Free Summer Crossing by Truman Capote Page B

chance there was of making these up, she saw there was none, for only a child could have done so, and the child, like the chance itself, was gone.
    “Ah, what is worse than an old woman who talks too much, a
yenta
?” said Mrs. Manzer with a lively sigh. She was looking at Grady: it was not a look that asked, why did my son marry you? for she didn’t know they were married; but: why does my son love this girl? is for any mother a deeper question, and Grady could read it in her eyes. “You are polite and listen. But I will hold my tongue now, and listen to you.”
    In imagining the visit to Brooklyn, Grady had conceived of herself as an invisible witness wandering unobserved into the parts of Clyde’s life that took an hour to reach by subway:only at the door had she realized how unrealistic this was, and that she, as much as anyone else, would be on view: who are you? what have you to say? It was not presumptuous that Mrs. Manzer should ask, and Grady, meeting the challenge, forced herself forward: “I was thinking—I’m sure you’re wrong—about Clyde,” she stammered, having seized the nearest subject. “Clyde is so terribly devoted to you.”
    She knew at once that she had spoken out of turn, and Ida, with a look just this side of haughty, lost no time in telling her so: “All Mama’s children are devoted to her; she has had a lot of good fortune in that respect.”
    An outsider so indiscreet as to comment on the loyalties of a family must expect reprimand, and Grady accepted Ida’s with a grace that implied she did not know it was one. For indeed the Manzers were a family: the used fragrance and worn possessions of their house reeked of a life in common and a unity no fracas could disrupt. It belonged to them, this life, these rooms; and they belonged to each other, and Clyde was more theirs than he knew. For Grady, who, in this sense, had little sense of family, it was a strange, a warm, an almost exotic atmosphere. It was not, however, an atmosphere she would have chosen for herself—the airless inescapable pressures of intimacy with others would have withered her soon enough—her system required the cold, exclusive climate ofthe individual. She was not afraid to say: I am rich, money is the island I stand on; for she assessed properly the value of this island, was aware its soil contained her roots; and because of money she could afford always to substitute: houses, furniture, people. If the Manzers understood life differently, it was because they were not educated to these benefits: their compensation was in a greater attachment to what they did have, and doubtlessly for them the rhythm of life and death beat on a smaller but more concentrated drum. It was two ways of being, at least that is how she saw it. Still, when all is said, somewhere one must belong: even the soaring falcon returns to its master’s wrist.
    Mrs. Manzer smiled at her; quietly, with the persuasive, firelight voice of a storyteller, she said: “When I was a girl I lived in a little city on the side of a mountain. There was snow on top and a green river at the bottom: can you see it? Now listen, and tell me if you can hear the bells. A dozen towers, and always ringing.”
    Grady said, “Yes, I do,” and she did; and Ida, impatient, said, “Is this about the birds, Mama?”
    “Strangers who came there called it a city of birds. How true. Of an evening, when it was almost dark, they flew in clouds, and sometimes it was not possible to see the moon rise: never have there been so many birds. But in winter itwas bad, mornings so cold we could not break the ice to wash our faces. And on those mornings you would see a sad thing: sheets of feathers where the birds had fallen frozen: believe me. It was my father’s job to sweep them up, like old leaves; then they were put into a fire. But a few he would bring home. Mama, all of us, we nursed them until they were strong and could fly away. They would fly away just when we loved them