The Key to Nicholas Street Read online

  They didn’t pay much attention to me as long as she was around, and after awhile they left her alone, too.

  “Which means,” as I told her, “you are now accepted. Part of Nicholas Street, one and indivisible, till the day you die.”

  “You make it sound pretty grim and awe-inspiring, Mr. Ayres. There isn’t any oath of allegiance to take, is there?”

  “To some of the citizens of Sutton, Miss Ballou, it is grim and awe-inspiring. Humble though he may seem to the naked eye, the Nicholas Streeter walks the Plaza like royalty.”

  “I’ll try to live up to that, Mr. Ayres.”

  But she wouldn’t have to try very hard. Men straightened up and took off their hats for Katherine Ballou too readily for that. And that thought lingered in my mind just long enough to make me utterly ruin a section of canvas that needed the lightest and most careful touch.

  It was Matt Chaves who finally lifted the curtain on the part of Harry Ayres I hadn’t known about. Not by anything he said, although Matt with his propensity for brutal frankness might not have minced words had he known of the situation then, but by merely making his entrance into the scheme of things.

  Bettina glowed in a way unusual for her as she introduced him, and his first words to me were, “You’re taking quite an interest in painting, aren’t you, Mr. Ayres? Kate Ballou’s been telling me about it.”

  I was shocked at the sick grinding of jealousy in me when he said that. Somehow, I had never really thought of Kate as part of any world but Nicholas Street, and though I knew she spent several days each week in New York I had chosen to think of those days as being devoted to “business” in the abstract. The recognition that, of course, there were people in New York—men—with whom she talked, dined, shared her thoughts, shared, perhaps, more than that, was driven into me like a knife. And smiling pleasantly at Matt Chaves, one of those men, I could have killed him on the spot.

  “Yes,” I told him, “I’ve been doing a lot of painting lately. But I’m surprised to hear Miss Ballou thinks it’s worth mentioning. It’s not very good, you know.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and from his cool regard of me and his slight smile I got the uncomfortable feeling that he was looking right into me. “I’d like to see some of your stuff and judge for myself.”

  “The pictures are in the attic,” Bettina suggested. “How about going up there right now?”

  “No,” I said shortly. Then I realized how that sounded and tried to soften it. “If you’re ever back in Sutton, Mr. Chaves, and happen to visit us again, I’ll arrange a private showing.”

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  I saw Kate the next evening although I had not intended to. I had been given an abrupt insight into my feelings for her, and I was frightened at what I saw. The best thing, I had decided, was to come to terms with myself, to realize that what was perfectly in order for Matthew Chaves or for any other unattached man who might know Kate Ballou was out of the question for Harry Ayres. The lessons would have to stop—it would not be difficult to bow out of them—and the nice balance of things restored.

  It was not hard to come to this decision. I have always been contemptuous of the married man who finds himself involved in some fantastic liaison which stands to cost him his home, his family, and his position in the community, because I never felt the game was worth the candle. The average man works too hard to build his life into a respectable structure to have it kicked apart by a whim.

  I was fortified by all this when I drove my car into the garage that evening and saw the Cadillac there, a sure sign that Kate was at home. Then I heard her footsteps briskly approaching the garage, and found myself sick with anticipation and strangely angry at her, at myself, at the whole world around me. I snapped off the ignition of the car, climbed out, and then slammed the door behind me so hard that I thought for a second the window would shatter. Kate walked in as I was running my thumb along the glass.

  “Hello,” she said casually, “anything wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “When I slammed the door I thought I might have broken the glass, but no harm done.”

  “I heard that door. Sounded as if you were working off a lot of steam, mister.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s just that it sticks sometimes.”

  “The perversity of mechanical objects. I had a breakdown outside Peekskill, and I just sat there like a bump on a log for four hours until they fixed it. Four beautiful hours out of my life while two solemn men hunted around for the casket or gasket or something.”

  “Gasket.”

  “Doesn’t matter what you call it. I stand by my conviction that all this stuff you see under the hood is just to make it mysterious and expensive. Truth is, when a car is all put together in the factory they just wind it up with a key, and it’ll go until it runs down. Bring it to a garage and all they do is rewind it. It’s a billion-dollar conspiracy.”

  We stood facing each other in the shadowy garage so near that I could have reached out and touched her. And it seemed to me that although she spoke lightly and easily there was a trace of breathlessness in it.

  “You sound upset about something,” I said.

  “That damn delay in Peekskill. I was so sore about it that I came shooting right up to the house here without even remembering to buy something to eat. Now I have to take time out and go shopping, and I am not the type who takes kindly to shopping.”

  “If that’s what it is I don’t see why you can’t come over and eat with us tonight.”

  She shook her head. “No, I couldn’t really. Thanks for the invitation, but I have to get the shopping done sooner or later. It might as well be now.”

  She slid behind the wheel of the Cadillac, and from the way she sat poised I knew she was waiting for me to walk out of the garage and get clear of the car. And I had every intention of doing that, I can swear I did, but then I turned almost wildly to her and spoke to her as I never had before.

  “Kate,” I said, and my heart was in it, “who is this Matthew Chaves?”

  She showed nothing in her reaction that I might have expected, neither surprise nor annoyance nor amusement. She answered me as if I had every right to speak as I did.

  “He’s just a friend, Harry,” she said.

  “Is he the one you see when you go to New York? I mean, is he in charge of your work there, or something?”

  She sounded surprised. “Of course not. Matt’s strictly circulation department. What would he have to do with my work?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really didn’t know what kind of work he did. Bettina said something about his being on a magazine, and I just got the idea that he worked with you.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m standing here cross-examining you like this. It’s none of my business, really, and I think you’ve been decent not to just tell me that in so many words.” I turned away from her. “Meanwhile I won’t hold you back from your shopping any longer.”

  I had taken one step toward the garage entrance when she said, “Harry,” and the way she said it stopped me and turned me slowly around in my tracks. “Harry, Matt Chaves called me last night when he got back to New York. He wanted to give me hell for not being here when he came up, although he should have had sense enough to get in touch with me before he started. And he said he met you and talked to you. Harry,” she said, “what did Matt say I told him about you?”

  “Something about my painting. I didn’t talk to him very long.”

  “He didn’t say anything else? You’re sure of that?”

  Of course I am.”

  “You’re not just being gallant, are you, Harry? I couldn’t stand that. I can forgive you a lot of bad painting, but I’d never forgive you for being gallant at the wrong time, Harry.”

  “I’m not, Kate. And to prove it, I’d like to know what you have been telling him about me.”

  She didn’t answer. And in the silence of the garage I could pick
out a series of noises from outside: the clatter of dishes in the kitchen where Junie would be at work, the hiss of brakes on the Jackson Avenue bus as it pulled up to the Nicholas Street stop, noises that were the only things measuring off the time while we looked at each other in the shadows there.

  Then she said lifelessly. “It’s nothing, Harry. Nothing I’d care to have you know.”

  “Your friend Matt knows.”

  She reached her hand out to the rear-view mirror and twisted it impatiently to a new angle.

  “I don’t know what it is about Matt Chaves, Harry. I can go along thinking my own thoughts, keeping my worries to myself, figuring that if something has to be worked out I’ll do it my own way sooner or later. Then I sit down with Matt, and before I know it I’m turning myself inside out for him. Telling him things I have no right to tell him, and he has no right to know. And all the while I’m talking to him I know that damn brain of his is ticking away, working out some kind of wild solution that would only blow up right in my face. Did you ever know anybody like that, Harry?”

  “No,” I said, “I never did.”

  “Then you’re a lucky man, mister.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes, because afterwards I worry myself sick wondering just what he’ll do or say without my knowing it. When he called me at the studio last night and told me he had spoken to you I didn’t know what to think. I asked him what he had told you, and he said nothing, he had just passed the time of the day. That should have been enough, Harry. I’ve never known him to tell a lie yet. But it didn’t stop me from worrying. I guess there are some things you just don’t want people blabbing around.”

  “I guess there are,” I said.

  She nodded brightly. “So you see, Harry, it was only I was afraid Matt had talked out of turn. As long as he hasn’t it’s best we leave things just as they were.”

  “Kate,” I said, “you weren’t really going shopping, were you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that right now you probably have a houseful of groceries. I mean that all this stuff about the car’s breaking down and your forgetting to go shopping, all of it was just made up on the spur of the moment, wasn’t it?”

  “As it happens, I did have a breakdown outside Peekskill.”

  “You were waiting to talk to me, Kate.”

  Her hands were limp on the steering wheel. She stared straight ahead refusing to meet my eyes.

  “Harry,” she said, “why don’t we leave well enough alone?”

  I nodded. “All right,” I said, “but before we do I want you to answer one question.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sure it’s what you told Matt Chaves, and I have a right to know it, too. Kate, how do you feel about me?”

  She sat like, that for a long while, and then she turned slowly toward me. “I love you, Harry,” she said evenly. “I’m so damn deep drunk in love with you that I’m ashamed of myself.”

  I had known before she spoke what she would say. Yet the words struck me with the impact of a wave that whirls you around and leaves you blinded and bewildered when it recedes. And I had been blind all along. Not with the blindness of vanity, God knows, but with its exact opposite.

  She must have misread my reaction. “I’m not a complete fool, Harry,” she said humbly. “I told you I was ashamed, and I meant it.”

  “Ashamed!” I exploded. “For God’s sake, Kate, what do you think’s been on my mind day and night for the last month! Why do you think I asked you about Matt Chaves! Just the thought that you might be interested in some man, any man but me, was driving me crazy. Only, I never thought, I never knew you could feel the same way about me.”

  “Why not?” she said defiantly.

  “Kate,” I said, “I’m forty-six years old. A respectable gaffer of forty-six. And there’s nothing about me that hides a year of it.”

  “Harry,” she said mockingly, “I’m thirty-one years old. Old enough to know what I want.” She suddenly reached out her hand so that it rested, warm and hard, in mine, and I felt her nails digging into my palm. “It’s knowing I can’t have it that hurts, Harry.”

  The sun was low behind the roofs of the houses across the street now, and it spilled a long tongue of red along the driveway and into the garage almost to my feet. I would walk into it, and then turn away from it into my kitchen. Junie would be there, and Lucille wheedling and pampering her at her work because no other girl worked so hard for so little money on Nicholas Street. And I would turn into the dining room where my son and daughter would have little to say to me, or nothing, because what they had to say was reserved for their mother. After dinner I would read the paper, touch up a painting, and if anyone else was present in the room exchange small talk with Lucille. I would be the perfect loving husband, and Lucille would be the perfect loving wife, like the two figurines on top of a wedding cake. That is, if someone else was present.

  Then I would check the neat little water heater in the cellar, a gas heater because Lucille disliked the kind of coal burner they had next door in 159 which might smudge the floors, and I would lock the doors and climb upstairs and get into bed with Lucille. We didn’t need a sword between us. We had the ever-present contempt she felt for me to serve instead.

  I thought of that, and I said, “I’ve never had much use for the man who comes crawling to some woman to tell her his wife doesn’t understand him.”

  “You aren’t doing that.”

  “No,” I said dryly, “I’m afraid Lucille understands me almost too well.”

  “Do you love her, Harry?”

  “No,” I said, “I hate her. But that’s all right, because she feels the same about me. Or I should say, I came to hate her because she hates me. And it struck me that I’m getting a little tired of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I’m curious to know what it feels like to love someone, and to have someone love you. That I think it would be worth anything I’d have to pay for it if you were the one.”

  She turned her head away abruptly.

  “Kate,” I said in bewilderment, “if I’ve said anything …”

  She shook her head furiously, then pulled her hand free of mine and fumbled in the glove compartment on the dashboard until she found a small, crumpled handkerchief. I watched her helplessly as she dried her eyes and blew her nose heartily.

  “Damn fool,” she said in a muffled voice, and pointed to herself. “Me.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t know people could still talk like that, Harry. And I certainly never thought I’d be lucky enough to ever hear anyone talk like that to me.”

  “But it’s true, Kate. I meant every word of it.”

  “Why do you think I was crying, Harry?”

  “Kate,” I said, “now that we know how things stand would you want to meet me in New York? I have to go to the city to do some buying this week. Do you think we could meet there?”

  She nodded. “Anywhere, Harry, and any time.”

  “But in Sutton things will have to stay the way they always were, Kate.”

  “If that’s the way you want it, Harry.”

  “It’s better that way,” I said. “My God, I’m even afraid to kiss you right here in our own garage, and yet I’m damned if I leave without doing it.”

  “Damned if you don’t, and damned if you do,” she laughed, and turned her face up to mine. Her lips were warm and demanding, and then she drew away.

  “You don’t have to worry about wiping off the lipstick,” she said. “I’m not wearing any.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  There is a widespread opinion, I know, that in a small town it is impossible to keep a secret. Small-town people live only to poke and pry into their neighbor’s affairs, it is said, and there is always an ear at every door and an eye to every keyhole. One man’s business is every man’s business; nothing can be said or done that is not common property.

  I have always felt that t
here is as much truth to this as there is to any generalization, which is to say, very little, indeed. Prying and gossiping are universal faults, and not restricted to any particular place on the basis of its census figures. Wherever you are, when you take up a newspaper you cannot fail to see the eminence to which professional snoops and gossips have been raised. And more than that, you will discover that the victims of this gossip are not really victims at all. They take pride in what is being said about them, they luxuriate in it, they beg for more of the same.

  I think that is the key to the matter, and it applies to Sutton as it does to New York or any other city on the map. Sutton has had its scandals, its extramarital affairs, its blasted reputations. And in one case after another, I realized, the secret became known only because one of the people involved wanted it to be. What I could not understand then was why anyone in such a position would be fool enough to want this. In my relationship with Kate I found the answer, or at least part of the answer.

  I had never been one to invite or offer confidences; I had learned over the years to keep my enthusiasms to myself, and never found it difficult to do so. Now I found myself charged with a high, fierce excitement. A man would parade some pretty little thing along the street, and I would look at him and think, “What do you know of women if you do not know my Kate!” An attractive woman dining in a restaurant would look at me as I entered, and then turn away with obvious disinterest, and I found myself bursting to tell her, “I’m nothing to you, lady, but that doesn’t matter. I am everything to Kate.” It was as if a sort of rhapsodical insanity had seized me and was continually urging me to take the whole world into my confidence. Sophomoric, dangerous, so alien to me that I found myself marveling at it, yet there it was.