Streets of Night

by John Dos Passos

At Symphony Hall they got out of the car.

"Nan, you'll invite me to your first concert in there, won't you?" said Betty Thomas.

"If you'll invite me first." They laughed to hide their eagerness.

They walked up a street of brick and brownstone houses with narrow windows stuffed with fussy curtains on the parlor floors. Occasionally a girl passed them with a folder of music under her arm. From the houses came a perpetual sound of scales taken with tenors, sopranos, contraltos, tinkled on pianos, scraped on 'cellos and violins, toodled on flutes. From somewhere came occasionally the muffled bray of an English horn.

"Fearful street, isn't it?" said Fanshaw.

"So Betty and I aren't the only ones ..."

"You mean who want to scale Symphony Hall? O, it's a common disease, Nan.... Well, I must go back and get the car over to Brookline. If Wenny goes to see you, do try and get him to be sensible."

* * * *

Fanshaw had marked the last paper in the test on Florentine sculpture. He got up from his desk yawning. O Lord! he was thinking, I'll never be able to look Donatello or the Ghiberti doors in the face again. He leaned over, arranged the pencils in their tray, put the papers away in the drawer, and slowly took off his tortoise-shell spectacles. My eyes are smarting; I mustn't work any more tonight. The case closed on his spectacles with a faint clack. Poor Wenny, what a rotten shame; but if he would not learn tact, discretion, what on earth was there to do? So idiotically childish. Fanshaw walked with long, leisurely stride into his bathroom, where he hung his dressing gown on the back of the door. He came back with yellowstriped pajamas under his arm and sat on the edge of the bed to take off his shoes. Fearful how this business upsets me, he muttered aloud. Much too fond of Wenny, his dark skin, his extraordinary bright eyes. One ought to have more control over one's emotions, senses. At grade school in Omaha, there had been that curlyhaired boy, Bunny Jones. Walking home from school one day, they took the roundabout way beyond the railroad yards. Must have been May, for the locusts were out. Mother never could abide the smell of locusts, insisted they gave her a headache. Bunny had suddenly put an arm round his neck and kissed him and run off crying in a funny little voice, "Gee, I'm skeered." Curious the way streaks like that turn up in one. Pico della Mirandola wouldn't have been afraid of such an impulse if it had come to him. There were so many scandalmongers about this place. How fearful anything like that would be. He wasn't free like Wenny. He had his mother to take care of, lovely career to make. How bitterly silly the idea was. He folded his trousers over the back of the chair. And it was really Nan he cared for. Love, he thought; the word somehow rasped in him. When he had put on his pajamas he stood in front of the dim mirror a second rubbing his fingers through his short sandy hair. Wonderful it would be to have yellow curls like Dürer in his portrait. He turned out the light and got into bed. O, the window! He got up, pushed the window up half way and retreated hastily before the blast of cold air that stung his flesh under the loose pajamas. Comfortable, this bed; better than the one I have at mother's place. He closed his eyes and drew the covers up about his chin. Streets, he thought of, long streets of blind windows, dark, cold under arclights, and himself and Wenny and Nan walking arm in arm, hurrying from corner to corner. Can't seem to find that street, and on to the next corner between endless rows of blind windows converging in a perspective utterly black beyond the cold lividness of arclights. Must have lost our way in these streets.

He opened his eyes with a jerk. The room was familiar and quiet about him, the accustomed bulk of the desk opposite the bed. Out on Mt. Auburn Street voices, occasional steps. He closed his eyes again and fell asleep.