; Katy Renshaw stared down at her shiny shoes for a moment.

  “Well,” said Katy, looking up brightly again. “Qué será, será.”

  “Nice song.”

  “Nice movie. You like Doris Day?”

  “Sure I like Doris Day, though I guess I like jazz even better,” said Frank.

  “Oh, so does Charlie! Let’s put on a record and we can dance.”

  The guests began to leave soon after one, though it took so long for them to be gone that Charlie was able to drink a half bottle of burgundy he found in the dresser and a tumbler of Four Roses on the rocks as a nightcap. From time to time he tottered to the doorway, chastely pecking Lauren Williams on her powdered cheek, pummeling her husband, whose name always just eluded him, on the shoulder, taking the opportunity to bury his face in Katy Renshaw’s fragrant hair as he squeezed her waist.

  “A stoop full of kisses and good-byes,” he murmured. “Do you know that line?”

  “What?”

  “It’s from Wallace Stevens.”

  “Not in the Collected I read, Charlie,” said Edward Renshaw, as he threw a wrap round the shoulders of his wife.

  “You’re right, Eddie. I made it up.”

  The night had grown woundingly cold with a breeze whistling down out of Canada. Charlie lit one more good-night cigarette as he leaned against the door frame; Mary stood beside him as the last of their guests started up their cars. An upstairs light went on opposite: it was the Chinese couple who dined on bowls of clear soup and went to bed at seven. Mary flinched. The guests had left quietly, but the rumble of Detroit machinery was enough to shake the storm windows gently in their frames.

  As Mary looked down again, she saw a tall figure making its way toward them, hunched, veering from side to side. It was Frank Renzo. He was clasping his right hand in his left, and behind him, along the snowy sidewalk, there ran a trail of blood.

  “Jesus … goddamn car door,” he was muttering.

  Mary went forward anxiously. “What happened? Come inside. It’s all right, it’s just tiles,” said Mary as she led him, dripping, through to the kitchen.

  “What happened?” said Charlie. “Do we have a bandage or something?”

  “Upstairs. In the bathroom.”

  Frank’s face was pale. Mary held his hand beneath the kitchen faucet and the cold water pounded onto the metal sink, swilling with its rosy flow the last of the jettisoned clam dip. Mary pushed back the shirt cuff and rolled up the sleeve of his suit with its gray nailhead pattern. The cut was deep but clean; it ran through from the base of the thumb down into the blue wiring of the wrist.

  “Goddamn car …”

  “Maybe we should call a doctor. Perhaps it needs stitches.”

  “Stitches? No, no, it’s fine. As soon as it stops bleeding.”

  “Is this any use?” said Charlie. He was holding a first-aid box.

  “Let’s have a look,” said Mary. “You’d better keep that hand under the tap.”

  “What happened?” said Charlie.

  “It was an accident. Could I use your telephone?”

  “I’m sure we had a bandage.”

  “It’s in the hall.”

  “Did Louisa take it for her Barbie?”

  When Frank came back into the kitchen, Mary dressed the cut with what she could find in the box.

  “You sure you’re all right?” said Charlie. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Maybe some scotch? Tell me, who was that guy with the red face?”

  “Duncan Trench,” said Mary. “He’s at the Embassy.”

  “Is he a thimble-belly?”

  “What?”

  “Can he hold his liquor?”

  “I think he was tight.”

  Frank sat back with his drink. “Thank you.” For the first time since he had been back in the house, he smiled. “To tell the truth, I’m a little scared of blood.”

  “Let’s go and sit in the living room,” said Charlie, as though sensing the chance that the party might reignite. He poured himself a measure of Four Roses to keep Frank company and lit another cigarette as he put on Songs for Swingin’ Lovers. It no longer seemed polite to ask Frank exactly what had happened to his hand.

  “That girl told me you like jazz,” said Frank.

  “I certainly do,” said Charlie. “We don’t get to hear much in Washington. You live in New York, don’t you?”

  “That’s right,” said Frank. “I have an apartment loaned to me by a friend who’s on a foreign assignment. It’s in the Village.”

  “How lovely,” said Mary.

  “I don’t like it,” said Frank, grinding out his cigarette. “I don’t like the Village.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Too many bakeries and antique stores.”

  Mary, standing with her back to the fireplace, looked at Frank closely for the first time. It was impossible to tell how serious he was being. Surely anyone below the age of fifty, particularly if he liked jazz, would want to live in Greenwich Village more than any neighborhood in the United States of America; but Frank didn’t seem to be joking. His face, with its long, narrow jaw on which the first shadows of the morning’s beard were darkening, was not smiling. He looked drawn and anxious: the thin lapels of his suit, the narrow tie pulled halfway down over his cotton shirt, the long limbs folded over one another combined to suggest fragility. His pants had ridden up a little, showing where the gray woolen socks hung from his shins in slouched, concentric rings. There were dark hemispheres beneath his eyes, yet he showed no signs of wanting to leave. A drop of blood fell from the saturated dressing onto the maple parquet beside his chair.

  Charlie said, “Have you heard this fellow Ornette Coleman I keep reading about?”

  “I went to see him once. At the Five Spot. I didn’t really like it. That free stuff. I’m not sure it’s as difficult as it looks.”

  “Apparently he can play the piano and the violin and the trumpet as well.”

  “Sure. But how well does he play them? That’s the point. Do you like Miles Davis?”

  “Quite,” said Charlie. “But I’m pretty much lost with anything after Duke Ellington. This hard bop stuff, you know Charlie Parker and Dizzy—”

  “Yeah, but Miles Davis is kind of melodic, too. Did you hear the Kind of Blue record?”

  Charlie refreshed their glasses and put his feet up on the table.

  “Would you two like something to eat?” said Mary. “Those little snacks were a long time ago.”

  “To tell the truth, darling,” said Charlie, “I’m not really hungry.”

  “Frank? I could make an omelette and toast. There are some potatoes I could fry up, too.”

  “I guess I should head back.”

  “Have a bloody omelette,” said Charlie genially. “Here, listen to this.” He took off Frank Sinatra and began riffling through a line of long-playing records held in a red wire rack.

  By four o’clock, they had sampled most of the collection and the bottle of Four Roses was empty. Mary showed Frank upstairs to the attic at the back of the house; he lost his footing for a moment on the uncarpeted stair. Charlie was already in bed by the time Mary got back to their room and started to undress.

  “Have we got to get up early?” he said.

  “Just the usual. School.”

  Mary slid in beside him.

  “What do you make of that chap?” said Charlie.

  “Who? Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Strange,” said Mary. “Your sort of man, though.”

  “Yup. Ghastly taste in music.”

  That night, for no reason she could see, Mary dreamed of David Oliver. His presence in her dreams was, naturally, unpredictable, though he always took center stage as
though nothing had gone wrong.

  In the second summer of the war, having completed her studies, Mary was in London, living with her parents in their house in Regent’s Park. She helped them stick tape crosses on the windowpanes in the corridor that ran off the first-floor landing; though London was a dangerous place to be, beneath the German bombs, her parents felt better with their only child wrapped up safe inside their house. Mary, while she set about applying to join the WAAF, was glad to be home again, and to resume the familiar routine all three of them pretended they followed only to please the other two. Before dinner they gathered in the drawing room for drinks and did the crossword in The Times. Mary’s father, James Kirwan, read out the clues to give the women a chance to volunteer an answer; if none was forthcoming, he would fill it in himself with a propelling pencil. “Mary, here’s one for you: ‘One takes a hammering, sleeping rough without security.’ Twelve letters. G, two blanks C, ends P three blanks. If ‘Pietà’ is right, which I think it must be.”

  “Glockenspiel,” said Mary. “I don’t know why.”

  After dinner they would listen to the wireless, read or play cards. James often wore strangely unbecoming clothes, lumberjack shirts or tennis sweaters, after his day at the Treasury; Mary’s mother, Elizabeth, was usually in a suit she had worn to the surgery where she worked as a general practitioner. James was a solidly made man, patient and sardonic; Elizabeth suffered from weak eyesight, was sympathetic, untidy, with gray hair struggling to escape from a variety of restraints, and still had the clear skin and wide dark eyes that had made her beautiful. She also had a ferocious temper, which exploded without warning; although the subsequent peacemaking could sometimes make the atmosphere more harmonious than before the outburst, it was a process the others both feared.

  Mary had thought all children were as richly enfolded in love as she was because the child assumes the extent to which it possesses any quality is the norm, until its experience of others’ lives gives it a median against which to judge. It was not until her twenties that she started to appreciate that, even among families generally termed happy, few children had enjoyed what she could now see that she had had: a triangle of affection, in which each person was fully contented only in the presence of the other two. Sometimes when it was growing dark she watched the railings at the foot of Primrose Hill from her bedroom window until she saw her father’s hat and turned-up raincoat progressing toward the gloomy street lamp; though he denied it when she taxed him with it later, it was clear to her that his step unconsciously quickened to something near a run as he approached his house.

  One day he brought back with him to tea a man called David Oliver, an economist who had been seconded to the Treasury from London University. He sat next to the fire with his teacup rattling in his lap; he was awkwardly polite toward Mrs. Kirwan, struggling to his feet each time she came back into the room, slopping tea into the saucer, and was deferential toward her husband, occasionally slipping in a vocative “sir.” He had round cheeks and wire-rimmed glasses; it was a face that seemed aching to be comic, and his manner suggested some hilarity suppressed, but he successfully maintained a solemn front, smiling only when he glanced across at Mary, who was sitting on the sofa, her stockinged feet beneath her, stroking the marmalade cat.

  Mary Kirwan, at the age of twenty-one, had something of the feline about herself. She was smaller than either of her parents, lacking her father’s solid build or her mother’s height; she was small-boned, with wavy hair of a color bordering on black, cut a little above the shoulder and held off her face with combs. Her movements were still quick and girlish, while her features were those of her mother at the same age: large, dark eyes, prone to fright, in pale, clear skin. “It’s like looking at a miniature version of myself,” Elizabeth said. “Like looking in a mirror that slightly reduces everything.” Her sense of her daughter as someone of not quite serious adult size was integral to the way she loved her.

  Mary’s father often brought home people from work; he liked to think his wife and daughter would enjoy their conversation and he wanted lonely colleagues to think they were free to share in his unexpected domestic happiness. A bachelor who lived in Southwark digs, where the landlady’s offering was some version of stew and semolina at six o’clock, David Oliver was easily persuaded to stay to dinner. He drank gin and orange and accepted two refills.

  “David’s a terrific brainbox,” said Mary’s father over dinner. “People are in awe of him at work.”

  “I had to make myself good at work because no one took me seriously.”

  “Why was that?” said Elizabeth.

  “It just happened. At school, at work, wherever I’ve been, it’s always the same. The others always seemed to think I was a figure of fun.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.” David looked down into his wineglass; he seemed less nervous than before. “Maybe I’ve just got a ridiculous face.”

  A week later, Mary had a postcard from David asking if she would like to go to the pictures; there was a cinema in Bloomsbury still showing Rebecca, he said. Concealing the fact that she had already seen it, Mary took a bus to Russell Square and sat through the film a second time. Afterward, they went to an ABC café, where they had tea and dry buns; David told her about his work and how little he liked it. He was in a reserved occupation, required to lend the weight of his economic expertise to the war effort; he had failed an army medical on the grounds that he was still debilitated by childhood polio.

  “But it’s absurd,” he said, drawing a face with his finger on the steamed window of the café. “I’m as strong as an ox. I play squash twice a week. As soon as this job’s over, I’m going to reapply.”

  “I think you should,” said Mary. “That’s a good drawing, by the way.”

  “What?” David rubbed his hand quickly across the pane.

  “Do you do proper drawings? I mean on paper, not on glass?”

  “I do go to life classes, I admit. In an awful drafty place in Battersea. We draw a little man who used to be a prizefighter, or so he says. He’s very hairy.”

  Mary looked at David’s face closely: his blinking eyes and plump cheeks would hardly have enthralled a Rebecca, but she felt at ease with him, flattered by his attention.

  David continued to send her postcards; he seemed anxious that her parents should know that he communicated with her, that there should be nothing underhand in his approach. He invited her to watch him play squash, where he revealed an unexpectedly muscular and competitive side, whipping the small black ball from the hidden corners of the court with a powerful wrist, his plimsolls squeaking with torsion on the narrow floorboards. He took her to a pub; he took her boating on the Serpentine; he invited her back to his digs and made her toast on the gas fire in his room overlooking Trinity Church Square. At Mary’s request, he showed her his sketchbooks, including charcoal drawings of the hirsute prizefighter, and some watercolors of intense indigo and crimson.

  One Sunday she arrived at David’s lodgings in her WAAF uniform, free not to return until ten. The film they had agreed on was due to start at five, and David made cocktails from gin and various tins of fruit juice he had found in his landlady’s cupboard. After lunch, Mary curled up on his sofa with a book, while he began to sketch, standing in the window where the light was best.

  “Would you like me to pose for you?” said Mary, bored by the book.

  David raised his eyebrows. “It’s rather cold.”

  “David! I didn’t mean—”

  “Of course not. I was being silly.”

  She looked at his suddenly serious face, with the light coming through behind it, and she thought how much she liked him.

  Flushed by the cocktails, she said, “I will if you like.”

  David said nothing for a moment, then, “Are you sure?”

  Mary laughed and sprang from the sofa. “You look so solemn!”

  He grimaced and exhaled, as though he did not know what to do.

  �
��You could start by lighting the gas,” said Mary.

  “All right. You can undress behind that screen. There’s a dressing gown on the chair.”

  As she stepped out of her skirt, Mary was aware that something more than art was happening. She had made no plans, but so great was her confidence in being loved and not betrayed that she barely hesitated, unfastening the hooks and clips of her underwear; she followed some light instinctive purpose, immune to the cautious gravity of self-questioning. Perhaps it was necessary in some way to liberate herself from the perfect triangle of her parents’ pure emotion, to coarsen the texture of her life, but she felt no awareness of this thought, only a strange levity as she wrapped David’s scratchy woolen dressing gown around her.

  Then, as she went back to the sofa, she changed her mind: it was only a drawing, nothing more than that. Her posing for him showed a new degree of trust and friendship—one that he had more than earned—but when she saw the prosaic details of his artistic preparations, watched him roll back the page on the pad and clip it in place, she saw she had been wrong to think this was somehow a significant moment.

  “How do you want me?”

  “Are you warm enough? If so, you can take the dressing gown off.”

  Apart from parents and doctors, Mary had never stood naked before anyone in her life. She had been so used to thinking of herself in the diminutive, her own body reflected back through the loving eyes of those who still viewed her as a child, that she had little sense of her breasts and the dark, filmy circles that spread from their centers; she was unaware of any effect the sight of her pale skin and its inverse, hidden folds might have on the clothed man standing opposite.

  She held her hand for a moment across her chest as she sat down again, then breathed deeply and put it by her side.

  “Is this all right?”

  “Just turn to your left a little. That’s right.”

  For twenty minutes, David stood scratching at the pad with short, irritable strokes, his eyes flashing back and forth behind the lenses of his spectacles. Mary knew that one thing a model was not supposed to do was ask to see the picture, and she concentrated on keeping still. Her back ached from the lack of support in the broken-springed sofa, and a nerve, which had caught in the ball of her foot where she had arched it in the hope of grace, was making her leg tremble.