Free Eagle Eye by Hortense Calisher Page B

right in that dining room.”
    “Well, let’s go down, huh.” He took his father’s arm, as height permitted. “Maybe they’ll make a man of me.”
    “Of us,” Buddy said.
    On the bottom step, he stopped. “What are they doing about Maeve?”
    His father held up his newsboy face. “For her—they pray.”
    The two of them had to get all the way down the stairs to see all of it before he understood what had happened to the Bronsteins, and how rich they were. Anybody who had been reared in his collection of angles, walls, views, courtyard-juttings that almost provided the city-coveted “double exposure,” fire escapes that did at last bring the morning sun—a whole mute storehouse of wistful accommodation—could be excused for thinking it.
    The Fifth Avenue side was all glass—so much of it, and so clean, it seemed all air. Maybe angels came and licked it in the early morning—Paulina Vespasi again, telling him why the Chrysler Building’s needle always shone so clean, “same as the Vittorio Emmanuele monument.” And the air curved and wrapped itself nonchalantly, accepting a roofline, but dispensing with smaller privileges. Outside there, the whole upper city offered itself at sunset-level, no cover-charge, a gorgeous cloud-cafeteria for all bums. Strain for more meaning at your own risk. In case of too much ardor, on the terrace beyond the windows there were parapets.
    To the left, where the building curved in, an open door—yes, that was air, like summer on his boots—gave on a striped party-marquee and all the fixings, white tables and spots of chrysanthemum bushes, stacked against the dusk. He had no trouble believing they were real. There were even a couple of girls in front of the nearest bush. I see you, he signaled to himself. I’ll get back to you. Stay there.
    To his right, on the far north corner, about fourteen feet back from the angle, he saw the terrarium, a bulb of opaline glass perhaps ten feet in diameter, extruded on air again, as if the building had blown a last bubble before it gave up its climb. Outside a just-perceptible sliding-door, a life-sized porcelain lion raised its chub head. Inside, all the shapes of hothouse-green pressed lovingly toward him. They wanted to get in here, why was that? In their center, behind lattice, vine and spike, a life-sized statue with its back turned—the old Kwan-Yin from Park Avenue Two, its ivory coif bent, looking out. Clever.
    No, it’s Maeve.
You must know, Betts, that she was absolutely lucid. Perhaps more absolutely lucid than she had to be. Her only aberration was that she had to go into that place once an hour—not on the hour, nothing so bald as that—and gaze down. Whatever was being looked at there, the former owners of such vantage points as tree-houses, captain’s walks and pergolas—or a small porch in the Berkshire past—are not required to say.
    She tripped out of there, not seeing him at first, in the same white wool dress and bronze shoes he and Buddy had had to applaud over and over before she could trust herself to wear them to his graduation, an event she had trained for—as she did for all public appearances outside their house, and some in it—as if she were a movie star. “There’ll be so many bigwig parents there.” Though nothing ever came of that for her—she always became ashamed of the impudence that had brought her thus far, and hung back inside the shell she had made to be looked at—he had been proud of her, when he saw some of the other boys’ old bags. And Buddy had afterwards lunched downtown with one of the fathers, who in a whisper to his own son, had asked to be introduced to him.
    As his mother came toward him, seeing her now, it was hard to believe she was not a girl. Since he’d last seen her, she must have given up “keeping up the red” of her hair. It was now a silvery white, brushed high off her face and clipped at the back George Washington-style, in an exaggerated version of half the