“June 8th.—And to-day I’ve
promised not to chew my mouth. Well, I won’t,
I suppose—but if he’d only asked me
not to eat!
“Blowing bubbles—that’s what
we’re doing, Anthony and me. And we blew
such beautiful ones to-day, and they’ll explode
and then we’ll blow more and more, I guess—bubbles
just as big and just as beautiful, until all the soap
and water is used up.”
On this note the diary ended. Her eyes wandered
up the page, over the June 8th’s of 1912, 1910,
1907. The earliest entry was scrawled in the
plump, bulbous hand of a sixteen-year-old girl—it
was the name, Bob Lamar, and a word she could not
decipher. Then she knew what it was—and,
knowing, she found her eyes misty with tears.
There in a graying blur was the record of her first
kiss, faded as its intimate afternoon, on a rainy
veranda seven years before. She seemed to remember
something one of them had said that day and yet she
could not remember. Her tears came faster, until
she could scarcely see the page. She was crying,
she told herself, because she could remember only the
rain and the wet flowers in the yard and the smell
of the damp grass.
... After a moment she found a pencil and holding
it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the
last entry. Then she printed FINIS in large capitals,
put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.
Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony
snapped out his lights and, feeling impersonal and
fragile as a piece of china waiting on a serving table,
got into bed. It was a warm night—a
sheet was enough for comfort—and through
his wide-open windows came sound, evanescent and summery,
alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking
that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful,
had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism
upon the recorded emotions of men long dust.
And there was something beyond that; he knew now.
There was the union of his soul with Gloria’s,
whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material
of which the dead beauty of books was made.
From the night into his high-walled room there came,
persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound—something
the city was tossing up and calling back again, like
a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx,
Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little
parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a
thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little
fragments of it into the air. All the city was
playing with this sound out there in the blue summer
dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising
that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as
a story, promising happiness—and by that
promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own
survival. It could do no more.
