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Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that Dickie would not be appreciated in other people's houses. She evaded asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood.
Albert Sessions were awaiting them at the end of the long cavernous walk from the ferry-boat, and New York immediately became a blur of cabs, cobblestones, bales of cotton, long vistas of very dirty streets, high buildings, surface cars, elevateds, shop windows that seemed dark and foreign, and everywhere such a rush of people as made her feel insecure, cling to the Sessionses, and try to ward off the dizziness of the swirl of new impressions.
At home she tried not merely to keep her mother from being lonely, but actually to make her happy, to coax her to break into the formidable city. She arranged summer-evening picnics with the Sessionses. She persuaded them to hold one of these picnics at the foot of the Palisades. During it she disappeared for nearly half an hour. She sat alone by the river.
She was daunted for a moment, but she rejoiced in the conviction that she was going to like this madness of multiform energy. The Sessionses lived in a flat on Amsterdam Avenue near Ninety-sixth Street. They all went up from Cortlandt Street in the Subway, which was still new and miraculous in 1905.
Schwirtz and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother's happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient to think of men again, her school-work was over.
Months afterward, when she was going to vaudeville by herself, Una tried to identify the theater of wizardry, but she never could. The Sessionses couldn't remember which theater it was; they thought it was the Pitt, but surely they must have been mistaken, for the Pitt was a shanty daubed with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly amateurish programs.
Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden modesty appropriate to a Golden, a young female friend of the Sessionses', in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers and just one bathroom. Una was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to share her shrinking modesty.
I'll take the Sessionses up some ice-cream, and we'll have a jolly time.... Mother won't care if I go. Or maybe she'll come with me" knowing all the while that her mother would not come, and decidedly would care if Una deserted her.
When they reached the Sessionses' flat and fell upon the gossip of Panama, Pennsylvania, Una was absent-minded except when the Sessionses teased her about Henry Carson and Charlie Martindale.
Whenever Una announced that she was going out, her mother's bright, birdlike eyes filmed over; she sighed and hesitated, "Shall I be alone all evening after all day, too?" Una felt like a brute. She tried to get her mother to go to the Sessionses' flat more often, to make new friends, but Mrs. Golden had lost all her adaptability.
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