The Progress of Love

She also said—in George’s hearing—that my friend did not seem to be blessed with a lot of brains. I was not surprised. Neither MaryBeth nor I expectedanything but the most artificial, painful, formal contact with the world of adults.
    The Cryderman house was still called the Steuer house. Until not so long ago, Mrs. Cryderman had been Evangeline Steuer. The house had been built by Dr. Steuer, her father. It was set back from the street on a smooth, built-up terrace, and was unlike any other house in town. In fact, it was unlike any other house I had ever seen, reminding me of a bank or some important public building. It was one story high, and flat-roofed, with low French windows, classical pillars, a balustrade around the roof with an urn at each corner. Urns also flanked the front steps. The urns and the balustrade and the pillars had all been painted a creamy white, and the house itself was covered with pale-pink stucco. By this time, both the paint and the stucco were beginning to flake and look dingy.
    I started going there in February. The urns were piled high with snow like dishes full of ice cream, and the various bushes in the yard looked as if polar-bear rugs had been thrown over them. There was just a little meandering path to the front door, instead of the broad neat walkway other people shovelled.
    “Mr. Cryderman doesn’t shovel the snow because he doesn’t believe it’s permanent,” Mrs. Cryderman said. “He thinks he’ll wake up some morning and it’ll be all gone. Like fog. He wasn’t prepared for this!”
    Mrs. Cryderman talked emphatically, as if everything she said was drastically important, and at the same time she made everything sound like a joke. This way of talking was entirely new to me.
    Once inside that house, you never got a view of outside, except through the kitchen window over the sink. The living room was where Mrs. Cryderman spent her days, lying on the sofa, with ashtrays and cups and glasses and magazines and cushions all around her. She wore a Chinese dressing gown, or a long dark-green robe of brushed wool, or a jacket of quilted black satin—quickly ash-sprinkled—and a pair of maternity pants. The jacket would flap open and give me a glimpse of her stomach, already queerly swollen. She had the lamps turned on and the wine-colored curtains drawnacross the windows, and sometimes she burned a little cone of incense in a brass dish. I loved those cones, a dusty-pink color, lying snug as bullets in their pretty box, retaining their shape magically as they turned to ash. The room was full of marvels—Chinese furniture of carved black wood, vases of peacock feathers and pampas grass, fans spread against the faded red walls, heaps of velvet cushions, satin cushions with gold tassels.
    The first thing I had to do was tidy up. I picked up the city newspapers strewn on the floor, put the cushions back on the chairs and sofas, gathered up the cups with cold tea or coffee in them and the plates with their hardened scraps of food and the glasses in which there might be slices of soggy fruit, dregs of wine—sweet, weakened, but still faintly alcoholic mixtures. In the kitchen, I drank anything that was left and sucked the fruit to get the strange taste of liquor.
    Mrs. Cryderman’s baby was expected in late June or early July. The uncertainty of the date was due to the irregularity of her menstrual cycle. (This was the first time I had ever heard anybody say “menstrual.” We said “monthlies” or “the curse” or used more roundabout expressions.) She herself was certain that she got pregnant on the night of Mr. Cryderman’s birthday when she was full of champagne. The twenty-ninth of September. The birthday was Mr. Cryderman’s thirty-third. Mrs. Cryderman was forty. She said she might as well own up to it, she was a cradle robber. And she was paying the price. Forty was too old to have a baby. It was too old to have a first baby. It was a mistake.
    She pointed out the damage. First, the pale-brown blotches on her face and neck, which she said were all over her. They made me think of the flesh of pears beginning to go rotten—that soft discoloration, the discouraging faint deep bruises. Next, she showed her varicose veins, which kept her lying on the sofa. Cranberry-colored spiders, greenish lumps all over her legs. They turned black when she stood up. Before she put her feet to the floor, she had to wrap her legs in long, tight, rubbery bandages.
    “Take my