Summer Crossing Read Free Page B

Whereas Peter had cared exceedingly. All their childhood she’d helped her friend build, drafty though it was, a sandcastle of protection. Such castles should deteriorate of natural and happy processes. That for Peter his should still exist was simply extraordinary. Grady,though she still had use for their file of privately humorous references, for the sad anecdotes and tender coinages they shared, wanted no part of the castle: that applauded hour, the golden moment Peter had promised, did he not know that it was now?
    “I know,” he said, as if, having divined this thought of hers, he now replied to it. “Nevertheless.” I know. Nevertheless. He sighed over his motto. “I suppose you imagined I was joking. About the university. Really, I was kicked out; not for saying the wrong thing, but for saying perhaps the too-right thing: both would appear to be objectionable.” The exuberant quality that so suited him rearranged his mischief-maker face. “I’m glad about you,” he said inexplicably, but with such a waterfall of warmth that Grady pressed her cheek near his. “If I said that I was in love with you, that would be incestuous, wouldn’t it, McNeil?” All-ashore gongs were clanging through the ship, and ashes of shadow, spilt by sudden cloud-shades, heaped the deck. Grady for an instant felt the oddest loss: poor Peter, he knew her even less, she realized, than Apple, and yet, because he was her only friend, she wanted to tell him: not now, sometime. And what would he say? Because he was Peter, she trusted him to love her more: if not, then let the sea usurp their castle, not the one they’d built to keep life out, it was already gone, at leastfor her, but another, that one sheltering friendships and promises.
    As the sun flooded out, he stood up and pulled her to her feet, saying, “And where shall we be gala tonight?” but Grady, who every moment meant to explain that she could not keep a date with him, let it pass again, for, as they descended the steps, a steward, brassy with the shininess of a gong, called his warning to them, and later, confronted with the activity of Lucy’s farewell, she forgot altogether.
    Fanfaring a handkerchief, and embracing her daughters fitfully, Lucy followed them to the gangplank; once she’d seen them down the canvas tunnel, she hurried out on the deck and watched for their appearance beyond the green fence; when she saw them, all clustered together and gazing dazedly, she started flagging the handkerchief to show them where she was, but her arm grew strangely weak and, overtaken by a guilty sensation of incompleteness, of having left something unfinished, undone, she let it fall to her side. The handkerchief came to her eyes in earnest, and the image of Grady (she loved her! Before God she had loved Grady as much as the child would let her) bubbled in the blur; there were stricken days, difficult days, and though Grady was as different from her as she had been from her own mother, head-sure and harder, she still was not a woman, but a girl, achild, and it was a terrible mistake, they could not leave her here, she could not leave her child unfinished, incomplete, she would have to hurry, she would have to tell Lamont they mustn’t go. But before she could move he had closed his arms around her; he was waving down to the children; and then she was waving too.

Chapter 2

    Broadway is a street; it is also a neighborhood, an atmosphere. From the time she was thirteen, and during all those winters at Miss Risdale’s classes, Grady had made, even if it meant skipping school, as it often did, secret and weekly expeditions into this atmosphere, the attraction at first being band-shows at the Paramount, the Strand, curious movies that never played the theaters east of Fifth or in Stamford and Greenwich. In the last year, however, she had liked only to walk around or stand on street-corners with crowds moving about her. She would stay all afternoon and sometimes until it was