1The fat man who had given Coverly pointers on how to shave had begun to come into Coverly’s room at night after supper and give him advice on how to get ahead in the world. He was a widower who had a house somewhere to the north where he went for week ends and who pinched pennies by living in the rooming house so that he would have a comfortable retirement. He had a job with Civil Service and it was his feeling that Coverly should get on the Civil Service lists. He brought him those newspapers that list Civil Service openings and kept pointing out opportunities for high-school graduates or opportunities for specialists who had been trained by the Civil Service schools in the city. There was a demand that year for Tapers and he pointed this out to Coverly as his best bet. The government would pay half of Coverly’s tuition at the MacIlhenney Institute. It was a four-month course and if he passed his exams he would be taken into government service at seventy-five dollars a week. Advised and encouraged by his friend, Coverly enrolled in some night classes on Taping. This involved the translation of physics experiments into the symbols—or tape—that could be fed into a computation machine.

2Coverly’s schedule went like this. He punched Warburton’s time clock at half-past eight and went down a back staircase into the basement. The air was spectacularly bad: the reek and the closeness of a department store backstage. The other stock boys were of varying ages—one of them was in his sixties—and they were all amused by Coverly’s catarrhal accent and his references to life in St. Botolphs. They unpacked the merchandise as it came in and kept it flowing up the freight elevators to the departments overhead. When there were sales they worked sometimes as late as midnight, unloading racks of fur-trimmed coats or cartons of bed sheets. On three nights a week, when Coverly had finished work at Warburton’s, he signed the monitor’s book at the MacIlhenney Institute. This was in the fourth floor of an office building that seemed to contain a good many other schools—institutes of portrait photography, journalism and music. The only elevator that ran in the evening was a freight elevator, operated by an old man in overalls who could, by pursing his lips, give a fairly good imitation of a French horn. He performed the William Tell Overture while he took his passengers up and down and he liked to be complimented. There were twenty-four students in Coverly’s class and the instructor was a young man who seemed to have put in a hard day himself by the time he got to them. The first lecture was an orientation talk on cybernetics or automation, and if Coverly, with his mildly rueful disposition, had been inclined to find any irony in his future relationship to a thinking machine, he was swiftly disabused. Then they got to work memorizing the code.

3This was like learning a language and a rudimentary one. Everything was done by rote. They were expected to memorize fifty symbols a week. They were quizzed for fifteen minutes at the opening of each class and were given speed tests at the end of the two-hour period. After a month of this the symbols—like the study of any language—had begun to dominate Coverly’s thinking, and walking on the street he had gotten into the habit of regrouping numbers on license plates, prices in store windows and numerals on clocks so that they could be fed into a machine. When the class ended he sometimes drank a cup of coffee with a friend who was going to school five nights a week. His name was Mittler and his second enrollment was at Dale Carnegie’s and Coverly was very much impressed with how likeable Mittler had learned to make himself. Moses came over one Sunday to visit Coverly and they spent the day banging around the streets and drinking beer but when it came time for Moses to go back the separation was so painful for both of them that Moses never returned. Coverly planned to go to St. Botolphs for Christmas but he had a chance to work overtime on Christmas Eve and he took it, for he was in the city, after all, to make his fortune.

4All things of the sea belong to Venus; pearls and shells and alchemists’ gold and kelp and the riggish smell of neap tides, the inshore water green, and purple further out and the joy of distances and the roar of falling masonry, all these are hers, but she doesn’t come out of the sea for all of us. She came for Coverly through the swinging door of a sandwich shop in the Forties where he had gone to get something to eat after classes at the MacIlhenney Institute. She was a thin, dark-haired girl named Betsey MacCaffery—raised in the badlands of northern Georgia—an orphan, her eyes red that night from crying. Coverly was the only customer in the shop. She brought him a glass of milk and a sandwich in an envelope and then went to the far end of the counter and began to wash glasses. Now and then she took a deep, tremulous breath—a sound that made her seem to Coverly, as she bent over the sink, tender and naked. When he had eaten half his sandwich he spoke to her:

5“Why are you crying?”

6“Oh Jesus,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t be here crying in front of strangers, but the boss just came in and found me smoking a cigarette and he gave me hell. There wasn’t anybody in the store. It’s always slow this late on rainy nights, but he can’t blame me for that, can he? I don’t have anything to do with the rain and I just can’t stand out there in the rain asking people to come in. Well, it was slow and there hadn’t been anybody in for nearly twenty—twenty-five or thirty minutes—and so I went out back and lighted a cigarette and then he came right in, sniffing like a pig, and gave me hell. He said these awful things about me.”

7“You shouldn’t pay any attention to what he says.”

8“You English?”

9“No,” Coverly said. “I come from a place called St. Botolphs. It’s a small town, north of here.”

10“The reason I asked was you don’t talk like the others. I come from a small town myself. I’m just a small-town girl. I guess maybe that’s the trouble with me. I don’t have this thick skin you need to get along with in the city. I had so much trouble this week. I just took this apartment with my girl friend. I have or perhaps I should say I had this girl friend, Helen Bent. I thought she was my true-blue friend; true-blue. She certainly led me to believe she was my best friend. Well, since we were such good friends it seemed sensible for us to take an apartment together. We were inseparable. That’s what people used to say about us. You can’t ask Betsey unless you ask Helen, they used to say. Those two are inseparable. Well, we took this apartment together, my girl friend and I. That was about a month ago; a month or six weeks. Well, just as soon as we got moved in and settled and about to enjoy ourselves I discover that the whole thing is just a scheme. The only reason she wants to share this apartment with me is so she can meet men there. Formerly she was living with her family out in Queens. Well, I don’t have any objections to having a boy friend now and then but it was only a one-room apartment and she was having them in every night and naturally it was very embarrassing for me. There were men going in and out of there so much that it didn’t seem like home to me. Why, sometimes when it was time for me to go home to my own apartment where I was paying rent and had all my own furniture I’d just feel so heavyhearted about busting in on her with one of her friends that I’d go and sit in a late movie. Well, I finally spoke to her. Helen, I said, this place doesn’t seem like home to me. There’s no sense in my paying rent, I said, if I have to take up residence in a movie house. Well, she certainly showed her true colors. Oh, the spiteful things she said. When I come home the next day she’s gone, television set and all. I was glad to see the last of her, of course, but I’m stuck with this apartment with nobody to share the rent and in a job like this I don’t have any occasion to make girl friends.”

11She asked Coverly if he wanted anything more. It was nearly time to close and Coverly asked if he could walk her home.

12“You sure come from a small town, all right,” she said. “Anybody could tell you come from a small town, asking if you can walk me home, but it so happens I just live five blocks from here and I do walk home and I don’t guess it would do me any harm, providing you don’t get fresh. I’ve had too much of freshness. You’ve got to promise that you won’t be fresh.”

13“I promise,” Coverly said.

14She talked on and on while she made the preparations for closing the store and when these were finished she put on a hat and coat and stepped with Coverly out into the rain. He was delighted with her company. What a citizen of New York, he thought—walking a counter girl home in the rain. As they approached her house she reminded him of his promise not to be fresh and he didn’t ask to come up, but he asked her to have dinner with him some night. “Well, I’d adore to,” she said. “Sunday’s my only night off but if Sunday’s all right with you I’d adore to have dinner with you on Sunday night. There’s this nice Italian restaurant right around the corner we can go to—I’ve never been there, but this former girl friend of mine told me it was very good—excellent cooking, and if you could pick me up at around seven …” Coverly watched her walk through the lighted hall to the inner door, a thin girl and not a very graceful one, feeling, as surely as the swan recognizes its mate, that he was in love.