train coming up the track, to beat the train on an
April day, to reach the corner before the train .
"Blue, that's your color," he repeated. "Blue .
Do you ever remember running on the streets, just
running"-he kissed her-"just
running," and her
head nodding, her eyes smiling.
"Just running," she said. "Of course."
Overhead the sky droning and water sweeping
over a rock, shining it black, a sailboat tipping, a
boy running out on the short breakwater and stand-
ing there on the edge of it, and the water dunes, the
trees along the curving shore, blue trees far off....
"That boy," he said, pointing, "now watch-"
And she nodded, leaning forward, both of them
watching like watching something under glass.
The boy was standing there with his hands in the
pockets of yellow pants, one sleeve of a brown shirt
fluttering. Then he went along the breakwater and
balanced himself along the edge of it. He hopped
on one foot and then the other. He leaned
over
sizing the jump to the wet sand below. He jumped
and rolled over the sand and he stood up and looked
at the mud-streak along the yellow pants and look-
ed some more and then he went along, not in a walk
but in something he had devised in which he threw
his head back and his knees forward. He progress-
ed. He stopped. He went down on his knees on the
sand and picked shells out of it and put them to his
ear. He picked up stones and tossed them out on the
water. Then he gave it all up and ran and scrambled
up the rocks and ran, making noises that were howls
mixedwith music.
"I asked you," he said, "but I didn't want to
until it was settled one way or the other, whether
I would or wouldn't go into Party work on that
basis....
Very well, I
was
in, I was working hard
in the Party and I had dropped out of school a long
time before-it's a year and a half ago, the time of
that strike at the Metro-and there I was, doing
Party work, but not until last month when I spoke
to Si did I realize that even after you're in you've
got to go forwards or backwards, become more or
less valuable ....
And for a month now I've been
thinking about it, and realizing that I don't want to
do anything else. From all angles," he laughed, "it's
a career in the best sense of the word, in the sense
of working at something that's necessary and that'll
demand the limit of your resources. I've been in the
Party a little over a year now but I've worked hard
in it and so perhaps I've moved fast and I want
to move faster. It's taken me a long time to figure
out what it was all about. If I hadn't had the picture
of myoId man's erratic and crazy socialism I mi2'ht
have been in sooner ....
Anyway, I'm in and now
I think I want to make a career out of it in the best
sense of the word, I mean spending a lifetime at
it. If you can't see it that way then you don't fully
accept it. If the Party thinks I'm worth full-time to
PARTISAN
REVIEW
it then that'll settle the question. But I didn't want
to tell you until it was all worked out," he finished.
"But you've told me," she said, smiling.
"Oh, of course I would've told you, sooner or
later," he said, and she seized the hand pointing the
remark, held it.
The blue polka-dot dress fluttered, her head
against his arm rolled meditatively. "-And me,"
she said. "It all works out a little differently in my
case....
Do I want to spend a lifetime at it, in
Party work, in the same full way that you do? No,
not quite, not yet ....
But at least everything broad.
ens for me now. And thank_heaven-being young
enough not to be sorry for throwing away half a
lifetime I I know what it is that does things to people
and breaks them down-a little bit anyway-I>
"That's it," he said quickly, opening his shirt at
the throat against the sun. "That's it exactly. Young
enough, you haven't built up .anything-you haven't
been able to I-so there's nothing to be sorry for,
not too much I mean ....
God, Helen if I could let
go the way Sam does sometimes about
after-
wards-"
Afterwards
rolling and rolling in his brain with
the fresh vision with which he had first looked at
the world, holding his father's hand,
a future made
out of the intimations of earliest childhood,
th'e
sound of wheels fresh, streets, roads, houses, faces,
colors fresh ....
"But I can't very well," he said, "so it has to be
the job, and now-and what more can anyone want
than to be in at the end of something and the begin-
ning of something else-that's enough to look for-
ward to for anyone-and as to what's going to
happen to people using their lives in their own way
and only conforming to the-limits of the real world
-I'll
stop there," he said, laughing.
But a mood continued in him, the remembrance of
the earliest years making a mood that fitted after-
wards, the first impression of a hill in a Park, Long
Island from a chugging motorboat, downtown from
a bridge, long yards of railroad cars shimmering
black against green grass ....
She said : "Well, go on" -her cheeks dimpling in
laughter-"I
just this second thought of what you
looked like last week one night working with those
fellows on that shop paper-go on, sing a little, can
you really sing, Harry," she teased.
"My mother tells me that when I was four I
sang the Ave l'vlaria," he ~id, "but I don't remem-
ber that, because I don't waitt to."
He stretched out on the bench, sighing comfort-
ably. "Comfort. Ease!" He shut his eyes. "If you
shut your eyes," he said, "you'll feel the sun on
them, it's nice." She shut her eyes, and they were
still for moments, with -his- hand wandering back
over his head to touch the dress, press her thigh
gently through the dress, her hand falling on his,
II
