CHAPTER 13

A Pane of Glass (1953)

The six boys—men, really—came stamping down the snowy street. The air was hard and clear, the glassy places on the sidewalk rang. One of the boys laughed, and without breaking their fast walk, without looking, you would say, they threw their several snowballs across and into the doorway of the house I live in.

I was pulling the sled to the steps.

“Couldn’t we go back to the Park?” my little boy asked. “For a couple of rides?”

“Well—” I began in doubt. It was getting colder, the whole lower part of the sky was turning orange; the six boys—really men, certainly eighteen or nineteen—were striding away on the other side; and in front of the house, an elderly German couple walked with pointed shoulders into the cold. Black icy places in the street; and the Park had been windy, my coat and skirt lashing while the little children poured down their hill on sleds.1

“Let’s go in for a while, and then I’ll take you to the party. And keep the sled under your bed again, for the morning.”

The German couple had stopped short, and were facing each other, talking.

My little boy carried his sled up. Against the shiny glass of the door, the breaks stared out, soft and black.

“For no reason!” said the man, with his startled, burring speech.

“They were not angry, even!” said the German woman.

The snowballs had gone through the door in places, and one pane of the fanlight was shattered. On the floor inside, snow melting ran among the glitter of splintered glass.

The six boys had hardly glanced at the brick house. By now, the hall was cooling. The only sound was the baby upstairs trotting up and down and laughing. There was a silence of profound hangovers late on New Year’s Day. My little son looked at me, and stood the sled against the wall, his stubby red boots grinding at glass.

“Let’s just find them,” I said. The German couple were still talking, with their high pointed shoulders declaring cold and outrage. They approved of my coming out again. They nodded, and went on with their walk.

“What will you say to them?” my little boy asked finally, as we turned the corner.

“I don’t know,” I told him. There they were—six of them, spread over the wide avenue and the traffic island, shouting. I felt cold and helpless. I walked over to the tallest one. He was wearing a leather jacket. His green clear eyes looked at me. I saw their distinct faces full of pride and question. I had no anger left.

“About the door down the street,” I said. “Everyone feels like throwing snowballs today. But not through—that house is getting cold already, and it’s full of little kids.”

“What makes you think we did it?” asked the one in blue denim. He blew on his hands. “Anybody know about some snowball?”

“You can’t prove which one of us threw it,” said the short black-haired boy.

Which one. A few panes of glass, small-time stuff, kids’ stuff, the grins are saying; we are six young men, far past all of this.

“That’s a coward’s trick,” I started to say. But what do you ask them to do? Fix the glass? They mock and laugh. Pay—for what? Find—what? Something to do and be on New Year’s Day?

“I’ll know you next time,” I said.

“That’s right, lady. Five six and a half,” said Blue Denim, leaning his length against the pillar of the drygoods store.

My little boy stood waiting, brown and bearlike in the cold.

“Those big boys should be shamed,” he was saying.

Shame! That is the cry of the parks, I thought. You hear the mothers and nurses all calling Shame! Shame! Where did you get it? I thought, looking at him. We won’t do it like that.

We went home, talking. The sky was darkened now. All down our street the Christmas windows of the ground floors were lit—the Santa Claus riding over the white plastic hill; here, with a pointed red bulb turned on, all the approaches brought together: the crèche in one corner, the tree over here, the cathedral window in stained plastic centered, and an ivory Crucifixion high up and guarded by red and blue saints. Against the brick warehouse lay the first charred Christmas tree. Three little girls smiled as the short burning needles twisted rising, their keen pine scent burning through the cold.

In the chilly hallway, burnt smell of tree, glass ground down underfoot.

The super’s wife answered the phone. “He’ll be around in a half hour,” she said. “He can patch up the door, anyway, and sweep the hall.”

My little boy took off his stiff clothes. He put on his best suit, with very little help, and brushed down his hair. “Will there be many kids?” he asked.

I was wearing my long black skirt with the blue-green lining. I like to walk in that skirt. It must have been while we were dressing that it happened, but I did not see a sign of it on our street.

When we went down, it was as cold indoors as out. We walked the other way now, past the little grocery and the Home, across the avenue at the drugstore. These are mostly remodeled houses, with photographers and actors, TV people and cover artists, professionals.

The bars were shut, and the soda fountain. A few pigeons circled and landed at the next corner. Two couples hurried to the taxi stand.

My little boy went off, roaring with the son of the house through the crowd at the party. After a while, I looked out of the window, high over the street and the river. Smoke, lit white, blowing past the hospital sign; the mayor’s house standing alone and snowy in the trees, its TV antennae low on the low Georgian roof; the other antennae, on the apartments and tenements near East End Avenue making alphabets and crucifixions.

A new man was saying to me, “. . . Like the mother in the shelter who said, ‘Pay attention to the air raid.’”2

I laughed and answered. The rooms seemed to be full of painters. Standing on the edge, I could see them—the little square man with the white hair, telling people how soon his show would open; the man near the door, whose face was held together only by his exerted will, who kept frowning and explaining the film about himself; the lady all wire bracelets, and suddenly many women in green dresses; and there, listening, the lenient Puritan who had forgotten all of it, renounced it, and found himself in this room just the same.

The sound was mounting, a centered sound of a party going well. It was a sound moving over even the little boys who raced and went weaving through, hip-high, and could not be heard until they were very close; even over the lamp breaking; over the half-said things.

Now the man said to someone whose back had been pressed against his arm, “Yes, you’re the one”; and to me, “He must listen to me! He’s the man to invent it—the thing we need most of all just now: a glareless headlight.”

Standing in that room, I thought of the six boys. They walked; they ran; they scattered through the streets.

When I got home, it was the freezing night. My heel went slipping and scratching on that floor.

I called the super. “He did mean to come,” said his wife; “but there’s been quite a commotion here; somebody seems to have given birth on the roof, and thrown it down the airshaft. The place has been full of cops.—He found it, Angelo found it.”

I nailed the Times magazine section across one panel, and some corrugated paper from a Christmas present across another; and a pie-slice of brown paper over the fanlight section.

In the middle of the night, I woke out of dreamless sleep. The lights of a taxi slid on the ceiling. Where is that girl? I thought. What year did she have?

Angelo looked down from the ladder the next evening. “I’ll have to show you how to do this,” he said. His eyes glinted. He laughed at me. “No. You fixed it fine,” he said, coming down. “Those were good pictures, in the Times.”

Yes, he had found her sitting there. The tailor had gone downstairs to his shop. Just as he started to lock up again, he saw her face against the door. She asked to go back. Yes, that was where she had it, in the bathroom, and threw it out the window. Of course not; it was dead when they got to it. She was just sitting there, on the stairs of his house—“just like you now, here”—said Angelo. When he recognized her, she tried to get up and go. Lived up the street; a girl he saw around. Well, the detectives had been there all day, measuring and measuring. She wouldn’t say a word, not whose it was, nothing. She’d have to, though. For the grand jury.

I heard the little boy playing cars upstairs. What with one miraculous deliverance and another, here I sat and he played cars.

Jim came out of the first-floor door. “Finished my script,” he said, and put down the wastebasket. “Oh,” he said, “Angelo. That glass was out yesterday. I wish we could get some action around here. Start the year right.”

Angelo made the whole thing little with a turn of his wrist, and left. I told Jim.

“Threw it away!” Jim said. He laughed, and then cut it off, startled at himself. He laughed again. “Threw it away!” He laughed again, before he disappeared into the sound of children behind him. He put his head out of the door, his white face in order again. “What a mess!”

But Angelo in the pale sunshine downtown, among the gleaming marble of the Courts, was not the man on the ladder. Never had I seen this Angelo: his hair cut short and outlined; his shaved cheeks, with their straight lines drawn down plain, his sharp checked shirt. He clapped the policeman’s shoulder. “You know what they say in Washington”—he was quoting a column in the afternoon paper—“they say it would be a pity if Taft died, because—”

He saw me coming, and looked again. I think it was the hat. “Oh,” said Angelo, “the D.A. won’t be here for forty minutes.” He smiled, a public smile. He was being a civic character, at home in the world of detectives, files in the case of, and jokes with guards.

I thanked him and went to phone. I suppose I had some idea of finding somebody to help that girl. Could a psychiatrist . . . ? Could somebody be found to speak to her? And if she were told she was wanted, that her child had been wanted?

As I stood in front of the line of booths, not knowing whom to reach, I looked up, into Steve’s face. After years, he looked at me with the same care. Here, in the soft-shining marble, we might still have been on the deck of that far ship, just evacuated from the city at peace, the great city so soon to fall. We had looked across the shore-waves to the city, and then at each other. He turned just such a look on me, and then the printer from Paris had said, “And where, in all this, is the place for poetry?”3

Only his face was not easygoing and a little fat now. He had emerged, a lawyer walking calmly through the halls.

“I know the case,” he said. “I know one of the guys on it. There’s something else,” he said. “On the next block—you know, the church block—she threw her first baby, year before last, two years ago—threw it under the wheels of a car. There’s a twist to this one: the car missed, the baby rolled clear, wasn’t touched. They got her for abandoning the child. She’s in Bellevue now, they’re bringing her over for the hearing.4 Do? They all say lock her up, keep her safe from herself, keep society safe. What do you want to do?”

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh?” said Steve. “Change your mind? That’s a different story, is it?”

Yes, I did; for a moment I did change my mind. But how do I dare? This will open, and open, and all be the same story.

“Come and have a drink,” said Steve. “I want to hear about you.”

“Next time,” I said. “I know I can’t get into the hearing—”

“Damn right,” said Steve cheerfully. “Crime.”

“Well. I’ve got a five-year-old coming home from school.”

“Only one?” said Steve. “We’ve got two. Boy or girl?”

“Boy,” I told him.

“Like that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said.

I got out of the El.5 From the top of the iron steps, I looked across the neighborhood: the chained tall walk-ups, the strong curve of the asphalt plant, one vivid green building past the brewery, and all the reds, the greys, the blackened blond colors down toward the river and around to the sweep of the Triboro.6 What will become of me? I had been thinking, but now, with a lifting of breath, What happens now? What is coming?

A close-running bunch of four boys and a girl in jeans, running like a team in purpose down the hill, put out their arms to knock over the ashcans. A spill of papers, a confession of food unused, and eggshells still beautiful, all were cast out across the sidewalk stone.

The river-light struck grey on water grey.

I thought of that girl. “Well, so long,” Steve had said. “I’m sure you’ll think of a way we can do something. Or you can. For her, or for all of us.”

It was not until the next morning; and now, later, I look out of my window. The clean woman across the street is washing her venetian blinds again. The house is warm; the panes have been replaced downstairs, all but the one in the fanlight, a hard shape. My brown paper still is there. Up past where I stand drift the burning worms of fire—the needles of another tree transfigured. I feel as if I were on the edge of some way to speak to that girl, or speak for her, help somehow; help her, or my own knowledge of that day. But I have not really thought of anything definite.

That next morning, though, my little boy was putting on his socks. Our timing was good, and he was going to be able to play before school. He suddenly began asking.

“Mother,” he said, “what are babies before they’re babies?”

“Well,” I said, “they grow to be babies. All the time before, they are growing to be babies out of something like a seed. Then they’re ready to be born and be babies. Embryos, they call them.”

“Something like a seed?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Inside their mothers?”

“Yes.”

Let him know this well, I thought. Let them all know it well.

“How do they get inside their mothers?” the little boy asked.

“Well,” I said. “The father gives life to the seed, life is planted, it’s something like planting. The man gives it to the woman.”

“But how does the man get inside the woman?”

“All right,” I said. “What does a man have to get inside a woman with?”

“Love,” he said.

(Discovery, 1953)