The price of salt

By Claire Morgan

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Title: The price of salt

Author: Claire Morgan


        
Release date: July 31, 2026 [eBook #79242]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Bantam Books, 1952

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79242

Credits: Adam Buchbinder, Jens Sadowski, the San Francisco History Center and James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center at the San Francisco Public Library, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRICE OF SALT ***


   “Are you tired?” Carol asked calmly. The question seemed not of
   now but of always.

   “Yes.”

   Carol came up behind her and set her hands on Therese’s
   shoulders. Therese could see her hands in her memory—flexible and
   strong, the delicate tendons showing as they pressed her
   shoulders. It seemed an age as her hands moved toward her neck
   and under her chin, an age of tumult so intense it blotted out
   the pleasure of Carol’s tipping her head back and kissing her
   lightly at the edge of her hair. Therese did not feel the kiss at
   all.

   “Come with me,” Carol said.




                                  THE
                                 PRICE
                                   OF
                                  SALT


                            by CLAIRE MORGAN


                        Bantam Books · New York


                           THE PRICE OF SALT

              A BANTAM BOOK published by arrangement with
                          Coward-McCann, Inc.

                            PRINTING HISTORY

           Coward-McCann Edition Published        May,  1952
           1st Printing                         April,  1952
           Bantam Edition Published         September,  1953
           1st Printing                        August,  1953

                Copyright, 1952, by Coward-McCann, Inc.
         All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must
           not be reproduced in any form without permission.

   The lyrics quoted on pages 115, 116 and 117 are from the song,
   “Easy Living,” by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger, copyright, 1937,
   by Famous Music Corporation, and are reprinted by courtesy of the
   Famous Music Corporation. The lines quoted on page 13 are from
   “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T. S. Eliot, and are
   reprinted by courtesy of Harcourt, Brace and Company. Copyright,
   1934, 1936, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

   Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trade mark,
   consisting of the words “BANTAM BOOKS” and the portrayal of a
   bantam, is registered in the U.S. Patent Office and in other
   countries. _Marca Registrada_

                Printed in the United States of America

                   BANTAM BOOKS, 25 West 45th Street,
                         New York 36, New York


                        TO EDNA, JORDY, AND JEFF




                              chapter one


The lunch hour in the coworkers’ cafeteria at Frankenberg’s had reached
its peak.

There was no room left at any of the long tables, and more and more
people were arriving to wait back of the wooden barricades by the cash
register. People who had already got their trays of food wandered about
between the tables in search of a spot they could squeeze into, or a
place that somebody was about to leave, but there was no place. The roar
of dishes, chairs, voices, shuffling feet, and the bra-a-ack of the
turnstiles in the bare-walled room was like the din of a single huge
machine.

Therese ate nervously, with the “Welcome to Frankenberg’s” booklet
propped up in front of her against a sugar container. She had read the
thick booklet through last week, in the first day of training class, but
she had nothing else with her to read, and in the coworkers’ cafeteria,
she felt it necessary to concentrate on something. So she read again
about vacation benefits, the three weeks’ vacation given to people who
had worked fifteen years at Frankenberg’s, she ate the hot plate special
of the day—a grayish slice of roast beef with a ball of mashed potatoes
covered with brown gravy, a heap of peas, and a tiny paper cup of
horseradish. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have worked
fifteen years in Frankenberg’s department store, and she found she was
unable to. “Twenty-five Yearers” got four weeks’ vacation, the booklet
said. Frankenberg’s also provided a camp for summer and winter
vacationers. They should have a church, too, she thought, and a hospital
for the birth of babies. The store was organized so much like a prison,
it frightened her now and then to realize she was a part of it.

She turned the page quickly, and saw in big black script across two
pages: “_Are You Frankenberg Material?_”

She glanced across the room at the windows and tried to think of
something else. Of the beautiful black and red Norwegian sweater she had
seen at Saks and might buy for Richard for Christmas, if she couldn’t
find a better-looking wallet than the ones she had seen for twenty
dollars. Of the possibility of driving with the Kellys next Sunday up to
West Point to see a hockey game. The great square window across the room
looked like a painting by—Who was it? Mondrian. The little square
section of window in the corner open to a white sky. And no bird to fly
in or out. What kind of a set would one make for a play that took place
in a department store? She was back again.

But it’s so different with you, Terry, Richard had said to her. You’ve
got an absolute conviction you’ll be out of it in a few weeks and the
others haven’t. Richard said she could be in France next summer. Would
be. Richard wanted her to go with him, and there was really nothing that
stood in the way of her going with him. And Richard’s friend Phil
McElroy had written him that he might be able to get her a job with a
theatre group next month. Therese had not met Phil yet, but she had very
little faith that he could get her a job. She had combed New York since
September, gone back and combed it a few times more, and she hadn’t
found anything. Who gave a job in the middle of the winter to a stage
designer apprentice just beginning to be an apprentice? It didn’t seem
real either that she might be in Europe with Richard next summer,
sitting with him in sidewalk cafés, walking with him in Arles, finding
the places Van Gogh had painted, she and Richard choosing towns to stop
in for a while and paint. It seemed less real these last few days since
she had been working at the store.

She knew what bothered her at the store. It was the sort of thing she
wouldn’t try to tell Richard. It was that the store intensified things
that had always bothered her, as long as she could remember. It was the
waste actions, the meaningless chores that seemed to keep her from doing
what she wanted to do, might have done—and here it was the complicated
procedures with money bags, coat checkings, and time clocks that kept
people even from serving the store as efficiently as they might—the
sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on
an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or
whatever it was that each life contained, never could find its
expression. It reminded her of conversations at tables, on sofas, with
people whose words seemed to hover over dead, unstirrable things, who
never touched a string that played. And when one tried to touch a live
string, looked at one with faces as masked as ever, making a remark so
perfect in its banality that one could not even believe it might be
subterfuge. And the loneliness, augmented by the fact one saw within the
store the same faces day after day, the few faces one might have spoken
to and never did, or never could. Not like the face on the passing bus
that seems to speak, that is seen once and at least is gone forever.

She would wonder, standing in the time-clock queue in the basement every
morning, her eyes sorting out unconsciously the regular employees from
the temporary ones, just how she had happened to land here—she had
answered an ad, of course, but that didn’t explain fate—and what was
coming next instead of a stage designing job. Her life was a series of
zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.

“You must learn to trust people, Therese. Remember that,” Sister Alicia
had often told her. And often, quite often, Therese tried to apply it.

“Sister Alicia,” Therese whispered carefully, the sibilant syllables
comforting her.

Therese sat up again and picked up her fork, because the cleanup boy was
working in her direction.

She could see Sister Alicia’s face, bony and reddish like pink stone
when the sunlight was on it, and the starched blue billow of her bosom.
Sister Alicia’s big bony figure coming around a corner in a hall,
between the white enamel tables in the refectory, Sister Alicia in a
thousand places, her small blue eyes always finding her out among the
other girls, seeing her differently, Therese knew, from all the other
girls, yet the thin pink lips always set in the same straight line. She
could see Sister Alicia handing her the knitted green gloves wrapped in
tissue, not smiling, only presenting them to her directly, with hardly a
word, on her eighth birthday. Sister Alicia telling her with the same
straight mouth that she must pass her arithmetic. Who else had cared if
she passed her arithmetic? Therese had kept the green gloves at the
bottom of her tin locker at school, for years after Sister Alicia had
gone away to California. The white tissue had become limp and
crackleless like ancient cloth, and still she had not worn the gloves.
Finally, they were too small to wear.

Someone moved the sugar container, and the propped booklet fell flat.

Therese looked at the pair of hands across from her, a woman’s plump,
aging hands, stirring her coffee, breaking a roll now with a trembling
eagerness, daubing half the roll greedily into the brown gravy of the
plate that was identical with Therese’s. The hands were chapped, there
was dirt in the parallel creases of the knuckles, but the right hand
bore a conspicuous silver filigree ring set with a clear green stone,
the left a gold wedding ring, and there were traces of red polish in the
corners of the nails. Therese watched the hand carry a forkful of peas
upward, and she did not have to look at the face to know what it would
be like. It would be like all the fifty-year-old faces of women who
worked at Frankenberg’s, stricken with an ever-lasting exhaustion and
terror, the eyes distorted behind glasses that enlarged or made smaller,
the cheeks splotched with rouge that did not brighten the grayness
underneath. Therese could not look.

“You’re a new girl, aren’t you?” The voice was shrill and clear in the
din, almost a sweet voice.

“Yes,” Therese said, and looked up. She remembered the face. It was the
face whose exhaustion had made her see all the other faces. It was the
woman Therese had seen creeping down the marble stairs from the
mezzanine at about six thirty one evening when the store was empty,
sliding her hands down the broad marble banister to take some of the
weight from her bunioned feet. Therese had thought: she is not ill, she
is not a beggar, she simply works here.

“Are you getting along all right?”

And here was the woman smiling at her, with the same terrible creases
under her eyes and around her mouth. Her eyes were actually alive now,
and rather affectionate.

“Are you getting along all right?” the woman repeated, for there was a
great clatter of voices and dishes all around them.

Therese moistened her lips. “Yes, thank you.”

“Do you like it here?”

Therese nodded.

“Finished?” A young man in a white apron gripped the woman’s plate with
an imperative thumb.

The woman made a tremulous, dismissing gesture. She pulled her saucer of
canned sliced peaches toward her. The peaches, like slimy little orange
fishes, slithered over the edge of the spoon each time the spoon lifted,
all except one which the woman would eat.

“I’m on the third floor in the sweater department. If you want to ask me
anything”—the woman said with nervous uncertainty, as if she were trying
to deliver a message before they would be cut off or separated—“come up
and talk to me sometime. My name is Mrs. Robichek, Mrs. Ruby Robichek,
five forty-four.”

“Thank you very much,” Therese said. And suddenly the woman’s ugliness
disappeared, because her reddish-brown eyes behind the glasses were
gentle, and interested in her. Therese could feel her heart beating, as
if it had come to life. She watched the woman get up from the table, and
watched her short, thick figure move away until it was lost in the crowd
that waited behind the barricade.

Therese did not visit Mrs. Robichek, but she looked for her every
morning when the employees trickled into the building around a quarter
to nine, and she looked for her in the elevators and in the cafeteria.
She never saw her, but it was pleasant to have someone to look for in
the store. It made all the difference in the world.

Nearly every morning when she came to work on the seventh floor, Therese
would stop for a moment to watch a certain toy train. The train was on a
table by itself near the elevators. It was not a big fine train like the
one that ran on the floor at the back of the toy department, but there
was a fury in its tiny pumping pistons that the bigger trains did not
possess. Its wrath and frustration on the closed oval track held Therese
spellbound.

Awrr rr rr rrgh! it said as it hurled itself blindly into the
papier-mâché tunnel. And Urr rr rr rrgh! as it emerged.

The little train was always running when she stepped out of the elevator
in the morning, and when she finished work in the evening. She felt it
cursed the hand that threw its switch each day. In the jerk of its nose
around the curves, in its wild dashes down the straight lengths of
track, she could see a frenzied and futile pursuit of a tyrannical
master. It drew three Pullman cars in which minuscule human figures
showed flinty profiles at the windows, behind these an open boxcar of
real miniature lumber, a boxcar of coal that was not real, and a caboose
that snapped round the curves and clung to the fleeing train like a
child to its mother’s skirts. It was like something gone mad in
imprisonment, something already dead that would never wear out, like the
dainty, springy-footed foxes in the Central Park Zoo, whose complex
footwork repeated and repeated as they circled their cages.

This morning, Therese turned away quickly from the train, and went on
toward the doll department where she worked.

At five past nine, the great block-square toy department was coming to
life. Green cloths were being pulled back from the long tables.
Mechanical toys began to toss balls into the air and catch them,
shooting galleries popped and their targets rotated. The table of
barnyard animals squawked, cackled, and brayed. Behind Therese, a weary
rat-tat-tat—tat-tat had started up, the drumbeats of the giant tin
soldier who militantly faced the elevators and drummed all day. The arts
and handicrafts table gave out a smell of fresh modeling clay,
reminiscent of the art room at school when she was very small, and also
of a kind of vault on the school grounds, rumored to be the real tomb of
someone, that she had used to stick her nose into through iron bars.

Mrs. Hendrickson, section manager of the doll department, was dragging
dolls from the stock shelves and seating them, splay legged, atop the
glass counters.

Therese said hello to Miss Martucci, who stood at the counter counting
the bills and coins from her moneybag with such concentration she could
give Therese only a deeper nod of her rhythmically nodding head. Therese
counted twenty-eight fifty from her own moneybag, recorded it on a slip
of white paper for the sales receipts envelope, and transferred the
money by denominations into her drawer in the cash register.

By now, the first customers were emerging from the elevators, hesitating
a moment with the bewildered, somewhat startled expressions that people
always had on finding themselves in the toy department, then starting
off on weaving courses.

“Do you have the dolls that wet?” a woman asked her.

“I’d like this doll, but with a yellow dress,” a woman said, pushing a
doll toward her, and Therese turned and got the doll she wanted out of a
stock shelf.

The woman had a mouth and cheeks like her mother’s, Therese noticed,
slightly pocked cheeks under dark-pink rouge, separated by a thin red
mouth full of vertical lines.

“Are the Drinksy-Wetsy dolls all this size?”

There was no need of salesmanship. People wanted a doll, any doll, to
give for Christmas. It was a matter of stooping, pulling out boxes in
search of a doll with brown eyes instead of blue, calling Mrs.
Hendrickson to open a showcase window with her key, which she did
grudgingly if she were convinced the particular doll could not be found
in stock, a matter of sidling down the aisle behind the counter to
deposit a purchased doll on the mountain of boxes on the wrapping
counter that was always growing, always toppling, no matter how often
the stock boys came to take the packages away. Almost no children came
to the counter. Santa Claus was supposed to bring the dolls, Santa Claus
represented by the frantic faces and the clawing hands. Yet there must
be a certain good will in all of them, Therese thought, even behind the
cool, powdered faces of the women in mink and sable, who were generally
the most arrogant, who hastily bought the biggest and most expensive
dolls, the dolls with real hair and changes of clothing. There was
surely love in the poor people, who waited their turn and asked quietly
how much a certain doll cost, and shook their heads regretfully and
turned away. Thirteen dollars and fifty cents for a doll only ten inches
high.

“Take it,” Therese wanted to say to them. “It really is too expensive,
but I’ll give it to you. Frankenberg’s won’t miss it.”

But the women in the cheap cloth coats, the timid men huddled inside
shabby mufflers would be gone, wistfully glancing at other counters as
they made their way back to the elevators. If people came for a doll,
they didn’t want anything else. A doll was a special kind of Christmas
gift, practically alive, the next thing to a baby.

There were almost never any children, but now and again one would come
up, generally a little girl, very rarely a little boy, her hand held
firmly by a parent. Therese would show her the dolls she thought the
child might like. She would be patient, and finally a certain doll would
bring that metamorphosis in the child’s face, that response to
make-believe that was the purpose of all of it, and usually that was the
doll the child went away with.

Then one evening after work, Therese saw Mrs. Robichek in the coffee and
doughnut shop across the street. Therese often stopped in the doughnut
shop to get a cup of coffee before going home. Mrs. Robichek was at the
back of the shop, at the end of the long curving counter, dabbling a
doughnut into her mug of coffee.

Therese pushed and thrust herself toward her, through the press of girls
and coffee mugs and doughnuts. Arriving at Mrs. Robichek’s elbow, she
gasped, “Hello,” and turned to the counter, as if a cup of coffee had
been her only objective.

“Hello,” said Mrs. Robichek, so indifferently that Therese was crushed.

Therese did not dare look at Mrs. Robichek again. And yet their
shoulders were actually pressed together! Therese was half finished with
her coffee, when Mrs. Robichek said dully, “I’m going to take the
Independent subway. I wonder if we’ll ever get out of here.” Her voice
was dreary, not as it had been the day in the cafeteria. Now she was
like the hunched old woman Therese had seen creeping down the stairs.

“We’ll get out,” Therese said reassuringly.

Therese forced a path for both of them to the door. Therese was taking
the Independent subway, too. She and Mrs. Robichek edged into the
sluggish mob at the entrance of the subway, and were sucked gradually
and inevitably down the stairs, like bits of floating waste down a
drain. They found they both got off at the Lexington Avenue stop, too,
though Mrs. Robichek lived on Fifty-fifth Street, just east of Third
Avenue. Therese went with Mrs. Robichek into the delicatessen where she
was going to buy something for her dinner. Therese might have bought
something for her own dinner, but somehow she couldn’t in Mrs.
Robichek’s presence.

“Do you have food at home?”

“No, I’m going to buy something later.”

“Why don’t you come and eat with me? I’m all alone. Come on.” Mrs.
Robichek finished with a shrug, as if that were less effort than a
smile.

Therese’s impulse to protest politely lasted only a moment. “Thank you.
I’d like to come.” Then she saw a cellophane wrapped cake on the
counter, a fruit cake like a big brown brick topped with red cherries,
and she bought it to give to Mrs. Robichek.

It was a house like the one Therese lived in, only brownstone and much
darker and gloomier. There were no lights at all in the halls, and when
Mrs. Robichek put on the light in the third-floor hall, Therese saw that
the house was not very clean. Mrs. Robichek’s room was not very clean
either, and the bed was unmade. Did she get up as tired as she went to
bed, Therese wondered. Therese was left standing in the middle of the
room while Mrs. Robichek moved on dragging feet toward the kitchenette,
carrying the bag of groceries she had taken from Therese’s hands. Now
that she was home, Therese felt, where no one could see her, she allowed
herself to look as tired as she really was.

Therese could never remember how it began. She could not remember the
conversation just before and the conversation didn’t matter, of course.
What happened was that Mrs. Robichek edged away from her, strangely, as
if she were in a trance, suddenly murmuring instead of talking, and lay
down flat on her back on the unmade bed. It was the continued murmuring,
the faint smile of apology, and the terrible, shocking ugliness of the
short, heavy body with the bulging abdomen, and the apologetically
tilted head still politely looking at her, that she could not make
herself listen.

“I used to have my own dress shop in Queens. Oh, a fine big one,” Mrs.
Robichek said, and Therese caught the note of boasting and began to
listen despite herself, hating it. “You know, the dresses with the V at
the waist and the little buttons running up. You know, three, five years
ago—” Mrs. Robichek spread her stiff hands inarticulately across her
waist. The short hands did not nearly span the front half of herself.
She looked very old in the dim lamplight that made the shadows under her
eyes black. “They called them Caterina dresses. You remember? I designed
them. They come out of my shop in Queens. They famous, all right!”

Mrs. Robichek got up from the bed and went to a small trunk that stood
against the wall. She opened it, talking all the while, and began to
drag out dresses of dark, heavy looking material, which she let fall on
the floor. Mrs. Robichek held up a garnet-red velvet dress with a white
collar and tiny white buttons that came to a V down the front of the
narrow bodice.

“See, I got lots of them. I made them. Other stores copied.” Above the
white collar of the dress, which she gripped with her chin, Mrs.
Robichek’s ugly head was tilted grotesquely. “You like this? I give you
one. Come here. Come here, try one on.”

Therese was repelled by the thought of trying one on. She wished Mrs.
Robichek would lie down and rest again, but obediently Therese got up,
as if she had no will of her own, and came toward her.

Mrs. Robichek pressed a black velvet dress upon Therese with trembling
and importunate hands, and Therese suddenly knew how she would wait on
people in the store, thrusting sweaters upon them helter skelter, for
she could not have performed the same action in any other way. For four
years, Therese remembered, Mrs. Robichek had said she had worked at
Frankenberg’s.

“You like the green one better? Try it on.” And in the instant Therese
hesitated, she dropped it and picked up another, the dark-red one. “I
sell five of them to girls at the store, but you I give one. Left over,
but they still in style. You like this one better?”

Therese liked the red better. She liked red, especially garnet-red, and
she loved red velvet. Mrs. Robichek pressed her toward a corner where
she could take off her clothing and lay it on an armchair. But she did
not want the dress, did not want to be given it. It reminded her of
being given clothing at the Home, hand-me-downs, because she was
considered practically as one of the orphan girls, who made up half the
school, who never got packages from outside. Therese pulled off her
sweater and felt completely naked. She gripped her arms above the elbow,
and her flesh there felt cold and sensationless.

“I sewed,” Mrs. Robichek was saying ecstatically to herself, “how I
sewed, morning to night! I managed four girls. But my eyes got bad. One
blind, this one. Put the dress on.” She told Therese about the operation
on the eye. It was not blind, only partially blind. But it was very
painful. Glaucoma. It still gave her pain. That and her back. And her
feet. Bunions.

Therese realized she was relating all her troubles and her bad luck so
that she, Therese, would understand why she had sunk so low as to work
in a department store.

“It fits?” Mrs. Robichek asked confidently.

Therese looked in the mirror in the wardrobe door. It showed a long thin
figure with a narrowish head that seemed ablaze at the outline, bright
yellow fire running down to the bright red bar on either shoulder. The
dress hung in straight draped folds down almost to her ankles. It was
the dress of queens in fairy tales, of a red deeper than blood. She
stepped back, and pulled in the looseness of the dress behind her, so it
fitted her ribs and her waist, and she looked back at her own dark-hazel
eyes in the mirror. Herself meeting herself. This was she, not the girl
in the dull plaid skirt and the beige sweater, not the girl who worked
in the doll department at Frankenberg’s.

“Do you like it?” Mrs. Robichek asked.

Therese studied the surprisingly tranquil mouth, whose modeling she
could see distinctly, though she wore no more lipstick than she might if
someone had kissed her. She wished she could kiss the person in the
mirror and make her come to life, yet she stood perfectly still, like a
painted portrait.

“If you like it, take it,” Mrs. Robichek urged impatiently, watching
from a distance, lurking against the wardrobe as saleswomen lurk while
women try on coats and dresses in front of mirrors in department stores.

But it wouldn’t last, Therese knew. She would move, and it would be
gone. Even if she kept the dress, it would be gone, because it was a
thing of a minute, this minute. She didn’t want the dress. She tried to
imagine the dress in her closet at home, among her other clothing, and
she couldn’t. She began to unbutton the buttons, to unfasten the collar.

“You like it, yes?” Mrs. Robichek asked as confidently as ever.

“Yes,” Therese said firmly, admitting it.

She couldn’t get the hook and eye unfastened at the back of the collar.
Mrs. Robichek had to help her, and she could hardly wait. She felt as if
she were being strangled. What was she doing here? How did she happen to
have put on a dress like this? Suddenly Mrs. Robichek and her apartment
were like a horrible dream that she had just realized she was dreaming.
Mrs. Robichek was the hunchbacked keeper of the dungeon. And she had
been brought here to be tantalized.

“What’s the matter? A pin stick you?”

Therese’s lips opened to speak, but her mind was too far away. Her mind
was at a distant point, at a distant vortex that opened on the scene in
the dimly lighted, terrifying room where the two of them seemed to stand
in desperate combat. And at the point of the vortex where her mind was,
she knew it was the hopelessness that terrified her and nothing else. It
was the hopelessness of Mrs. Robichek’s ailing body and her job at the
store, of her stack of dresses in the trunk, of her ugliness, the
hopelessness of which the end of her life was entirely composed. And the
hopelessness of herself, of ever being the person she wanted to be and
of doing the things that person would do. Had all her life been nothing
but a dream, and was _this_ real? It was the terror of this hopelessness
that made her want to shed the dress and flee before it was too late,
before the chains fell around her and locked.

It might already be too late. As in a nightmare, Therese stood in the
room in her white slip, shivering, unable to move.

“What’s the matter? You cold? It’s hot.”

It was hot. The radiator hissed. The room smelled of garlic and the
fustiness of old age, of medicines, and of the peculiar metallic smell
that was Mrs. Robichek’s own. Therese wanted to collapse in the chair
where her skirt and sweater lay. Perhaps if she lay on her own clothing,
she thought, it wouldn’t matter. But she shouldn’t lie down at all. If
she did, she was lost. The chains would lock, and she would be one with
the hunchback.

Therese trembled violently. She was suddenly out of control. It was a
chill, not merely fright or tiredness.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Robichek’s voice said from a distance, and with
shocking unconcern and boredom, as if she were quite used to girls
feeling faint in her room, and from a distance, too, her dry,
rough-tipped fingers pressed against Therese’s arms.

Therese struggled against the chair, knowing she was going to succumb to
it, and even aware that she was attracted to it for that reason. She
dropped into the chair, felt Mrs. Robichek tugging at her skirt to pull
it from under her, but she couldn’t make herself move. She was still at
the same point of consciousness, however, still had the same freedom to
think, even though the dark arms of the chair rose about her.

Mrs. Robichek was saying, “You stand up too much at the store. It’s hard
these Christmases. I seen four of them. You got to learn how to save
yourself a little.”

Creeping down the stairs clinging to the banister. Save herself by
eating lunch in the cafeteria. Taking shoes off bunioned feet like the
row of women perched on the radiator in the women’s room, fighting for a
bit of the radiator to put a newspaper on and sit for five minutes.

Therese’s mind worked very clearly. It was astonishing how clearly it
worked, though she knew she was simply staring into space in front of
her, and that she could not have moved if she had wanted to.

“You just tired, you baby,” Mrs. Robichek said, tucking a woolen blanket
about her shoulders in the chair. “You need to rest, standing up all day
and standing up tonight, too.”

A line from Richard’s Eliot came to Therese. _That is not what I meant
at all. That is not it, at all._ She wanted to say it, but she could not
make her lips move. Something sweet and burning was in her mouth. Mrs.
Robichek was standing in front of her, spooning something from a bottle,
and pushing the spoon between her lips. Therese swallowed it obediently,
not caring if it were poison. She could have moved her lips now, could
have gotten up from the chair, but she didn’t want to move. Finally, she
lay back in the chair, and let Mrs. Robichek cover her with the blanket,
and she pretended to go to sleep. But all the while she watched the
humpbacked figure moving about the room, putting away the things from
the table, undressing for bed. She watched Mrs. Robichek remove a big
laced corset and then a strap device that passed around her shoulders
and partially down her back. Therese closed her eyes then in horror,
pressed them tight shut, until the creaking of a spring and a long
groaning sigh told her that Mrs. Robichek had gone to bed. But that was
not all. Mrs. Robichek reached for the alarm clock and wound it, and
without lifting her head from the pillow, groped with the clock for the
straight chair beside the bed. In the dark, Therese could barely see her
arm rise and fall four times before the clock found the chair.

I shall wait fifteen minutes until she is asleep and then go, Therese
thought.

And because she was tired, she tensed herself to hold back that spasm,
that sudden seizure that was like falling, that came every night long
before sleep, yet heralded sleep. It did not come. So after what she
thought was fifteen minutes, Therese dressed herself and went out the
door silently. It was easy, after all, simply to open the door and
escape. It was easy, she thought, because she was not really escaping at
all.




                              chapter two


“Terry, remember that fellow Phil McElroy I told you about? The one with
the stock company? Well, he’s in town, and he says you’ve got a job in a
couple of weeks.”

“A real job? Where?”

“A show in the Village. Phil wants to see us tonight. I’ll tell you
about it when I see you. I’ll be over in about twenty minutes. I’m just
leaving school now.”

Therese ran up the three flights of stairs to her room. She was in the
middle of washing up, and the soap had dried on her face. She stared
down at the orange washcloth in the basin.

“A job!” she whispered to herself. The magic word.

She changed into a dress, and hung a short silver chain with a St.
Christopher medallion, a birthday present from Richard, around her neck,
and combed her hair with a little water so it would look neater. Then
she set some loose sketches and cardboard models just inside the closet
where she could reach them easily when Phil McElroy asked to see them.
No, I haven’t had much actual experience, she would have to say, and she
felt a sink of failure. She hadn’t even an apprentice’s job behind her,
except that two-day job in Montclair, making the cardboard model that
the amateur group had finally used, if that could be called a job. She
had taken two courses in scenic design in New York, and she had read a
lot of books. She could hear Phil McElroy—an intense and very busy young
man, probably, a little annoyed at having come to see her for
nothing—saying regretfully that she wouldn’t do after all. But with
Richard present, Therese thought, it wouldn’t be quite as crushing as if
she were alone. Richard had quit or been fired from about five jobs
since she had known him. Nothing bothered Richard less than losing and
finding jobs. Therese remembered being fired from the Pelican Press a
month ago, and she winced. They hadn’t even given her notice, and the
only reason she had been fired, she supposed, was that her particular
research assignment had been finished. When she had gone in to speak to
Mr. Nussbaum, the president, about not being given notice, he had not
known, or had pretended not to know, what the term meant. “Notiz?—Wuss?”
he had said indifferently, and she had turned and fled, afraid of
bursting into tears in his office. It was easy for Richard, living at
home with a family to keep him cheerful. It was easier for him to save
money. He had saved about two thousand in a two-year hitch in the Navy,
and a thousand more in the year since. And how long would it take her to
save the fifteen hundred dollars that a junior membership in the stage
designers’ union cost? After nearly two years in New York, she had only
about five hundred dollars of it.

“Pray for me,” she said to the wooden Madonna on the bookshelf. It was
the one beautiful thing in her apartment, the wooden Madonna she had
bought the first month she had been in New York. She wished there were a
better place for it in the room than on the ugly bookshelf. The
bookshelf was like a lot of fruit crates stacked up and painted red. She
longed for a bookshelf of natural-colored wood, smooth to the touch and
sleek with wax.

She went down to the delicatessen and bought six cans of beer and some
blue cheese. Then when she came upstairs, she remembered the original
purpose of her going to the store, to buy some meat for dinner. She and
Richard had planned to have dinner in tonight. That might be changed
now, but she didn’t like to take it on her own initiative to alter plans
where Richard was concerned, and she was about to run down again for the
meat when Richard’s long ring sounded. She pressed the release button.

Richard came up the steps at a run, smiling. “Did Phil call?”

“No,” she said.

“Good. That means he’s coming.”

“When?”

“In a few minutes, I guess. He probably won’t stay long.”

“Does it really sound like a definite job?”

“Phil says so.”

“Do you know what kind of play it is?”

“I don’t know anything except they need somebody for sets, and why not
you?” Richard looked her over critically, smiling. “You look swell
tonight. Don’t be nervous, will you? It’s just a little company in the
Village, and you’ve probably got more talent than all the rest of them
put together.”

She took the overcoat he had dropped on a chair and hung it in the
closet. Under the overcoat was a roll of charcoal paper he had brought
from art school. “Did you do something good today?” she asked.

“Soso. That’s something I want to work on at home,” he said carelessly.
“We had that redheaded model today, the one I like.”

Therese wanted to see his sketch, but she knew Richard probably didn’t
think it good enough. Some of his first paintings were good, like the
lighthouse in blues and blacks that hung over her bed, that he had done
when he was in the Navy and just starting to paint. But his life drawing
was not good yet, and Therese doubted that it ever would be. There was a
new charcoal smudge all over one knee of his tan cotton trousers. He
wore a shirt inside the red and black checked shirt, and buckskin
moccasins that made his big feet look like shapeless bear paws. He was
more like a lumberjack or a professional athlete of some sort, Therese
thought, than anything else. She could more easily imagine him with an
ax in his hand than a paintbrush. She had seen him with an ax once,
cutting wood in the yard back of his house in Brooklyn. If he didn’t
prove to his family that he was making some progress in his painting, he
would probably have to go into his father’s bottled gas business this
summer, and open the branch in Long Island that his father wanted him
to.

“Will you have to work this Saturday?” she asked, still afraid to talk
about the job.

“Hope not. Are you free?”

She remembered now, she was not. “I’m free Friday,” she said resignedly.
“Saturday’s a late day.”

Richard smiled. “It’s a conspiracy.” He took her hands and drew her arms
around his waist, his restless prowling of the room at an end. “Maybe
Sunday? The family asked if you could come out for dinner, but we don’t
have to stay long. I could borrow a truck and we could drive somewhere
in the afternoon.”

“All right.” She liked that and so did Richard, sitting up in front of
the big empty gas tank, and driving anywhere, as free as if they rode a
butterfly. She took her arms from around Richard. It made her feel
self-conscious and foolish, as if she stood embracing the stem of a
tree, to have her arms around Richard. “I did buy a steak for tonight,
but they stole it at the store.”

“Stole it? From where?”

“Off the shelf where we keep our handbags. The people they hire for
Christmas don’t get any regular lockers.” She smiled at it now, but this
afternoon, she had almost wept. Wolves, she had thought, a pack of
wolves, stealing a bloody bag of meat just because it was food, a free
meal. She had asked all the salesgirls if they had seen it, and they had
all denied it. Bringing meat into the store wasn’t allowed, Mrs.
Hendrickson had said indignantly. But what was one to do, if all the
meat stores closed at six o’clock?

Richard lay back on the studio couch. His mouth was thin and its line
uneven, half of it downward slanting, giving an ambiguity to his
expression, a look sometimes of humor, sometimes of bitterness, a
contradiction that his rather blank and frank blue eyes did nothing to
clarify. He said slowly and mockingly, “Did you go down to the lost and
found? Lost, one pound of beefsteak. Answers to the name Meatball.”

Therese smiled, looking over the shelves in her kitchenette. “Do you
think you’re joking? Mrs. Hendrickson did tell me to go down to the lost
and found.”

Richard gave a hooting laugh and stood up.

“There’s a can of corn here and I’ve got lettuce for a salad. And
there’s bread and butter. Shall I go get some frozen pork chops?”

Richard reached a long arm over her shoulder and took the square of
pumpernickel bread from the shelf. “You call that bread? It’s fungus.
Look at it, blue as a mandrill’s behind. Why don’t you eat bread once
you buy it?”

“I use that to see in the dark with. But since you don’t like it—” She
took it from him and dropped it into the garbage bag. “That wasn’t the
bread I meant anyway.”

“Show me the bread you meant.”

The doorbell shrieked right beside the refrigerator, and she jumped for
the button.

“That’s them,” Richard said.

There were two young men. Richard introduced them as Phil McElroy and
his brother, Dannie. Phil was not at all what Therese had expected. He
did not look intense or serious or even particularly intelligent. And he
scarcely glanced at her when they were introduced.

Dannie stood with his coat over his arm until Therese took it from him.
She could not find an extra hanger for Phil’s coat, and Phil took it
back and tossed it onto a chair, half on the floor. It was an old dirty
polo coat. Therese served the beer and cheese and crackers, listening
all the while for Phil and Richard’s conversation to turn to the job.
But they were talking about things that had happened since they had seen
each other last in Kingston, New York. Richard had worked for two weeks
last summer on some murals in a roadhouse there, where Phil had had a
job as a waiter.

“Are you in the theatre, too?” she asked Dannie.

“No, I’m not,” Dannie said. He seemed shy, or perhaps bored and
impatient to leave. He was older than Phil and a little more heavily
built. His dark-brown eyes moved thoughtfully from object to object in
the room.

“They haven’t got anything yet but a director and three actors,” Phil
said to Richard, leaning back on the couch. “A fellow I worked with in
Philly once is directing. Raymond Cortes. If I recommend you, it’s a
cinch you’ll get in,” he said with a glance at Therese. “He promised me
the part of the second brother in the play. It’s called _Small Rain_.”

“A comedy?” Therese asked.

“Comedy. Three acts. Have you done any sets so far by yourself?”

“How many sets will it take?” Richard asked, just as she was about to
answer.

“Two at the most, and they’ll probably get by on one. Georgia Halloran
has the lead. Did you happen to see that Sartre thing they did in the
fall down there? She was in that.”

“Georgia?” Richard smiled. “Whatever happened with her and Rudy?”

Disappointedly, Therese heard their conversation settling down on
Georgia and Rudy and other people she didn’t know. Georgia might have
been one of the girls Richard had had an affair with, Therese supposed.
He had once mentioned about five. She couldn’t remember any of their
names except Celia.

“Is this one of your sets?” Dannie asked her, looking at the cardboard
model that hung on the wall, and when she nodded, he got up to see it.

And now, Richard and Phil were talking about a man who owed Richard
money from somewhere. Phil said he had seen the man last night in the
San Remo bar. Phil’s elongated face and his clipped hair was like an El
Greco, Therese thought, yet the same features in his brother looked like
an American Indian. And the way Phil talked completely destroyed the
illusion of El Greco. He talked like any of the people one saw in
Village bars, young people who were supposed to be writers or actors,
and who usually did nothing.

“It’s very attractive,” Dannie said, peering behind one of the little
suspended figures.

“It’s a model for _Petrushka_. The fair scene,” she said, wondering if
he would know the ballet. He might be a lawyer, she thought, or even a
doctor. There were yellowish stains on his fingers, not the stains of
cigarettes.

Richard said something about being hungry, and Phil said he was
starving, but neither of them ate any of the cheese that was in front of
them.

“We’re due in half an hour, Phil,” Dannie repeated.

Then a moment later, they were all standing up, putting on their coats.

“Let’s eat out somewhere, Terry,” Richard said. “How about the Czech
place up on Second?”

“All right,” she said, trying to sound agreeable. This was the end of
it, she supposed, and nothing was definite. She had an impulse to ask
Phil a crucial question, but she didn’t.

And on the street, they began to walk downtown instead of up. Richard
walked with Phil, and only glanced back once or twice at her, as if to
see if she were still there. Dannie held her arm at the curbs, and
across the patches of dirty slippery stuff, neither snow nor ice, that
were the remains of a snowfall three weeks ago.

“Are you a doctor?” she asked Dannie.

“Physicist,” Dannie replied. “I’m taking graduate courses at N.Y.U.
now.” He smiled at her, but the conversation stopped there for a while.

Then he said, “That’s a long way from stage designing, isn’t it.”

She nodded. “Quite a long way.” She started to ask him if he intended to
do any work pertaining to the atom bomb, but she didn’t, because what
would it matter if he did or didn’t? “Do you know where we’re going?”
she asked.

He smiled broadly, showing square white teeth. “Yes. To the subway. But
Phil wants a bite somewhere first.”

They were walking down Third Avenue. And Richard was talking to Phil
about their going to Europe next summer. Therese felt a throb of
embarrassment as she walked along behind Richard, like a dangling
appendage, because Phil and Dannie would naturally think she was
Richard’s mistress. She wasn’t his mistress, and Richard didn’t expect
her to be in Europe. It was a strange relationship, she supposed, and
who would believe it? Because from what she had seen in New York,
everybody slept with everybody they had dates with more than once or
twice. And the two people she had gone out with before Richard—Angelo
and Harry—had certainly dropped her when they discovered she didn’t care
for an affair with them. She had tried to have an affair with Richard
three or four times in the year she had known him, though with negative
results; Richard said he preferred to wait. He meant wait until she
cared more for him. Richard wanted to marry her, and she was the first
girl he had ever proposed to, he said. She knew he would ask her again
before they left for Europe, but she didn’t love him enough to marry
him. And yet she would be accepting most of the money for the trip from
him, she thought with a familiar sense of guilt. Then the image of Mrs.
Semco, Richard’s mother, came before her, smiling approval on them, on
their marrying, and Therese involuntarily shook her head.

“What’s the matter?” Dannie asked.

“Nothing.”

“Are you cold?”

“No. Not at all.”

But he tucked her arm closer anyway. She was cold, and felt rather
miserable in general. It was the half dangling, half cemented
relationship with Richard, she knew. They saw more and more of each
other, without actually growing closer. She still wasn’t in love with
him, not after ten months, and maybe she never could be, though the fact
remained that she liked him better than any one person she had ever
known, certainly any man. Sometimes she thought she was in love with
him, waking up in the morning and looking blankly at the ceiling,
remembering suddenly that she knew him, remembering suddenly his face
shining with affection for her because of some gesture of affection on
her part, before her sleepy emptiness had time to fill up with the
realization of what time it was, what day, what she had to do, the
solider substance that made up one’s life. But the feeling bore no
resemblance to what she had read about love. Love was supposed to be a
kind of blissful insanity. Richard didn’t act blissfully insane either,
in fact.

“Oh, everything’s called St. Germain-des-Près!” Phil shouted with a wave
of his hand. “I’ll give you some addresses before you go. How long do
you think you’ll be there?”

A truck with rattling, slapping chains turned in front of them, and
Therese couldn’t hear Richard’s answer. Phil went into the Riker’s shop
on the corner of Fifty-third Street.

“We don’t have to eat here. Phil just wants to stop a minute.” Richard
squeezed her shoulder as they went in the door. “It’s a great day, isn’t
it, Terry? Don’t you feel it? It’s your first real job!”

Richard was convinced, and Therese tried hard to realize it might be a
great moment. But she couldn’t recapture even the certainty she
remembered when she had looked at the orange washcloth in the basin
after Richard’s telephone call. She leaned against the stool next to
Phil’s, and Richard stood beside her, still talking to him. The glaring
white light on the white tile walls and the floor seemed brighter than
sunlight, for here there were no shadows. She could see every shiny
black hair in Phil’s eyebrows, and the rough and smooth spots on the
pipe Dannie held in his hand, unlighted. She could see the details of
Richard’s hand that hung limply out of his overcoat sleeve, and she was
conscious again of their incongruity with his limber, long-boned body.
They were thick, even plump looking hands, and they moved in the same
inarticulate, blind way if they picked up a salt shaker or the handle of
a suitcase. Or stroked her hair, she thought. The insides of his hands
were extremely soft, like a girl’s, and a little moist. Worst of all, he
generally forgot to clean his nails, even when he took the trouble to
dress up. Therese had said something about it a couple of times to him,
but she felt now that she couldn’t say anything more without irritating
him.

Dannie was watching her. She was held by his thoughtful eyes for a
moment, then she looked down. Suddenly she knew why she couldn’t
recapture the feeling she had before: she simply didn’t believe Phil
McElroy could get her a job on his recommendation.

“Are you worried about that job?” Dannie was standing beside her.

“No.”

“Don’t be. Phil can give you some tips.” He poked his pipe stem between
his lips, and seemed to be about to say something else, but he turned
away.

She half listened to Phil’s conversation with Richard. They were talking
about boat reservations.

Dannie said, “By the way, the Black Cat Theatre’s only a couple of
blocks from Morton Street where I live. Phil’s staying with me, too.
Come and have lunch with us, will you?”

“Thanks very much. I’d like to.” It probably wouldn’t be, she thought,
but it was nice of him to ask her.

“What do you think, Terry?” Richard said. “Is March too soon to go to
Europe? It’s better to go early than wait till everything’s so crowded
over there.”

“March sounds all right,” she said.

“There’s nothing to stop us, is there? I don’t care if I don’t finish
the winter term at school.”

“No, there’s nothing to stop us.” It was easy to say. It was easy to
believe all of it, and just as easy not to believe any of it. But if it
were all true, if the job were real, the play a success, and she could
go to France with at least a single achievement behind her—Suddenly,
Therese reached out for Richard’s arm, slid her hand down it to his
fingers. Richard was so surprised, he stopped in the middle of a
sentence.

The next afternoon, Therese called the Watkins number that Phil had
given her. A very efficient sounding girl answered. Mr. Cortes was not
there, but they had heard about her through Phil McElroy. The job was
hers, and she would start work December twenty-eighth at fifty dollars a
week. She could come in beforehand and show Mr. Cortes some of her work,
if she wanted to, but it wasn’t necessary, not if Mr. McElroy had
recommended her so highly.

Therese called up Phil to thank him, but nobody answered the telephone.
She wrote him a note, in care of the Black Cat Theatre.




                             chapter three


Roberta Walls, the youngest D.S. in the toy department, paused just long
enough in her midmorning flurry to whisper to Therese, “If we don’t sell
this twenty-four ninety-five suitcase today, it’ll be marked down Monday
and the department’ll take a two-dollar loss!” Roberta nodded at the
brown pasteboard suitcase on the counter, thrust her load of gray boxes
into Miss Martucci’s hands, and hurried on.

Down the long aisle, Therese watched the salesgirls make way for
Roberta. Roberta flew up and down counters and from one corner of the
floor to the other, from nine in the morning until six at night. Therese
had heard that Roberta was trying for another promotion. She wore red
harlequin glasses, and unlike the other girls, always pushed the sleeves
of her green smock up above her elbows. Therese saw her flit across an
aisle and stop Mrs. Hendrickson with an excited message delivered with
gestures. Mrs. Hendrickson nodded agreement, Roberta touched her
shoulder familiarly, and Therese felt a small start of jealousy.
Jealousy, though she didn’t care in the least for Mrs. Hendrickson, even
disliked her.

“Do you have a doll made of cloth that cries?”

Therese didn’t know of such a doll in stock, but the woman was positive
Frankenberg’s had it, because she had seen it advertised. Therese pulled
out another box, from the last spot it might possibly be, and it wasn’t.

“Wotcha lookin’ fuh?” Miss Santini asked her. Miss Santini had a cold.

“A doll made of cloth that cries,” Therese said. Miss Santini had been
especially courteous to her lately. Therese remembered the stolen meat.
But now Miss Santini only lifted her eyebrows, stuck out her bright red
underlip with a shrug, and went on.

“Made of cloth? With pigtails?” Miss Martucci, a lean, straggly haired
Italian girl with a long nose like a wolf’s looked at Therese. “Don’t
let Roberta hear you,” Miss Martucci said with a glance around her.
“Don’t let anybody hear you, but those dolls are in the basement.”

“Oh.” The upstairs toy department was at war with the basement toy
department. The tactics were to force the customer into buying on the
seventh floor, where everything was more expensive. Therese told the
woman the dolls were in the basement.

“Try and sell this today,” Miss Davis said to her as she sidled past,
slapping the battered imitation alligator suitcase with her red-nailed
hand.

Therese nodded.

“Do you have any stiff-legged dolls? One that stands up?”

Therese looked at the middle-aged woman with the crutches that thrust
her shoulders high. Her face was different from all the other faces
across the counter, gentle, with a certain cognizance in the eyes as if
they actually saw what they looked at.

“That’s a little bigger than I wanted,” the woman said when Therese
showed her a doll. “I’m sorry. Do you have a smaller one?”

“I think so.” Therese went farther down the aisle, and was aware that
the woman followed her on her crutches, circling the press of people at
the counter, so as to save Therese walking back with the doll. Suddenly
Therese wanted to take infinite pains, wanted to find exactly the doll
the woman was looking for. But the next doll wasn’t quite right, either.
The doll didn’t have real hair. Therese tried in another place and found
the same doll with real hair. It even cried when it bent over. It was
exactly what the woman wanted. Therese laid the doll down carefully in
fresh tissue in a new box.

“That’s just perfect,” the woman repeated. “I’m sending this to a friend
in Australia who’s a nurse. She graduated from nursing school with me,
so I made a little uniform like ours to dress a doll in. Thank you so
much. And I wish you a merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas to you!” Therese said, smiling. It was the first merry
Christmas she had heard from a customer.

“Have you had your relief yet, Miss Belivet?” Mrs. Hendrickson asked
her, as sharply as if she reproached her.

Therese hadn’t had it. She got her pocketbook and the novel she was
reading from the shelf under the wrapping counter. The novel was Joyce’s
_Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, which Richard was anxious for
her to read. How anyone could have read Gertrude Stein without reading
any Joyce, Richard said, he didn’t know. She felt a bit inferior when
Richard talked with her about books. She had browsed all over the
bookshelves at school, but the library assembled by the Order of St.
Margaret had been far from catholic, she realized now, though it had
included such unexpected writers as Gertrude Stein.

The hall to the employees’ rest rooms was blocked by big shipping carts
piled high with boxes. Therese waited to get through.

“Pixie!” one of the shipping cart boys shouted to her.

Therese smiled a little because it was silly. Even down in the cloakroom
in the basement, they yelled “Pixie!” at her morning and night.

“Pixie, waiting for me?” the raw-edged voice roared again, over the
crash and bump of the stock carts.

She got through, and dodged a shipping cart that hurtled toward her with
a clerk aboard.

“No smoking here!” shouted a man’s voice, the very growly voice of an
executive, and the girls ahead of Therese who had lighted cigarettes
blew their smoke in the air and said loudly in chorus just before they
reached the refuge of the women’s room, “Who does he think _he_ is, Mr.
Frankenberg?”

“Yoo-hoo! Pixie!”

“Ah’m juss bahdin mah tahm, Pixie!”

A shipping cart skidded in front of her, and she struck her leg against
its metal corner. She went on without looking down at her leg, though
pain began to blossom there, like a slow explosion. She went on into the
different chaos of women’s voices, women’s figures, and the smell of
disinfectant. Blood was running to her shoe, and her stocking was torn
in a jagged hole. She pushed some skin back into place, and feeling
sickened, leaned against the wall and held to a water pipe. She stayed
there a few seconds, listening to the confusion of voices among the
girls at the mirror. Then she wet toilet paper and daubed until the red
was gone from her stocking, but the red kept coming.

“It’s all right, thanks,” she said to a girl who bent over her for a
moment, and the girl went away.

Finally, there was nothing to do but buy a sanitary napkin from the slot
machine. She used a little of the cotton from inside it, and tied it on
her leg with the gauze. And then it was time to go back to the counter.

Their eyes met at the same instant, Therese glancing up from a box she
was opening, and the woman just turning her head so she looked directly
at Therese. She was tall and fair, her long figure graceful in the loose
fur coat that she held open with a hand on her waist. Her eyes were
gray, colorless, yet dominant as light or fire, and caught by them,
Therese could not look away. She heard the customer in front of her
repeat a question, and Therese stood there, mute. The woman was looking
at Therese, too, with a preoccupied expression as if half her mind were
on whatever it was she meant to buy here, and though there were a number
of salesgirls between them, Therese felt sure the woman would come to
her. Then Therese saw her walk slowly toward the counter, heard her
heart stumble to catch up with the moment it had let pass, and felt her
face grow hot as the woman came nearer and nearer.

“May I see one of those valises?” the woman asked, and leaned on the
counter, looking down through the glass top.

The damaged valise lay only a yard away. Therese turned around and got a
box from the bottom of a stack, a box that had never been opened. When
she stood up, the woman was looking at her with the calm gray eyes that
Therese could neither quite face nor look away from.

“That’s the one I like, but I don’t suppose I can have it, can I?” she
said, nodding toward the brown valise in the show window behind Therese.

Her eyebrows were blond, curving around the bend of her forehead. Her
mouth was as wise as her eyes, Therese thought, and her voice was like
her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets.

“Yes,” Therese said.

Therese went back to the stockroom for the key. The key hung just inside
the door on a nail, and no one was allowed to touch it but Mrs.
Hendrickson.

Miss Davis saw her and gasped, but Therese said, “I need it,” and went
out.

She opened the show window and took the suitcase down and laid it on the
counter.

“You’re giving me the one on display?” She smiled as if she understood.
She said casually, leaning both forearms on the counter, studying the
contents of the valise, “They’ll have a fit, won’t they?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Therese said.

“All right. I’d like this. That’s C.O.D. And what about clothes? Do
these come with it?”

There were cellophane wrapped clothes in the lid of the suitcase, with a
price tag on them. Therese said, “No, they’re separate. If you want doll
clothes—these aren’t as good as the clothes in the dolls’ clothing
department across the aisle.”

“Oh! Will this get to New Jersey before Christmas?”

“Yes, it’ll arrive Monday.” If it didn’t, Therese thought, she would
deliver it herself.

“Mrs. H. F. Aird,” the woman’s soft, distinct voice said, and Therese
began to print it on the green C.O.D. slip.

The name, the address, the town appeared beneath the pencil point like a
secret Therese would never forget, like something stamping itself in her
memory forever.

“You won’t make any mistakes, will you?” the woman’s voice asked.

Therese noticed the woman’s perfume for the first time, and instead of
replying, could only shake her head. She looked down at the slip to
which she was laboriously adding the necessary figures, and wished with
all her power to wish anything, that the woman would simply continue her
last words and say, “Are you really so glad to have met me? Then why
can’t we see each other again? Why can’t we even have lunch together
today?” Her voice was so casual, and she might have said it so easily.
But nothing came after the “will you?” nothing to relieve the shame of
having been recognized as a new salesgirl, hired for the Christmas rush,
inexperienced and liable to make mistakes. Therese slid the book toward
her for her signature.

Then the woman picked up her gloves from the counter, and turned, and
slowly went away, and Therese watched the distance widen and widen. Her
ankles below the fur of the coat were pale and thin. She wore plain
black suede shoes with high heels.

“That’s a C.O.D. order?”

Therese looked into Mrs. Hendrickson’s ugly, meaningless face. “Yes,
Mrs. Hendrickson.”

“Don’t you know you’re supposed to give the customer the strip at the
top? How do you expect them to claim the purchase when it comes? Where’s
the customer? Can you catch her?”

“Yes.” She was only ten feet away, across the aisle at the dolls’
clothing counter. And with the green slip in her hand, she hesitated a
moment, then carried it around the counter, forcing herself to advance,
because she was suddenly abashed by her appearance, the old blue skirt,
the cotton blouse—whoever assigned the green smocks had missed her—and
the humiliating flat shoes. And the horrible bandage through which the
blood was probably showing again.

“I’m supposed to give you this,” she said, laying the miserable little
scrap beside the hand on the edge of the counter, and turning away.

Behind the counter again, Therese faced the stock boxes, sliding them
thoughtfully out and back, as if she were looking for something. Therese
waited until the woman must have finished at the counter and gone away.
She was conscious of the moments passing like irrevocable time,
irrevocable happiness, for in these last seconds, she might turn and see
the face she would never see again. She was conscious, too, dimly now
and with a different horror, of the old, unceasing voices of customers
at the counter calling for assistance, calling to her, and of the low,
humming rrrrr of the little train, part of the storm that was closing in
and separating her from the woman.

But when she turned finally, she looked directly into the gray eyes
again. The woman was walking toward her, and as if time had turned back,
she leaned on the counter again and gestured to a doll and asked to see
it.

Therese got the doll and dropped it with a clatter on the glass counter,
and the woman glanced at her.

“Sounds unbreakable,” the woman said.

Therese smiled.

“Yes, I’ll get this, too,” she said in the quiet slow voice that made a
pool of silence in the tumult around them. She gave her name and address
again, and Therese took it slowly from her lips, as if she did not
already know it by heart. “That really will arrive before Christmas?”

“It’ll come Monday at the latest. That’s two days before Christmas.”

“Good. I don’t mean to make you nervous.”

Therese tightened the knot in the string she had put around the doll
box, and the knot mysteriously came open. “No,” she said. In an
embarrassment so profound there was nothing left to defend, she got the
knot tied under the woman’s eyes.

“It’s a rotten job, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Therese folded the C.O.D. slips around the white string, and
fastened them with a pin.

“So forgive me for complaining.”

Therese glanced at her, and the sensation returned that she knew her
from somewhere, that the woman was about to reveal herself, and they
would both laugh then, and understand. “You’re not complaining. But I
know it’ll get there.” Therese looked across the aisle, where the woman
had stood before, and saw the tiny slip of green paper still on the
counter. “You really are supposed to keep that C.O.D. slip.”

Her eyes changed with her smile now, brightened with a gray, colorless
fire that Therese almost knew, almost could place. “I’ve gotten things
before without them. I always lose them.” She bent to sign the second
C.O.D. slip.

Therese watched her go away with a step as slow as when she had come,
saw her look at another counter as she passed it, and slap her black
gloves across her palm twice, three times. Then she disappeared into an
elevator.

And Therese turned to the next customer. She worked with an
indefatigable patience, but her figures on the sales slips bore faint
tails where the pencil jerked convulsively. She went to Mr. Logan’s
office, which seemed to take hours, but when she looked at the clock,
only fifteen minutes had passed, and now it was time to wash up for
lunch. She stood stiffly in front of the rotating towel, drying her
hands, feeling unattached to anything or anyone, isolated. Mr. Logan had
asked her if she wanted to stay on after Christmas. She could have a job
downstairs in the cosmetic department. Therese had said no.

In the middle of the afternoon, she went down to the first floor and
bought a card in the greeting-card department. It was not a very
interesting card, but at least it was simple, in plain blue and gold.
She stood with the pen poised over the card, thinking of what she might
have written—“You are magnificent” or even “I love you”—finally writing
quickly the excruciatingly dull and impersonal: “Special salutations
from Frankenberg’s.” She added her number 645-A in lieu of a signature.
Then she went down to the post office in the basement, hesitated at the
letter drop, losing her nerve suddenly at the sight of her hand holding
the letter half in the slot. What would happen? She was going to leave
the store in a few days, anyway. What would Mrs. H. F. Aird care? The
blond eyebrows would perhaps lift a little, she would look at the card a
moment, then forget it. Therese dropped it.

On the way home, an idea came to her for a stage set, a house interior
with more depth than breadth, with a kind of vortex down the center,
from which rooms would go off on either side. She wanted to begin the
cardboard model that night, but at last she only elaborated on her
pencil sketch of it. She wanted to see someone—not Richard, not Jack or
Alice Kelly downstairs, maybe Stella, Stella Overton, the stage designer
she had met during her first weeks in New York. Therese had not seen
her, she realized, since she had come to the cocktail party Therese had
given before she left her other apartment. Stella was one of the people
who didn’t know where she lived now. Therese was on her way down to the
telephone in the hall, when she heard the short quick rings of her
doorbell that meant there was a call for her.

“Thank you,” Therese called down to Mrs. Osborne.

It was Richard’s usual call around nine o’clock. Richard wanted to know
if she felt like seeing a movie tomorrow night. It was the movie at the
Sutton they still hadn’t seen. Therese said she wasn’t doing anything,
but she wanted to finish a pillow cover. Alice Kelly had said she could
come down and use her sewing machine tomorrow night. And besides, she
had to wash her hair.

“Wash it tonight and see me tomorrow night,” Richard said.

“It’s too late. I can’t sleep if my head’s wet.”

“I’ll wash it tomorrow night. We won’t use the tub, just a couple of
buckets.”

She smiled. “I think we’d better not.” She had fallen into the tub the
time Richard had washed her hair. Richard had been imitating the tub
drain with writhings and gluggings, and she had laughed so hard, her
feet slipped on the floor.

“Well, what about that art show Saturday? It’s open Saturday afternoon.”

“But Saturday’s the day I have to work to nine. I can’t get away till
nine thirty.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll stay around school and meet you on the corner about nine
thirty. Forty-fourth and Fifth. All right?”

“All right.”

“Anything new today?”

“No. With you?”

“No. I’m going to see about boat reservations tomorrow. I’ll call you
tomorrow night.”

Therese did not telephone Stella at all.

The next day was Friday, the last Friday before Christmas, and the
busiest day Therese had known since she had been working at
Frankenberg’s, though everyone said tomorrow would be worse. People were
pressed alarmingly hard against the glass counters. Customers she
started to wait on got swept away and lost in the gluey current that
filled the aisle. It was impossible to imagine any more people crowding
onto the floor, but the elevators kept emptying people out.

“I don’t see why they don’t close the doors downstairs!” Therese
remarked to Miss Martucci, when they were both stooping by a stock
shelf.

“What?” Miss Martucci answered, unable to hear.

“Miss Belivet!” somebody yelled, and a whistle blew.

It was Mrs. Hendrickson. She had been using a whistle to get attention
today. Therese made her way toward her past salesgirls and through empty
boxes on the floor.

“You’re wanted on the telephone,” Mrs. Hendrickson told her, pointing to
the telephone by the wrapping table.

Therese made a helpless gesture that Mrs. Hendrickson had no time to
see. It was impossible to hear anything on a telephone now. And she knew
it was probably Richard being funny. He had called her once before.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello, is this coworker six forty-five A, Therese Belivet?” the
operator’s voice said over clickings and buzzings. “Go ahead.”

“Hello?” she repeated, and barely heard an answer. She dragged the
telephone off the table and into the stockroom a few feet away. The wire
did not quite reach, and she had to stoop on the floor. “Hello?”

“Hello,” the voice said. “Well—I wanted to thank you for the Christmas
card.”

“Oh. Oh, you’re—”

“This is Mrs. Aird,” she said. “Are you the one who sent it? Or not.”

“Yes,” Therese said, rigid with guilt suddenly, as if she had been
caught in a crime. She closed her eyes and wrung the telephone, seeing
the intelligent, smiling eyes again as she had seen them yesterday. “I’m
very sorry if it annoyed you,” Therese said mechanically, in the voice
with which she spoke to customers.

The woman laughed. “This is very funny,” she said casually, and Therese
caught the same easy slur in her voice that she had heard yesterday,
loved yesterday, and she smiled herself.

“Is it? Why?”

“You must be the girl in the toy department.”

“Yes.”

“It was extremely nice of you to send me the card,” the woman said
politely.

Then Therese understood. She had thought it was from a man, some other
clerk who had waited on her. “It was very nice waiting on you,” Therese
said.

“Was it? Why?” She might have been mocking Therese. “Well—since it’s
Christmas, why don’t we meet for a cup of coffee, at least? Or a drink.”

Therese flinched as the door burst open and a girl came into the room,
stood right in front of her. “Yes—I’d like that.”

“When?” the woman asked. “I’m coming in to New York tomorrow in the
morning. Why don’t we make it for lunch? Do you have any time tomorrow?”

“Of course. I have an hour, from twelve to one,” Therese said, staring
at the girl’s feet in front of her in splayed flat moccasins, the back
of her heavy ankles and calves in lisle stockings, shifting like an
elephant’s legs.

“Shall I meet you downstairs at the Thirty-fourth Street entrance at
about twelve?”

“All right. I—” Therese remembered now she went to work at one sharp
tomorrow. She had the morning off. She put her arm up to ward off the
avalanche of boxes the girl in front of her had pulled down from the
shelf. The girl herself teetered back onto her. “Hello?” she shouted
over the noise of tumbling boxes.

“I’m sow—ry,” Mrs. Zabriskie said irritatedly, plowing out the door
again.

“Hello?” Therese repeated.

The line was dead.




                              chapter four


“Hello,” the woman said, smiling.

“Hello.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” At least, the woman had recognized her, Therese thought.

“Do you have any preference as to restaurants?” the woman asked on the
sidewalk.

“No. It’d be nice to find a quiet one, but there aren’t any in this
neighborhood.”

“You haven’t time for the East Side? No, you haven’t, if you’ve only got
an hour. I think I know a place a couple of blocks west on this street.
Do you think you have time?”

“Yes, certainly.” It was twelve fifteen already. Therese knew she would
be terribly late, and it didn’t matter at all.

They did not bother to talk on the way. Now and then the crowds made
them separate, and once the woman glanced at Therese, across a pushcart
full of dresses, smiling. They went into a restaurant with wooden
rafters and white tablecloths, that miraculously was quiet, and not half
filled. They sat down in a large wooden booth, and the woman ordered an
old-fashioned without sugar, and invited Therese to have one, or a
sherry, and when Therese hesitated, sent the waiter away with the order.

She took off her hat and ran her fingers through her blond hair, once on
either side, and looked at Therese. “And where did you get the nice idea
of sending me a Christmas card?”

“I remembered you,” Therese said. She looked at the small pearl
earrings, that were somehow no lighter than her hair itself, or her
eyes. Therese thought her beautiful, though her face was a blur now
because she could not bear to look at it directly. She got something out
of her handbag, a lipstick and compact, and Therese looked at her
lipstick case—golden like a jewel, and shaped like a sea chest. She
wanted to look at the woman’s mouth, but the gray eyes so close drove
her away, flickering over her like fire.

“You haven’t been working there very long, have you?”

“No. Only about two weeks.”

“And you won’t be much longer—probably.” She offered Therese a
cigarette.

Therese took one. “No. I’ll have another job.” She leaned toward the
lighter the woman was holding for her, toward the slim hand with the
oval red nails and a sprinkling of freckles on its back.

“And do you often get inspired to send post cards?”

“Post cards?”

“Christmas cards?” She smiled at herself.

“Of course not,” Therese said.

“Well, here’s to Christmas.” She touched Therese’s glass and drank.
“Where do you live? In Manhattan?”

Therese told her. On Sixty-third Street. Her parents were dead, she
said. She had lived in New York the past two years, and before that at a
school in New Jersey. Therese did not tell her that the school was
semireligious, Episcopalian. She did not mention Sister Alicia whom she
adored and thought of so often, with her pale-blue eyes and her ugly
nose and her loving sternness. Because since yesterday morning, Sister
Alicia had been thrust far away, far below the woman who sat opposite
her.

“And what do you do in your spare time?” The lamp on the table made her
eyes silvery, full of liquid light. Even the pearl at her earlobe looked
alive, like a drop of water that a touch might destroy.

“I—” Should she tell her she usually worked on her stage models?
Sketched and painted sometimes, carved things like cats’ heads and tiny
figures to go in her ballet sets, but that she liked best to take long
walks practically anywhere, liked best simply to dream? Therese felt she
did not have to tell her. She felt the woman’s eyes could not look at
anything without understanding completely. Therese took some more of her
drink, liking it, though it was like the woman to swallow, she thought,
terrifying, and strong.

The woman nodded to the waiter, and two more drinks arrived.

“I like this.”

“What?” Therese asked.

“I like it that someone sent me a card, someone I didn’t know. It’s the
way things should be at Christmas. And this year I like it especially.”

“I’m glad.” Therese smiled, wondering if she were serious.

“You’re a very pretty girl,” she said. “And very sensitive, too, aren’t
you?”

She might have been speaking of a doll, Therese thought, so casually had
she told her she was pretty. “I think you are magnificent,” Therese said
with the courage of the second drink, not caring how it might sound,
because she knew the woman knew anyway.

She laughed, putting her head back. It was a sound more beautiful than
music. It made a little wrinkle at the corner of her eyes, and it made
her purse her red lips as she drew on her cigarette. She gazed past
Therese for a moment, her elbows on the table and her chin propped up on
the hand that held her cigarette. There was a long line from the waist
of her fitted black suit up to the widening shoulder, and then the blond
head with the fine, unruly hair held high. She was about thirty or
thirty-two, Therese thought, and her daughter, for whom she had bought
the valise and the doll, would be perhaps six or eight. Therese could
imagine the child, blond haired, the face golden and happy, the body
slim and well proportioned, and always playing. But the child’s face,
unlike the woman’s with its short cheeks and rather Nordic compactness,
was vague and nondescript. And the husband? Therese could not see him at
all.

Therese said, “I’m sure you thought it was a man who sent you the
Christmas card, didn’t you?”

“I did,” she said through a smile. “I thought it just might be a man in
the ski department who’d sent it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m delighted.” She leaned back in the booth. “I doubt very much if
I’d have gone to lunch with him. No, I’m delighted.”

The dusky and faintly sweet smell of her perfume came to Therese again,
a smell suggestive of dark-green silk, that was hers alone, like the
smell of a special flower. Therese leaned closer toward it, looking down
at her glass. She wanted to thrust the table aside and spring into her
arms, to bury her nose in the green and gold scarf that was tied close
about her neck. Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and
Therese’s skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning.
Therese could not understand it, but it was so. Therese glanced at her
face that was somewhat turned away, and again she knew that instant of
half-recognition. And knew, too, that it was not to be believed. She had
never seen the woman before. If she had, could she have forgotten? In
the silence, Therese felt they both waited for the other to speak, yet
the silence was not an awkward one. Their plates had arrived. It was
creamed spinach with an egg on top, steamy and buttery smelling.

“How is it you live alone?” the woman asked, and before Therese knew it,
she had told the woman her life story.

But not in tedious detail. In six sentences, as if it all mattered less
to her than a story she had read somewhere. And what did the facts
matter after all, whether her mother was French or English or Hungarian,
or if her father had been an Irish painter, or a Czechoslovakian lawyer,
whether he had been successful or not, or whether her mother had
presented her to the Order of St. Margaret as a troublesome, bawling
infant, or as a troublesome, melancholy eight-year-old? Or whether she
had been happy there? Because she was happy now, starting today. She had
no need of parents or background.

“What could be duller than past history!” Therese said, smiling.

“Maybe futures that won’t have any history.”

Therese did not ponder it. It was right. She was still smiling, as if
she had just learned how to smile and did not know how to stop. The
woman smiled with her, amusedly, and perhaps she was laughing at her,
Therese thought.

“What kind of a name is Belivet?” she asked.

“It’s Czech. It’s changed,” Therese explained awkwardly. “Originally—”

“It’s very original.”

“What’s your name?” Therese asked. “Your first name?”

“My name? Carol. Please don’t ever call me Carole.”

“Please don’t ever call me Thereese,” Therese said, pronouncing the
“th.”

“How do you like it pronounced? Therese?”

“Yes. The way you do,” she answered. Carol pronounced her name the
French way, Terez. She was used to a dozen variations, and sometimes she
herself pronounced it differently. She liked the way Carol pronounced
it, and she liked her lips saying it. An indefinite longing, that she
had been only vaguely conscious of at times before, became now a
recognizable wish. It was so absurd, so embarrassing a desire, that
Therese thrust it from her mind.

“What do you do on Sundays?” Carol asked.

“I don’t always know. Nothing in particular. What do you do?”

“Nothing—lately. If you’d like to visit me sometime, you’re welcome to.
At least there’s some country around where I live. Would you like to
come out this Sunday?” The gray eyes regarded her directly now, and for
the first time, Therese faced them. There was a measure of humor in
them, Therese saw. And what else? Curiosity and a challenge, too.

“Yes,” Therese said.

“What a strange girl you are.”

“Why?”

“Flung out of space,” Carol said.




                              chapter five


Richard was standing on the street corner, waiting for her, shifting
from foot to foot in the cold. She wasn’t cold at all tonight, she
realized suddenly, even though other people on the streets were hunched
in their overcoats. She took Richard’s arm and squeezed it
affectionately tight.

“Have you been inside?” she asked. She was ten minutes late.

“Of course not. I was waiting.” He pressed his cold lips and nose into
her cheek. “Did you have a rough day?”

“No.”

The night was very black, in spite of the Christmas lights on some of
the lampposts. She looked at Richard’s face in the flare of his match.
The smooth slab of his forehead overhung his narrowed eyes, strong
looking as a whale’s front, she thought, strong enough to batter
something in. His face was like a face sculpted in wood, planed smooth
and unadorned. She saw his eyes open like unexpected spots of blue sky
in the darkness.

He smiled at her. “You’re in a good mood tonight. Want to walk down the
block? You can’t smoke in there. Like a cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

They began to walk. The gallery was just beside them, a row of lighted
windows, each with a Christmas wreath, on the second floor of the big
building. Tomorrow she would see Carol, Therese thought, tomorrow
morning at eleven. She would see her only ten blocks from here, in a
little more than twelve hours. She started to take Richard’s arm again,
and suddenly felt self-conscious about it. Eastward, down Forty-third
Street, she saw Orion exactly spread in the center of the sky between
the buildings. She had used to look at him from windows in school, from
the window of her first New York apartment.

“I got our reservations today,” Richard said. “The _President Taylor_
sailing March seventh. I talked with the ticket fellow, and I think he
can get us outside rooms, if I keep after him.”

“March seventh?” She heard the start of excitement in her voice, though
she did not want to go to Europe now at all.

“About ten weeks off,” Richard said, taking her hand.

“Can you cancel the reservation in case I can’t go?” She could as well
tell him now that she didn’t want to go, she thought, but he would only
argue, as he had before when she hesitated.

“Oh, of course, Terry!” And he laughed.

Richard swung her hand as they walked. As if they were lovers, Therese
thought. It would be almost like love, what she felt for Carol, except
that Carol was a woman. It was not quite insanity, but it was certainly
blissful. A silly word, but how could she possibly be happier than she
was now, and had been since Thursday?

“I wish we could share one together,” Richard said.

“Share what?”

“Share a room!” Richard boomed out, laughing, and Therese noticed the
two people on the sidewalk who turned to look at them. “Should we have a
drink somewhere just to celebrate? We can go in the Mansfield around the
corner.”

“I don’t feel like sitting still. Let’s have it later.”

They got into the show at half price on Richard’s art school passes. The
gallery was a series of high-ceilinged, plush carpeted rooms, a
background of financial opulence for the commercial advertisements, the
drawings, lithographs, illustrations, or whatever that hung in a crowded
row on the walls. Richard pored over some of them for minutes at a time,
but Therese found them a little depressing.

“Did you see this?” Richard asked, pointing to a complicated drawing of
a lineman repairing a telephone wire that Therese had seen somewhere
before, that tonight actually pained her to look at.

“Yes,” she said. She was thinking of something else. If she stopped
scrimping to save money for Europe—which had been silly anyway because
she wasn’t going—she could buy a new coat. There would be sales right
after Christmas. The coat she had now was a kind of black polo coat, and
she always felt drab in it.

Richard took her arm. “You haven’t enough respect for technique, little
girl.”

She gave him a mocking frown, and took his arm again. She felt very
close to him suddenly, as warm and happy with him as she had been the
first night she met him, at the party down on Christopher Street where
Frances Cotter had taken her. Richard had been a little drunk, as he had
never been since with her, talking about books and politics and people
more positively than she had ever heard him talk since, too. He had
talked with her all evening, and she had liked him so very much that
night for his enthusiasms, his ambitions, his likes and dislikes, and
because it was her first real party and he had made it a success for
her.

“You’re not looking,” Richard said.

“It’s exhausting. I’ve had enough when you have.”

Near the door, they met some people Richard knew from the League, a
young man, a girl, and a young colored man. Richard introduced Therese
to them. She could tell they were not close friends of Richard’s, but he
announced to all of them, “We’re going to Europe in March.”

And they all looked envious.

Outside, Fifth Avenue seemed empty and waiting, like a stage set for
some dramatic action. Therese walked along quickly beside Richard, her
hands in her pockets. Somewhere today she had lost her gloves. She was
thinking of tomorrow, at eleven o’clock. She wondered if she would
possibly still be with Carol this time tomorrow night.

“What about tomorrow?” Richard asked.

“Tomorrow?”

“You know. The family asked if you could come out this Sunday and have
dinner with us.”

Therese hesitated, remembering. She had visited the Semcos four or five
Sunday afternoons. They had a big dinner around two o’clock, and then
Mr. Semco, a short man with a bald head, would want to dance with her to
polkas and Russian folk music on the phonograph.

“Say, you know Mamma wants to make you a dress?” Richard went on. “She’s
already got the material. She wants to measure you for it.”

“A dress—but that’s so much work.” Therese had a vision of Mrs. Semco’s
embroidered blouses, white blouses with rows upon rows of stitches. Mrs.
Semco was proud of her needlework. Therese did not feel she should
accept such a colossal labor.

“She loves it,” Richard said. “Well, what about tomorrow? Want to come
out around noon?”

“I don’t think I want to this Sunday. They haven’t made any great plans,
have they?”

“No,” Richard said, disappointed. “You just want to work or something
tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’d rather.” She didn’t want Richard to know about Carol, or even
ever meet her.

“Not even take a drive somewhere?”

“I don’t think so, thanks.” Therese didn’t like his holding her hand
now. His hand was moist, which made it icy cold.

“You don’t think you’ll change your mind?”

Therese shook her head. “No.” There were some mitigating things she
might have said, excuses, but she did not want to lie about tomorrow
either, any more than she had already lied. She heard Richard sigh, and
they walked along in silence for a while.

“Mamma wants to make you a white dress with lace edging. She’s going
crazy with frustration with no girls in the family but Esther.”

That was his cousin by marriage, whom Therese had only seen once or
twice. “How is Esther?”

“Just the same.”

Therese extricated her fingers from Richard’s. She was hungry suddenly.
She had spent her dinner hour writing something, a kind of letter to
Carol that she hadn’t mailed and didn’t intend to. They caught the
uptown bus at Third Avenue, then walked east to Therese’s house. Therese
did not want to invite Richard upstairs, but she did anyway.

“No, thanks, I’ll shove on,” Richard said. He put a foot on the first
step. “You’re in a funny mood tonight. You’re miles away.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, feeling inarticulate and resenting it.

“You are now. I can tell. After all, don’t you—”

“What,” she prompted.

“We aren’t getting very far, are we?” he said, suddenly earnest. “If you
don’t even want to spend Sundays with me, how’re we going to spend
months together in Europe?”

“Well—if you want to call it all off, Richard.”

“Terry, I love you.” He brushed his palm over his hair, exasperatedly.
“Of course, I don’t want to call it all off, but—” He broke off again.

She knew what he was about to say, that she gave him practically nothing
in the way of affection, but he wouldn’t say it, because he knew very
well that she wasn’t in love with him, so why did he really expect her
affection? Yet the simple fact that she wasn’t in love with him made
Therese feel guilty, guilty about accepting anything from him, a
birthday present, or an invitation to dinner at his family’s, or even
his time. Therese pressed her finger tips hard on the stone banister.
“All right—I know. I’m not in love with you,” she said.

“That’s not what I mean, Terry.”

“If you ever want to call the whole thing off—I mean, stop seeing me at
all, then do it.” It was not the first time she had said that, either.

“Terry, you know I’d rather be with you than anyone else in the world.
That’s the hell of it.”

“Well, if it’s hell—”

“Do you love me at all, Terry? How do you love me?”

Let me count the ways, she thought. “I don’t love you, but I like you. I
felt tonight, a few minutes ago,” she said, hammering the words out
however they sounded, because they were true, “that I felt closer to you
than I ever have, in fact.”

Richard looked at her, a little incredulously. “Do you?” He started
slowly up the steps, smiling, and stopped just below her. “Then—why not
let me stay with you tonight, Terry? Just let’s try, will you?”

She had known from his first step toward her that he was going to ask
her that. Now she felt miserable and ashamed, sorry for herself and for
him, because it was so impossible, and so embarrassing because she
didn’t want it. There was always that tremendous block of not even
wanting to try it, which reduced it all to a kind of wretched
embarrassment and nothing more, each time he asked her. She remembered
the first night she had let him stay, and she writhed again inwardly. It
had been anything but pleasant, and she had asked right in the middle of
it, “Is this right?” How could it be right and so unpleasant, she had
thought. And Richard had laughed, long and loud and with a heartiness
that had made her angry. And the second time had been even worse,
probably because Richard had thought all the difficulties had been
gotten over. It was painful enough to make her weep, and Richard had
been very apologetic and had said she made him feel like a brute. And
then she had protested that he wasn’t. She knew very well that he
wasn’t, that he was angelic compared to what Angelo Rossi would have
been, for instance, if she had slept with him the night he stood here on
the same steps, asking the same question.

“Terry, darling—”

“No,” Therese said, finding her voice at last. “I just can’t tonight,
and I can’t go to Europe with you either,” she finished with an abject
and hopeless frankness.

Richard’s lips parted in a stunned way. Therese could not bear to look
at the frown above them. “Why not?”

“Because. Because I can’t,” she said, every word agony. “Because I don’t
want to sleep with you.”

“Oh, Terry!” Richard laughed. “I’m sorry I asked you. Forget about it,
honey, will you? And in Europe, too?”

Therese looked away, noticed Orion again, tipped at a slightly different
angle, and looked back at Richard. But I can’t, she thought. I’ve got to
think about it sometime, because you think about it. It seemed to her
that she spoke the words and that they were solid as blocks of wood in
the air between them, even though she heard nothing. She had said the
words before to him, in her room upstairs, once in Prospect Park when
she was winding a kite string. But he wouldn’t consider them, and what
could she do now, repeat them? “Do you want to come up for a while
anyway?” she asked, tortured by herself, by a shame she could not really
account for.

“No,” Richard said with a soft laugh that shamed her all the more for
its tolerance and its understanding. “No, I’ll go on. Good night, honey.
I love you, Terry.” And with a last look at her, he went.




                              chapter six


Therese stepped out into the street and looked, but the streets were
empty with a Sunday morning emptiness. The wind flung itself around the
tall cement corner of Frankenberg’s as if it were furious at finding no
human figure there to oppose. No one but her, Therese thought, and
grinned suddenly at herself. She might have thought of a more pleasant
place to meet than this. The wind was like ice against her teeth. Carol
was a quarter of an hour late. If she didn’t come, she would probably
keep on waiting, all day and into the night. One figure came out of the
subway’s pit, a splintery thin hurrying figure of a woman in a long
black coat under which her feet moved as fast as if four feet were
rotating on a wheel.

Then Therese turned around and saw Carol in a car drawn up by the curb
across the street. Therese walked toward her.

“Hi!” Carol called, and leaned over to open the door for her.

“Hello. I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Awfully sorry I’m late. Are you freezing?”

“No.” Therese got in and pulled the door shut. The car was warm inside,
a long dark-green car with dark-green leather upholstery. Carol drove
slowly west.

“Shall we go out to the house? Where would you like to go?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Therese said. She could see freckles along the
bridge of Carol’s nose. Her short fair hair that made Therese think of
perfume held to a light was tied back with the green and gold scarf that
circled her head like a band.

“Let’s go out to the house. It’s pretty out there.”

They drove uptown. It was like riding inside a rolling mountain that
could sweep anything before it, yet was absolutely obedient to Carol.

“Do you like driving?” Carol asked without looking at her. She had a
cigarette in her mouth. She drove with her hands resting lightly on the
wheel, as if it were nothing to her, as if she sat relaxed in a chair
somewhere, smoking. “Why’re you so quiet?”

They roared into the Lincoln Tunnel. A wild, inexplicable excitement
mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the
tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be
dragged out together. She felt Carol glancing at her from time to time.

“Have you had breakfast?”

“No, I haven’t,” Therese answered. She supposed she was pale. She had
started to have breakfast, but she had dropped the milk bottle in the
sink, and then given it all up.

“Better have some coffee. It’s there in the thermos.”

They were out of the tunnel. Carol stopped by the side of the road.

“There,” Carol said, nodding at the thermos between them on the seat.
Then Carol took the thermos herself and poured some into the cup,
steaming and light brown.

Therese looked at the coffee gratefully. “Where’d it come from?”

Carol smiled. “Do you always want to know where things come from?”

The coffee was very strong and a little sweet. It sent strength through
her. When the cup was half empty, Carol started the car. Therese was
silent. What was there to talk about? The gold four-leaf clover with
Carol’s name and address on it that dangled from the key chain on the
dashboard? The stand of Christmas trees they passed on the road? The
bird that flew by itself across a swampy looking field? No. Only the
things she had written to Carol in the unmailed letter were to be talked
about, and that was impossible.

“Do you like the country?” Carol asked as they turned into a smaller
road.

They had just driven into a little town and out of it. Now on the
driveway that made a great semicircular curve, they approached a white
two-story house that had projecting side wings like the paws of a
resting lion.

There was a metal door mat, a big shining brass mailbox, a dog barking
hollowly from around the side of the house, where a white garage showed
beyond some trees. The house smelled of some spice, Therese thought,
mingled with a separate sweetness that was not Carol’s perfume either.
Behind her, the door closed with a light, firm double report. Therese
turned and found Carol looking at her puzzledly, her lips parted a
little as if in surprise, and Therese felt that in the next second Carol
would ask, “What are you doing here?” as if she had forgotten, or had
not meant to bring her here at all.

“There’s no one here but the maid. And she’s far away,” Carol said, as
if in reply to some question of Therese’s.

“It’s a lovely house,” Therese said, and saw Carol’s little smile that
was tinged with impatience.

“Take off your coat.” Carol took the scarf from around her head and ran
her fingers through her hair. “Wouldn’t you like a little breakfast?
It’s almost noon.”

“No, thanks.”

Carol looked around the living room, and the same puzzled
dissatisfaction came back to her face. “Let’s go upstairs. It’s more
comfortable.”

Therese followed Carol up the white wooden staircase, past an oil
painting of a small girl with yellow hair and a square chin like
Carol’s, past a window where a garden with an S-shaped path, a fountain
with a blue-green statue appeared for an instant and vanished. Upstairs,
there was a short hall with four or five rooms around it. Carol went
into a room with green carpet and walls, and took a cigarette from a box
on a table. She glanced at Therese as she lighted it. Therese didn’t
know what to do or say, and she felt Carol expected her to do or say
something, anything. Therese studied the simple room with its dark-green
carpet and the long green pillowed bench along one wall. There was a
plain table of pale wood in the center. A game room, Therese thought,
though it looked more like a study with its books and music albums and
its lack of pictures.

“My favorite room,” Carol said, walking out of it. “But that’s my room
over there.”

Therese looked into the room opposite. It had flowered cotton upholstery
and plain blond woodwork like the table in the other room. There was a
long plain mirror over the dressing table, and throughout a look of
sunlight, though no sunlight was in the room. The bed was a double bed.
And there were military brushes on the dark bureau across the room.
Therese glanced in vain for a picture of him. There was a picture of
Carol on the dressing table, holding up a small girl with blond hair.
And a picture of a woman with dark curly hair, smiling broadly, in a
silver frame.

“You have a little girl, haven’t you?” Therese asked.

Carol opened a wall panel in the hall. “Yes,” she said. “Would you like
a coke?”

The hum of the refrigerator came louder now. Through all the house,
there was no sound but those they made. Therese did not want the cold
drink, but she took the bottle and carried it downstairs after Carol,
through the kitchen and into the back garden she had seen from the
window. Beyond the fountain were a lot of plants some three feet high
and wrapped in burlap bags that looked like something, standing there in
a group, Therese thought, but she didn’t know what. Carol tightened a
string that the wind had loosened. Stooped in the heavy wool skirt and
the blue cardigan sweater, her figure looked solid and strong, like her
face, but not like her slender ankles. Carol seemed oblivious of her for
several minutes, walking about slowly, planting her moccasined feet
firmly, as if in the cold flowerless garden she was at last comfortable.
It was bitterly cold without a coat, but because Carol seemed oblivious
of that, too, Therese tried to imitate her.

“What would you like to do?” Carol asked. “Take a walk? Play some
records?”

“I’m very content,” Therese told her.

She was preoccupied with something, and regretted after all inviting her
out to the house, Therese felt. They walked back to the door at the end
of the garden path.

“And how do you like your job?” Carol asked in the kitchen, still with
her air of remoteness. She was looking into the big refrigerator. She
lifted out two plates covered with wax paper. “I wouldn’t mind some
lunch, would you?”

Therese had intended to tell her about the job at the Black Cat Theatre.
That would count for something, she thought, that would be the single
important thing she could tell about herself. But this was not the time.
Now she replied slowly, trying to sound as detached as Carol, though she
heard her shyness predominating, “I suppose it’s educational. I learn
how to be a thief, a liar, and a poet all at once.” Therese leaned back
in the straight chair so her head would be in the warm square of
sunlight. She wanted to say, and how to love. She had never loved anyone
before Carol, not even Sister Alicia.

Carol looked at her. “How do you become a poet?”

“By feeling things—too much, I suppose,” Therese answered
conscientiously.

“And how do you become a thief?” Carol licked something off her thumb
and frowned. “You don’t want any caramel pudding, do you?”

“No, thank you. I haven’t stolen yet, but I’m sure it’s easy there.
There are pocketbooks all around, and one just takes something. They
steal the meat you buy for dinner.” Therese laughed. One could laugh at
it with Carol. One could laugh at anything with Carol.

They had sliced cold chicken, cranberry sauce, green olives, and crisp
white celery. But Carol left her lunch and went into the living room.
She came back carrying a glass with some whisky in it, and added some
water to it from the tap. Therese watched her. Then for a long moment,
they looked at each other, Carol standing in the doorway and Therese at
the table, looking over her shoulder, not eating.

Carol asked quietly, “Do you meet a lot of people across the counter
this way? Don’t you have to be careful whom you start talking to?”

“Oh, yes,” Therese smiled.

“Or whom you go out to lunch with?” Carol’s eyes sparkled. “You might
run into a kidnaper.” She rolled the drink around in the iceless glass,
then drank it off, the thin silver bracelets on her wrist rattling
against the glass. “Well—do you meet many people this way?”

“No,” Therese said.

“Not many? Just three or four?”

“Like you?” Therese met her eyes steadily.

And Carol looked fixedly at her, as if she demanded another word,
another phrase from Therese. But then she set the glass down on the
stove top and turned away. “Do you play the piano?”

“Some.”

“Come and play something.” And when Therese started to refuse, she said
imperatively, “Oh, I don’t care how you play. Just play something.”

Therese played some Scarlatti she had learned at the Home. In a chair on
the other side of the room, Carol sat listening relaxed and motionless,
not even sipping the new glass of whisky and water. Therese played the C
major Sonata, which was slowish and rather simple, full of broken
octaves, but it struck her as dull, then pretentious in the trill parts,
and she stopped. It was suddenly too much, her hands on the keyboard
that she knew Carol played, Carol watching her with her eyes half
closed, Carol’s whole house around her, and the music that made her
abandon herself, made her defenseless. With a gasp, she dropped her
hands in her lap.

“Are you tired?” Carol asked calmly.

The question seemed not of now but of always. “Yes.”

Carol came up behind her and set her hands on Therese’s shoulders.
Therese could see her hands in her memory—flexible and strong, the
delicate tendons showing as they pressed her shoulders. It seemed an age
as her hands moved toward her neck and under her chin, an age of tumult
so intense it blotted out the pleasure of Carol’s tipping her head back
and kissing her lightly at the edge of her hair. Therese did not feel
the kiss at all.

“Come with me,” Carol said.

She went with Carol upstairs again. Therese pulled herself up by the
banister and was reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.

“I think a nap wouldn’t hurt you,” Carol said, turning down the flowered
cotton bedspread and the top blanket.

“Thanks, I’m not really—”

“Slip your shoes off,” Carol said softly, but in a tone that commanded
obedience.

Therese looked at the bed. She had hardly slept the night before. “I
don’t think I shall sleep, but if I do—”

“I’ll wake you in half an hour.” Carol pulled the blanket over her when
she lay down. Carol sat down on the edge of the bed. “How old are you,
Therese?”

Therese looked up at her, unable to bear her eyes now but bearing them
nevertheless, not caring if she died that instant, if Carol strangled
her, prostrate and vulnerable in her bed, the intruder. “Nineteen.” How
old it sounded. Older than ninety-one.

Carol’s eyebrows frowned, though she smiled a little. Therese felt that
she thought of something so intensely, one might have touched the
thought in the air between them. Then Carol slipped her hands under her
shoulders, and bent her head down to Therese’s throat, and Therese felt
the tension go out of Carol’s body with the sigh that made her neck
warm, that carried the perfume that was in Carol’s hair.

“You’re a child,” Carol said, like a reproach. She lifted her head.
“What would you like?”

Therese remembered what she had thought of in the restaurant, and she
set her teeth in shame.

“What would you like?” Carol repeated.

“Nothing, thanks.”

Carol got up and went to her dressing table and lighted a cigarette.
Therese watched her through half-closed lids, worried by Carol’s
restlessness, though she loved the cigarette, loved to see her smoke.

“What would you like, a drink?”

Therese knew she meant water. She knew from the tenderness and the
concern in her voice, as if she were a child sick with fever. Then
Therese said it: “I think I’d like some hot milk.”

The corner of Carol’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Some hot milk,” she
mocked. Then she left the room.

And Therese lay in a limbo of anxiety and sleepiness all the long while
until Carol reappeared with the milk in a straight-sided white cup with
a saucer under it, holding the saucer and the cup handle, and closing
the door with her foot.

“I let it boil and it’s got a scum on it,” Carol said annoyedly. “I’m
sorry.”

But Therese loved it, because she knew this was exactly what Carol would
always do, be thinking of something else and let the milk boil.

“Is that the way you like it? Plain like that?”

Therese nodded.

“Ug,” Carol said, and sat down on the arm of a chair and watched her.

Therese was propped on one elbow. The milk was so hot, she could barely
let her lip touch it at first. The tiny sips spread inside her mouth and
released a melange of organic flavors. The milk seemed to taste of bone
and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a
growing embryo. It was hot through and through to the bottom of the cup,
and Therese drank it down, as people in fairy tales drink the potion
that will transform, or the unsuspecting warrior the cup that will kill.
Then Carol came and took the cup, and Therese was drowsily aware that
Carol asked her three questions, one that had to do with happiness, one
about the store, and one about the future. Therese heard herself
answering. She heard her voice rise suddenly in a babble, like a spring
that she had no control over, and she realized she was in tears. She was
telling Carol all that she feared and disliked, of her loneliness, of
Richard, and of gigantic disappointments. And of her parents. Her mother
was not dead. But Therese had not seen her since she was fourteen.

Carol questioned her, and she answered, though she did not want to talk
about her mother. Her mother was not that important, not even one of the
disappointments. Her father was. Her father was quite different. He had
died when she was six—a lawyer of Czechoslovakian descent who all his
life had wanted to be a painter. He had been quite different, gentle,
sympathetic, never raising his voice in anger against the woman who had
nagged at him, because he had been neither a good lawyer nor a good
painter. He had never been strong, he had died of pneumonia, but in
Therese’s mind, her mother had killed him. Carol questioned and
questioned her, and Therese told of her mother’s bringing her to the
school in Montclair when she was eight, of her mother’s infrequent
visits afterward, for her mother had traveled a great deal around the
country. She had been a pianist—no, not a first-rate one, how could she
be, but she had always found work because she was pushing. And when
Therese was about ten, her mother had remarried. Therese had visited at
her mother’s house in Long Island in the Christmas holidays, and they
had asked her to stay with them, but not as if they wanted her to stay.
And Therese had not liked the husband, Nick, because he was exactly like
her mother, big and dark haired, with a loud voice, and violent and
passionate gestures. Therese was sure their marriage would be perfect.
Her mother had been pregnant even then, and now there were two children.
After a week with them, Therese had returned to the Home. There had been
perhaps three or four visits from her mother afterward, always with some
present for her, a blouse, a book, once a cosmetic kit that Therese had
loathed simply because it reminded her of her mother’s brittle,
mascaraed eye-lashes, presents handed her self-consciously by her
mother, like hypocritical peace offerings. Once her mother had brought
the little boy, her half brother, and then Therese had known she was an
outsider. Her mother had not loved her father, had chosen to leave her
at a school when she was eight, and why did she bother now even to visit
her, to claim her at all? Therese would have been happier to have no
parents, like half the girls in the school. Finally, Therese had told
her mother she did not want her to visit again, and her mother hadn’t,
and the ashamed, resentful expression, the nervous sidewise glance of
the brown eyes, the twitch of a smile and the silence—that was the last
she remembered of her mother. Then she had become fifteen. The sisters
at the school had known her mother was not writing. They had asked her
to write, and she had, but Therese had not answered. Then when
graduation came, when she was seventeen, the school had asked her mother
for two hundred dollars. Therese hadn’t wanted any money from her, had
half believed her mother wouldn’t give her any, but she had, and Therese
had taken it.

“I’m sorry I took it. I never told anyone but you. Some day I want to
give it back.”

“Nonsense,” Carol said softly. She was sitting on the arm of the chair,
resting her chin in her hand, her eyes fixed on Therese, smiling. “You
were still a child. When you forget about paying her back, then you’ll
be an adult.”

Therese did not answer.

“Don’t you think you’ll ever want to see her again? Maybe in a few years
from now?”

Therese shook her head. She smiled, but the tears still oozed out of her
eyes. “I don’t want to talk any more about it.”

“Does Richard know all this?”

“No. Just that she’s alive. Does it matter? This isn’t what matters.”
She felt if she wept enough, it would all go out of her, the tiredness
and the loneliness and the disappointment, as though it were in the
tears themselves. And she was glad Carol left her alone to do it now.
Carol was standing by the dressing table, her back to her. Therese lay
rigid in the bed, propped up on her elbow, racked with the
half-suppressed sobs.

“I’ll never cry again,” she said.

“Yes, you will.” And a match scraped.

Therese took another cleansing tissue from the bed table and blew her
nose.

“Who else is in your life besides Richard?” Carol asked.

She had fled them all. There had been Lily, and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in
the house where she had first lived in New York. Frances Cotter and Tim
at the Pelican Press. Lois Vavrica, a girl who had been at the Home in
Montclair, too. Now who was there? The Kellys who lived on the second
floor at Mrs. Osborne’s. And Richard. “When I was fired from that job
last month,” Therese said, “I was ashamed and I moved—” She stopped.

“Moved where?”

“I didn’t tell anyone where, except Richard. I just disappeared. I
suppose it was my idea of starting a new life, but mostly I was ashamed.
I didn’t want anyone to know where I was.”

Carol smiled. “Disappeared! I like that. And how lucky you are to be
able to do it. You’re free. Do you realize that?”

Therese said nothing.

“No,” Carol answered herself.

Beside Carol on the dressing table, a square gray clock ticked faintly,
and as Therese had done a thousand times in the store, she read the time
and attached a meaning to it. It was four fifteen and a little more, and
suddenly she was anxious lest she had lain there too long, lest Carol
might be expecting someone to come to the house.

Then the telephone rang, sudden and long like the shriek of a hysterical
woman in the hall, and they saw each other start.

Carol stood up, and slapped something twice in her palm, as she had
slapped the gloves in her palm in the store. The telephone screamed
again, and Therese was sure Carol was going to throw whatever it was she
held in her hand, throw it across the room against the wall. But Carol
only turned and laid the thing down quietly, and left the room.

Therese could hear Carol’s voice in the hall. She did not want to hear
what she was saying. She got up and put her skirt and her shoes on. Now
she saw what Carol had held in her hand. It was a shoehorn of
tan-colored wood. Anyone else would have thrown it, Therese thought.
Then she knew one word for what she felt about Carol: pride. She heard
Carol’s voice repeating the same tones, and now opening the door to
leave, she heard the words, “I have a guest,” for the third time calmly
presented as a barrier. “I think it’s an excellent reason. What
better?... What’s the matter with tomorrow? If you—”

Then there was no sound until Carol’s first step on the stair, and
Therese knew whoever had been talking to her had hung up on her. Who
dared, Therese wondered.

“Shouldn’t I leave?” Therese asked.

Carol looked at her in the same way she had when they first entered the
house. “Not unless you want to. No. We’ll take a drive later, if you
want to.”

She knew Carol did not want to take another drive. Therese started to
straighten the bed.

“Leave the bed.” Carol was watching her from the hall. “Just close the
door.”

“Who is it that’s coming?”

Carol turned and went into the green room. “My husband,” she said.
“Hargess.”

Then the doorbell chimed downstairs, and the latch clicked at the same
time.

“No end prompt today,” Carol murmured. “Come down, Therese.”

Therese felt sick with dread suddenly, not of the man but of Carol’s
annoyance at his coming.

He was coming up the stairs. When he saw Therese, he slowed, and a faint
surprise crossed his face, and then he looked at Carol.

“Harge, this is Miss Belivet,” Carol said. “Mr. Aird.”

“How do you do?” Therese said.

Harge only glanced at Therese, but his nervous blue eyes inspected her
from head to toe. He was a heavily built man with a rather pink face.
One eyebrow was set higher than the other, rising in an alert peak in
the center, as if it might have been distorted by a scar. “How do you
do?” Then to Carol, “I’m sorry to disturb you. I only wanted to get one
or two things.” He went past her and opened the door to a room Therese
had not seen. “Things for Rindy,” he added.

“Pictures on the wall?” Carol asked.

The man was silent.

Carol and Therese went downstairs. In the living room Carol sat down,
but Therese did not.

“Play some more, if you like,” Carol said.

Therese shook her head.

“Play some,” Carol said firmly.

Therese was frightened by the sudden white anger in her eyes. “I can’t,”
Therese said, stubborn as a mule.

And Carol subsided. Carol even smiled.

They heard Harge’s quick steps cross the hall and stop, then descend the
stairs slowly. Therese saw his dark clad figure and then his pinkish
blond head appear.

“I can’t find that watercolor set. I thought it was in my room,” he said
complainingly.

“I know where it is.” Carol got up and started toward the stairs.

“I suppose you want me to take her something for Christmas,” Harge said.

“Thanks, I’ll give the things to her.” Carol went up the stairs.

They are just divorced, Therese thought, or about to be divorced.

Harge looked at Therese, almost offered her his cigarette case, and
didn’t. He had an intense expression that curiously mingled anxiety and
boredom. The flesh around his mouth was firm and heavy, rounding into
the line of his mouth so that he seemed lipless. He lighted a cigarette
for himself. “Are you from New York?” he asked.

Therese felt the disdain and incivility in the question, like the sting
of a slap in the face. “Yes, from New York,” she answered.

He was on the brink of another question to her, when Carol came down the
stairs. Therese had steeled herself to be alone with him for minutes.
Now she shuddered as she relaxed, and she knew that he saw it.

“Thanks,” Harge said as he took the box from Carol. He walked to his
overcoat that Therese had noticed on the loveseat, sprawled open with
its black arms spread as if it were fighting and would take possession
of the house. “Good-by,” Harge said to her. He put the overcoat on as he
walked to the door. “Friend of Abby’s?” he murmured to Carol.

“A friend of mine,” Carol answered.

“Are you going to take the presents to Rindy? When?”

“What if I gave her nothing, Harge?”

“Carol—” He stopped on the porch, and Therese barely heard him say
something about making things unpleasant. Then, “I’m going to see
Cynthia now. Can I stop by on the way back? It’ll be before eight.”

“Harge, what’s the purpose?” Carol said wearily. “Especially when you’re
so disagreeable.”

“Because it concerns Rindy.” Then his voice faded unintelligibly.

Then an instant later, Carol came in alone and closed the door. Carol
stood against the door with her hands behind her, and they heard the car
outside leaving. Carol must have agreed to see him tonight, Therese
thought.

“I’ll go,” Therese said. Carol said nothing. There was a deadness in the
silence between them now, and Therese grew more uneasy. “I’d better go,
hadn’t I?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Harge. He’s not always so rude. It was
a mistake to say I had any guest here at all.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Carol’s forehead wrinkled and she said with difficulty, “Do you mind if
I put you on the train tonight, instead of driving you home?”

“No.” She couldn’t have borne Carol’s driving her home and driving back
alone tonight in the darkness.

They were silent also in the car. Therese opened the door as soon as the
car stopped at the station.

“There’s a train in about four minutes,” Carol said.

Therese blurted suddenly, “Will I see you again?”

Carol only smiled at her, a little reproachfully, as the window between
them rose up. “Au revoir,” she said.

Of course, of course, she would see her again, Therese thought. An
idiotic question!

The car backed fast and turned away into the darkness.

Therese longed for the store again, longed for Monday, because Carol
might come in again on Monday. But it wasn’t likely. Tuesday was
Christmas Eve. Certainly she could telephone Carol by Tuesday, if only
to wish her a merry Christmas.

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and
all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark
flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped
and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed
and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line,
carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright
forest with a million shimmering leaves.




                             chapter seven


The man looked at it, holding it carelessly between thumb and
forefinger. He was bald except for long strands of black hair that grew
from a former brow line, plastered sweatily down over the naked scalp.
His underlip was thrust out with the contempt and negation that had
fixed itself on his face as soon as Therese had come to the counter and
spoken her first words.

“No,” he said at last.

“Can’t you give me anything for it?” Therese asked.

The lip came out farther. “Maybe fifty cents.” And he tossed it back
across the counter.

Therese’s fingers crept over it possessively. “Well, what about this?”
From her coat pocket she dragged up the silver chain with the St.
Christopher medallion.

Again the thumb and forefinger were eloquent of scorn, turning the coin
like filth. “Two fifty.”

But it cost at least twenty dollars, Therese started to say, but she
didn’t because that was what everybody said. “Thanks.” She picked up the
chain and went out.

Who were all the lucky people, she wondered, who had managed to sell
their old pocketknives, broken wrist watches and carpenters’ planes that
hung in clumps in the front window? She could not resist looking back
through the window, finding the man’s face again under the row of
hanging hunting knives. The man was looking at her, too, smiling at her.
She felt he understood every move she made. Therese hurried down the
sidewalk.

In ten minutes, Therese was back. She pawned the silver medallion for
two dollars and fifty cents.

She hurried westward, ran across Lexington Avenue, then Park, and turned
down Madison. She clutched the little box in her pocket until its sharp
edges cut her fingers. Sister Beatrice had given it to her. It was
inlaid brown wood and mother-of-pearl, in a checked pattern. She didn’t
know what it was worth in money, but she had assumed it was rather
precious. Well, now she knew it wasn’t. She went into a leather goods
shop.

“I’d like to see the black one in the window—the one with the strap and
the gold buckles,” Therese said to the salesgirl.

It was the handbag she had noticed last Saturday morning on the way to
meet Carol for lunch. It had looked like Carol, just at a glance. She
had thought, even if Carol didn’t keep the appointment that day, if she
could never see Carol again, she must buy the bag and send it to her
anyway.

“I’ll take it,” Therese said.

“That’s seventy-one eighteen with the tax,” the salesgirl said. “Do you
want that gift wrapped?”

“Yes, please.” Therese counted six crisp ten-dollar bills across the
counter and the rest in singles. “Can I leave it here till about six
thirty tonight?”

Therese left the shop with the receipt in her billfold. It wouldn’t do
to risk bringing the handbag into the store. It might be stolen, even if
it was Christmas Eve. Therese smiled. It was her last day of work at the
store. And in four more days came the job at the Black Cat. Phil was
going to bring her a copy of the play the day after Christmas.

She passed Brentano’s. Its window was full of satin ribbons,
leather-bound books, and pictures of knights in armor. Therese turned
back and went into the store, not to buy but to look, just for a moment,
to see if there was anything here more beautiful than the handbag.

An illustration in one of the counter displays caught her eye. It was a
young knight on a white horse, riding through a bouquetlike forest,
followed by a line of page boys, the last bearing a cushion with a gold
ring on it. She took the leather-bound book in her hand. The price
inside the cover was twenty-five dollars. If she simply went to the bank
now and got twenty-five dollars more, she could buy it. What was
twenty-five dollars? She hadn’t needed to pawn the silver medallion. She
knew she had pawned it only because it was from Richard, and she didn’t
want it any longer. She closed the book and looked at the edges of the
pages that were like a concave bar of gold. But would Carol really like
it, a book of love poems of the middle ages? She didn’t know. She
couldn’t remember the slightest clue as to Carol’s taste in books. She
put the book down hurriedly and left.

Upstairs in the doll department, Miss Santini was strolling along behind
the counter, offering everybody candy from a big box.

“Take two,” she said to Therese. “Candy department sent ’em up.”

“I don’t mind if I do.” Imagine, she thought, biting into a nougat, the
Christmas spirit had struck the candy department. There was a strange
atmosphere in the store today. It was unusually quiet, first of all.
There were plenty of customers, but they didn’t seem in a hurry, even
though it was Christmas Eve. Therese glanced at the elevators, looking
for Carol. If Carol didn’t come in, and she probably wouldn’t, Therese
was going to telephone her at six thirty, just to wish her a happy
Christmas. Therese knew her telephone number. She had seen it on the
telephone at the house.

“Miss Belivet!” Mrs. Hendrickson’s voice called, and Therese jumped to
attention. But Mrs. Hendrickson only waved her hand for the benefit of
the Western Union messenger who laid a telegram in front of Therese.

Therese signed for it in a scribble, and tore it open. It said:

   MEET YOU DOWNSTAIRS AT 5PM. CAROL.

Therese crushed it in her hand. She pressed it hard with her thumb into
her palm, and watched the messenger boy who was really an old man walk
back toward the elevators. He walked ploddingly, with a stoop that
thrust his knees far ahead of him, and his puttees were loose and
wobbly.

“You look happy,” Mrs. Zabriskie said dismally to her as she went by.

Therese smiled. “I am.” Mrs. Zabriskie had a two months’ old baby, she
had told Therese, and her husband was out of work now. Therese wondered
if Mrs. Zabriskie and her husband were in love with each other, and
really happy. Perhaps they were, but there was nothing in Mrs.
Zabriskie’s blank face and her plodding walk that would suggest it.
Perhaps once Mrs. Zabriskie had been as happy as she. Perhaps it had
gone away. She remembered reading—even Richard once saying—that love
usually dies after two years of marriage. That was a cruel thing, a
trick. She tried to imagine Carol’s face, the smell of her perfume,
becoming meaningless. But in the first place could she say she was in
love with Carol? She had come to a question she could not answer.

At a quarter to five, Therese went to Mrs. Hendrickson and asked
permission to leave a half hour early. Mrs. Hendrickson might have
thought the telegram had something to do with it, but she let Therese go
without even a complaining look, and that was another thing that made
the day a strange one.

Carol was waiting for her in the foyer where they had met before.

“Hello!” Therese said. “I’m through.”

“Through what?”

“Through with working. Here.” But Carol seemed depressed, and it
dampened Therese instantly. She said anyway, “I was awfully happy to get
the telegram.”

“I didn’t know if you’d be free. Are you free tonight?”

“Of course.”

And they walked on, slowly, amid the jostling crowd, Carol in her
delicate looking suede pumps that made her a couple of inches taller
than Therese. It had begun to snow about an hour before, but it was
stopping already. The snow was no more than a film underfoot, like thin
white wool drawn across the street and sidewalk.

“We might have seen Abby tonight, but she’s busy,” Carol said. “Anyway,
we can take a drive, if you’d like. It’s good to see you. You’re an
angel to be free tonight. Do you know what?”

“No,” Therese said, still happy in spite of herself, though Carol’s mood
was disquieting. Therese felt something had happened.

“Do you suppose there’s a place to get a cup of coffee around here?”

“Yes. A little farther east.”

Therese was thinking of one of the sandwich shops between Fifth and
Madison, but Carol chose a small bar with an awning in front. The waiter
was reluctant at first, and said it was the cocktail hour, but when
Carol started to leave, he went away and got the coffee. Therese was
anxious about picking up the handbag. She didn’t want to do it when
Carol was with her, even though the package would be wrapped.

“Did something happen?” Therese asked.

“Something too long to explain.” Carol smiled at her but the smile was
tired, and a silence followed, an empty silence as if they traveled
through space away from each other.

Probably Carol had had to break an engagement she had looked forward to,
Therese thought. Carol would of course be busy on Christmas Eve.

“I’m not keeping you from doing anything now?” Carol asked.

Therese felt herself growing tense, helplessly. “I’m supposed to pick up
a package on Madison Avenue. It’s not far. I can do it now, if you’ll
wait for me.”

“All right.”

Therese stood up. “I can do it in three minutes with a taxi. But I don’t
think you will wait for me, will you?”

Carol smiled and reached for her hand. Indifferently, Carol squeezed her
hand and dropped it. “Yes, I’ll wait.”

The bored tone of Carol’s voice was in her ears as she sat on the edge
of the taxi seat. On the way back, the traffic was so slow, she got out
and ran the last block.

Carol was still there, her coffee only half finished.

“I don’t want my coffee,” Therese said, because Carol seemed ready to
go.

“My car’s downtown. Let’s get a taxi down.”

They went down into the business section not far from the Battery.
Carol’s car was brought up from an underground garage. Carol drove west
to the Westside Highway.

“This is better.” Carol shed her coat as she drove. “Throw it in back,
will you?”

And they were silent again. Carol drove faster, changing her lane to
pass cars, as if they had a destination. Therese set herself to say
something, anything at all, by the time they reached the George
Washington Bridge. Suddenly it occurred to her that if Carol and her
husband were divorcing, Carol had been downtown to see a lawyer today.
The district there was full of law offices. And something had gone
wrong. Why were they divorcing? Because Harge was having an affair with
the woman called Cynthia? Therese was cold. Carol had lowered the window
beside her, and every time the car sped, the wind burst through and
wrapped its cold arms around her.

“That’s where Abby lives,” Carol said, nodding across the river.

Therese did not even see any special lights. “Who’s Abby?”

“Abby? My best friend.” Then Carol looked at her. “Aren’t you cold with
this window open?”

“No.”

“You must be.” They stopped for a red light, and Carol rolled the window
up. Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the first time that
evening, and under her eyes that went from her face to her hands in her
lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had bought at a roadside kennel,
that Carol had just remembered was riding beside her.

“What happened, Carol? Are you getting a divorce now?”

Carol sighed. “Yes, a divorce,” she said quite calmly, and started the
car.

“And he has the child?”

“Just tonight.”

Therese was about to ask another question, when Carol said, “Let’s talk
about something else.”

A car went by with the radio playing Christmas carols and everyone
singing.

And she and Carol were silent. They drove past Yonkers, and it seemed to
Therese she had left every chance of talking further to Carol somewhere
behind on the road. Carol insisted suddenly that she should eat
something, because it was getting on to eight, so they stopped at a
little restaurant by the roadside, a place that sold fried-clam
sandwiches. They sat at the counter and ordered sandwiches and coffee,
but Carol did not eat. Carol asked her questions about Richard, not in
the concerned way she had Sunday afternoon, but rather as if she talked
to keep Therese from asking more questions about her. They were personal
questions, yet Therese answered them mechanically and impersonally.
Carol’s quiet voice went on and on, much quieter than the voice of the
counter boy talking with someone three yards away.

“Do you sleep with him?” Carol asked her.

“I did. Two or three times.” Therese told her about those times, the
first time and the three times afterward. She was not embarrassed,
talking about it. It had never seemed so dull and unimportant before.
She felt Carol could imagine every minute of those evenings. She felt
Carol’s objective, appraising glance over her, and she knew Carol was
about to say she did not look particularly cold, or perhaps, emotionally
starved. But Carol was silent, and Therese stared uncomfortably at the
list of songs on the little music box in front of her. She remembered
someone telling her once she had a passionate mouth, she couldn’t
remember who.

“Sometimes it takes time,” Carol said. “Don’t you believe in giving
people another chance?”

“But why? It isn’t pleasant. And I’m not in love with him.”

“Don’t you think you might be, if you got this worked out?”

“Is that the way people fall in love?”

Carol looked up at the deer’s head on the wall behind the counter. “No,”
she said, smiling. “What do you like about Richard?”

“Well, he has—” But she wasn’t sure if it really was sincerity. He
wasn’t sincere, she felt, about his ambition to be a painter. “I like
his attitude—more than most men’s. He does treat me like a person
instead of just a girl he can go so far with or not. And I like his
family—the fact that he has a family.”

“Lots of people have families.”

Therese tried again. “He’s flexible. He changes. He’s not like most men
that you can label doctor or—or insurance salesman.”

“I think you know him better than I knew Harge after months of marriage.
At least you’re not going to make the same mistake I did, to marry
because it was the thing to do when you were about twenty, among the
people I knew.”

“You mean you weren’t in love?”

“Yes, I was, very much. And so was Harge. And he was the kind of man who
could wrap your life up in a week and put it in his pocket. Were you
ever in love, Therese?”

She waited, until the word from nowhere, false, guilty, moved her lips,
“No.”

“But you’d like to be.” Carol was smiling.

“Is Harge still in love with you?”

Carol looked down at her lap, impatiently, and perhaps she was shocked
at her bluntness, Therese thought, but when Carol spoke, her voice was
the same as before, “Even I don’t know. In a way, he’s the same
emotionally as he’s always been. It’s just that now I can see how he
really is. He said I was the first woman he’d ever been in love with. I
think it’s true, but I don’t think he was in love with me—in the usual
sense of the word—for more than a few months. He’s never been interested
in anyone else, it’s true. Maybe he’d be more human if he were. That I
could understand and forgive.”

“Does he like Rindy?”

“Dotes on her.” Carol glanced at her smiling. “If he’s in love with
anyone, it’s Rindy.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“Nerinda. Harge named her. He wanted a son, but I think he’s even more
pleased with a daughter. I wanted a girl. I wanted two or three
children.”

“And—Harge didn’t?”

“I didn’t.” She looked at Therese again. “Is this the right conversation
for Christmas Eve?” Carol reached for a cigarette, and accepted the one
Therese offered her, a Philip Morris.

“I like to know all about you,” Therese said.

“I didn’t want any more children, because I was afraid our marriage was
going on the rocks anyway, even with Rindy. So you want to fall in love?
You probably will soon, and if you do, enjoy it, it’s harder later on.”

“To love someone?”

“To fall in love. Or even to have the desire to make love. I think sex
flows more sluggishly in all of us than we care to believe, especially
men care to believe. The first adventures are usually nothing but a
satisfying of curiosity, and after that one keeps repeating the same
actions, trying to find—what?”

“What?” Therese asked.

“Is there a word? A friend, a companion, or maybe just a sharer. What
good are words? I mean, I think people often try to find through sex,
things that are much easier to find in other ways.”

What Carol said about curiosity, she knew was true. “What other ways?”
she asked.

Carol gave her a glance. “I think that’s for each person to find out. I
wonder if I can get a drink here.”

But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did
not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back toward New York.
Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to her house for a
while, and Therese said to Carol’s house. She remembered the Kellys had
asked her to drop in on the wine and fruitcake party they were having
tonight, and she had promised to, but they wouldn’t miss her, she
thought.

“What a rotten time I give you,” Carol said suddenly. “Sunday and now
this. I’m not the best company this evening. What would you like to do?
Would you like to go to a restaurant in Newark where they have lights
and Christmas music tonight? It’s not a night club. We could have a
decent dinner there, too.”

“I really don’t care about going anywhere—for myself.”

“You’ve been in that rotten store all day, and we haven’t done a thing
to celebrate your liberation.”

“I just like to be here with you,” Therese said, and hearing the
explanatory tone in her voice, she smiled.

Carol shook her head, not looking at her. “Child, child, where do you
wander—all by yourself?”

Then a moment later on the New Jersey highway, Carol said, “I know
what.” And she turned the car into a graveled section off the road and
stopped. “Come out with me.”

They were in front of a lighted stand piled high with Christmas trees.
Carol told her to pick a tree, one not too big and not too small. They
put the tree in the back of the car, and Therese sat in front beside
Carol with her arms full of holly and fir branches. Therese pressed her
face into them and inhaled the dark-green sharpness of their smell,
their clean spice that was like a wild forest and like all the artifices
of Christmas—tree baubles, gifts, snow, Christmas music, holidays. It
was being through with the store and being beside Carol now. It was the
purr of the car’s engine, and the needles of the fir branches that she
could touch with her fingers. I am happy, I am happy, Therese thought.

“Let’s do the tree now,” Carol said as soon as they entered the house.

Carol turned the radio on in the living room, and fixed a drink for both
of them. There were Christmas songs on the radio, bells breaking
resonantly, as if they were inside a great church. Carol brought a
blanket of white cotton for the snow around the tree, and Therese
sprinkled it with sugar so it would glisten. Then she cut an elongated
angel out of some gold ribbon and fixed it to the top of the tree, and
folded tissue paper and cut a string of angels to thread along the
branches.

“You’re very good at that,” Carol said, surveying the tree from the
hearth. “It’s superb. Everything but presents.”

Carol’s present was on the sofa beside Therese’s coat. The card she had
made for it was at home, however, and she didn’t want to give it without
the card. Therese looked at the tree. “What else do we need?”

“Nothing. Do you know what time it is?”

The radio had signed off. Therese saw the mantel clock. It was after
one. “It’s Christmas,” she said.

“You’d better stay the night.”

“All right.”

“What do you have to do tomorrow?”

“Nothing.”

Carol got her drink from the radio top. “Don’t you have to see Richard?”

She did have to see Richard, at twelve noon. She was to spend the day at
his house. But she could make some kind of excuse. “No. I said I might
see him. It’s not important.”

“I can drive you in early.”

“Are you busy tomorrow?”

Carol finished the last inch of her drink. “Yes,” she said.

Therese began to clean up the mess she had made, the scraps of tissue
and snippets of ribbon. She hated cleaning up after making something.

“Your friend Richard sounds like the kind of man who needs a woman
around him to work for. Whether he marries her or not,” Carol said.
“Isn’t he like that?”

Why talk of Richard now, Therese thought irritably. She felt that Carol
liked Richard—which could only be her own fault—and a distant jealousy
prickled her, sharp as a pin.

“Actually, I admire that more than the men who live alone or think they
live alone, and end by making the stupidest blunders with women.”

Therese stared at Carol’s pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She
had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She could find Carol’s
perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of evergreen, and she
wanted to follow it, to put her arms around Carol.

“It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?”

“What?” Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.

“Harge is the kind of man who doesn’t let a woman enter his life. And on
the other hand, your friend Richard might never marry. But the pleasure
Richard will get out of thinking he wants to marry.” Carol looked at
Therese from head to foot. “The wrong girls,” she added. “Do you dance,
Therese? Do you like to dance?”

Carol seemed suddenly cool and bitter, and Therese could have wept.
“No,” she said. She should never have told her anything about Richard,
Therese thought, but now it was done.

“You’re tired. Come on to bed.”

Carol took her to the room that Harge had gone into Sunday, and turned
down the covers of one of the twin beds. It might have been Harge’s
room, Therese thought. There was certainly nothing about it that
suggested a child’s room. She thought of Rindy’s possessions that Harge
had taken from this room, and imagined Harge moving first from the
bedroom he shared with Carol, then letting Rindy bring her things into
this room, keeping them here, closing himself and Rindy away from Carol.

Carol laid some pajamas on the foot of the bed. “Good night, then,” she
said at the door. “Merry Christmas. What do you want for Christmas?”

Therese smiled suddenly. “Nothing.”

That night she dreamed of birds, long, bright red birds like flamingos,
zipping through a black forest and making scallopy patterns, arcs of red
that curved like their cries. Then her eyes opened and she heard it
really, a soft whistle curving, rising and coming down again with an
extra note at the end, and behind it the real, feebler twitter of birds.
The window was a bright gray. The whistling began again, just below the
window, and Therese got out of bed. There was a long open-topped car in
the driveway, and a woman standing in it, whistling. It was like a dream
she looked out on, a scene without color, misty at the edges.

Then she heard Carol’s whisper, as clearly as if all three of them were
in the same room together, “Are you going to bed or getting up?”

The woman in the car with her foot on the seat said just as softly,
“Both,” and Therese heard the tremor of repressed laughter in the word
and liked her instantly. “Go for a ride?” the woman asked. She was
looking up at Carol’s window with a big smile that Therese had just
begun to see.

“You nitwit,” Carol whispered.

“You alone?”

“No.”

“Oh-oh.”

“It’s all right. Do you want to come in?”

The woman got out of the car.

Therese went to the door of her room and opened it. Carol was just
coming into the hall, tying the belt of her robe.

“Sorry I wakened you,” Carol said. “Go back to bed.”

“I don’t mind. Can I come down?”

“Well, of _course_!” Carol smiled suddenly. “Get a robe out of the
closet.”

Therese got a robe, probably a robe of Harge’s, she thought, and went
downstairs.

“Who made the Christmas tree?” the woman was asking.

They were in the living room.

“She did.” Carol turned to Therese. “This is Abby. Abby Gerhard, Therese
Belivet.”

“Hello,” Abby said.

“How do you do.” Therese had hoped it was Abby. Abby looked at her now
with the same bright, rather popeyed expression of amusement that
Therese had seen when she stood in the car.

“You make a fine tree,” Abby told her.

“Will everybody stop whispering?” Carol asked.

Abby chafed her hands together and followed Carol into the kitchen. “Got
any coffee, Carol?”

Therese stood by the kitchen table, watching them, feeling at ease
because Abby paid no further attention to her, only took off her coat
and started helping Carol with the coffee. Her waist and hips looked
perfectly cylindrical, without any front or back, under her purple
knitted suit. Her hands were a little clumsy, Therese noticed, and her
feet had none of the grace of Carol’s. She looked older than Carol, and
there were two wrinkles across her forehead that cut deep when she
laughed and her strong arched eyebrows rose higher. And she and Carol
kept laughing now, while they fixed coffee and squeezed orange juice,
talking in short phrases about nothing, or nothing that was important
enough to be followed.

Except Abby’s sudden, “Well”—fishing a seed out of the last glass of
orange juice and wiping her finger carelessly on her own dress—“how’s
old Harge?”

“The same,” Carol said. Carol was looking for something in the
refrigerator, and watching her, Therese failed to hear all of what Abby
said next, or maybe it was another of the fragmentary sentences that
Carol alone understood, but it made Carol straighten up and laugh,
suddenly and hard, made her whole face change, and Therese thought with
sudden envy, she could not make Carol laugh like that, but Abby could.

“I’m going to tell him that,” Carol said. “I can’t resist.”

It was something about a Boy Scout pocket gadget for Harge.

“And tell him where it came from,” Abby said, looking at Therese and
smiling broadly, as if she should share in the joke, too. “Where’re you
from?” she asked Therese as they sat down in the table alcove at one
side of the kitchen.

“She’s from New York,” Carol answered for her, and Therese thought Abby
was going to say, why how unusual, or something silly, but Abby said
nothing at all, only looked at Therese with the same expectant smile, as
if she awaited the next cue from her.

For all their fussing about breakfast, there was only orange juice and
coffee and some unbuttered toast that nobody wanted. Abby lighted a
cigarette before she touched anything.

“Are you old enough to smoke?” she asked Therese, offering her a red box
that said Craven A’s.

Carol put her spoon down. “Abby, what is this?” she asked with an air of
embarrassment that Therese had never seen before.

“Thanks, I’d like one,” Therese said, taking a cigarette.

Abby settled her elbows on the table. “Well, what’s what?” she asked
Carol.

“I suspect you’re a little tight,” Carol said.

“Driving for hours in the open air? I left New Rochelle at two, got home
and found your message, and here I am.”

She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably
did nothing all day except what she felt like doing.

“Well?” Abby said.

“Well—I didn’t win the first round,” Carol said.

Abby drew on her cigarette, showing no surprise at all. “For how long?”

“For three months.”

“Starting when?”

“Starting now. Starting last night, in fact.” Carol glanced at Therese,
then looked down at her coffee cup, and Therese knew Carol would not say
any more with her sitting there.

“That’s not set already, is it?” Abby asked.

“I’m afraid it is,” Carol answered casually, with a shrug in her tone.
“Just verbally, but it’ll hold. What’re you doing tonight? Late.”

“I’m not doing anything early. Dinner’s at two today.”

“Call me sometime.”

“Sure.”

Carol kept her eyes down, looking down at the orange juice glass in her
hand, and Therese saw a downward slant of sadness in her mouth now, a
sadness not of wisdom but of defeat.

“I’d take a trip,” Abby said. “Take a little trip away somewhere.” Then
Abby looked at Therese, another of the bright, irrelevant, friendly
glances, as if to include her in something it was impossible she could
be included in, and anyway, Therese had gone stiff with the thought that
Carol might take a trip away from her.

“I’m not much in the mood,” Carol said, but Therese heard the play of
possibility in it nevertheless.

Abby squirmed a little and looked around her. “This place is gloomy as a
coalpit in the mornings, isn’t it?”

Therese smiled a little. A coalpit, with the sun beginning to yellow the
window sill, and the evergreen tree beyond it?

Carol was looking at Abby fondly, lighting one of Abby’s cigarettes. How
well they must know each other, Therese thought, so well that nothing
either of them said or did to the other could ever surprise, ever be
misunderstood.

“Was it a good party?” Carol asked.

“Mm,” Abby said indifferently. “Do you know someone called Bob
Haversham?”

“No.”

“He was there tonight. I met him somewhere before in New York. Funnily
enough, he said he was going to work for Rattner and Aird in the
brokerage department.”

“Really.”

“I didn’t tell him I knew one of the bosses.”

“What time is it?” Carol asked after a moment.

Abby looked at her wrist watch, a small watch set in a pyramid of gold
panels. “Seven thirty. About. Do you care?”

“Want to sleep some more, Therese?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“I’ll drive you in whenever you have to go,” Carol said.

But it was Abby who drove her finally, around ten o’clock, because she
had nothing else to do, she said, and she would enjoy it.

Abby was another one who liked cold air, Therese thought as they picked
up speed on the highway. Who rode in an open-topped car in December?

“Where’d you meet Carol?” Abby yelled at her.

Therese felt she might almost, but not quite, have told Abby the truth.
“In a store,” Therese yelled back.

“Oh?” Abby drove erratically, whipping the big car around curves,
putting on speed where one didn’t expect it. “Do you like her?”

“Of course!” What a question! Like asking her if she believed in God.

Therese pointed out her house to Abby when they turned into the street.
“Do you mind doing something for me?” Therese asked. “Could you wait
here a minute? I want to give you something to give to Carol.”

“Sure,” Abby said.

Therese ran upstairs and got the card she had made, and stuck it under
the ribbon of Carol’s present. She took it back down to Abby. “You’re
going to see her tonight, aren’t you?”

Abby nodded, slowly, and Therese sensed the ghost of a challenge in
Abby’s curious black eyes, because she was going to see Carol and
Therese wasn’t, and what could Therese do about it?

“And thanks for the ride in.”

Abby smiled. “Sure you don’t want me to take you anywhere else?”

“No, thanks,” Therese said, smiling, too, because Abby would certainly
have been glad to take her even to Brooklyn Heights.

She climbed her front steps and opened her mailbox. There were two or
three letters in it, Christmas cards, one from Frankenberg’s. When she
looked into the street again, the big cream-colored car was gone, like a
thing she had imagined, like one of the birds in the dream.




                             chapter eight


“And now you make a wish,” Richard said.

Therese wished it. She wished for Carol.

Richard had his hands on her arms. They were standing under a thing that
looked like a beaded crescent, or a section of a starfish, that hung
from the hall ceiling. It was ugly, but the Semco family attributed
almost magical powers to it, and hung it up on special occasions.
Richard’s grandfather had brought it from Russia.

“What did you wish?” He smiled down at her possessively. This was his
house, and he had just kissed her, though the door into the living room
was open and filled with people.

“You’re not supposed to tell,” Therese said.

“You can tell in Russia.”

“Well, I’m not in Russia.”

The radio roared louder suddenly, voices singing a carol. Therese drank
the rest of the pink eggnog in her glass.

“I want to go up to your room,” she said.

Richard took her hand, and they started up the stairs.

“Ri—chard?”

The aunt with the cigarette holder was calling him from the living room
door.

Richard said a word Therese didn’t understand, and waved a hand at her.
Even on the second floor, the house trembled with the crazy dancing
below, the dancing that had nothing to do with the music. Therese heard
another glass fall, and pictured the pink foamy eggnog rolling across
the floor. This was tame compared to the real Russian Christmases they
had used to celebrate in the first week in January, Richard said.
Richard smiled at her as he closed the door of his room.

“I like my sweater,” he said.

“I’m glad.” Therese swept her full skirt in an arc and sat on the edge
of Richard’s bed. The heavy Norwegian sweater she had given Richard was
on the bed behind her, lying across its tissued box. Richard had given
her a skirt from an East India shop, a long skirt with green and gold
bands and embroidery. It was lovely, but Therese did not know where she
could ever wear it.

“How about a real shot? That stuff downstairs is sickening.” Richard got
his bottle of whisky from his closet floor.

Therese shook her head. “No, thanks.”

“This’d be good for you.”

She shook her head again. She looked around her at the high-ceilinged,
almost square room, at the wallpaper with the barely discernible pattern
of pink roses, at the two peaceful windows curtained in slightly
yellowed white muslin. From the door, there were two pale trails in the
green carpet, one to the bureau and one to the desk in the corner. The
pot of brushes and the portfolio on the floor by the desk were the only
signs of Richard’s painting. Just as painting took up only a corner of
his brain, she felt, and she wondered how much longer he would go on
with it before he dropped it for something else. And she wondered, as
she had often wondered before, if Richard liked her only because she was
more sympathetic with his ambitions than anyone else he happened to know
now, and because he felt her criticism was a help to him. Therese got up
restlessly and went to the window. She loved the room—because it stayed
the same and stayed in the same place—yet today she felt an impulse to
burst from it. She was a different person from the one who had stood
here three weeks ago. This morning she had awakened in Carol’s house.
Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this
house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her.

“You’re different today,” Richard said so abruptly that a thrill of
peril passed down her body.

“Maybe it’s the dress,” she said.

She was wearing a blue taffeta dress that was God knows how old, that
she hadn’t put on since her first months in New York. She sat down on
the bed again, and looked at Richard who stood in the middle of the
floor with the little glass of straight whisky in his hand, his clear
blue eyes moving from her face to her feet in the new high-heeled black
shoes, back to her face again.

“Terry.” Richard took her hands, pinned her hands to the bed on either
side of her. The smooth, thin lips descended on hers, firmly, with the
flick of his tongue between her lips and the aromatic smell of fresh
whisky. “Terry, you’re an angel,” Richard’s deep voice said, and she
thought of Carol saying the same thing.

She watched him pick up his little glass from the floor and set it with
the bottle into the closet. She felt immensely superior to him suddenly,
to all the people below stairs. She was happier than any of them.
Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It
depended on how much one let the string out—

“Pretty?” Richard said.

Therese sat up. “It’s a beauty!”

“I finished it last night. I thought if it was a good day, we’d go to
the park and fly it.” Richard grinned like a boy, proud of his
handiwork. “Look at the back.”

It was a Russian kite, rectangular and bowed like a shield, its slim
frame notched and tied at the corners. On the front, Richard had painted
a cathedral with whirling domes and a red sky behind it.

“Let’s go fly it now,” Therese said.

They carried the kite downstairs. Then everybody saw them and came into
the hall, uncles, aunts, and cousins, until the hall was a din and
Richard had to hold the kite in the air to protect it. The noise
irritated Therese, but Richard loved it.

“Stay for the champagne, Richard!” one of the aunts shouted, one of the
aunts with a fat midriff straining like a second bosom under a satin
dress.

“Can’t,” Richard said, and added something in Russian, and Therese had a
feeling she often had, seeing Richard with his family, that there must
have been a mistake, that Richard might be an orphan himself, a
changeling, left on the doorstep and brought up a son of this family.
But there was his brother Stephen standing in the doorway, with
Richard’s blue eyes, though Stephen was even taller and thinner.

“What roof?” Richard’s mother asked shrilly. “This roof?”

Someone had asked if they were going to fly the kite on the roof, and
since the house hadn’t a roof one could stand on, Richard’s mother had
gone off into peals of laughter. Then the dog began to bark.

“I’m going to make you that dress!” Richard’s mother called to Therese,
wagging her finger admonishingly. “I know your measurements!”

They had measured her with a tape in the living room, in the midst of
all the singing and present opening, and a couple of the men had tried
to help, too. Mrs. Semco put her arm around Therese’s waist, and
suddenly Therese embraced her and kissed her firmly on the cheek, her
lips sinking into the soft powdered cheek, in that one second pouring
out in the kiss, and in the convulsive clasp of her arm, the affection
Therese really had for her, that Therese knew would hide itself again as
if it did not exist, in the instant she released her.

Then she and Richard were free and alone, walking down the front
sidewalk. It wouldn’t be any different, if they were married, Therese
thought, visiting the family on Christmas Day. Richard would fly his
kites even when he was an old man, like his grandfather who had flown
kites in Prospect Park until the year he died, Richard had told her.

They took the subway to the park, and walked to the treeless hill where
they had come a dozen times before. Therese looked around her. There
were some boys playing with a football down on the flat field at the
edge of the trees, but otherwise the park looked quiet and still. There
was not much wind, not really enough, Richard said, and the sky was
densely white as if it carried snow.

Richard groaned, failing again. He was trying to get the kite up by
running with it.

Therese, sitting on the ground with her arms around her knees, watched
him put his head up and turn in all directions, as if he had lost
something in the air. “Here it is!” She got up, pointing.

“Yes, but it’s not steady.”

Richard ran the kite into it anyway, and the kite sagged on its long
string, then jerked up as if something had sprung it. It made a big arc,
then began to climb in another direction.

“It’s found its own wind!” Therese said.

“Yes, but it’s slow.”

“What a gloomy Gus! Can I hold it?”

“Wait’ll I get it higher.”

Richard pumped at it with long swings of his arms, but the kite stayed
at the same place in the cold sluggish air. The golden domes of the
cathedral wagged from side to side, as if the whole kite were shaking
its head saying no, and the long limp tail followed foolishly, repeating
the negation.

“Best we can do,” Richard said. “It can’t carry any more string.”

Therese did not take her eyes from it. Then the kite steadied and
stopped, like a picture of a cathedral pasted on the thick white sky.
Carol wouldn’t like kites probably, Therese thought. Kites wouldn’t
amuse her. She would glance at one, and say it was silly.

“Want to take it?”

Richard poked the string stick into her hands, and she got to her feet.
She thought, Richard had worked on the kite last night when she was with
Carol, which was why he hadn’t called her, and didn’t know she had not
been home. If he had called, he would have mentioned it. Soon there
would come the first lie.

Suddenly the kite broke its mooring in the sky and tugged sharply to get
away. Therese let the stick turn fast in her hands, as long as she dared
to under Richard’s eyes, because the kite was still low. And now it
rested again, stubbornly still.

“Jerk it!” Richard said. “Keep working it up.”

She did. It was like playing with a long elastic band. But the string
was so long and slack now, it was all she could do to stir the kite. She
pulled and pulled and pulled. Then Richard came and took it, and Therese
let her arms hang. Her breath came harder, and little muscles in her
arms were quivering. She sat down on the ground. She hadn’t won against
the kite. It hadn’t done what she wanted it to do.

“Maybe the string’s too heavy,” she said. It was a new string, soft and
white and fat as a worm.

“String’s very light. Look now. Now it’s going!”

Now it was climbing in short, upward darts, as if it had found its own
mind suddenly, and a will to escape.

“Let out more string!” she shouted.

Therese stood up. A bird flew under the kite. She stared at the
rectangle that was growing smaller and smaller, jerking back and back
like a ship’s billowed sail going backward. She felt the kite meant
something, this particular kite, at this minute.

“Richard?”

“What?”

She could see him in the corner of her eye, crouched with his hands out
in front of him, as if he rode a surfboard. “How many times were you in
love?” she asked.

Richard laughed, a short, hoarse laugh. “Never till you.”

“Yes, you were. You told me about two times.”

“If I count those, I might count twelve others, too,” Richard said
quickly, with the bluntness of preoccupation.

The kite was starting to take arcing steps downward.

Therese kept her voice on the same level. “Were you ever in love with a
boy?”

“A boy?” Richard repeated, surprised.

“Yes.”

Perhaps five seconds passed before he said, “No,” in a positive and
final tone.

At least he troubled to answer, Therese thought. What would you do if
you were, she had an impulse to ask, but the question would hardly serve
a purpose. She kept her eyes on the kite. They were both looking at the
same kite, but with what different thoughts in their minds. “Did you
ever hear of it?” she asked.

“Hear of it? You mean people like that? Of course.” Richard was standing
straight now, winding the string in with figure-eight movements of the
stick.

Therese said carefully, because he was listening, “I don’t mean people
like that. I mean two people who fall in love suddenly with each other,
out of the blue. Say two men or two girls.”

Richard’s face looked the same as it might have if they had been talking
about politics. “Did I ever know any? No.”

Therese waited until he was working with the kite again, trying to pump
it higher. Then she remarked, “I suppose it could happen, though, to
almost anyone, couldn’t it?”

He went on, winding the kite. “But those things don’t just happen.
There’s always some reason for it in the background.”

“Yes,” she said agreeably. Therese had thought back into the background.
The nearest she could remember to being “in love” was the way she had
felt about a boy she had seen a few times in the town of Montclair, when
she rode in the school bus. He had curly black hair and a handsome,
serious face, and he had been perhaps twelve years old, older than she
then. She remembered a short time when she had thought of him every day.
But that was nothing, nothing like what she felt for Carol. Was it love
or wasn’t it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she
didn’t even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she
knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither
she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed
all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions. “Do you think I
could?” Therese asked simply, before she could debate whether she dared
to ask.

“What!” Richard smiled. “Fall in love with a girl? Of course not! My
God, you haven’t, have you?”

“No,” Therese said, in an odd, inconclusive tone, but Richard did not
seem to notice the tone.

“It’s going again. Look, Terry!”

The kite was wobbling straight up, faster and faster, and the stick was
whirling in Richard’s hands. At any rate, Therese thought, she was
happier than she had ever been before. And why worry about defining
everything.

“Hey!” Richard sprinted after the stick that was leaping crazily around
the ground, as if it were trying to leave the earth, too. “Want to hold
it?” he asked, capturing it. “Practically takes you up!”

Therese took the stick. There was not much string left, and the kite was
all but invisible now. When she let her arms go all the way up, she
could feel it lifting her a little, delicious and buoyant, as if the
kite might really take her up if it got all its strength together.

“Let it out!” Richard shouted, waving his arms. His mouth was open, and
two spots of red had come in his cheeks. “Let it out!”

“There’s no more string!”

“I’m going to cut it!”

Therese couldn’t believe she had heard it, but glancing over at him, she
saw him reaching under his overcoat for his knife. “Don’t,” she said.

Richard came running over, laughing.

“Don’t!” she said angrily. “Are you crazy?” Her hands were tired, but
she clung all the harder to the stick.

“Let’s cut it! It’s more fun!” And Richard bumped into her rudely,
because he was looking up.

Therese jerked the stick sideways, out of his reach, speechless with
anger and amazement. There was an instant of fear, when she felt Richard
might really have lost his mind, and then she staggered backward, the
pull gone, the empty stick in her hand. “You’re mad!” she yelled at him.
“You’re insane!”

“It’s only a kite!” Richard laughed, craning up at the nothingness.

Therese looked in vain, even for the dangling string. “Why did you do
it?” Her voice was shrill with tears. “It was such a beautiful kite!”

“It’s only a kite!” Richard repeated. “I can make another kite!”




                              chapter nine


Therese started to get dressed, then changed her mind. She was still in
her robe, reading the script of _Small Rain_ that Phil had brought over
earlier, and that was now spread all over the couch. Carol had said she
was at Forty-eighth and Madison. She could be here in ten minutes.
Therese glanced around her room, and at her face in the mirror, and
decided to let it all go.

She took some ash trays to the sink and washed them, and stacked the
play script neatly on her worktable. She wondered if Carol would have
her new handbag with her. Carol had called her last night from some
place in New Jersey where she was with Abby, had told her she thought
the bag was beautiful but much too grand a present. Therese smiled,
remembering Carol’s suggesting that she take it back. At least, Carol
liked it.

The doorbell sounded in three quick rings.

Therese looked down the stairwell, and saw Carol was carrying something.
She ran down.

“It’s empty. It’s for you,” Carol said, smiling.

It was a suitcase, wrapped. Carol slipped her fingers from under the
handle and let Therese carry it. Therese put it on the couch in her
room, and cut the brown paper off carefully. The suitcase was of thick
lightbrown leather, perfectly plain.

“It’s terribly good looking!” Therese said.

“Do you like it? I don’t even know if you need a suitcase.”

“Of course, I like it.” This was the kind of suitcase for her, this
exactly and no other. Her initials were on it in small gold
letters—T.M.B. She remembered Carol asking her her middle name on
Christmas Eve.

“Work the combination and see if you like the inside.”

Therese did. “I like the smell, too,” she said.

“Are you busy? If you are, I’ll leave.”

“No. Sit down. I’m not doing anything—except reading a play.”

“What play?”

“A play I have to do sets for.” She realized suddenly she had never
mentioned stage designing to Carol.

“Sets for?”

“Yes—I’m a stage designer.” She took Carol’s coat.

Carol smiled astonishedly. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” she asked
quietly. “How many other rabbits are you going to pull out of your hat?”

“It’s the first real job. And it’s not a Broadway play. It’s going to be
done in the Village. A comedy. I haven’t got a union membership yet.
I’ll have to wait for a Broadway job for that.”

Carol asked her all about the union, the junior and senior memberships
that cost fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars respectively. Carol
asked her if she had all that money saved up.

“No—just a few hundred. But if I get a job, they’ll let me pay it off in
installments.”

Carol was sitting on the straight chair, the chair Richard often sat in,
watching her, and Therese could read in Carol’s expression that she had
risen suddenly in Carol’s estimation, and she couldn’t imagine why she
hadn’t mentioned before that she was a stage designer, and in fact
already had a job. “Well,” Carol said, “if a Broadway job comes out of
this, would you consider borrowing the rest of the money from me? Just
as a business loan?”

“Thanks. I—”

“I’d like to do it for you. You shouldn’t be bothered paying off two
thousand dollars at your age.”

“Thanks. But I won’t be ready for one for another couple of years.”

Carol lifted her head and blew her smoke out in a thin stream. “Oh, they
don’t really keep track of apprenticeships, do they?”

Therese smiled. “No. Of course not. Would you like a drink? I’ve got a
bottle of rye.”

“How nice. I’d love one, Therese.” Carol got up and peered at her
kitchenette shelves as Therese fixed the two drinks. “Are you a good
cook?”

“Yes. I’m better when I have someone to cook for. I can make good
omelettes. Do you like them?”

“No,” Carol said flatly, and Therese laughed. “Why don’t you show me
some of your work?”

Therese got a portfolio down from the closet. Carol sat on the couch and
looked at everything carefully, but from her comments and questions,
Therese felt she considered them too bizarre to be usable, and perhaps
not very good either. Carol said she liked best the _Petrushka_ set on
the wall.

“But it’s the same thing,” Therese said. “The same thing as the
drawings, only in model form.”

“Well, maybe it’s your drawings. They’re very positive, anyway. I like
that about them.” Carol picked up her drink from the floor and leaned
back on the couch. “You see, I didn’t make a mistake, did I?”

“About what?”

“About you.”

Therese did not know exactly what she meant. Carol was smiling at her
through her cigarette smoke, and it rattled her. “Did you think you
had?”

“No,” Carol said. “What do you have to pay for an apartment like this?”

“Fifty a month.”

Carol clicked her tongue. “Doesn’t leave you much out of your salary,
does it?”

Therese bent over her portfolio, tying it up. “No. But I’ll be making
more soon. I won’t be living here forever either.”

“Of course you won’t. You’ll travel, too, the way you do in imagination.
You’ll see a house in Italy you’ll fall in love with. Or maybe you’ll
like France. Or California, or Arizona.”

The girl smiled. She probably wouldn’t have the money for it, when that
happened. “Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?”

“Always,” Carol said, smiling, too. She pushed her fingers through her
hair. “I think I shall take a trip after all.”

“For how long?”

“Just a month or so.”

Therese set the portfolio in the closet. “How soon will you be going?”

“Right away. I suppose as soon as I can arrange everything. And there
isn’t much to arrange.”

Therese turned around. Carol was rolling the end of her cigarette in the
ash tray. It meant nothing to her, Therese thought, that they wouldn’t
see each other for a month. “Why don’t you go somewhere with Abby?”

Carol looked up at her, and then at the ceiling. “I don’t think she’s
free in the first place.”

Therese stared at her. She had touched something, mentioning Abby. But
Carol’s face was unreadable now.

“You’re very nice to let me see you so often,” Carol said. “You know I
don’t feel like seeing the people I generally see just now. One can’t
really. Everything’s supposed to be done in pairs.”

How frail she is, Therese felt suddenly, how different from the day of
the first lunch. Then Carol got up, as if she knew her thoughts, and
Therese sensed a flaunt of assurance in her lifted head, in her smile as
she passed her so close their arms brushed, and went on.

“Why don’t we do something tonight?” Therese asked. “You can stay here
if you want to, and I’ll finish reading the play. We can spend the
evening together.”

Carol didn’t answer. She was looking at the flower box in the bookshelf.
“What kind of plants are these?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

They were all different, a cactus with fat leaves that hadn’t grown a
bit since she bought it a year ago, another plant like a miniature palm
tree, and a droopy red-green thing that had to be supported by a stick.
“Just plants.”

Carol turned around, smiling. “Just plants,” she repeated.

“What about tonight?”

“All right. But I won’t stay. It’s only three. I’ll give you a ring
around six.” Carol dropped her lighter in her handbag. It was not the
handbag Therese had given her. “I feel like looking at furniture this
afternoon.”

“Furniture? In stores?”

“In stores or at the Parke-Bernet. Furniture does me good.” Carol
reached for her coat on the armchair, and again Therese noticed the long
line from her shoulder to the wide leather belt, continued in her leg.
It was beautiful, like a chord of music or a whole ballet. She was
beautiful, and why should her days be so empty now, Therese wondered,
when she was made to live with people who loved her, to walk in a
beautiful house, in beautiful cities, along blue seacoasts with a long
horizon and a blue sky to background her.

“Bye-bye,” Carol said, and in the same movement with which she put on
her coat, she put her arm around Therese’s waist. It was only an
instant, too disconcerting with Carol’s arm suddenly about her, to be
relief or end or beginning, before the doorbell rang in their ears like
the tearing of a brass wall. Carol smiled. “Who is it?” she asked.

Therese felt the sting of Carol’s thumbnail in her wrist as she released
her. “Richard probably.” It could only be Richard, because she knew his
long ring.

“Good. I’d like to meet him.”

Therese pressed the bell, then heard Richard’s firm, hopping steps on
the stairs. She opened the door.

“Hello,” Richard said. “I decided—”

“Richard, this is Mrs. Aird,” Therese said. “Richard Semco.”

“How do you do?” Carol said.

Richard nodded, with almost a bow. “How do you do,” he said, his blue
eyes stretched wide.

They stared at each other, Richard with a square box in his hands as if
he were about to present it to her, and Carol standing with a new
cigarette in her hand, neither staying nor leaving. Richard put the box
on an end table.

“I was so near, I thought I’d come up,” he said, and under its note of
explanation, Therese heard the unconscious assertion of a right, just as
she had seen behind his inquisitive stare a spontaneous mistrust of
Carol. “I had to take a present to a friend of Mamma’s. This is
_lebkuchen_.” He nodded at the box and smiled, disarmingly. “Anybody
want some now?”

Carol and Therese declined. Carol was watching Richard as he opened the
box with his pocketknife. She liked his smile, Therese thought. She
likes him, the gangling young man with unruly blond hair, the broad lean
shoulders, and the big funny feet in moccasins.

“Please sit down,” Therese said to Carol.

“No, I’m going,” she answered.

“I’ll give you half, Terry, then I’ll be going too,” he said.

Therese looked at Carol, and Carol smiled at her nervousness and sat
down on a corner of the couch.

“Anyway, don’t let me rush you off,” Richard said, lifting the paper
with the cake in it to a kitchen shelf.

“You’re not. You’re a painter, aren’t you, Richard?”

“Yes.” He popped some loose icing into his mouth, and looked at Carol,
poised because he was incapable of being unpoised, Therese thought, his
eyes frank because he had nothing to hide. “Are you a painter, too?”

“No,” Carol said with another smile. “I’m nothing.”

“The hardest thing to be.”

“Is it? Are you a good painter?”

“I will be. I can be,” said Richard, unperturbed. “Have you got any
beer, Terry? I’ve got an awful thirst.”

Therese went to the refrigerator and got out the two bottles that were
there. Richard asked Carol if she would like some, but Carol refused.
Then Richard strolled past the couch, looking at the suitcase and the
wrappings, and Therese thought he was going to say something about it,
but he didn’t.

“I thought we might go to a movie tonight, Terry. I’d like to see that
thing at the Victoria. Do you want to?”

“I can’t tonight. I’ve got a date with Mrs. Aird.”

“Oh.” Richard looked at Carol.

Carol put out her cigarette and stood up. “I must be going.” She smiled
at Therese. “Call you back around six. If you change your mind, it’s not
important. Good-by, Richard.”

“Good-by,” Richard said.

Carol gave her a wink as she went down the stairs. “Be a good girl,”
Carol said.

“Where’d the suitcase come from?” Richard asked when she came back in
the room.

“It’s a present.”

“What’s the matter, Terry?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“Did I interrupt anything important? Who is she?”

Therese picked up Carol’s empty glass. There was a little lipstick at
the rim. “She’s a woman I met at the store.”

“Did she give you that suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“It’s quite a present. Is she that rich?”

Therese glanced at him. Richard’s aversion to the wealthy, to the
bourgeois, was automatic. “Rich? You mean the mink coat? I don’t know. I
did her a favor. I found something she lost in the store.”

“Oh?” he said. “What? You didn’t say anything about it.”

She washed and dried Carol’s glass and set it back on the shelf. “She
left her billfold on the counter and I took it to her, that’s all.”

“Oh. Damned nice reward.” He frowned. “Terry, what is it? You’re not
still sore about that silly kite, are you?”

“No, of course not,” she said impatiently. She wished he would go. She
put her hands in her robe pockets and walked across the room, stood
where Carol had stood, looking at the box of plants. “Phil brought the
play over this morning. I started reading it.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

“What makes you think I’m worried?” She turned around.

“You’re in another of those miles-away moods again.”

“I’m not worried and I’m not miles away.” She took a deep breath. “It’s
funny—you’re so conscious of some moods and so unconscious of others.”

Richard looked at her. “All right, Terry,” he said with a shrug, as if
he conceded it. He sat down in the straight chair and poured the rest of
the beer into his glass. “What’s this date you have with that woman
tonight?”

Therese’s lips widened in a smile as she ran the end of her lipstick
over them. For a moment, she stared at the eyebrow tweezers that lay on
the little shelf fixed to the inside of the closet door. Then she put
the lipstick down on the shelf. “It’s sort of a cocktail party, I think.
Sort of a Christmas benefit thing. In some restaurant, she said.”

“Hmm. Do you want to go?”

“I said I would.”

Richard drank his beer, frowning a little over his glass. “What about
afterward? Maybe I could hang around here and read the play while you’re
gone, and then we could grab a bite and go to the movie.”

“Afterward, I thought I’d better finish the play. I’m supposed to start
on Saturday, and I ought to have some ideas in my head.”

Richard stood up. “Yep,” he said casually, with a sigh.

Therese watched him idle over to the couch and stand there, looking down
at the manuscript. Then he bent over, studying the title page, and the
cast pages. He looked at his wrist watch, and then at her.

“Why don’t I read it now?” he asked.

“Go ahead,” she answered with a brusqueness that Richard either didn’t
hear or ignored, because he simply lay back on the couch with the
manuscript in his hands and began to read. She picked up a book of
matches from the shelf. No, he only recognized the “miles away” moods,
she thought, when he felt himself deprived of her by distance. And she
thought suddenly of the times she had gone to bed with him, of her
distance then compared to the closeness that was supposed to be, that
everyone talked about. It hadn’t mattered to Richard then, she supposed,
because of the physical fact they were in bed together. And it crossed
her mind now, seeing Richard’s complete absorption in his reading,
seeing the plump, stiff fingers catch a front lock of his hair between
them and pull it straight down toward his nose, as she had seen him do a
thousand times before, it occurred to her Richard’s attitude was that
his place in her life was unassailable, her tie with him permanent and
beyond question, because he was the first man she had ever slept with.
Therese threw the match cover at the shelf, and a bottle of something
fell over.

Richard sat up, smiling a little, surprisedly. “’S matter, Terry?”

“Richard, I feel like being alone—the rest of the afternoon. Would you
mind?”

He got up. The surprise did not leave his face. “No. Of course not.” He
dropped the manuscript on the couch again. “All right, Terry. It’s
probably better. Maybe you ought to read this now—read it alone,” he
said argumentatively, as if he persuaded himself. He looked at his watch
again. “Maybe I’ll go down and try to see Sam and Joan for a while.”

She stood there not moving, not even thinking of anything except of the
few seconds of time to pass until he would be gone, while he brushed his
hand once, a little clingy with its moisture, over her hair, and bent to
kiss her. Then quite suddenly she remembered the Degas book she had
bought days ago, the book of reproductions that Richard wanted and
hadn’t been able to find anywhere. She got it from the bottom drawer of
the bureau. “I found this. The Degas book.”

“Oh, swell. Thanks.” He took it in both hands. It was still wrapped.
“Where’d you find it?”

“Frankenberg’s. Of all places.”

“Frankenberg’s.” Richard smiled. “It’s six bucks, isn’t it?”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

Richard had his wallet out. “But I asked you to get it for me.”

“Never mind, really.”

Richard protested, but she didn’t take the money. And a minute later, he
was gone, with a promise to call her tomorrow at five. They might do
something tomorrow night, he said.

Carol called at ten past six. Did she feel like going to Chinatown,
Carol asked. Therese said, of course.

“I’m having cocktails with someone in the St. Regis,” Carol said. “Why
don’t you pick me up here? It’s the little room, not the big one. And
listen, we’re going on to some theater thing you’ve asked me to. Get
it?”

“Some sort of Christmas benefit cocktail party?”

Carol laughed. “Hurry up.”

Therese flew.

Carol’s friend was a man called Stanley McVeigh, a tall and very
attractive man of about forty with a mustache and a boxer dog on a
leash. Carol was ready to go when she arrived. Stanley walked out with
them, put them into a taxi and gave the driver some money through the
window.

“Who’s he?” Therese asked.

“An old friend. Seeing more of me now that Harge and I are separating.”

Therese looked at her. Carol had a wonderful little smile in her eyes
tonight. “Do you like him?”

“Soso,” Carol said. “Driver, will you make that Chinatown instead of the
other?”

It began to rain while they were having dinner. Carol said it always
rained in Chinatown, every time she had been here. But it didn’t matter
much, because they ducked from one shop to another, looking at things
and buying things. Therese saw some sandals with platform heels that she
thought were beautiful, rather more Persian looking than Chinese, and
she wanted to buy them for Carol, but Carol said Rindy wouldn’t approve.
Rindy was a conservative, and didn’t like her even to go without
stockings in summer, and Carol conformed to her. The same store had
Chinese suits of a black shiny material, with plain trousers and a
high-collared jacket, and Carol bought one for Rindy. Therese bought the
sandals for Carol anyway, while Carol was arranging for Rindy’s suit to
be sent. She knew the right size just by looking at the sandals, and it
pleased Carol after all that she bought them. Then they spent a weird
hour in a Chinese theater where people in the audience were sleeping
through all the clangor. And finally they went uptown for a late supper
in a restaurant where a harp played. It was a glorious evening, a really
magnificent evening.




                              chapter ten


On Tuesday, the fifth day of work, Therese sat in a little bare room
with no ceiling at the back of the Black Cat Theatre, waiting for Mr.
Donohue, the new director, to come and look at her cardboard model.
Yesterday morning, Donohue had replaced Cortes as director, had thrown
out her first model, and also thrown out Phil McElroy as the second
brother in the play. Phil had walked out yesterday in a huff. It was
lucky she hadn’t been thrown out along with her model, Therese thought,
so she had followed Mr. Donohue’s instructions to the letter. The new
model hadn’t the movable section she had put into the first, which would
have permitted the living room scene to be converted into the terrace
scene for the last act. Mr. Donohue seemed to be adamant against
anything unusual or even simple. By setting the whole play in the living
room, a lot of the dialogue had to be changed in the last act, and some
of the cleverest lines had been lost. Her new model indicated a
fireplace, broad French windows giving onto a terrace, two doors, a
sofa, and a couple of armchairs and a bookcase. It would look, when
finished, like a room in a model house at Sloan’s, lifelike down to the
last ash tray.

Therese stood up, stretched herself, and reached for the corduroy jacket
that was hanging on a nail in the door. The place was cold as a barn.
Mr. Donohue probably wouldn’t come in until afternoon, or not even today
if she didn’t remind him again. There was no hurry about the scenery. It
might have been the least important matter in the whole production, but
she had sat up until late last night, enthusiastically working on the
model.

She went out to stand in the wings again. The cast was all on stage with
scripts in hand. Mr. Donohue kept running the cast through the whole
play, to get the flow of it, he said, but today it seemed to be only
putting them to sleep. All the cast looked lazy except Tom Harding, a
tall blond young man who had the male lead, and he was a little too
energetic. Georgia Halloran was suffering from sinus headaches, and had
to stop every hour to put drops in her nose and lie down for a few
minutes. Geoffrey Andrews, a middle-aged man who played the heroine’s
father, grumbled constantly between his lines because he didn’t like
Donohue.

“No, no, no, no,” said Mr. Donohue for the tenth time that morning,
stopping everything and causing everybody to lower his script and turn
to him with a puzzled, irritated docility. “Let’s start again from page
twenty-eight.”

Therese watched him waving his arms to indicate the speakers, putting up
a hand to silence them, following the script with his head down as if he
led an orchestra. Tom Harding winked at her, and pulled his hand down
his nose. After a moment, Therese went back to the room behind the
partition, where she worked, where she felt a little less useless. She
knew the play almost by heart now. It had a rather Sheridanesque comedy
of errors plot—two brothers who pretend to be valet and master in order
to impress an heiress with whom one of the brothers is in love. The
dialogue was gay and altogether not bad, but the dreary, matter-of-fact
set that Donohue had ordered for it—Therese hoped something could be
done with the color they would use.

Mr. Donohue did come in just after twelve o’clock. He looked at her
model, lifted it up and looked at it from below and from both sides,
without any change in his nervous, harassed expression. “Yes, this is
fine. I like this very much. You see how much better this is than those
empty walls you had before, don’t you?”

Therese took a deep breath of relief. “Yes,” she said.

“A set grows out of the needs of the actors. This isn’t a ballet set
you’re designing, Miss Belivet.”

She nodded, looking at the model, too, and trying to see how it possibly
was better, possibly more functional.

“The carpenter’s coming in this afternoon about four. We’ll get together
and have a talk about this.” Mr. Donohue went out.

Therese stared at the cardboard model. At least she would see it used.
At least she and the carpenters would make it something real. She went
to the window and looked out at the gray but luminous winter sky, at the
backs of some five-story houses garlanded with fire escapes. In the
foreground was a small vacant lot with a runted leafless tree in it, all
twisted up like a signpost gone wild. She wished she could call Carol
and invite her for lunch. But Carol was an hour and a half away by car.

“Is your name Beliver?”

Therese turned to the girl in the doorway. “Belivet. Telephone?”

“The phone by the lights.”

“Thanks.” Therese hurried, hoping it was Carol, knowing more likely it
was Richard. Carol hadn’t yet called her here.

“Hello, this is Abby.”

“Abby?” Therese smiled. “How’d you know I was here?”

“You told me, remember? I’d like to see you. I’m not far away. Have you
had lunch yet?”

They agreed to meet at the Palermo, a restaurant a block or two from the
Black Cat.

Therese whistled a song as she walked there, happy as if she were
meeting Carol. The restaurant had sawdust on the floor, and a couple of
black kittens played around under the rail of the bar. Abby was sitting
at a table in the back.

“Hi,” Abby said as she came up. “You’re looking very chipper. I almost
didn’t recognize you. Would you like a drink?”

Therese shook her head. “No, thanks.”

“You mean, you’re so happy without it?” Abby asked, and she chuckled
with that secret amusement that in Abby was somehow not offensive.

Therese took the cigarette that Abby offered her. Abby knew, she
thought. And perhaps she was in love with Carol, too. It put Therese on
guard with her. It created a tacit rivalry that gave her a curious
exhilaration, a sense of certain superiority over Abby—emotions that
Therese had never known before, never dared to dream of, emotions
consequently revolutionary in themselves. So their lunching together in
the restaurant became nearly as important as the meeting with Carol.

“How is Carol?” Therese asked. She had not seen Carol in three days.

“She’s very fine,” Abby said, watching her.

The waiter came, and Abby asked him if he could recommend the mussels
and the scaloppine.

“Excellent, madame!” He beamed at her as if she were a special customer.

It was Abby’s manner, the glow in her face as if today, or every day,
were a special holiday for her. Therese liked that. She looked
admiringly at Abby’s suit of red and blue weave, her cuff links that
were scrolly G’s, like filigree buttons in silver. Abby asked her about
her job at the Black Cat. It was tedious to Therese, but Abby seemed
impressed. Abby was impressed, Therese thought, because she did nothing
herself.

“I know some people in the producing end of the theater,” Abby said.
“I’ll be glad to put in a word for you any time.”

“Thanks.” Therese played with the lid of the grated cheese bowl in front
of her. “Do you know anyone called Andronich? I think he’s from
Philadelphia.”

“No,” Abby said.

Mr. Donohue had told her to go and see Andronich next week in New York.
He was producing a show that would open this spring in Philadelphia, and
then on Broadway.

“Try the mussels.” Abby was eating hers with gusto. “Carol likes these,
too.”

“Have you known Carol a long time?”

“Um-hm,” Abby nodded, looking at her with the bright eyes that revealed
nothing.

“And you know her husband, too, of course.”

Abby nodded again, silently.

Therese smiled a little. Abby was out to question her, she felt, but not
to disclose anything about herself or about Carol.

“How about some wine? Do you like Chianti?” Abby summoned a waiter with
a snap of her fingers. “Bring us a bottle of Chianti. A good one. Builds
up the blood,” she added to Therese.

Then the main course arrived, and two waiters fussed around the table,
uncorking the Chianti, pouring more water and bringing fresh butter. The
radio in the corner played a tango—a little cheesebox of a radio with a
broken front, but the music might have come from a string orchestra
behind them, at Abby’s request. No wonder Carol likes her, Therese
thought. She complemented Carol’s solemnity, she could remind Carol to
laugh.

“Did you always live by yourself?” Abby asked.

“Yes. Since I got out of school.” Therese sipped her wine. “Do you? Or
do you live with your family?”

“With my family. But I’ve got my own half of the house.”

“And do you work?” Therese ventured.

“I’ve had jobs. Two or three of them. Didn’t Carol tell you we had a
furniture shop once? We had a shop just outside of Elizabeth on the
highway. We bought up antiques or plain second-hand stuff and fixed it
up. I never worked so hard in my life.” Abby smiled at her gaily, as if
every word might be untrue. “Then my other job. I’m an entomologist. Not
a very good one, but good enough to pull bugs out of Italian lemon
crates and things like that. Bahama lilies are full of bugs.”

“So I’ve heard.” Therese smiled.

“I don’t think you believe me.”

“Yes, I do. Do you still work at that?”

“I’m on reserve. Just in time of emergency, I work. Like Easter.”

Therese watched Abby’s fork cutting the scaloppine into small bites
before she picked any up. “Do you take trips a lot with Carol?”

“A lot? No, why?” Abby asked.

“I should think you’d be good for her. Because Carol’s so serious.”
Therese wished she could lead the conversation to the heart of things,
but just what the heart of things was, she didn’t know. The wine ran
slow and warm in her veins, down to her finger tips.

“Not all the time,” Abby corrected, with the laughter under the surface
of her voice, as it had been in the first word Therese had heard her
say.

The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was
stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that
would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.

“How’d you meet Carol?” Abby asked.

“Didn’t Carol tell you?”

“She just said she met you at Frankenberg’s when you had a job there.”

“Well, that’s how,” Therese said, feeling a resentment in her against
Abby building up, incontrollably.

“You just started talking?” Abby asked with a smile, lighting a
cigarette.

“I waited on her,” Therese said, and stopped.

And Abby waited, for a precise description of that meeting, Therese
knew, but she wouldn’t give it to Abby or to anyone else. It belonged to
her. Surely Carol hadn’t told Abby, she thought, told her the silly
story of the Christmas card. It wouldn’t be important enough to Carol
for Carol to have told her.

“Do you mind telling me who started talking first?”

Therese laughed suddenly. She reached for a cigarette and lighted it,
still smiling. No, Carol hadn’t told her about the Christmas card, and
Abby’s question struck her as terribly funny. “I did,” Therese said.

“You like her a lot, don’t you?” Abby asked.

Therese explored it for hostility. It was not hostile, but jealous.
“Yes.”

“Why do you?”

“Why do I? Why do you?”

Abby’s eyes still laughed. “I’ve known Carol since she was four years
old.”

Therese said nothing.

“You’re awfully young, aren’t you? Are you twenty-one?”

“No. Not quite.”

“You know Carol’s got a lot of worries right now, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s lonely now,” Abby added, her eyes watching.

“Do you mean that’s why she sees me?” Therese asked calmly. “Do you want
to tell me I shouldn’t see her?”

Abby’s unblinking eyes blinked twice after all. “No, not a bit. But I
don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want you to hurt Carol either.”

“I’d never hurt Carol,” Therese said. “Do you think I would?”

Abby was still watching her alertly, had never taken her eyes from her.
“No, I don’t think you would,” Abby replied as if she had just decided
it. And she smiled now as if she were especially pleased about
something.

But Therese did not like the smile or the question, and realizing her
face showed her feelings, she looked down at the table. There was a
glass of hot zabaglione standing on a plate in front of her.

“Would you like to come to a cocktail party this afternoon, Therese?
It’s uptown at about six o’clock. I don’t know if there’ll be any stage
designers there, but one of the girls who’s giving it is an actress.”

Therese put her cigarette out. “Is Carol going to be there?”

“No. She won’t be. But they’re all easy to get along with. It’s a small
party.”

“Thanks. I don’t think I should go. I may have to work late today, too.”

“Oh. I was going to give you the address anyway, but if you won’t come—”

“No,” Therese said.

Abby wanted to walk around the block after they came out of the
restaurant. Therese agreed, though she was tired of Abby now. Abby with
her cocksureness, her blunt, careless questions made Therese feel she
had gotten an advantage over her. And Abby had not let her pay the
check.

Abby said, “Carol thinks a lot of you, you know. She says you have a lot
of talent.”

“Does she?” Therese said, only half believing it. “She never told me.”
She wanted to walk faster, but Abby held their pace back.

“You must know she thinks a lot of you, if she wants you to take a trip
with her.”

Therese glanced and saw Abby smiling at her, guilelessly. “She didn’t
say anything to me about that either,” Therese said quietly, though her
heart had begun pumping.

“I’m sure she will. You’ll go with her, won’t you?”

Why should Abby know about it before she did, Therese wondered. She felt
a flush of anger in her face. What was it all about? Did Abby hate her?
If she did, why wasn’t she consistent about it? Then in the next
instant, the rise of anger fell and left her weak, left her vulnerable
and defenseless. She thought, if Abby pressed her against the wall at
that moment and said: “Out with it. What do you want from Carol? How
much of her do you want to take from me?” she would have babbled it all.
She would have said: “I want to be with her. I love to be with her, and
what has it got to do with you?”

“Isn’t that for Carol to talk about? Why do you ask me these things?”
Therese made an effort to sound indifferent. It was hopeless.

Abby stopped walking. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to her. “I think I
understand better now.”

“Understand what?”

“Just—that you win.”

“Win what?”

“What,” Abby echoed with her head up, looking up at the corner of a
building, at the sky, and Therese suddenly felt furiously impatient.

She wanted Abby to go so she could telephone Carol. Nothing mattered but
the sound of Carol’s voice. Nothing mattered but Carol, and why did she
let herself forget for a moment?

“No wonder Carol thinks such a lot of you,” Abby said, but if it was a
kind remark, Therese did not accept it as such. “So long, Therese. I’ll
see you again no doubt.” Abby held out her hand.

Therese took it. “So long,” she said. She watched Abby walking toward
Washington Square, her step quicker now, her curly head high.

Therese went into the drugstore at the next corner and called Carol. She
got the maid and then Carol.

“What’s the matter?” Carol asked. “You sound low.”

“Nothing. It’s dull at work.”

“Are you doing anything tonight? Would you like to come out?”

Therese came out of the drugstore smiling. Carol was going to pick her
up at five thirty. Carol insisted on picking her up, because it was such
a rotten trip by train.

Across the street, walking away from her, she saw Dannie McElroy,
striding along without a coat, carrying a naked bottle of milk in his
hand.

“Dannie!” she called.

Dannie turned and walked toward her. “Come by for a few minutes?” he
yelled.

Therese started to say no, then as he came up to her, she took his arm.
“Just for a minute. I’ve had a long lunch hour already.”

Dannie smiled down at her. “What time is it? I’ve been studying till I’m
blind.”

“After two.” She felt Dannie’s arm tensed hard against the cold. There
were goose-pimples under the dark hair on his forearm. “You’re mad to go
out without a coat,” she said.

“It clears my head.” He held the iron gate for her that led to his door.
“Phil’s out somewhere.”

The room smelled of pipe smoke, rather like hot chocolate cooking. The
apartment was a semibasement, generally darkish, and the lamp made a
warm pool of light on the desk that was always cluttered. Therese looked
down at the opened books on his desk, the pages and pages covered with
symbols that she could not understand, but that she liked to look at.
Everything the symbols stood for was true and proven. The symbols were
stronger and more definite than words. She felt Dannie’s mind swung on
them, from one fact to another, as if he bore himself on strong chains,
hand over hand through space. She watched him assembling a sandwich,
standing at the kitchen table. His shoulders looked very broad and
rounded with muscle under his white shirt, shifting a little with the
motions of laying the salami and cheese slices onto the big piece of rye
bread.

“I wish you’d come by more often, Therese. Wednesday’s the only day I’m
not home at noon. We wouldn’t bother Phil, having lunch, even if he’s
sleeping.”

“I will,” Therese said. She sat down in his desk chair that was half
turned around. She had come once for lunch, and once after work. She
liked visiting Dannie. One did not have to make small talk with him.

In the corner of the room, Phil’s sofa bed was unmade, a tangle of
blankets and sheets. The two times she had come in before, the bed had
been unmade, or Phil had still been in it. The long bookcase pulled out
at right angles to the sofa made a unit of Phil’s corner of the room,
and it was always in disorder, in a frustrated and nervous disorder not
at all like the working disorder of Dannie’s desk.

Dannie’s beer can hissed as he opened it. He leaned against the wall
with the beer and the sandwich, smiling, delighted to have her here.
“Remember what you said about physics not applying to people?”

“Umm. Vaguely.”

“Well, I’m not sure you’re right,” he said as he took a bite. “Take
friendships, for instance. I can think of a lot of cases where the two
people have nothing in common. I think there’s a definite reason for
every friendship just as there’s a reason why certain atoms unite and
others don’t—certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors
in the other—what do you think? I think friendships are the result of
certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes
hidden forever.”

“Maybe. I can think of a few cases, too.” Richard and herself, for one.
Richard got on with people, elbowed his way through the world in a way
she couldn’t. She had always been attracted to people with Richard’s
kind of self-assurance. “And what’s weak about you, Dannie?”

“Me?” he said, smiling. “Do you want to be my friend?”

“Yes. But you’re about the strongest person I know.”

“Really? Shall I enumerate my shortcomings?”

She smiled, looking at him. A young man of twenty-five who had known
where he was going since he was fourteen. He had driven all his energy
into one channel—just the opposite of what Richard had done.

“I have a secret and very buried need for a cook,” Dannie said, “and a
dancing teacher, and someone to remind me to do little things like take
my laundry and get haircuts.”

“I can’t remember to take my laundry either.”

“Oh,” he said sadly. “Then it’s out. And I’d had some hope. I’d had a
little feeling of destiny. Because you see what I mean about affinities
is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone
on the street, there’s always a definite reason somewhere. I think even
the poets would agree with me.”

She smiled. “_Even_ the poets?” She thought of Carol, and then of Abby,
of their conversation at lunch that had been so much more than a glance
and so much less, and the sequence of emotions it had evoked in her. It
depressed her. “But you have to make allowances for people’s
perversities, things that don’t make much sense.”

“Perversities? That’s only a subterfuge. A word used by the poets.”

“I thought it was used by the psychologists,” Therese said.

“I mean, to make allowances—that’s a meaningless term. Life is an exact
science on its own terms, it’s just a matter of finding them and
defining them. What doesn’t make any sense to you?”

“Nothing. I was thinking of something that doesn’t matter anyway.” She
was suddenly angry again, as she had been on the sidewalk after the
lunch.

“What?” he persisted, frowning.

“Like the lunch I just had,” she said.

“With whom?”

“It doesn’t matter. If it did, I’d go into it. It’s just a waste, like
losing something, I thought. But maybe something that didn’t exist
anyway.” She had wanted to like Abby because Carol did.

“Except in your mind? That can still be a loss.”

“Yes—but there are some people or some things people do that you can’t
salvage anything from finally, because nothing connects with you.” It
was of something else she wanted to talk about, though, not this at all.
Not Abby or Carol, but before. Something that made perfect connection
and perfect sense. She loved Carol. She leaned her forehead against her
hand.

Dannie looked at her for a moment, then pushed himself off from the
wall. He turned to the stove, and got a match from his shirt pocket, and
Therese sensed that the conversation dangled, would always dangle and
never be finished, whatever they went on to say. But she felt if she
told Dannie every word that she and Abby had exchanged, that he could
clear away its subterfuges with a phrase, as if he sprinkled a chemical
in the air that would dry up the mist instantly. Or was there always
something that logic couldn’t touch? Something illogical, behind the
jealousy, the suspicion and the hostility in Abby’s conversation, that
was Abby all by herself?

“Everything’s not as simple as a lot of combinations,” Therese added.

“Some things don’t react. But everything’s alive.” He turned around with
a broad smile, as if quite another train of thought had entered his
head. He was holding up the match that was still smoking. “Like this
match. And I’m not talking physics, about the indestructibility of
smoke. In fact, I feel rather poetic today.”

“About the match?”

“I feel as if it were growing, like a plant, not disappearing. I feel
everything in the world must have the texture of a plant sometimes to a
poet. Even this table, like my own flesh.” He touched the table edge
with his palm. “It’s like a feeling I had once riding up a hill on a
horse. It was in Pennsylvania. I didn’t know how to ride very well then,
and I remember the horse turning his head and seeing the hill, and
deciding by himself to run up it, his hind legs sank before we took off,
and suddenly we were going like blazes and I felt completely in harmony
with the horse and the land, as if we were a whole tree simply being
stirred by the wind in its branches. I remember being sure that nothing
would happen to me then, but some other time, yes, eventually. And it
made me very happy. I thought of all the people who are afraid and hoard
things, and themselves, and I thought, when everybody in the world comes
to realize what I felt going up the hill, then there’ll be a kind of
right economy of living and of using and using up. Do you know what I
mean?” Dannie had clenched his fist, but his eyes were bright as if he
still laughed at himself. “Did you ever wear out a sweater you
particularly liked, and throw it away finally?”

She thought of the green woolen gloves of Sister Alicia that she had
neither worn nor thrown away. “Yes,” she said.

“Well, that’s all I mean. And the lambs who didn’t realize how much wool
they were losing when somebody sheared them to make the sweater, because
they could grow more wool. It’s very simple.” He turned to the coffeepot
that he had reheated, that was already boiling.

“Yes.” She knew. And like Richard and the kite, because he could make
another kite. She thought of Abby with a sense of vacuity suddenly, as
if the luncheon had been eradicated. For an instant, she felt as if her
mind had overflowed a brim and was swimming emptily into space. She
stood up.

Dannie came toward her, put his hands on her shoulders, and though she
felt it was only a gesture, a gesture instead of a word, the spell was
broken. She was uneasy at his touch, and the uneasiness was a point of
concreteness. “I should go back,” she said. “I’m way late.”

His hands came down, pinning her elbows hard against her sides, and he
kissed her suddenly, held his lips hard against hers for a moment, and
she felt his warm breath on her upper lip before he released her.

“You are,” he said, looking at her.

“Why did you—” She stopped, because the kiss had so mingled tenderness
and roughness, she didn’t know how to take it.

“‘_Why_,’ Terry,” he said, turning away from her, smiling. “Did you
mind?”

“No,” she said.

“Would Richard mind?”

“I suppose.” She buttoned her coat. “I must go,” she said, moving toward
the door.

Dannie swung the door open for her, smiling his easy smile, as if
nothing had happened. “Come back tomorrow? Come for lunch.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I don’t work.”

“And we couldn’t possibly have lunch.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“All right, come Monday.”

“All right.” She smiled, too, and put her hand out automatically and
Dannie shook it once, politely.

She ran the two blocks to the Black Cat. A little like the horse, she
thought. But not enough, not enough to be perfect, and what Dannie meant
was perfect.




                             chapter eleven


“The pastimes of idle people,” Carol said, stretching her legs out
before her on the glider. “It’s time Abby got herself a job again.”

Therese said nothing. She hadn’t told Carol all the conversation at
lunch, but she didn’t want to talk about Abby any more.

“Don’t you want to sit in a more comfortable chair?”

“No,” Therese said. She was sitting on a leather stool near the glider.
They had finished dinner a few moments ago, and then come up to this
room that Therese had not seen before, a glass enclosed porch off the
plain green room.

“What else did Abby say that bothers you?” Carol asked, still looking
straight before her, down her long legs in the navy-blue slacks.

Carol seemed tired. She was worried about other things, Therese thought,
more important things than this. “Nothing. Does it bother you, Carol?”

“Bother me?”

“You’re different with me tonight.”

Carol glanced at her. “You imagine,” she said, and the pleasant
vibration of her voice faded into silence again.

The page she had written last night, Therese thought, had nothing to do
with this Carol, was not addressed to her. _I feel I am in love with
you_, she had written, _and it should be spring. I want the sun
throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like
Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and bird-calls like Stravinsky. But the
tempo is all mine._

“I don’t think Abby likes me,” Therese remarked. “I don’t think she
wants me to see you.”

“That’s not true. You’re imagining again.”

“I don’t mean she said it.” Therese tried to sound as calm as Carol.
“She was very nice. She invited me to a cocktail party.”

“Whose party?”

“I don’t know. She said uptown. She said you wouldn’t be there, so I
didn’t particularly want to go.”

“Where uptown?”

“She didn’t say. Just that one of the girls giving it was an actress.”

Carol set her lighter down with a click on the glass table, and Therese
sensed her displeasure. “She did,” Carol murmured, half to herself. “Sit
over here, Therese.”

Therese got up, and sat down at the very foot of the glider.

“You mustn’t think Abby feels that way about you. I know her well enough
to know she wouldn’t.”

“All right,” Therese said.

“But Abby’s incredibly clumsy sometimes in the way she talks.”

Therese wanted to forget the whole thing. Carol was still so distant
even when she spoke, even when she looked at her. A bar of light from
the green room lay across the top of Carol’s head, but she could not see
Carol’s face now.

Carol poked her with the back of her toe. “Hop up.”

But Therese was slow to move, and Carol swung her feet over Therese’s
head and sat up. Then Therese heard the maid’s step in the next room,
and the plump, Irish-looking maid in the gray and white uniform came in
bearing a coffee tray, shaking the porch floor with her quick, eager
little steps that sounded so eager to please.

“The cream’s in here, ma’am,” she said, pointing to a pitcher that
didn’t match the demitasse set. Florence glanced at Therese with a
friendly smile and round blank eyes. She was about fifty, with a bun at
the back of her neck under the starched white band of her cap. Therese
could not establish her somehow, could not determine her allegiance.
Therese had heard her refer to Mr. Aird twice as if she were very
devoted to him, and whether it was professional or genuine, Therese did
not know.

“Will there be anything else, ma’am?” Florence asked. “Shall I put out
the lights?”

“No, I like the lights. We won’t need anything else, thanks. Did Mrs.
Riordan call?”

“Not yet, ma’am.”

“Will you tell her I’m out when she does?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Florence hesitated, “I was wondering if you were finished
with that new book, ma’am. The one about the Alps.”

“Go in my room and get it, if you’d like it, Florence. I don’t think I
want to finish it.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Good night, ma’am. Good night, miss.”

“Good night,” Carol said.

While Carol was pouring the coffee, Therese asked, “Have you decided how
soon you’re going away?”

“Maybe in about a week.” Carol handed her the demitasse with cream in
it. “Why?”

“Just that I’ll miss you. Of course.”

Carol was motionless for a moment, and then she reached for a cigarette,
a last one, and crumpled the pack up. “I was thinking, in fact, you
might like to go with me. What do you think, for three weeks or so?”

There it was, Therese thought, as casual as if she suggested their
taking a walk together. “You mentioned it to Abby, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Carol said. “Why?”

Why? Therese could not put into words why it hurt her that Carol had.
“It just seems strange you’d tell her before you said anything to me.”

“I didn’t tell her. I only said I might ask you.” Carol came over to her
and put her hands on Therese’s shoulders. “Look, there’s no reason for
you to feel like this about Abby—unless Abby said a lot else to you at
lunch that you didn’t tell me.”

“No,” Therese said. No, but it was the undercurrents, it was worse. She
felt Carol’s hands leave her shoulders.

“Abby’s a very old friend of mine,” Carol said. “I talk over everything
with her.”

“Yes,” Therese said.

“Well, do you think you’d like to go?”

Carol had turned away from her, and suddenly it meant nothing, because
of the way Carol asked her, as if she didn’t really care one way or the
other if she went. “Thanks—I don’t think I can afford it just now.”

“You wouldn’t need much money. We’d go in the car. But if you have a job
offered you right away, that’s different.”

As if she wouldn’t turn down a job on a ballet set to go away with
Carol—to go with her through country she had never seen before, over
rivers and mountains, not knowing where they would be when night came.
Carol knew that, and knew she would have to refuse if Carol asked her in
this way. Therese felt suddenly sure that Carol taunted her, and she
resented it with the bitter resentment of a betrayal. And the resentment
resolved itself into a decision never to see Carol again. She glanced at
Carol, who was waiting for her answer, with that defiance only half
masked by an air of indifference, an expression that Therese knew would
not change at all if she should give a negative answer. Therese got up
and went to the box on the end table for a cigarette. There was nothing
in the box but some phonograph needles and a photograph.

“What is it?” Carol asked, watching her.

Therese felt Carol had been reading all her thoughts. “It’s a picture of
Rindy,” Therese said.

“Of Rindy? Let’s see it.”

Therese watched Carol’s face as she looked at the picture of the little
girl with the white-blond hair and the serious face, with the taped
white bandage on her knee. In the picture, Harge was standing in a
rowboat, and Rindy was stepping from a dock into his arms.

“It’s not a very good picture,” Carol said, but her face had changed,
grown softer. “That’s about three years old. Would you like a cigarette?
There’s some over here. Rindy’s going to stay with Harge for the next
three months.”

Therese had supposed that from the conversation in the kitchen that
morning with Abby. “Is that in New Jersey, too?”

“Yes. Harge’s family lives in New Jersey. They’ve a big house.” Carol
waited. “The divorce will come through in a month, I think, and after
March, I’ll have Rindy the rest of the year.”

“Oh. But you’ll see her again before March, won’t you?”

“A few times. Probably not much.”

Therese looked at Carol’s hand holding the photograph, beside her on the
glider, carelessly. “Won’t she miss you?”

“Yes, but she’s very fond of her father, too.”

“Fonder than she is of you?”

“No. Not really. But he’s bought her a goat to play with now. He takes
her to school on his way to work, and he picks her up at four. Neglects
his business for her—and what more can you ask of a man?”

“You didn’t see her Christmas, did you?” Therese said.

“No. Because of something that happened in the lawyer’s office. That was
the afternoon Harge’s lawyer wanted to see us both, and Harge had
brought Rindy, too. Rindy said she wanted to go to Harge’s house for
Christmas. Rindy didn’t know I wasn’t going to be there this year. They
have a big tree that grows on the lawn and they always decorate it, so
Rindy was set on it. Anyway, it made quite an impression on the lawyer,
you know, the child asking to go home for Christmas with her father. And
naturally I didn’t want to tell Rindy then I wasn’t going, or she’d have
been disappointed. I couldn’t have said it anyway, in front of the
lawyer. Harge’s machinations are enough.”

Therese stood there, crushing the unlighted cigarette in her fingers.
Carol’s voice was calm, as it might have been if she talked to Abby,
Therese thought. Carol had never said so much to her before. “But the
lawyer understood?”

Carol shrugged. “It’s Harge’s lawyer, not mine. So I agreed to the
three-month arrangement now, because I don’t want her to be tossed back
and forth. If I’m to have her nine months and Harge three—it might as
well start now.”

“You won’t even visit her?”

Carol waited so long to answer, Therese thought she was not going to.
“Not very often. The family isn’t too cordial. I talk to Rindy every day
on the telephone. Sometimes she calls me.”

“Why isn’t the family cordial?”

“They never cared for me. They’ve been complaining ever since Harge met
me at some deb party. They’re very good at criticizing. I sometimes
wonder just who would pass with them.”

“What do they criticize you for?”

“For having a furniture shop, for instance. But that didn’t last a year.
Then for not playing bridge, or not liking to. They pick out the funny
things, the most superficial things.”

“They sound horrid.”

“They’re not horrid. One’s just supposed to conform. I know what they’d
like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in
disturbs them terribly. Shall we play some music? Don’t you ever like
the radio?”

“Sometimes.”

Carol leaned against the window sill. “And now Rindy’s got television
every day. Hopalong Cassidy. How she’d love to go out West. That’s the
last doll I’ll ever buy for her, Therese. I only got it because she said
she wanted one, but she’s outgrown them.”

Behind Carol, an airport searchlight made a pale sweep in the night, and
disappeared. Carol’s voice seemed to linger in the darkness. In its
richer, happier tone, Therese could hear the depths within her where she
loved Rindy, deeper than she would probably ever love anyone else.
“Harge doesn’t make it easy for you to see her, does he?”

“You know that,” Carol said.

“I don’t see how he could be so much in love with you.”

“It’s not love. It’s a compulsion. I think he wants to control me. I
suppose if I were a lot wilder but never had an opinion on anything
except his opinion—Can you follow all this?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never done anything to embarrass him socially, and that’s all he
cares about really. There’s a certain woman at the club I wish he’d
married. Her life is entirely filled with giving exquisite little dinner
parties and being carried out of the best bars feet first—She’s made her
husband’s advertising business a great success, so he smiles on her
little faults. Harge wouldn’t smile, but he’d have some definite reason
for complaint. I think he picked me out like a rug for his living room,
and he made a bad mistake. I doubt if he’s capable of loving anyone,
really. What he has is a kind of acquisitiveness, which isn’t much
separate from his ambition. It’s getting to be a disease, isn’t it, not
being able to love?” She looked at Therese. “Maybe it’s the times. If
one wanted to, one could make out a case for racial suicide. Man trying
to catch up with his own destructive machines.”

Therese said nothing. It reminded her of a thousand conversations with
Richard, Richard mingling war and big business and Congressional
witch-hunts and finally certain people he knew into one grand enemy,
whose only collective label was hate. Now Carol, too. It shook Therese
in the profoundest part of her where no words were, no easy words like
death or dying or killing. Those words were somehow future, and this was
present. An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to _know_, know anything, for
certain, had jammed itself in her throat so for a moment she felt she
could hardly breathe. Do you think, do you think, it began. Do you think
both of us will die violently someday, be suddenly shut off? But even
that question wasn’t definite enough. Perhaps it was a statement after
all: I don’t want to die yet without knowing you. Do you feel the same
way, Carol? She could have uttered the last question, but she could not
have said all that went before it.

“You’re the young generation,” Carol said. “And what have you got to
say?” She sat down on the glider.

“I suppose the first thing is not to be afraid.” Therese turned and saw
Carol’s smile. “You’re smiling because you think I am afraid, I
suppose.”

“You’re about as weak as this match.” Carol held it burning for a moment
after she lighted her cigarette. “But given the right conditions, you
could burn a house down, couldn’t you?”

“Or a city.”

“But you’re even afraid to take a little trip with me. You’re afraid
because you think you haven’t got enough money.”

“That’s not it.”

“You’ve got some very strange values, Therese. I asked you to go with
me, because it would give me pleasure to have you. I should think it’d
be good for you, too, and good for your work. But you’ve got to spoil it
by a silly pride about money. Like that handbag you gave me. Out of all
proportion. Why don’t you take it back, if you need the money? I don’t
need the handbag. It gave you pleasure to give it to me, I suppose. It’s
the same thing, you see. Only I make sense and you don’t.” Carol walked
by her and turned to her again, poised with one foot forward and her
head up, the short blond hair as unobtrusive as a statue’s hair. “Well,
do you think it’s funny?”

Therese was smiling. “I don’t care about the money,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that,” Therese said. “I’ve got the money to go. I’ll go.”

Carol stared at her. Therese saw the sullenness leave her face, and then
Carol began to smile, too, with surprise, a little incredulously.

“Well, all right,” Carol said. “I’m delighted.”

“I’m delighted.”

“What brought this happy change about?”

Doesn’t she really know, Therese thought. “You do seem to care whether I
go or not,” Therese said simply.

“Of course I care. I asked you, didn’t I?” Carol said, still smiling,
but with a twist of her toe, she turned her back on Therese and walked
toward the green room.

Therese watched her go, her hands in her pockets and her moccasins
making light slow clicks on the floor. Therese looked at the empty
doorway. Carol would have walked out exactly the same way, she thought,
if she had said no, she wouldn’t go. She picked up her half-finished
demitasse, then set it down again.

She went out and across the hall, to the door of Carol’s room. “What are
you doing?”

Carol was bending over her dressing table, writing. “What am I doing?”
She stood up and slipped a piece of paper into her pocket. She was
smiling now, really smiling in her eyes, like the moment in the kitchen
with Abby. “Something,” Carol said. “Let’s have some music.”

“Fine.” A smile spread over her face.

“Why don’t you get ready for bed first? It’s late, do you know that?”

“It always gets late with you.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“I don’t feel like going to bed tonight.”

Carol crossed the hall to the green room. “You get ready. You’ve got
circles under your eyes.”

Therese undressed quickly in the room with the twin beds. The phonograph
in the other room played “Embraceable You.” Then the telephone rang.
Therese opened the top drawer of the bureau. It was empty except for a
couple of men’s handkerchiefs, an old clothesbrush, and a key. And a few
papers in the corner. Therese picked up a card covered in isinglass. It
was an old driver’s license that belonged to Harge. Hargess Foster Aird.
Age: 37. Height: 5'8½". Weight: 168. Hair: blond. Eyes: blue. She knew
all that. A 1950 Oldsmobile. Color: dark blue. Therese put it back and
closed the drawer. She went to the door and listened.

“I am sorry, Tessie, but I did get stuck after all,” Carol was saying
regretfully, but her voice was happy. “Is it a good party?... Well, I’m
not dressed and I’m tired.”

Therese went to the bed table and got a cigarette from the box there. A
Philip Morris. Carol had put them there, not the maid, Therese knew,
because Carol remembered that she liked them. Naked now, Therese stood
listening to the music. It was a song she didn’t know.

Was Carol on the telephone again?

“Well, I don’t like it,” she heard Carol say, half angry, half joking,
“one damn bit.”

_... it’s easy to live ... when you’re in love ..._

“How do I know what kind of people they are?... Oh-ho! Is that so?”

Abby, Therese knew. She blew her smoke out and snuffed at the slightly
sweet smelling wisps of it, remembering the first cigarette she had ever
smoked, a Philip Morris, on the roof of a dormitory at the Home, four of
them passing it around.

“Yes, we’re going,” Carol said emphatically. “Well, I am. Don’t I sound
it?”

_... For you ... maybe I’m a fool but it’s fun ... People say you rule
me with one ... wave of your hand ... darling, it’s grand ... they just
don’t understand ..._

It was a good song. Therese closed her eyes and leaned on the half-open
door, listening. Behind the voice was a slow piano that rippled all over
the keyboard. And a lazy trumpet.

Carol said, “That’s nobody’s business but mine, is it?... Nonsense!” and
Therese smiled at her vehemence.

Therese closed the door. The phonograph had dropped another record.

“Why don’t you come say hello to Abby?” Carol said.

Therese had ducked behind the bathroom door because she was naked.
“Why?”

“Come along,” Carol said, and Therese put on a robe and went.

“Hello,” Abby said. “I hear you’re going.”

“Is that news to you?”

Abby sounded silly, as if she wanted to talk all night. She wished
Therese a pleasant trip, and told her about the roads in the corn belt,
how bad they could be in winter.

“Will you forgive me if I was rude today?” Abby said for the second
time. “I like you O.K., Therese.”

“Cut it, cut it!” Carol called down.

“She wants to talk to you again,” Therese said.

“Tell Abigail I’m in the tub.”

Therese told her, and got away.

Carol had brought a bottle and two little glasses into the room.

“What’s the matter with Abby?” Therese asked.

“What do you mean, what’s the matter with her?” Carol poured a brown
colored liquor into the two glasses. “I think she’s had a couple
tonight.”

“I know. But why did she want to have lunch with me?”

“Well—I guess a lot of reasons. Try some of this stuff.”

“It just seems vague,” Therese said.

“What does?”

“The whole lunch.”

Carol gave her a glass. “Some things are always vague, darling.”

It was the first time Carol had called her darling. “What things?”
Therese asked. She wanted an answer, a definite answer.

Carol sighed. “A lot of things. The most important things. Taste your
drink.”

Therese sipped it, sweet and dark brown, like coffee, with the sting of
alcohol. “Tastes good.”

“You would think so.”

“Why do you drink it if you don’t like it?”

“Because it’s different. This is to our trip, so it’s got to be
something different.” Carol grimaced and drank the rest of her glass.

In the light of the lamp, Therese could see all the freckles on half of
Carol’s face. Carol’s white looking eyebrow bent like a wing around the
curve of her forehead. Therese felt ecstatically happy all at once.
“What’s that song that was playing before, the one with just the voice
and the piano?”

“Hum it.”

She whistled part of it, and Carol smiled.

“‘Easy Living,’” Carol said. “That’s an old one.”

“I’d like to hear it again.”

“I’d like you to get to bed. I’ll play it again.”

Carol went into the green room, and stayed there while it played.
Therese stood by the door of her room, listening, smiling.

_... I’ll never regret ... the years I’m giving ... They’re easy to
give, when you’re in love ... I’m happy to do whatever I do for you ..._

That was her song. That was everything she felt about Carol. She went in
the bathroom before it was over, and turned the water on in the tub, got
in and let the greenish looking water tumble about her feet.

“Hey!” Carol called. “Have you ever been to Wyoming?”

“No.”

“It’s time you saw America.”

Therese lifted the dripping rag and pressed it against her knee. The
water was so high now, her breasts looked like flat things floating on
the surface. She studied them, trying to decide what they looked like
besides what they were.

“Don’t go to sleep in there,” Carol called in a preoccupied voice, and
Therese knew she was sitting on the bed, looking at a map.

“I won’t.”

“Well, some people do.”

“Tell me more about Harge,” she said as she dried herself. “What does he
do?”

“A lot of things.”

“I mean, what’s his business?”

“Real estate investment.”

“What’s he like? Does he like to go to the theater? Does he like
people?”

“He likes a little group of people who play golf,” Carol said with
finality. Then in a louder voice, “And what else? He’s very, very
meticulous about everything. But he forgot his best razor. It’s in the
medicine cabinet and you can see it if you want to and you probably do.
I’ve got to mail it to him, I suppose.”

Therese opened the medicine cabinet. She saw the razor. The medicine
cabinet was still full of men’s things, after-shaving lotions and lather
brushes. “Was this his room?” she asked as she came out of the bathroom.
“Which bed did he sleep in?”

Carol smiled. “Not yours.”

“Can I have some more of this?” Therese asked, looking at the liqueur
bottle.

“Of course.”

“Can I kiss you good night?”

Carol was folding the road map, pursing her lips as if she would
whistle, waiting. “No,” she said.

“Why not?” Anything seemed possible tonight.

“I’ll give you this instead.” Carol pulled her hand out of her pocket.

It was a check. Therese read the sum, two hundred dollars, made out to
her. “What’s this for?”

“For the trip. I don’t want you to spend the money you’ll need for that
union membership thing.” Carol took a cigarette. “You won’t need all of
that, I just want you to have it.”

“But I don’t need it,” Therese said. “Thanks. I don’t care if I spend
the union money.”

“No back talk,” Carol interrupted her. “It gives me pleasure, remember?”

“But I won’t take it.” She sounded curt, so she smiled a little as she
put the check down on the table top by the liqueur bottle. But she had
thumped the check down, too. She wished she could explain it to Carol.
It didn’t matter at all, the money, but since it did give Carol
pleasure, she hated not to take it. “I don’t like the idea,” Therese
said. “Think of something else.” She looked at Carol. Carol was watching
her, was not going to argue with her, Therese was glad to see.

“To give me pleasure?” Carol asked.

Therese’s smile broadened. “Yes,” she said, and picked up the little
glass.

“All right,” Carol said. “I’ll think. Good night.” Carol had stopped by
the door.

It was a funny way of saying good night, Therese thought, on such an
important night. “Good night,” Therese answered.

She turned to the table and saw the check again. But it was for Carol to
tear up. She slid it under the edge of the dark-blue linen table runner,
out of sight.




                             chapter twelve


January.

It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold
sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was
a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory:
the woman she saw peering anxiously by the light of a match at the names
in a dark doorway, the man who scribbled a message and handed it to his
friend before they parted on the sidewalk, the man who ran a block for a
bus and caught it. Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January
was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow
crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar
yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.

A young man named Red Malone and a baldheaded carpenter worked with her
on the _Small Rain_ set. Mr. Donohue was very pleased with it. He said
he had asked a Mr. Baltin to come in and see her work. Mr. Baltin was a
graduate of a Russian academy, and had designed a few sets for theaters
in New York. Therese had never heard of him. She tried to get Mr.
Donohue to arrange an appointment for her to see Myron Blanchard or Ivor
Harkevy, but Mr. Donohue never promised anything. He couldn’t, Therese
supposed.

Mr. Baltin came in one afternoon, a tall, bent man in a black hat and a
seedy overcoat, and looked intently at the work she showed him. She had
brought only three or four models down to the theatre, her very best
ones. Mr. Baltin told her of a play that was to start in production in
about six weeks. He would be glad to recommend her as an assistant, and
Therese said that would work out very well, because she would be out of
town until then, anyway. Everything was working out very well in these
last days. Mr. Andronich had promised her a two-week job in Philadelphia
in the middle of February, which would be just about the time she would
be back from the trip with Carol. Therese wrote down the name and
address of the man Mr. Baltin knew.

“He’s looking for someone now, so call him the first of the week,” Mr.
Baltin said. “It’ll just be a helper’s job, but his helper, a pupil of
mine, is working with Harkevy now.”

“Oh. Do you suppose you—or he could arrange for me to see Harkevy?”

“Nothing easier. All you have to do is call Harkevy’s studio and ask to
speak to Charles. Charles Winant. Tell him that you’ve spoken with me.
Let’s see—call him Friday. Friday afternoon around three.”

“All right. Thank you.” Friday was a whole week off. Harkevy was not
unapproachable, Therese had heard, but he had the reputation of never
making appointments, much less keeping them if he did make them, because
he was very busy. But maybe Mr. Baltin knew.

“And don’t forget to call Kettering,” Mr. Baltin said as he left.

Therese looked again at the name he had given her: Adolph Kettering,
Theatrical Investments, Inc., at a private address. “I’ll call him
Monday morning. Thanks a lot.”

That was the day, a Saturday, when she was to meet Richard in the
Palermo after work. It was the seventh of January, eleven days before
she and Carol planned to leave. She saw Phil standing with Richard at
the bar.

“Well, how’s the old Cat?” Phil asked her, dragging up a stool for her.
“Working Saturdays, too?”

“The cast didn’t work. Just my department,” she said.

“When’s the opening?”

“The twenty-first.”

“Look,” Richard said. He pointed to a spot of dark-green paint on her
skirt.

“I know. I did that days ago.”

“What would you like to drink?” Phil asked her.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have a beer, thanks.” Richard had turned his
back on Phil, who stood on the other side of him, and she sensed an
ill-feeling between them. “Did you do any painting today?” she asked
Richard.

Richard’s mouth was down at both corners. “Had to pinch hit for some
driver who was sick. Ran out of gas in the middle of Long Island.”

“Oh. That’s rotten. Maybe you’d rather paint than go anywhere tomorrow.”
They had talked of going over to Hoboken tomorrow, just to walk around
and eat at the Clam House. But Carol would be in town tomorrow, and had
promised to call her.

“I’ll paint if you’ll sit for me,” Richard said.

Therese hesitated uncomfortably. “I just don’t feel in the mood for
sitting these days.”

“All right. It’s not important.” He smiled. “But how can I ever paint
you if you’ll never sit?”

“Why don’t you do it out of the air?”

Phil slid his hand out and held the bottom of her glass. “Don’t drink
that. Have something better. I’ll drink this.”

“All right. I’ll try a rye and water.”

Phil was standing on the other side of her now. He looked cheerful, but
a little dark around the eyes. For the past week, in a sullen mood, he
had been writing a play. He had read a few scenes of it aloud at his New
Year’s party. Phil called it an extension of Kafka’s _Metamorphosis_.
She had drawn a rough sketch for a set New Year’s morning, and showed it
to Phil when she came down to see him. And suddenly it occurred to her,
that was what was the matter with Richard.

“Terry, I wish you’d make a model we can photograph from that sketch you
showed me. I’d like to have a set to go with the script.” Phil pushed
the rye and water toward her, and leaned on the bar close beside her.

“I might,” Therese said. “Are you really going to try to get it
produced?”

“Why not?” Phil’s dark eyes challenged her above his smile. He snapped
his fingers at the barman. “Check?”

“I’ll pay,” Richard said.

“No, you won’t. This is mine.” Phil had his old black wallet in his
hand.

His play would never be produced, Therese thought, might not even be
finished, because Phil’s moods were capricious.

“I’ll be moving along,” Phil said. “Drop by soon, Terry. Cheerio, Rich.”

She watched him go off and up the little front stairs, shabbier than she
had ever seen him in his sandals and threadbare polo coat, yet with an
attractive nonchalance about his shabbiness. Like a man walking through
his house in his favorite old bathrobe, Therese thought. She waved back
at him through the front window.

“I hear you took Phil sandwiches and beer New Year’s Day,” Richard said.

“Yes. He called up and said he had a hangover.”

“Why didn’t you mention it?”

“I forgot, I suppose. It wasn’t important.”

“Not important. If you—” Richard’s stiff hand gestured slowly,
hopelessly. “If you spend half the day in a guy’s apartment, bringing
him sandwiches and beer? Didn’t it occur to you I might have wanted some
sandwiches, too?”

“If you did, you had plenty of people to get them for you. We’d eaten
and drunk everything in Phil’s house. Remember?”

Richard nodded his long head, still smiling the downward, disgruntled
smile. “And you were alone with him, just the two of you.”

“Oh, Richard—” She remembered, and it was so unimportant. Dannie hadn’t
been back from Connecticut that day. He had spent New Year’s at the
house of one of his professors. She had hoped Dannie would come in that
afternoon at Phil’s, but Richard would probably never think that, never
guess she liked Dannie a lot better than Phil.

“If any other girl did that, I’d suspect something was brewing and I’d
be right,” Richard went on.

“I think you’re being silly.”

“I think you’re being naïve.” Richard was looking at her stonily,
resentfully, and Therese thought, it surely couldn’t be only this he was
so resentful about. He resented the fact that she wasn’t and never could
be what he wished her to be, a girl who loved him passionately and would
love to go to Europe with him. A girl like herself, with her face, her
ambitions, but a girl who adored him. “You’re not Phil’s type, you
know,” he said.

“Whoever said I was? Phil?”

“That twerp, that half-baked dilettante,” Richard murmured. “And he has
the nerve to sound off tonight and say you don’t give a damn for me.”

“He hasn’t any right to say that. I don’t discuss you with him.”

“Oh, that’s a fine answer. Meaning if you had, he’d know you didn’t give
a damn, eh?” Richard said it quietly, but his voice shook with anger.

“What’s Phil suddenly got against you?” she asked.

“That’s not the point!”

“What is the point?” she said impatiently.

“Oh, Terry, let’s stop it.”

“You can’t find any point,” she said, but seeing Richard turn away from
her and shift his elbows on the bar, almost as if he writhed physically
under her words, she felt a sudden compassion for him. It was not now,
not last week that galled him, but the whole past and future futility of
his own feelings about her.

Richard plunged his cigarette into the ash tray on the bar. “What do you
want to do tonight?” he asked.

Tell him about the trip with Carol, she thought. Twice before she had
meant to tell him, and put it off. “Do you want to do anything?” She
emphasized the last word.

“Of course,” he said depressedly. “What do you say we have dinner, then
call up Sam and Joan? Maybe we can walk up and see them tonight.”

“All right.” She hated it. Two of the most boring people she had ever
met, a shoe clerk and a secretary, happily married on West Twentieth
Street, and she knew Richard meant to show her an ideal life in theirs,
to remind her that they might live together the same way one day. She
hated it, and any other night she might have protested, but the
compassion for Richard was still in her, dragging after it an amorphous
wake of guilt and a necessity to atone. Suddenly, she remembered a
picnic they had had last summer, off the road near Tarrytown, remembered
precisely Richard’s reclining on the grass, working ever so slowly with
his pocketknife at the cork in the wine bottle, while they talked
of—what? But she remembered that moment of contentment, that conviction
that they shared something wonderfully real and rare together that day,
and she wondered now where it had gone to, on what it had been based.
For now even his long flat figure standing beside her seemed to oppress
her with its weight. She forced down her resentment, but it only grew
heavy inside her, like a thing of substance. She looked at the chunky
figures of the two Italian workmen standing at the bar, and at the two
girls at the end of the bar whom she had noticed before, and now that
they were leaving, she saw that they were in slacks. One had hair cut
like a boy’s. Therese looked away, aware that she avoided them, avoided
being seen looking at them.

“Want to eat here? Are you hungry yet?” Richard asked.

“No. Let’s go somewhere else.”

So they went out and walked north, in the general direction of where Sam
and Joan lived.

Therese rehearsed the first words until all their sense was rubbed out.
“Remember Mrs. Aird, the woman you met in my house that day?”

“Sure.”

“She’s invited me to go on a trip with her, a trip West in a car for a
couple of weeks or so. I’d like to go.”

“West? California?” Richard said surprisedly. “Why?”

“Why?”

“Well—do you know her as well as that?”

“I’ve seen her a few times.”

“Oh. Well, you didn’t mention it.” Richard walked along with his hands
swinging at his sides, looking at her. “Just the two of you?”

“Yes.”

“When would you be leaving?”

“Around the eighteenth.”

“Of this month?—Then you won’t get to see your show.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s so much to miss.”

“Then it’s definite?”

“Yes.”

He was silent a moment. “What kind of a person is she? She doesn’t drink
or anything, does she?”

“No.” Therese smiled. “Does she look like she drinks?”

“No. I think she’s very good looking, in fact. It’s just damned
surprising, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“You so seldom make up your mind about anything. You’ll probably change
your mind again.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe I can see her again sometime with you. Why don’t you arrange it?”

“She said she’d be in the city tomorrow. I don’t know how much time
she’s got—or really whether she’ll call or not.”

Richard didn’t continue and neither did Therese. They did not mention
Carol again that evening.

Richard spent Sunday morning painting, and came to Therese’s apartment
around two. He was there when Carol telephoned a little later. Therese
told her that Richard was with her, and Carol said, “Bring him along.”
Carol said she was near the Plaza, and they might meet there in the Palm
Room.

Half an hour later, Therese saw Carol look up at them from a table near
the center of the room, and almost like the first time, like the echo of
an impact that had been tremendous, Therese was jolted by the sight of
her. Carol was wearing the same black suit with the green and gold scarf
that she had worn the day of the luncheon. But now Carol paid more
attention to Richard than to her.

The three of them talked of nothing, and Therese, seeing the calm in
Carol’s gray eyes that only once turned to her, seeing a quite ordinary
expression on Richard’s face, felt a kind of disappointment. Richard had
gone out of his way to meet her, but Therese thought it was even less
from curiosity than because he had nothing else to do. She saw Richard
looking at Carol’s hands, the nails manicured in a bright red, saw him
notice the ring with the clear green sapphire, and the wedding ring on
the other hand. Richard could not say they were useless hands, idle
hands, despite the longish nails. Carol’s hands were strong, and they
moved with an economy of motion. Her voice emerged from the flat murmur
of other voices around them, talking of nothing at all with Richard, and
once she laughed.

Carol looked at her. “Did you tell Richard we might go on a trip?” she
asked.

“Yes. Last night.”

“West?” Richard asked.

“I’d like to go up to the Northwest. It depends on the roads.”

And Therese was suddenly impatient. Why did they sit here having a
conference about it? Now they were talking about temperatures, and the
state of Washington.

“Washington’s my home state,” Carol said. “Practically.”

Then a few moments later, Carol asked if anyone wanted to take a walk in
the park. Richard paid the check for their beer and coffee, pulling a
bill from the tangle of bills and change that bulged a pocket of his
trousers. How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought.
She felt he didn’t see her, as he sometimes hadn’t seen figures in rock
or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him. He was
looking down at the table now, the thin careless line of his mouth half
smiling as he straightened up and shoved his hand quickly through his
hair.

They walked from the entrance of the park at Fifty-ninth Street toward
the zoo, and through the zoo at a strolling pace. They walked on under
the first bridge over the path, where the path bent and the real park
began. The air was cold and still, a little overcast, and Therese felt a
motionlessness about everything, a lifeless stillness even in their
slowly moving figures.

“Shall I hunt up some peanuts?” Richard asked.

Carol was stooped at the edge of the path, holding her fingers out to a
squirrel. “I have something,” she said softly, and the squirrel started
at her voice but advanced again, seized her fingers in a nervous grip
and fixed its teeth on something, and dashed away. Carol stood up,
smiling. “Had something in my pocket from this morning.”

“Do you feed squirrels out where you live?” Richard asked.

“Squirrels and chipmunks,” Carol replied.

What dull things they talked of, Therese thought.

Then they sat on a bench and smoked a cigarette, and Therese, watching a
diminutive sun bring its orange fire down finally into the scraggly
black twigs of a tree, wished the night were here already and that she
were alone with Carol. They began to walk back. If Carol had to go home
now, Therese thought, she would do something violent. Like jump off the
Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Or take the three benzedrine tablets Richard
had given her last week.

“Would you people like to have some tea somewhere?” Carol asked as they
neared the zoo again. “How about that Russian place over by Carnegie
Hall?”

“Rumpelmayer’s is right here,” Richard said. “Do you like
Rumpelmayer’s?”

Therese sighed. And Carol seemed to hesitate. But they went there.
Therese had been here once with Angelo, she remembered. She did not care
for the place. Its bright lights gave her a feeling of nakedness, and it
was annoying not to know if one were looking at a real person or at a
reflection in a mirror.

“No, none of that, thanks,” Carol said, shaking her head at the great
tray of pastry the waitress was holding.

But Richard chose something, chose two pastries, though Therese had
declined.

“What’s that for, in case I change my mind?” she asked him, and Richard
winked at her. His nails were dirty again, she noticed.

Richard asked Carol what kind of car she had, and they began discussing
the merits of various car makes. Therese saw Carol glance about at the
tables in front of her. She doesn’t like it here either, Therese
thought. Therese stared at a man in the mirror that was set obliquely
behind Carol. His back was to Therese, and he leaned forward, talking
animatedly to a woman, jerking his spread left hand for emphasis. She
looked at the thin, middle-aged woman he spoke to, and back at him,
wondering if the aura of familiarity about him were real or an illusion
like the mirror, until a memory fragile as a bubble swam upward in her
consciousness and burst at the surface. It was Harge.

Therese glanced at Carol, but if Carol had noticed him, she thought,
Carol would not know that he was in the mirror behind her. A moment
later, Therese looked over her shoulder, and saw Harge in profile, much
like one of the images she carried in her memory from the house—the
short high nose, the full lower face, the receding twist of blond hair
above the usual hairline. Carol must have seen him, only three tables
away to her left.

Carol looked from Richard to Therese. “Yes,” she said to her, smiling a
little, and turned back to Richard and went on with her conversation.
Her manner was just as before, Therese thought, not different at all.
Therese looked at the woman with Harge. She was not young, not very
attractive. She might have been one of his relatives.

Then Therese saw Carol mash out a long cigarette. Richard had stopped
talking. They were ready to leave. Therese was looking at Harge the
moment he saw Carol. After his first glimpse of her, his eyes drew
almost shut as if he had to squint to believe her, and then he said
something to the woman he was with and stood up and went to her.

“Carol,” Harge said.

“Hello, Harge.” She turned to Therese and Richard. “Would you excuse me
a minute?”

Watching from the doorway where she stood with Richard, Therese tried to
see it all, to see beyond the pride and aggressiveness in Hargie’s
anxious, forward leaning figure that was not quite so tall as the crown
of Carol’s hat, to see beyond Carol’s acquiescent nods as he spoke, to
surmise not what they talked of now but what they had said to each other
five years ago, three years ago, that day of the picture in the rowboat.
Carol had loved him once, and that was hard to remember.

“Can we get free now, Terry?” Richard asked her.

Therese saw Carol nod good-by to the woman at Harge’s table, then turn
away from Harge. Harge looked past Carol, to her and Richard, and
without apparently recognizing her, he went back to his table.

“I’m sorry,” Carol said as she rejoined them.

On the sidewalk, Therese drew Richard aside and said, “I’ll say good
night, Richard. Carol wants me to visit a friend of hers tonight with
her.”

“Oh.” Richard frowned. “I had those concert tickets for tonight, you
know.”

Therese remembered suddenly. “Alex’s. I forgot. I’m sorry.”

He said gloomily, “It’s not important.”

It wasn’t important. Richard’s friend Alex was accompanying somebody in
a violin concert, and had given Richard the tickets, she remembered,
weeks ago.

“You’d rather see her than me, wouldn’t you?” he said.

Therese saw that Carol was looking for a taxi. Carol would leave them
both in a moment. “You might have mentioned the concert this morning,
Richard, reminded me, at least.”

“Was that her husband?” Richard’s eyes narrowed under his frown. “What
is this, Terry?”

“What’s what?” she said. “I don’t know her husband.”

Richard waited a moment, then the frown left his eyes. He smiled, as if
he conceded he had been unreasonable. “Sorry. I just took it for granted
I’d see you tonight.” He walked toward Carol. “Good night,” he said.

He looked as if he were leaving by himself, and Carol said, “Are you
going downtown? Maybe I can drop you.”

“I’m walking, thanks.”

“I thought you two had a date,” Carol said to Therese.

Therese saw that Richard was lingering, and she walked toward Carol, out
of his hearing. “Not an important one. I’d rather stay with you.”

A taxi had slid up beside Carol. Carol put her hand on the door handle.
“Well, neither is our date so important, so why don’t you go on with
Richard tonight?”

Therese glanced at Richard, and saw that he had heard her.

“Bye-bye, Therese,” Carol said.

“Good night,” Richard called.

“Good night,” Therese said, and watched Carol pull the taxi door shut
after her.

“So,” Richard said.

Therese turned toward him. She wouldn’t go to the concert, and neither
would she do anything violent, she knew, nothing more violent than walk
quickly home and get to work on the set she wanted to finish by Tuesday
for Harkevy. She could see the whole evening ahead, with a half-dismal,
half-defiant fatality, in the second it took for Richard to walk to her.
“I still don’t want to go to the concert,” she said.

To her surprise, Richard stepped back and said angrily, “All right,
don’t!” and turned away.

He walked west on Fifty-ninth Street in his loose, lopsided gait that
jutted his right shoulder ahead of the other, hands swinging
unrhythmically at his sides, and she might have known from the walk
alone that he was angry. And he was out of sight in no time. The
rejection from Kettering last Monday flashed across her mind. She stared
at the darkness where Richard had disappeared. She did not feel guilty
about tonight. It was something else. She envied him. She envied him his
faith there would always be a place, a home, a job, someone else for
him. She envied him that attitude. She almost resented his having it.




                            chapter thirteen


Richard began it.

“Why do you like her so much?”

It was an evening on which she had broken a date with Richard on the
slim chance Carol would come by. Carol hadn’t, and Richard had come by
instead. Now at five past eleven in the huge pink-walled cafeteria on
Lexington Avenue, she had been about to begin, but Richard was ahead of
her.

“I like being with her, I like talking with her. I’m fond of anybody I
can talk to.” The phrases of some letter she had written to Carol and
never mailed drifted across her mind as if to answer Richard. _I feel I
stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down
upon me._

“You’ve got a hell of a crush on her,” Richard announced, explanatorily
and resentfully.

Therese took a deep breath. Should she be simple and say yes, or should
she try to explain it? What could he ever understand of it, even if she
explained it in a million words?

“Does she know it? Of course she knows it.” Richard frowned and drew on
his cigarette. “Don’t you think it’s pretty silly? It’s like a crush
that schoolgirls get.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. She felt so very sure of herself. _I
will comb you like music caught in the heads of all the trees in the
forest...._

“What’s there to understand? But she understands. She shouldn’t indulge
you. She shouldn’t play with you like this. It’s not fair to you.”

“Not fair to me?”

“What’s she doing, amusing herself with you? And then one day she’ll get
tired of you and kick you out.”

Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an
emotion? She was angry, but she did not want to argue. She said nothing.

“You’re in a daze!”

“I’m wide awake. I never felt more awake.” She picked up the table knife
and rubbed her thumb back and forth on the ridge at the base of the
blade. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

He frowned. “Leave you alone?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, about Europe, too?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Listen, Terry—” Richard wriggled in his chair and leaned forward,
hesitated, then took another cigarette, lighting it distastefully,
throwing the match on the floor. “You’re in some kind of trance! It’s
worse—”

“Just because I don’t want to argue with you?”

“It’s worse than being lovesick, because it’s so completely
unreasonable. Don’t you understand that?”

No, she didn’t understand a word.

“But you’re going to get over it in about a week. I hope. My God!” He
squirmed again. “To say—to say for a minute you practically want to say
good-by to me because of some silly crush!”

“I didn’t say that. You said it.” She looked back at him, at his rigid
face that was beginning to redden in the center of the flat cheeks. “But
why should I want to be with you if all you do is argue about this?”

He sat back. “Wednesday, next Saturday, you won’t feel like this at all.
You haven’t known her three weeks yet.”

She looked over toward the steam tables, where people edged slowly
along, choosing this and that, drifting toward the curve in the counter
where they dispersed. “We may as well say good-by,” she said, “because
neither of us will ever be any different from what we are this minute.”

“Therese, you’re like a person gone so crazy, you think you’re saner
than ever!”

“Oh, let’s stop it!”

Richard’s hand with its row of knuckles embedded in the white, freckled
flesh was clenched on the table motionless, like a picture of a hand
that had hammered some ineffectual, inaudible point. “I’ll tell you one
thing, I think your friend knows what she’s doing. I think she’s
committing a crime against you. I’ve half a mind to report her to
somebody, but the trouble is you’re not a child. You’re just acting like
one.”

“Why do you make so much out of it?” she asked. “You’re practically in a
frenzy.”

“You make enough out of it to want to say good-by to me! What do you
know about her?”

“What do _you_ know about her?”

“Did she ever make any passes at you?”

“God!” Therese said. She felt like saying it a dozen times. It summed up
everything, her imprisonment now, here, yet. “You don’t understand.” But
he did, and that was why he was angry. But did he understand that she
would have felt the same way if Carol had never touched her? Yes, and if
Carol had never even spoken to her after that brief conversation about a
doll’s valise in the store. If Carol, in fact, had never spoken to her
at all, for it had all happened in that instant she had seen Carol
standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. Then the realization
that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly
lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other,
to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol—“I think I
understand you better than you understand me. You don’t really want to
see me again, either, because you said yourself I’m not the same person.
If we keep on seeing each other, you’ll only get more and more—like
this.”

“Terry, forget for a minute I ever said I wanted you to love me, or that
I love you. It’s you as a person, I mean. I like you. I’d like—”

“I wonder sometimes why you think you like me, or did like me. Because
you didn’t even know me.”

“You don’t know yourself.”

“But I do—and I know you. You’ll drop painting someday and me with it.
Just as you’ve dropped everything else you ever started, as far as I can
see. The dry-cleaning thing, or the used-car lot—”

“That’s not true,” Richard said sullenly.

“But why do you think you like me? Because I paint a little, too, and we
can talk about that? I’m just as impractical as a girl friend for you as
painting is as a business for you.” She hesitated a minute, then said
the rest of it, “You know enough about art anyway to know you’ll never
make a good painter. You’re like a little boy playing truant as long as
you can, knowing all the time what you ought to be doing and what you’ll
finally be doing, working for your father.”

Richard’s blue eyes had gone suddenly cold. The line of his mouth was
straight and very short now, the thin upper lip faintly curling. “All
that isn’t quite the point now, is it?”

“Well—yes. It’s part of your hanging on when you know it’s hopeless, and
when you know you’ll finally let go.”

“I will not!”

“Richard, there’s no point—!”

“You’re going to change your mind, you know.”

She understood that. It was like a song he kept singing to her.

A week later, Richard stood in her room with the same expression of
sullen anger on his face, talking in the same tone. He had called up at
the unusual hour of three in the afternoon, and insisted on seeing her
for a moment. She was packing a bag to take to Carol’s for the week end.
If she hadn’t been packing for Carol’s house, Richard might have been in
quite another mood, she thought, because she had seen him three times
the past week, and he had never been pleasanter, never been more
considerate of her.

“You can’t just give me marching orders out of your life,” he said,
flinging his long arms out, but there was a lonesome tone in it, as if
he had already started on that road away from her. “What really makes me
sore is that you act like I’m not worth anything, that I’m completely
ineffectual. It isn’t fair to me, Terry. I can’t compete!”

No, she thought, of course he couldn’t. “I don’t have any quarrel with
you,” she said. “It’s you who choose to quarrel over Carol. She hasn’t
taken anything away from you, because you didn’t have it in the first
place. But if you can’t go on seeing me—” She stopped, knowing he could
and probably would go on seeing her.

“What logic,” he said, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye.

Therese watched him, caught by the idea that had just come to her, that
she knew suddenly was a fact. Why hadn’t it occurred to her the night of
the theater, days ago? She might have known it from a hundred gestures,
words, looks, this past week. But she remembered the night of the
theater especially—he had surprised her with tickets to something she
particularly wanted to see—the way he had held her hand that night, and
from his voice on the telephone, not just telling her to meet him here
or there, but asking her very sweetly if she could. She hadn’t liked it.
It was not a manifestation of affection, but rather a means of
ingratiating himself, of somehow paving the way for the sudden questions
he had asked so casually that night, “What do you mean you’re fond of
her? Do you want to go to bed with her?” Therese had replied, “Do you
think I would tell you if I did?” while a quick succession of
emotions—humiliation, resentment, loathing of him—had made her
speechless, had made it almost impossible for her to keep walking beside
him. And glancing at him, she had seen him looking at her with that
soft, inane smile that in memory now looked cruel, and unhealthy. And
its unhealthiness might have escaped her, she thought, if it weren’t
that Richard was so frankly trying to convince her she was unhealthy.

Therese turned and tossed into the overnight bag her toothbrush and her
hairbrush, then remembered she had a toothbrush at Carol’s.

“Just what do you want from her, Therese? Where’s it going to go from
here?”

“Why are you so interested?”

He stared at her and for a moment beneath the anger she saw the fixed
curiosity she had seen before, as if he were watching a spectacle
through a keyhole. But she knew he was not so detached as that. On the
contrary, she sensed that he was never so bound to her as now, never so
determined not to give her up. It frightened her. She could imagine the
determination transformed to hatred and to violence.

Richard sighed, and twisted the newspaper in his hands. “I’m interested
in _you_. You can’t just say to me, ‘Find someone else.’ I’ve never
treated you the way I treated the others, never thought of you that
way.”

She didn’t answer.

“Damn!” Richard threw the newspaper at the bookshelf, and turned his
back on her.

The newspaper flicked the Madonna, and it tipped back against the wall
as if astonished, fell over, and rolled off the edge. Richard made a
lunge for it and caught it in both hands. He looked at Therese and
smiled involuntarily.

“Thanks.” Therese took it from him. She lifted it to set it back, then
brought her hands down quickly and smashed the figure to the floor.

“Terry!”

The Madonna lay in three or four pieces.

“Never mind it,” she said. Her heart was beating as if she were angry,
or fighting.

“But—”

“To hell with it!” she said, pushing the pieces aside with her shoe.

Richard left a moment later, slamming the door.

What was it, Therese wondered, the Andronich thing or Richard? Mr.
Andronich’s secretary had called about an hour ago and told her that Mr.
Andronich had decided to hire an assistant from Philadelphia instead of
her. So that job would not be there to come back to, after the trip with
Carol. Therese looked down at the broken Madonna. The wood was quite
beautiful inside. It had cracked cleanly along the grain.

Carol asked her in detail that evening about her talk with Richard. It
irked Therese that Carol was so concerned as to whether Richard were
hurt or not.

“You’re not used to thinking of other people’s feelings,” Carol said
bluntly to her.

They were in the kitchen fixing a late dinner, because Carol had given
the maid the evening off.

“What real reason have you to think he’s not in love with you?” Carol
asked.

“Maybe I just don’t understand how he works. But it doesn’t seem like
love to me.”

Then in the middle of dinner, in the middle of a conversation about the
trip, Carol remarked suddenly, “You shouldn’t have talked to Richard at
all.”

It was the first time Therese had told Carol any of it, any of the first
conversation in the cafeteria with Richard. “Why not? Should I have lied
to him?”

Carol was not eating. Now she pushed back her chair and stood up.
“You’re much too young to know your own mind. Or what you’re talking
about. Yes, in that case, lie.”

Therese laid her fork down. She watched Carol get a cigarette and light
it. “I had to say good-by to him and I did. I have. I won’t see him
again.”

Carol opened a panel in the bottom of the bookcase and took out a
bottle. She poured some into an empty glass and slammed the panel shut.
“Why did you do it now? Why not two months ago or two months from now?
And why did you mention me?”

“I know—I think it fascinates him.”

“It probably does.”

“But if I simply don’t see him again—” She couldn’t finish it, about his
not being apt to follow her, spy on her. She didn’t want to say such
things to Carol. And besides, there was the memory of Richard’s eyes. “I
think he’ll give it up. He said he couldn’t compete.”

Carol struck her forehead with her hand. “Couldn’t compete,” she
repeated. She came back to the table and poured some of the water from
her glass into the whisky. “How true. Finish your dinner. I may be
making too much of it, I don’t know.”

But Therese did not move. She had done the wrong thing. And at best,
even doing the right thing, she could not make Carol happy as Carol made
her happy, she thought as she had thought a hundred times before. Carol
was happy only at moments here and there, moments that Therese caught
and kept. One had been in the evening they put away the Christmas
decorations, and Carol had refolded the string of angels and put them
between the pages of a book. “I’m going to keep these,” she had said.
“With twenty-two angels to defend me, I can’t lose.” Therese looked at
Carol now, and though Carol was watching her, it was through that veil
of preoccupation that Therese so often saw, that kept them a world
apart.

“Lines,” Carol said. “I can’t compete. People talk of classics. These
lines are classic. A hundred different people will say the same words.
There are lines for the mother, lines for the daughter, for the husband
and the lover. I’d rather see you dead at my feet. It’s the same play
repeated with different casts. What do they say makes a play a classic,
Therese?”

“A classic—” Her voice sounded tight and stifled. “A classic is
something with a basic human situation.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

When Therese awakened, the sun was in her room. She lay for a moment,
watching the watery looking sunspots rippling on the pale green ceiling,
listening for any sound of activity in the house. She looked at her
blouse, hanging over the edge of the bureau. Why was she so untidy in
Carol’s house? Carol didn’t like it. The dog that lived somewhere beyond
the garages was barking intermittently, halfheartedly. There had been
one pleasant interval last evening, the telephone call from Rindy. Rindy
back from a birthday party at nine thirty. Could she give a birthday
party on her birthday in April. Carol said of course. Carol had been
different after that. She had talked about Europe, and summers in
Rapallo.

Therese got up and went to the window, raised it higher and leaned on
the sill, tensing herself against the cold. There were no mornings
anywhere like the mornings from this window. The round bed of grass
beyond the driveway had darts of sunlight in it, like scattered gold
needles. There were sparks of sun in the moist hedge leaves, and the sky
was a fresh solid blue. She looked at the place in the driveway where
Abby had been that morning, and at the bit of white fence beyond the
hedges that marked the end of the lawn. The ground looked breathing and
young, even though the winter had browned the grass. There had been
trees and hedges around the school in Montclair, but the green had
always ended in part of a red brick wall, or a gray stone building that
was part of the school—an infirmary, a woodshed, a toolhouse—and the
green each spring had seemed old already, used and handed down by one
generation of children to the next, as much a part of school
paraphernalia as textbooks and uniforms.

She dressed in the plaid slacks she had brought from home, and one of
the shirts she had left from another time, that had been laundered. It
was twenty past eight. Carol liked to get up about eight thirty, liked
to be awakened by someone with a cup of coffee, though Therese had
noticed she never had Florence do it.

Florence was in the kitchen when she went down, but she had only just
started the coffee.

“Good morning,” Therese said. “Do you mind if I fix the breakfast?”
Florence hadn’t minded the two other times she had come in and found
Therese fixing them.

“Go ahead, miss,” Florence said. “I’ll just make my own fried eggs. You
like doing things for Mrs. Aird yourself, don’t you?” she said like a
statement.

Therese was getting two eggs out of the refrigerator. “Yes,” she said,
smiling. She dropped one of the eggs into the water that was just
beginning to heat. Her answer sounded rather flat, but what other answer
was there? When she turned around after setting the breakfast tray, she
saw Florence had put the second egg in the water. Therese took it out
with her fingers. “She wants only one egg,” Therese said. “That’s for my
omelette.”

“Does she? She always used to eat two.”

“Well—she doesn’t now,” Therese said.

“Shouldn’t you measure that egg anyway, miss?” Florence gave her the
pleasant professional smile. “Here’s the egg timer, top of the stove.”

Therese shook her head. “It comes out better when I guess.” She had
never gone wrong yet on Carol’s egg. Carol liked it a little better done
than the egg timer made it. Therese looked at Florence, who was
concentrating now on the two eggs she was frying in the skillet. The
coffee was almost all filtered. In silence, Therese prepared the cup to
take up to Carol.

Later in the morning, Therese helped Carol take in the white iron chairs
and the glider from the lawn in back of the house. It would be simpler
with Florence there, Carol said, but Carol had sent her away marketing,
then had a sudden whim to get the furniture in. It was Harge’s idea to
leave them out all winter, she said, but she thought they looked bleak.
Finally only one chair remained by the round fountain, a prim little
chair of white metal with a bulging bottom and four lacy feet. Therese
looked at it and wondered who had sat there.

“I wish there were more plays that happened out of doors,” Therese said.

“What do you think of first when you start to make a set?” Carol asked.
“What do you start from?”

“The mood of the play, I suppose. What do you mean?”

“Do you think of the kind of play it is, or of something you want to
see?”

One of Mr. Donohue’s remarks brushed Therese’s mind with a vague
unpleasantness. Carol was in an argumentative mood this morning. “I
think you’re determined to consider me an amateur,” Therese said.

“I think you’re rather subjective. That’s amateurish, isn’t it?”

“Not always.” But she knew what Carol meant.

“You have to know a lot to be absolutely subjective, don’t you? In those
things you showed me, I think you’re too subjective—without knowing
enough.”

Therese made fists of her hands in her pockets. She had so hoped Carol
would like her work, unqualifiedly. It had hurt her terribly that Carol
hadn’t liked in the least a certain few sets she had shown her. Carol
knew nothing about it, technically, yet she could demolish a set with a
phrase.

“I think a look at the West would do you good. When did you say you had
to be back? The middle of February?”

“Well, now I don’t—I just heard yesterday.”

“What do you mean? It fell through? The Philadelphia job?”

“They called me up. They want somebody from Philadelphia.”

“Oh, baby. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, it’s just this business,” Therese said. Carol’s hand was on the
back of her neck, Carol’s thumb rubbing behind her ear as Carol might
have fondled a dog.

“You weren’t going to tell me.”

“Yes, I was.”

“When?”

“Sometime on the trip.”

“Are you very disappointed?”

“No,” Therese said positively.

They heated the last cup of coffee and took it out to the white chair on
the lawn and shared it.

“Shall we have lunch out somewhere?” Carol asked her. “Let’s go to the
club. Then I ought to do some shopping in Newark. How about a jacket?
Would you like a tweed jacket?”

Therese was sitting on the edge of the fountain, one hand pressed
against her ear because it was aching from the cold. “I don’t
particularly need one,” she said.

“But I’d particularly like to see you in one.”

Therese was upstairs, changing her clothes, when she heard the telephone
ring. She heard Florence say, “Oh, good morning, Mr. Aird. Yes, I’ll
call her right now,” and Therese crossed the room and closed the door.
Restlessly, she began to put the room in order, hung her clothes in the
closet, and smoothed the bed she had already made. Then Carol knocked on
the door and put her head in. “Harge is coming by in a few minutes. I
don’t think he’ll be long.”

Therese did not want to see him. “Would you like for me to take a walk?”

Carol smiled. “No. Stay up here and read a book, if you want to.”

Therese got the book she had bought yesterday, the _Oxford Book of
English Verse_, and tried to read it, but the words stayed separate and
meaningless. She had a disquieting sense of hiding, so she went to the
door and opened it.

Carol was just coming from her room, and for an instant, Therese saw the
same look of indecision cross her face that Therese remembered from the
first moment she had entered the house. Then she said, “Come down.”

Harge’s car drove up as they walked into the living room. Carol went to
the door, and Therese heard their greeting, Carol’s only cordial, but
Harge’s very cheerful, and Carol came in with a long flower box in her
arms.

“Harge, this is Miss Belivet. I think you met her once,” Carol said.

Harge’s eyes narrowed a little, then opened. “Oh, yes. How do you do?”

“How do you do?”

Florence came in, and Carol handed the flower box to her.

“Would you put these in something?” Carol said.

“Ah, here’s that pipe. I thought so.” Harge reached behind the ivy on
the mantel, and brought forth a pipe.

“Everything is fine at home?” Carol asked as she sat down at the end of
the sofa.

“Yes. Very.” Harge’s tense smile did not show his teeth, but his
face and the quick turns of his head radiated geniality and
self-satisfaction. He watched with proprietary pleasure as Florence
brought in the flowers, red roses, in a vase, and set them on the coffee
table in front of the sofa.

Therese wished suddenly that she had brought Carol flowers, brought them
on any of a half a dozen occasions past, and she remembered the flowers
Dannie had brought to her one day when he simply dropped in at the
theater. She looked at Harge, and his eyes glanced away from her, the
peaked brow lifting still higher, the eyes darting everywhere, as if he
looked for little changes in the room. But it might all be pretense,
Therese thought, his air of good cheer. And if he cared enough to
pretend, he must also care in some way for Carol.

“May I take one for Rindy?” Harge asked.

“Of course.” Carol got up, and she would have broken a flower, but Harge
stepped forward and put a little knife blade against the stem and the
flower came off. “They’re very beautiful. Thank you, Harge.”

Harge lifted the flower to his nose. Half to Carol, half to Therese, he
said, “It’s a beautiful day. Are you going to take a drive?”

“Yes, we were,” Carol said. “By the way, I’d like to drive over one
afternoon next week. Perhaps Tuesday.”

Harge thought a moment. “All right. I’ll tell her.”

“I’ll speak to her on the phone. I meant tell your family.”

Harge nodded once, in acquiescence, then looked at Therese. “Yes, I
remember you. Of course. You were here about three weeks ago. Before
Christmas.”

“Yes. One Sunday.” Therese stood up. She wanted to leave them alone.
“I’ll go upstairs,” she said to Carol. “Good-by, Mr. Aird.”

Harge made her a little bow. “Good-by.”

As she went up the stairs, she heard Harge say, “Well, many happy
returns, Carol. I’d like to say it. Do you mind?”

Carol’s birthday, Therese thought. Of course, Carol wouldn’t have told
her.

She closed the door and looked around the room, realized she was looking
for any sign that she had spent the night. There was none. She stopped
at the mirror and looked at herself for a moment, frowningly. She was
not so pale as she had been three weeks ago when Harge saw her, she did
not feel like the drooping, frightened thing Harge had met then. From
the top drawer, she got her handbag and took her lipstick out of it.
Then she heard Harge knock on the door, and she closed the drawer.

“Come in.”

“Excuse me. I must get something.” He crossed the room quickly, went
into the bathroom, and he was smiling as he came back with the razor in
his hand. “You were in the restaurant with Carol last Sunday, weren’t
you?”

“Yes,” Therese said.

“Carol said you do stage designing.”

“Yes.”

He glanced from her face to her hands, to the floor, and up again. “I
hope you see that Carol gets out enough,” he said. “You look young and
spry. Make her take some walks.”

Then he went briskly out the door, leaving behind him a faint
shaving-soap scent. Therese tossed her lipstick onto the bed, and wiped
her palms down the side of her skirt. She wondered why Harge troubled to
let her know he took it for granted she spent a great deal of time with
Carol.

“Therese!” Carol called suddenly. “Come down!”

Carol was sitting on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. Harge had gone. She
looked at Therese with a little smile. Then Florence came in and Carol
said, “Florence, you can take these somewhere else. Put them in the
dining room.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Carol winked at Therese.

Nobody used the dining room, Therese knew. Carol preferred to eat
anywhere else. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday?” Therese
asked her.

“Oh!” Carol laughed. “It’s not. It’s my wedding anniversary. Get your
coat and let’s go.”

As they backed out of the driveway, Carol said, “If there’s anything I
can’t stand, it’s a hypocrite.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing of any importance.” Carol was still smiling.

“But you said he was a hypocrite.”

“Par excellence.”

“Pretending all this good humor?”

“Oh—just partially that.”

“Did he say anything about me?”

“He said you looked like a nice girl. Is that news?” Carol shot the car
down the narrow road to the village. “He said the divorce will take
about six weeks longer than we’d thought, due to some more red tape.
That’s news. He has an idea I still might change my mind in the
meantime. That’s hypocrisy. I think he likes to fool himself.”

Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never
solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so
the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud,
harsh step of the intruder’s foot.

“Carol, I never took that check, you know,” Therese remarked suddenly.
“I stuck it under the cloth on the table by the bed.”

“What made you think of that?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to tear it up? I started to that night.”

“If you insist,” Carol said.




                            chapter fourteen


Therese looked down at the big cardboard box. “I don’t want to take it.”
Her hands were full. “I can let Mrs. Osborne take the food out and the
rest can stay here.”

“Bring it,” Carol said, going out the door. She carried down the last
dribble of things, the books and the jackets Therese had decided at the
last minute that she wanted.

Therese came back upstairs for the box. It had come an hour ago by
messenger—a lot of sandwiches in wax paper, a bottle of blackberry wine,
a cake, and a box containing the white dress Mrs. Semco had promised
her. Richard had had nothing to do with the box, she knew, or there
would have been a book or an extra note in it.

An unwanted dress still lay on the couch, a corner of the rug was turned
back, but Therese was impatient to be off. She pulled the door shut, and
hurried down the steps with the box, past the Kellys’ who were both away
at work, past Mrs. Osborne’s door. She had said good-by to Mrs. Osborne
an hour ago when she had paid the next month’s rent.

Therese was just closing the car door, when Mrs. Osborne called her from
the front steps.

“Telephone call!” Mrs. Osborne shouted, and reluctantly Therese got out,
thinking it was Richard.

It was Phil McElroy, calling her to ask about the interview with Harkevy
yesterday. She had told Dannie about it last night when they had had
dinner together. Harkevy hadn’t promised her a job, but he had said to
keep in touch, and Therese felt he meant it. He had let her come to see
him backstage in the theater where he was supervising the set for
_Winter Town_. He had chosen three of her cardboard models and looked
very carefully at them, dismissed one as a little dull, pointed out some
impracticality in the second, and liked best the hall-like set Therese
had started the evening she had come back from the first visit to
Carol’s house. He was the first person who had ever given her less
conventional sets a serious consideration. She had called Carol up
immediately and told her about the meeting. She told Phil about the
Harkevy interview, but she didn’t mention that the Andronich job had
fallen through. She knew it was because she didn’t want Richard to hear
about it. Therese asked Phil to let her know what play Harkevy was doing
sets for next, because he said he hadn’t decided himself between two
plays. There was more of a chance he would take her on as apprentice, if
he chose the English play he had talked about yesterday.

“I don’t know any address to give you yet,” Therese said. “I know we’ll
get to Chicago.”

Phil said he might drop her a letter general delivery there.

“Was that Richard?” Carol asked when she came back.

“No. Phil McElroy.”

“So you haven’t heard from Richard?”

“I haven’t for the last few days. He sent me a telegram this morning.”
Therese hesitated, then took it from her pocket and read it. “I HAVE NOT
CHANGED. NEITHER HAVE YOU. WRITE TO ME. I LOVE YOU. RICHARD.”

“I think you should call him,” Carol said. “Call him from my house.”

They were going to spend the night at Carol’s house and leave early in
the morning.

“Will you put on that dress tonight?” Carol asked.

“I’ll try it on. It looks like a wedding dress.”

Therese put on the dress just before dinner. It hung below her calf, and
the waist tied in back with long white bands that in front were stitched
down and embroidered. She went down to show it to Carol. Carol was in
the living room writing a letter.

“Look,” Therese said, smiling.

Carol looked at her for a long moment, then came over and examined the
embroidery at the waist. “That’s a museum piece. You look adorable. Wear
it this evening, will you?”

“It’s so elaborate.” She didn’t want to wear it, because it made her
think of Richard.

“What the hell kind of style is it, Russian?”

Therese gave a laugh. She liked the way Carol cursed, always casually,
and when no one else could hear her.

“Is it?” Carol repeated.

Therese was going upstairs. “Is it what?”

“Where did you get this habit of not answering people?” Carol demanded,
her voice suddenly harsh with anger.

Carol’s eyes had the angry white light she had seen in them the time she
refused to play the piano. And what angered her now was just as
trifling. “I’m sorry, Carol. I guess I didn’t hear you.”

“Go ahead,” Carol said, turning away. “Go on up and take it off.”

It was Harge still, Therese thought. Therese hesitated a minute, then
went upstairs. She untied the waist and the sleeves, glanced at herself
in the mirror, then tied them all back again. If Carol wanted her to
keep it on, she would.

They fixed dinner themselves, because Florence had already started her
three weeks’ leave. They opened some special jars of things that Carol
said she had been saving, and they made stingers in the cocktail shaker
just before dinner. Therese thought Carol’s mood had passed, but when
she started to pour a second stinger for herself, Carol said shortly, “I
don’t think you should have any more of that.”

And Therese deferred, with a smile. And the mood went on. Nothing
Therese said or did could change it, and Therese blamed the inhibiting
dress for not being able to think of the right things to say. They took
brandied chestnuts and coffee up to the porch after dinner, but they
said even less to each other in the semidarkness, and Therese only felt
sleepy and rather depressed.

The next morning, Therese found a paper bag on the back doorstep. Inside
it was a toy monkey with gray and white fur. Therese showed it to Carol.

“My God,” Carol said softly, and smiled. “Jacopo.” She took the monkey
and rubbed her forefinger against its slightly dirty white cheek. “Abby
and I used to have him hanging in the back of the car,” Carol said.

“Abby brought it? Last night?”

“I suppose.” Carol went on to the car with the monkey and a suitcase.

Therese remembered wakening from a doze on the glider last night,
awakening to an absolute silence, and Carol sitting there in the dark,
looking straight before her. Carol must have heard Abby’s car last
night. Therese helped Carol arrange the suitcases and the lap rug in the
back of the car.

“Why didn’t she come in?” Therese asked.

“Oh, that’s Abby,” Carol said with a smile, with the fleeting shyness
that always surprised Therese. “Why don’t you go call Richard?”

Therese sighed. “I can’t now, anyway. He’s left the house by this time.”
It was eight forty, and his school began at nine.

“Call his family then. Aren’t you going to thank them for the box they
sent you?”

“I was going to write them a letter.”

“Call them now, and you won’t have to write them a letter. It’s much
nicer to call anyway.”

Mrs. Semco answered the telephone. Therese praised the dress and Mrs.
Semco’s needlework, and thanked her for all the food and the wine.

“Richard just left the house,” Mrs. Semco said. “He’s going to be
awfully lonely. He mopes around already.” But she laughed, her vigorous,
high-pitched laugh that filled the kitchen where Therese knew she stood,
a laugh that would ring through the house, even to Richard’s empty room
upstairs. “Is everything all right with you and Richard?” Mrs. Semco
asked with the faintest suspicion, though Therese could tell she still
smiled.

Therese said yes. And she promised she would write. Afterward, she felt
better because she had called.

Carol asked her if she had closed her window upstairs, and Therese went
up again, because she couldn’t remember. She hadn’t closed the window,
and she hadn’t made her bed either, but there wasn’t time now. Florence
could take care of the bed when she came in on Monday to lock the house
up.

Carol was on the telephone when Therese came downstairs. She looked up
at Therese with a smile and held the telephone toward her. Therese knew
from the first tone that it was Rindy.

“... at—uh—Mr. Byron’s. It’s a farm. Have you ever been there, Mother?”

“Where is it, sweetheart?” Carol said.

“At Mr. Byron’s. He has horses. But not the kind you would like.”

“Oh. Why not?”

“Well, these are heavy.”

Therese tried to hear anything in the shrill, rather matter-of-fact
voice that resembled Carol’s voice, but she couldn’t.

“Hello,” Rindy said. “Mother?”

“I’m still here.”

“I’ve got to say good-by now. Daddy’s ready to leave.” And she coughed.

“Have you got a cough?” Carol asked.

“No.”

“Then don’t cough into the phone.”

“I wish you would take me on the trip.”

“Well, I can’t because you’re in school. But we’ll have trips this
summer.”

“Can you still call me?”

“On the trip? Of course I will. Every day.” Carol took the telephone and
sat back with it, but she still watched Therese the minute or so more
that she talked.

“She sounds so serious,” Therese said.

“She was telling me all about the big day yesterday. Harge let her play
hooky.”

Carol had seen Rindy day before yesterday, Therese remembered. It had
evidently been a pleasant visit, from what Carol had told Therese over
the telephone, but she hadn’t mentioned any details about it, and
Therese had not asked her anything.

Just as they were about to leave, Carol decided to make a last call to
Abby. Therese wandered back into the kitchen, because the car was too
cold to sit in.

“I don’t know any small towns in Illinois,” Carol was saying. “Why
Illinois?... All right, Rockford.... I’ll remember, I’ll think of
roquefort.... Of course I’ll take good care of him. I wish you’d come
in, nitwit.... Well, you’re mistaken, very mistaken.”

Therese took a sip from Carol’s half-finished coffee on the kitchen
table, drank from the place where the lipstick was.

“Not a word,” Carol said, drawling the phrase. “No one, so far as I
know, not even Florence.... Well, you do that, darling. Cheerio now.”

Five minutes later, they were leaving Carol’s town on the highway marked
on the strip map in red, the highway they would use until Chicago. The
sky was overcast. Therese looked around her at the country that had
grown familiar now, the clump of woods off to the left that the road to
New York passed, the tall flagstaff in the distance that marked the club
Carol belonged to.

Therese let a crack of air in at her window. It was quite cold, and the
heater felt good on her ankles. The clock on the dashboard said quarter
to ten, and she thought suddenly of the people working in Frankenberg’s,
penned in there at a quarter of ten in the morning, this morning and
tomorrow morning and the next, the hands of clocks controlling every
move they made. But the hands of the clock on the dashboard meant
nothing now to her and Carol. They would sleep or not sleep, drive or
not drive, whenever it pleased them. She thought of Mrs. Robichek,
selling sweaters this minute on the third floor, commencing another year
there, her fifth year.

“Why so silent?” Carol asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She did not want to talk. Yet she felt there were thousands
of words choking her throat, and perhaps only distance, thousands of
miles, could straighten them out. Perhaps it was freedom itself that
choked her.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania they went through a section of pale sunshine,
like a leak in the sky, but around noon, it began to rain. Carol cursed,
but the sound of the rain was pleasant, drumming irregularly on the
windshield and the roof.

“You know what I forgot?” Carol said. “A raincoat. I’ll have to pick one
up somewhere.”

And suddenly, Therese remembered she had forgotten the book she was
reading. And there was a letter to Carol in it, one sheet that stuck out
both ends of the book. Damn. It had been separate from her other books,
and that was why she had left it behind, on the table by the bed. She
hoped Florence wouldn’t decide to look at it. She tried to remember if
she had written Carol’s name in the letter, and she couldn’t. And the
check. She had forgotten to tear that up, too.

“Carol, did you get that check?”

“That check I gave you?—You said you were going to tear it up.”

“I didn’t. It’s still under the cloth.”

“Well, it’s not important,” Carol said.

When they stopped for gas, Therese tried to buy some stout, which Carol
liked sometimes, at a grocery store next to the gas station, but they
had only beer. She bought one can, because Carol didn’t care for beer.
Then they drove into a little road off the highway and stopped, and
opened the box of sandwiches Richard’s mother had put up. There was also
a dill pickle, a mozzarella cheese, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs.
Therese had forgotten to ask for an opener, so she couldn’t open the
beer, but there was coffee in the thermos. She put the beer can on the
floor in the back of the car.

“Caviar. How very, very nice of them,” Carol said, looking inside a
sandwich. “Do you like caviar?”

“No. I wish I did.”

“Why?”

Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she
had removed the top slice of bread, a bite where the most caviar was.
“Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it,”
Therese said.

Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. “It’s an acquired taste.
Acquired tastes are always more pleasant—and hard to get rid of.”

Therese poured more coffee into the cup they were sharing. She was
acquiring a taste for black coffee. “How nervous I was the first time I
held this cup. You brought me coffee that day. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“How’d you happen to put cream in it that day?”

“I thought you’d like it. Why were you so nervous?”

Therese glanced at her. “I was so excited about you,” she said, lifting
the cup. Then she looked at Carol again and saw a sudden stillness, like
a shock, in Carol’s face. Therese had seen it two or three times before
when she had said something like that to Carol about the way she felt,
or paid Carol an extravagant compliment. Therese could not tell if she
were pleased or displeased. She watched Carol fold the wax paper around
the other half of her sandwich.

There was cake, but Carol didn’t want any. It was the brown-colored
spicecake that Therese had often had at Richard’s house. They put
everything back, into the valise that held the cartons of cigarettes and
the bottle of whisky, with a painstaking neatness that would have
annoyed Therese in anyone but Carol.

“Did you say Washington was your home state?” Therese asked her.

“I was born there, and my father’s there now. I wrote him I might visit
him, if we get out that far.”

“Does he look like you?”

“Do I look like him, yes—more than like my mother.”

“It’s strange to think of you with a family,” Therese said.

“Why?”

“Because I just think of you as you. _Sui generis._”

Carol smiled, her head lifted as she drove. “All right, go ahead.”

“Brothers and sisters?” Therese asked.

“One sister. I suppose you want to know all about her, too? Her name is
Elaine, she has three children and she lives in Virginia. She’s older
than I am, and I don’t know if you’d like her. You’d think she was
dull.”

Yes. Therese could imagine her, like a shadow of Carol, with all Carol’s
features weakened and diluted.

Late in the afternoon, they stopped at a roadside restaurant that had a
miniature Dutch village in the front window. Therese leaned on the rail
beside it and looked at it. There was a little river that came out of a
faucet at one end, that flowed in an oval stream and turned a windmill.
Little figures in Dutch costume stood about the village, stood on
patches of live grass. She thought of the electric train in
Frankenberg’s toy department, and the fury that drove it on the oval
course that was about the same size as the stream.

“I never told you about the train in Frankenberg’s,” Therese remarked to
Carol. “Did you notice it when you—”

“An electric train?” Carol interrupted her.

Therese had been smiling, but something constricted her heart suddenly.
It was too complicated to go into, and the conversation stopped there.

Carol ordered some soup for both of them. They were stiff and cold from
the car.

“I wonder if you’ll really enjoy this trip,” Carol said. “You so prefer
things reflected in a glass, don’t you? You have your private conception
of everything. Like that windmill. It’s practically as good as being in
Holland to you. I wonder if you’ll even like seeing real mountains and
real people.”

Therese felt as crushed as if Carol had accused her of lying. She felt
Carol meant, too, that she had a private conception of her, and that
Carol resented it. Real people? She thought suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.
And she had fled her because she was hideous.

“How do you ever expect to create anything if you get all your
experiences second hand?” Carol asked, her voice soft and even, and yet
merciless.

Carol made her feel she had done nothing, was nothing at all, like a
wisp of smoke. Carol had lived like a human being, had married, and had
a child.

The old man from behind the counter was coming toward them. He had a
limp. He stood by the table next to them and folded his arms. “Ever been
to Holland?” he asked pleasantly.

Carol answered. “No, I haven’t. I suppose you’ve been. Did you make the
village in the window?”

He nodded. “Took me five years to make.”

Therese looked at the man’s bony fingers, the lean arms with the purple
veins twisting just under the thin skin. She knew better than Carol the
work that had gone into the little village, but she could not get a word
out.

The man said to Carol, “Got some fine sausages and hams next door, if
you like real Pennsylvania made. We raise our own hogs and they’re
killed and cured right here.”

They went into the whitewashed box of a store beside the restaurant.
There was a delicious smell of smoked ham inside it, mingled with the
smell of wood smoke and spice.

“Let’s pick something we don’t have to cook,” Carol said, looking into
the refrigerated counter. “Let’s have some of this,” she said to the
young man in the earlapped cap.

Therese remembered standing in the delicatessen with Mrs. Robichek, her
buying the thin slices of salami and liverwurst. A sign on the wall said
they shipped anywhere, and she thought of sending Mrs. Robichek one of
the big cloth-wrapped sausages, imagined the delight on Mrs. Robichek’s
face when she opened the package with her trembling hands and found a
sausage. But should she after all, Therese wondered, make a gesture that
was probably motivated by pity, or by guilt, or by some perversity in
her? Therese frowned, floundering in a sea without direction or gravity,
in which she knew only that she could mistrust her own impulses.

“Therese—”

Therese turned around, and Carol’s beauty struck her like a glimpse of
the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Carol asked her if she thought they
should buy a whole ham.

The young man slid all the bundles across the counter, and took Carol’s
twenty-dollar bill. And Therese thought of Mrs. Robichek tremulously
pushing her single dollar bill and a quarter across the counter that
evening.

“See anything else?” Carol asked.

“I thought I might send something to somebody. A woman who works in the
store. She’s poor and she once asked me to dinner.”

Carol picked up her change. “What woman?”

“I don’t really want to send her anything.” Therese wanted suddenly to
leave.

Carol frowned at her through her cigarette smoke. “Do it.”

“I don’t want to. Let’s go, Carol.” It was like the nightmare again,
when she couldn’t get away from her.

“Send it,” Carol said. “Close the door and send her something.”

Therese closed the door and chose one of the six-dollar sausages, and
wrote on a gift card: “This comes from Pennsylvania. I hope it’ll last a
few Sunday mornings. With love from Therese Belivet.”

Later, in the car, Carol asked her about Mrs. Robichek, and Therese
answered as she always did, succinctly, and with the involuntary and
absolute honesty that always depressed her afterward. Mrs. Robichek and
the world she lived in was so different from that of Carol, she might
have been describing another species of animal life, some ugly beast
that lived on another planet. Carol made no comment on the story, only
questioned and questioned her as she drove. She made no comment when
there was nothing more to ask, but the taut, thoughtful expression with
which she had listened stayed on her face even when they began to talk
of other things. Therese gripped her thumbs inside her hands. Why did
she let Mrs. Robichek haunt her? And now she had spread it into Carol
and could never take it back.

“Please don’t mention her again, will you, Carol? Promise me.”




                            chapter fifteen


Carol walked barefoot with little short steps to the shower room in the
corner, groaning at the cold. She had red polish on her toenails, and
her blue pajamas were too big for her.

“It’s your fault for opening the window so high,” Therese said.

Carol pulled the curtain across, and Therese heard the shower come on
with a rush. “Ah, divinely hot!” Carol said. “Better than last night.”

It was a luxurious tourist cabin, with a thick carpet and wood-paneled
walls and everything from cellophane-sealed shoe rags to television.

Therese sat on her bed in her robe, looking at a road map, spanning it
with her hand. A span and a half was about a day’s driving,
theoretically, though they probably would not do it. “We might get all
the way across Ohio today,” Therese said.

“Ohio. Noted for rivers, rubber, and certain railroads. On our left the
famous Chillicothe drawbridge, where twenty-eight Hurons once massacred
a hundred—morons.”

Therese laughed.

“And where Lewis and Clark once camped,” Carol added. “I think I’ll wear
my slacks today. Want to see if they’re in that suitcase? If not, I’ll
have to get into the car. Not the light ones, the navy-blue gabardines.”

Therese went to Carol’s big suitcase at the foot of the bed. It was full
of sweaters and underwear and shoes, but no slacks. She saw a nickel
plated tube sticking out of a folded sweater. She lifted the sweater
out. It was heavy. She unwrapped it, and started so she almost dropped
it. It was a gun with a white handle.

“No?” Carol asked.

“No.” Therese wrapped the gun up again and put it back as she had found
it.

“Darling, I forgot my towel. I think it’s on a chair.”

Therese got it and took it to her, and in her nervousness as she put the
towel into Carol’s outstretched hand her eyes dropped from Carol’s face
to her bare breasts and down, and she saw the quick surprise in Carol’s
glance as she turned around. Therese closed her eyes tight and walked
slowly toward the bed, seeing before her closed lids the image of
Carol’s naked body.

Therese took a shower, and when she came out, Carol was standing at the
mirror, almost dressed.

“What’s the matter?” Carol asked.

“Nothing.”

Carol turned to her, combing her hair that was darkened a little by the
wet of the shower. Her lips were bright with fresh lipstick, a cigarette
between them. “Do you realize how many times a day you make me ask you
that?” she said. “Don’t you think it’s a little inconsiderate?”

During breakfast, Therese said, “Why did you bring that gun along,
Carol?”

“Oh. So that’s what’s bothering you. It’s Harge’s gun, something else he
forgot.” Carol’s voice was casual. “I thought it’d be better to take it
than to leave it.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Yes, it’s loaded. Harge got a permit, because we had a burglar at the
house once.”

“Can you use it?”

Carol smiled at her. “I’m no Annie Oakley. I can use it. I think it
worries you, doesn’t it? I don’t expect to use it.”

Therese said nothing more about it. But it disturbed her whenever she
thought of it. She thought of it the next night, when a bellhop set the
suitcase down heavily on the sidewalk. She wondered if a gun could ever
go off from a jolt like that.

They had taken some snapshots in Ohio, and because they could get them
developed early the next morning, they spent a long evening and the
night in a town called Defiance. All evening they walked around the
streets, looking in store windows, walking through silent residential
streets where lights showed in front parlors, and homes looked as
comfortable and safe as birds’ nests. Therese had been afraid Carol
would be bored by aimless walks, but Carol was the one who suggested
going one block farther, walking all the way up the hill to see what was
on the other side. Carol talked about herself and Harge. Therese tried
to sum up in one word what had separated Carol and Harge, but she
rejected the words almost at once—boredom, resentment, indifference.
Carol told her of one time that Harge had taken Rindy away on a fishing
trip and not communicated for days. That was a retaliation for Carol’s
refusing to spend Harge’s vacation with him at his family’s summer house
in Massachusetts. It was a mutual thing. And the incidents were not the
start.

Carol put two of the snapshots in her billfold, one of Rindy in jodhpurs
and a derby that had been on the first part of the roll, and one of
Therese, with a cigarette in her mouth and her hair blowing back in the
wind. There was one unflattering picture of Carol standing huddled in
her coat that Carol said she was going to send to Abby because it was so
bad.

They got to Chicago late one afternoon, crept into its gray, sprawling
disorder behind a great truck of a meat-distributing company. Therese
sat up close to the windshield. She couldn’t remember anything about the
city from the trip with her father. Carol seemed to know Chicago as well
as she knew Manhattan. Carol showed her the famous Loop, and they
stopped for a while to watch the trains and the homeward rush of five
thirty in the afternoon. It couldn’t compare to the madhouse of New York
at five thirty.

At the main post office, Therese found a post card from Dannie, nothing
from Phil, and a letter from Richard. Therese glanced at the letter and
saw it began and ended affectionately. She had expected just that,
Richard’s getting the general delivery address from Phil and writing her
an affectionate letter. She put the letter in her pocket before she went
back to Carol.

“Anything?” Carol said.

“Just a post card. From Dannie. He’s finished his exams.”

Carol drove to the Drake Hotel. It had a black and white checked floor,
a fountain in the lobby, and Therese thought it magnificent. In their
room, Carol took off her coat and flung herself down on one of the twin
beds.

“I know a few people here,” she said sleepily. “Shall we look somebody
up?”

But Carol fell asleep before they quite decided.

Therese looked out the window at the light-bordered lake and at the
irregular, unfamiliar line of tall buildings against the still grayish
sky. It looked fuzzy and monotonous, like a Pissarro painting. A
comparison Carol wouldn’t appreciate, she thought. She leaned on the
sill, staring at the city, watching a distant car’s lights chopped into
dots and dashes as it passed behind trees. She was happy.

“Why don’t you ring for some cocktails?” Carol’s voice said behind her.

“What kind would you like?”

“What kind would you?”

“Martinis.”

Carol whistled. “Double Gibsons,” Carol interrupted her as she was
telephoning. “And a plate of canapés. Might as well get four Martinis.”

Therese read Richard’s letter while Carol was in the shower. The whole
letter was affectionate. You are not like any of the other girls, he
wrote. He had waited and he would keep on waiting, because he was
absolutely confident that they could be happy together. He wanted her to
write to him every day, send at least a post card. He told her how he
had sat one evening re-reading the three letters she had sent him when
he had been in Kingston, New York, last summer. There was a
sentimentality in the letter that was not like Richard at all, and
Therese’s first thought was that he was pretending. Perhaps in order to
strike at her later. Her second reaction was aversion. She came back to
the old decision, that not to write him, not to say anything more was
the shortest way to end it.

The cocktails arrived, and Therese paid for them instead of signing. She
could never pay a bill except behind Carol’s back.

“Will you wear your black suit?” Therese asked when Carol came in.

Carol gave her a look. “Go all the way to the bottom of that suitcase?”
she said, going to the suitcase. “Drag it out, brush it off, steam the
wrinkles out of it for half an hour?”

“We’ll be a half hour drinking these.”

“Your powers of persuasion are irresistible.” Carol took the suit into
the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub.

It was the suit she had worn the day they had had the first lunch
together.

“Do you realize this is the only drink I’ve had since we left New York?”
Carol said. “Of course you don’t. Do you know why? I’m happy.”

“You’re beautiful,” Therese said.

And Carol gave her the derogatory smile that Therese loved, and walked
to the dressing table. She flung a yellow-silk scarf around her neck and
tied it loosely, and began to comb her hair. The lamp’s light framed her
figure like a picture, and Therese had a feeling all this had happened
before. She remembered suddenly: the woman in the window brushing up her
long hair, remembered the very bricks in the wall, the texture of the
misty rain that morning.

“How about some perfume?” Carol asked, moving toward her with the
bottle. She touched Therese’s forehead with her fingers, at the hairline
where she had kissed her that day.

“You remind me of the woman I once saw,” Therese said, “somewhere off
Lexington. Not you but the light. She was combing her hair up.” Therese
stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she
could never say exactly what she wanted to say. “Early one morning when
I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain,” she
floundered on. “I saw her in a window.” She really could not go on,
about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an
intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she
might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door,
wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican
Press.

“My little orphan,” Carol said.

Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when
Carol said it.

“What does your mother look like?”

“She had black hair,” Therese said quickly. “She didn’t look anything
like me.” Therese always found herself talking about her mother in the
past tense, though she was alive this minute, somewhere in Connecticut.

“You really don’t think she’ll ever want to see you again?” Carol was
standing at the mirror.

“I don’t think so.”

“What about your father’s family. Didn’t you say he had a brother?”

“I never met him. He was a kind of geologist, working for an oil
company. I don’t know where he is.” It was easier talking about the
uncle she had never met.

“What’s your mother’s name now?”

“Esther—Mrs. Nicolas Strully.” The name meant as little to her as one
she might see in a telephone book. She looked at Carol, suddenly sorry
she had said the name. Carol might some day—A shock of loss, of
helplessness came over her. She knew so little about Carol after all.

Carol glanced at her. “I’ll never mention it,” she said, “never mention
it again. If that second drink’s going to make you blue, don’t drink it.
I don’t want you to be blue tonight.”

The restaurant where they dined overlooked the lake, too. They had a
banquet of a dinner with champagne and brandy afterward. It was the
first time in her life that Therese had been a little drunk, in fact
much drunker than she wanted Carol to see. Her impression of Lakeshore
Drive was always to be of a broad avenue studded with mansions all
resembling the White House in Washington. In the memory there would be
Carol’s voice, telling her about a house here and there where she had
been before, and the disquieting awareness that for a while this had
been Carol’s world, as Rapallo, Paris, and other places Therese did not
know had for a while been the frame of everything Carol did.

That night, Carol sat on the edge of her bed, smoking a cigarette before
they turned the light out. Therese lay in her own bed, sleepily watching
her, trying to read the meaning of the restless, puzzled look in Carol’s
eyes that would stare at something in the room for a moment and then
move on. Was it of her she thought, or of Harge, or of Rindy? Carol had
asked to be called at seven tomorrow, in order to telephone Rindy before
she went to school. Therese remembered their telephone conversation in
Defiance. Rindy had had a fight with some other little girl, and Carol
had spent fifteen minutes going over it, and trying to persuade Rindy
she should take the first step and apologize. Therese still felt the
effects of what she had drunk, the tingling of the champagne that drew
her painfully close to Carol. If she simply asked, she thought, Carol
would let her sleep tonight in the same bed with her. She wanted more
than that, to kiss her, to feel their bodies next to each other’s.
Therese thought of the two girls she had seen in the Palermo bar. They
did that, she knew, and more. And would Carol suddenly thrust her away
in disgust, if she merely wanted to hold her in her arms? And would
whatever affection Carol now had for her vanish in that instant? A
vision of Carol’s cold rebuff swept her courage clean away. It crept
back humbly in the question, couldn’t she ask simply to sleep in the
same bed with her?

“Carol, would you mind—”

“Tomorrow we’ll go to the stockyards,” Carol said at the same time, and
Therese burst out laughing. “What’s so damned funny about that?” Carol
asked, putting out her cigarette, but she was smiling, too.

“It just is. It’s terribly funny,” Therese said, still laughing,
laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.

“You’re giggly on champagne,” Carol said as she put the light out.

Late the next afternoon they left Chicago and drove in the direction of
Rockford. Carol said she might have a letter from Abby there, but
probably not, because Abby was a bad correspondent. Therese went to a
shoe repair shop to get a moccasin stitched, and when she came back,
Carol was reading the letter in the car.

“What road do we take out?” Carol’s face looked happier.

“Twenty, going west.”

Carol turned on the radio and worked the dial until she found some
music. “What’s a good town for tonight on the way to Minneapolis?”

“Dubuque,” Therese said, looking at the map. “Or Waterloo looks fairly
big, but it’s about two hundred miles away.”

“We might make it.”

They took Highway 20 toward Freeport and Galena, which was starred on
the map as the home of Ulysses S. Grant.

“What did Abby say?”

“Nothing much. Just a very nice letter.”

Carol said little to her in the car, or even in the café where they
stopped later for coffee. Carol went over and stood in front of a juke
box, dropping nickels slowly.

“You wish Abby’d come along, don’t you?” Therese said.

“No,” Carol said.

“You’re so different since you got the letter from her.”

Carol looked at her across the table. “Darling, it’s just a silly
letter. You can even read it if you want to.” Carol reached for her
handbag, but she did not get the letter out.

Sometime that evening, Therese fell asleep in the car and woke up with
the lights of a city on her face. Carol was resting both arms tiredly on
the top of the wheel. They had stopped for a red light.

“Here’s where we stay the night,” Carol said.

Therese’s sleep still clung to her as she walked across the hotel lobby.
She rode up in an elevator and she was acutely conscious of Carol beside
her, as if she dreamed a dream in which Carol was the subject and the
only figure. In the room, she lifted her suitcase from the floor to a
chair, unlatched it and left it, and stood by the writing table,
watching Carol. As if her emotions had been in abeyance all the past
hours, or days, they flooded her now as she watched Carol opening her
suitcase, taking out, as she always did first, the leather kit that
contained her toilet articles, dropping it onto the bed. She looked at
Carol’s hands, at the lock of hair that fell over the scarf tied around
her head, at the scratch she had gotten days ago across the toe of her
moccasin.

“What’re you standing there for?” Carol asked. “Get to bed, sleepyhead.”

“Carol, I love you.”

Carol straightened up. Therese stared at her with intense, sleepy eyes.
Then Carol finished taking her pajamas from the suitcase and pulled the
lid down. She came to Therese and put her hands on her shoulders. She
squeezed her shoulders hard, as if she were exacting a promise from her,
or perhaps searching her to see if what she had said were real. Then she
kissed Therese on the lips, as if they had kissed a thousand times
before.

“Don’t you know I love you?” Carol said.

Carol took her pajamas into the bedroom, and stood for a moment, looking
down at the basin.

“I’m going out,” Carol said. “But I’ll be back right away.”

Therese waited by the table while Carol was gone, while time passed
indefinitely or maybe not at all, until the door opened and Carol came
in again. She set a paper bag on the table, and Therese knew she had
only gone to get a container of milk, as Carol or she herself did very
often at night.

“Can I sleep with you?” Therese asked.

“Did you see the bed?”

It was a double bed. They sat up in their pajamas, drinking milk and
sharing an orange that Carol was too sleepy to finish. Then Therese set
the container of milk on the floor and looked at Carol who was sleeping
already, on her stomach, with one arm flung up as she always went to
sleep. Therese pulled out the light. Then Carol slipped her arm under
her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if
something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading
through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her
flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in
darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

“Go to sleep,” Carol said.

Therese hoped she would not. But when she felt Carol’s hand move on her
shoulder, she knew she had been asleep. It was dawn now. Carol’s fingers
tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped
in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when
Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night. I love you, Therese
wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and
terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol’s lips over her
neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly, the length of her body. Her
arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing
else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that
brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in
widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought
could follow. While a thousand memories and moments, words, the first
darling, the second time Carol had met her at the store, a thousand
memories of Carol’s face, her voice, moments of anger and laughter
flashed like the tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was
pale-blue distance and space, an expanding space in which she took
flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an
impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and
not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still clung to Carol, that
she trembled violently, and the arrow was herself. She saw Carol’s pale
hair across her eyes, and now Carol’s head was close against hers. And
she did not have to ask if this were right, no one had to tell her,
because this could not have been more right or perfect. She held Carol
tighter against her, and felt Carol’s mouth on her own smiling mouth.
Therese lay still, looking at her, at Carol’s face only inches away from
her, the gray eyes calm as she had never seen them, as if they retained
some of the space she had just emerged from. And it seemed strange that
it was still Carol’s face, with the freckles, the bending blond eyebrow
that she knew, the mouth now as calm as her eyes, as Therese had seen it
many times before.

“My angel,” Carol said. “Flung out of space.”

Therese looked up at the corners of the room that were much brighter
now, at the bureau with the bulging front and the shield-shaped drawer
pulls, at the frameless mirror with the beveled edge, at the green
patterned curtains that hung straight at the windows, and the two gray
tips of buildings that showed just above the sill. She would remember
every detail of this room forever.

“What town is this?” she asked.

Carol laughed. “This? This is Waterloo.” She reached for a cigarette.
“Isn’t that awful.”

Smiling, Therese raised up on her elbow. Carol put a cigarette between
her lips. “There’s a couple of Waterloos in every state,” Therese said.




                            chapter sixteen


Therese went out to get some newspapers while Carol was dressing. She
stepped into the elevator and turned around in the exact center of it.
She felt a little odd, as if everything had shifted and distances were
not quite the same. She walked across the lobby to the newspaper stand
in the corner.

“The _Courier_ and the _Tribune_,” she said to the man, taking them, and
even to utter words was as strange as the names of the newspapers she
bought.

“Eight cents,” the man said, and Therese looked down at the change he
had given her and saw there was still the same difference between eight
cents and a quarter.

She wandered across the lobby, looked through the glass into the barber
shop where a couple of men were getting shaves. A Negro boy was shining
shoes. A tall man with a cigar and a broad-brimmed hat, with Western
shoes, walked by her. She would remember this lobby, too, forever, the
people, the old-fashioned looking woodwork at the base of the
registration desk, and the man in the dark overcoat who looked at her
over the top of his newspaper, and slumped in his chair and went on
reading beside the black and cream-colored marble column.

When Therese opened the room door, the sight of Carol went through her
like a spear. She stood a moment with her hand on the knob.

Carol looked at her from the bathroom, holding the comb suspended over
her head. Carol looked at her from head to foot. “Don’t do that in
public,” Carol said.

Therese threw the newspapers on the bed and came to her. Carol seized
her suddenly in her arms. They stood holding each other as if they would
never separate. Therese shuddered, and there were tears in her eyes. It
was hard to find words, locked in Carol’s arms, closer than kissing.

“Why did you wait so long?” Therese asked.

“Because—I thought there wouldn’t be a second time, that I wouldn’t want
it. But that’s not true.”

Therese thought of Abby, and it was like a slim shaft of bitterness
dropping between them. Carol released her.

“And there was something else—to have you around reminding me, knowing
you and knowing it would be so easy. I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair to you.”

Therese set her teeth hard. She watched Carol walk slowly away across
the room, watched the space widen, and remembered the first time she had
seen her walk so slowly away in the department store, Therese had
thought forever. Carol had loved Abby, too, and she reproached herself
for it. As Carol would one day for loving her, Therese wondered? Therese
understood now why the December and January weeks had been made up of
anger and indecision, reprimands alternating with indulgences. But she
understood now that whatever Carol said in words, there were no barriers
and no indecisions now. There was no Abby, either, after this morning,
whatever had happened between Carol and Abby before.

“Was it?” Carol asked.

“You’ve made me so happy ever since I’ve known you,” Therese said.

“I don’t think you can judge.”

“I can judge this morning.”

Carol did not answer. Only the rasp of the door lock answered her. Carol
had locked the door and they were alone. Therese came toward her,
straight into her arms.

“I love you,” Therese said, just to hear the words. “I love you, I love
you.”

But Carol seemed deliberately to pay almost no attention to her that
day. There was more arrogance in the tilt of her cigarette, in the way
she backed the car away from a curb, cursing, not quite joking. “Damned
if I’ll put a dime in a parking meter with a prairie right in sight,”
Carol said. But when Therese did catch her looking at her, Carol’s eyes
were laughing. Carol teased her, leaning on her shoulder as they stood
in front of a cigarette machine, touching her foot under tables. It made
Therese limp and tense at the same time. She thought of people she had
seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn’t she and Carol? Yet when
she simply took Carol’s arm as they stood choosing a box of candy in a
shop, Carol murmured, “Don’t.”

Therese sent a box of candy to Mrs. Robichek from the candy shop in
Minneapolis, and a box also to the Kellys. She sent an extravagantly big
box to Richard’s mother, a double-deck box with wooden compartments that
she knew Mrs. Semco would use later for sewing articles.

“Did you ever do that with Abby?” Therese asked abruptly that evening in
the car.

Carol’s eyes understood suddenly and she blinked. “What questions you
ask,” she said. “Of course.”

Of course. She had known it. “And now—?”

“Therese—”

She asked stiffly, “Was it very much the same as with me?”

Carol smiled. “No, darling.”

“Don’t you think it’s more pleasant than sleeping with men?”

Her smile was amused. “Not necessarily. That depends. Who have you ever
known except Richard?”

“No one.”

“Well, don’t you think you’d better try some others?”

Therese was speechless for a moment, but she tried to be casual,
drumming her fingers on the book in her lap.

“I mean sometime, darling. You’ve got a lot of years ahead.”

Therese said nothing. She could not imagine ever leaving Carol either.
That was another terrible question that had sprung into her mind at the
start, that hammered at her brain now with a painful insistence to be
answered. Would Carol ever want to leave her?

“I mean, whom you sleep with depends so much on habit,” Carol went on.
“And you’re too young to make enormous decisions. Or habits.”

“Are you just a habit?” she asked, smiling, but she heard the resentment
in her voice. “You mean it’s nothing but that?”

“Therese—of all times to get so melancholic.”

“I’m not melancholic,” she protested, but the thin ice was under her
feet again, the uncertainties. Or was it that she always wanted a little
more than she had, no matter how much she had? She said impulsively,
“Abby loves you, too, doesn’t she?”

Carol started a little, and put her foot down. “Abby has loved me
practically all her life—even as you.”

Therese stared at her.

“I’ll tell you about it one day. Whatever happened is past. Months and
months ago,” she said, so softly Therese could hardly hear.

“Only months?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me now.”

“This isn’t the time or the place.”

“There’s never a time,” Therese said. “Didn’t you say there never was a
right time?”

“Did I say that? About what?”

But neither of them said anything for a moment, because a fresh barrage
of wind hurled the rain like a million bullets against the hood and
windshield, and for a moment they could have heard nothing else. There
was no thunder, as if the thunder, somewhere up above, modestly
refrained from competing with this other god of rain. They waited in the
inadequate shelter of a hill at the side of the road.

“I might tell you the middle,” Carol said, “because it’s funny—and
ironic. It was last winter when we had the furniture shop together. But
I can’t begin without telling you the first part—and that was when we
were children. Our families lived near each other in New Jersey, so we
saw each other during vacations. Abby always had a mild crush on me, I
thought, even when we were about six and eight. Then she wrote me a
couple of letters when she was about fourteen and away at school. And by
that time I’d heard of girls who preferred girls. But the books also
tell you it goes away after that age.” There were pauses between her
sentences, as if she left out sentences in between.

“Were you in school with her?” Therese asked.

“I never was. My father sent me to a different school, out of town. Then
Abby went to Europe when she was sixteen, and I wasn’t at home when she
came back. I saw her once at some party around the time I got married.
Abby looked quite different then, not like a tomboy any more. Then Harge
and I lived in another town, and I didn’t see her again—really for
years, till long after Rindy was born. She came once in a while to the
riding stable where Harge and I used to ride. A few times we all rode
together. Then Abby and I started playing tennis on Saturday afternoons
when Harge usually played golf. Abby and I always had fun together.
Abby’s former crush on me never crossed my mind—we were both so much
older and so much had happened. I had an idea about starting a shop,
because I wanted to see less of Harge. I thought we were getting bored
with each other and it would help. So I asked Abby if she wanted to be
partners in it, and we started the furniture shop. After a few weeks to
my surprise, I felt I was attracted to her,” Carol said in the same
quiet voice. “I couldn’t understand it, and I was a little afraid of
it—remembering Abby from before, and realizing she might feel the same
way, or that both of us could. So I tried not to let Abby see it, and I
think I succeeded. But finally—here’s the funny part finally—there was
the night in Abby’s house one night last winter. The roads were snowed
in that night, and Abby’s mother insisted that we stay together in
Abby’s room, simply because the room I’d stayed in before hadn’t any
sheets on the bed then, and it was very late. Abby said she’d fix the
sheets, we both protested, but Abby’s mother insisted.” Carol smiled a
little, and glanced at her, but Therese felt Carol didn’t even see her.
“So I stayed with Abby. Nothing would have happened, if not for that
night, I’m sure of it. If not for Abby’s mother, that’s the ironic
thing, because she doesn’t know anything about it. But it did happen,
and I felt very much as you, I suppose, as happy as you.” Carol blurted
out the end, though her voice was still level and somehow without
emotion of any kind.

Therese stared at her, not knowing if it was jealousy or shock or anger
that was suddenly jumbling everything. “And after that?” she asked.

“After that, I knew I was in love with Abby. I don’t know why not call
it love, it had all the earmarks. But it lasted only two months, like a
disease that came and went.” Carol said in a different tone, “Darling,
it’s got nothing to do with you, and it’s finished now. I knew you
wanted to know, but I didn’t see any reason for telling you before. It’s
that unimportant.”

“But if you felt the same way about her—”

“For two months?” Carol said. “When you have a husband and child, you
know, it’s a little different.”

Different from her, Carol meant, because she hadn’t any
responsibilities. “Is it? You can just start and stop?”

“When you haven’t got a chance,” Carol answered.

The rain was abating, but only by so much that she could see it as rain
now and not solid silver sheets. “I don’t believe it.”

“You’re hardly in a state to talk.”

“Why are you so cynical?”

“Cynical? Am I?”

Therese was not sure enough to answer. What was it to love someone, what
was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real
questions, and who could answer them.

“It’s letting up,” Carol said. “How about going on and finding a good
brandy somewhere? Or is this a dry state?”

They drove on to the next town and found a deserted bar in the biggest
hotel. The brandy was delicious, and they ordered two more.

“It’s French brandy,” Carol said. “Someday we’ll go to France.”

Therese turned the little bowl of a glass between her fingers. A clock
ticked at the end of the bar. A train whistle blew in the distance. And
Carol cleared her throat. Ordinary sounds, yet the moment was not an
ordinary one. No moment had been an ordinary one since the morning in
Waterloo. Therese stared at the bright brown light in the brandy glass,
and suddenly she had no doubt that she and Carol would one day go to
France. Then out of the shimmering brown sun in the glass, Harge’s face
emerged, mouth and nose and eyes.

“Harge knows about Abby, doesn’t he?” Therese said.

“Yes. He asked me something about her a few months ago—and I told him
the whole thing from start to finish.”

“You did—” She thought of Richard, imagined how Richard would react. “Is
that why you’re getting the divorce?”

“No. It’s got nothing to do with the divorce. That’s another ironic
thing—that I told Harge after it was all over. A mistaken effort at
honesty, when Harge and I had nothing left to salvage. We’d already
talked about a divorce. Please don’t remind me of mistakes!” Carol
frowned.

“You mean—he certainly must have been jealous.”

“Yes. Because however I chose to tell it, I suppose it came out that I’d
cared more about Abby at one period than I’d ever cared for him. At one
point, even with Rindy I’d have left everything behind to go with her. I
don’t know how it was that I didn’t.”

“And taken Rindy with you?”

“I don’t know. I know the fact that Rindy existed stopped me from
leaving Harge then.”

“Do you regret it?”

Carol shook her head slowly. “No. It wouldn’t have lasted. It didn’t
last, and maybe I knew it wouldn’t. With my marriage failing, I was too
afraid and too weak—” She stopped.

“Are you afraid now?”

Carol was silent.

“Carol—”

“I am not afraid,” she said stubbornly, lifting her head, drawing on her
cigarette.

Therese looked at her face in profile in the dim light. What about Rindy
now, she wanted to ask, what will happen? But she knew Carol was on the
brink of growing suddenly impatient, giving her a careless answer, or no
answer at all. Another time, Therese thought, not this moment. It might
destroy everything, even the solidity of Carol’s body beside her, and
the bend of Carol’s body in the black sweater seemed the only solid
thing in the world. Therese ran her thumb down Carol’s side, from under
the arm to the waist.

“I remember Harge was particularly annoyed about a trip I took with Abby
to Connecticut. Abby and I went up to buy some things for the shop. It
was only a two-day trip, but he said, ‘Behind my back. You had to run
away.’” Carol said it bitterly. There was more self-reproach in her
voice than imitation of Harge.

“Does he still talk about it?”

“No. Is it anything to talk about? Is it anything to be proud of?”

“Is it anything to be ashamed of?”

“Yes. You know that, don’t you?” Carol asked in her even, distinct
voice. “In the eyes of the world it’s an abomination.”

The way she said it, Therese could not quite smile. “You don’t believe
that.”

“People like Harge’s family.”

“They’re not the whole world.”

“They are enough. And you have to live in the world. You, I mean—and I
don’t mean anything just now about whom you decide to love.” She looked
at Therese, and at last Therese saw a smile rising slowly in her eyes,
bringing Carol with it. “I mean responsibilities in the world that other
people live in and that might not be yours. Just now it isn’t, and
that’s why in New York I was exactly the wrong person for you to
know—because I indulge you and keep you from growing up.”

“Why don’t you stop?”

“I’ll try. The trouble is, I like to indulge you.”

“You’re exactly the right person for me to know,” Therese said.

“Am I?”

On the street, Therese said, “I don’t suppose Harge would like it if he
knew we were away on a trip, either, would he?”

“He’s not going to know about it.”

“Do you still want to go to Washington?”

“Absolutely, if you’ve got the time. Can you stay away all of February?”

Therese nodded. “Unless I hear something in Salt Lake City. I told Phil
to write there. It’s a pretty slim chance.” Probably Phil wouldn’t even
write, she thought. But if there was the least chance of a job in New
York, she should go back. “Would you go on to Washington without me?”

Carol glanced at her. “As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t,” she said with a
little smile.

Their hotel room was so overheated when they came back that evening,
they had to throw open the windows for a while. Carol leaned on the
window sill, cursing the heat for Therese’s amusement, calling her a
salamander because she could bear it. Then Carol asked abruptly, “What
did Richard have to say yesterday?”

Therese had not even known that Carol knew about the last letter. The
one he had promised, in the Chicago letter, to send to Minneapolis and
to Seattle. “Nothing much,” Therese said. “Just a one-page letter. He
still wants me to write to him. And I don’t intend to.” She had thrown
the letter away, but she remembered it, “I haven’t heard from you, and
it’s beginning to dawn on me what an incredible conglomeration of
contradictions you are. You are sensitive and yet so insensitive,
imaginative and yet so unimaginative.... If you get stranded by your
whimsical friend, let me know and I’ll come after you. This won’t last,
Terry. I know a little about such things. I saw Dannie and he wanted to
know what I’d heard from you, what you were doing. How would you like it
if I had told him? I didn’t say anything, for your sake, because I think
one day you’ll blush. I still love you, I admit it. I’ll come out to
you—and show you what America’s really like—if you care enough about me
to write and say so....”

It was insulting to Carol, and Therese had torn it up. Therese sat on
the bed with her arms around her knees, gripping her wrists inside the
sleeves of her robe. Carol had overdone the ventilation, and the room
was cold. The Minnesota winds had taken possession of the room, were
seizing Carol’s cigarette smoke and tearing it to nothing. Therese
watched Carol calmly brushing her teeth at the basin.

“Do you mean that about not writing to him? That’s your decision?” Carol
asked.

“Yes.”

Therese watched Carol knock the water out of her toothbrush, and turn
from the basin, blotting her face with a towel. Nothing about Richard
mattered so much to her as the way Carol blotted her face with a towel.

“Let’s say no more,” Carol said.

She knew Carol would say no more. She knew Carol had been pushing her
toward him, until this moment. Now it seemed it might all have been for
this moment as Carol turned and walked toward her and her heart took a
giant’s step forward.

They went on westward, through Sleepy Eye, Tracy, and Pipestone,
sometimes taking an indirect highway on a whim. The West unfolded like a
magic carpet, dotted with the neat, tight units of farmhouse, barn, and
silo that they could see for half an hour before they came abreast of
them. They stopped once at a farmhouse to ask if they could buy enough
gas to get to the next station. The house smelled like fresh cold
cheese. Their steps sounded hollow and lonely on the solid brown
planks of the floor, and Therese thought in a fervid burst of
patriotism—_America_. There was a picture of a rooster on the wall, made
of colored patches of cloth sewn on a black ground, beautiful enough to
hang in a museum. The farmer warned them about ice on the road directly
west, so they took another highway going south.

They discovered a one-ring circus that night beside a railroad track in
a town called Sioux Falls. The performers were not very expert. Their
seats were a couple of orange crates in the first row. One of the
acrobats invited them into the performers’ tent after the show, and
insisted on giving Carol a dozen of the circus posters, because she had
admired them. Carol sent some of them to Abby and some to Rindy, and
sent Rindy as well a green chameleon in a pasteboard box. It was an
evening Therese would never forget, and unlike most such evenings, this
one registered as unforgettable while it still lived. It was a matter of
the bag of popcorn they shared, the circus, and the kiss Carol gave her
back of some booth in the performers’ tent. It was a matter of that
particular enchantment that came from Carol—though Carol took their good
times so for granted—seemed to work on all the world around them, a
matter of everything going perfectly, without disappointments or
hitches, going just as they wished it to.

Therese walked from the circus with her head down, lost in thought. “I
wonder if I’ll ever want to create anything again,” she said.

“What brought this on?”

“I mean—what was I ever trying to do but this? I’m happy.”

Carol took her arm and squeezed it, dug her thumb in so hard that
Therese yelled. Carol looked up at a street marker and said, “Fifth and
Nebraska. I think we go this way.”

“What’s going to happen when we get back to New York? It can’t be the
same, can it?”

“Yes,” Carol said. “Till you get tired of me.”

Therese laughed. She heard the soft snap of Carol’s scarf end in the
wind.

“We might not be living together, but it’ll be the same.”

They couldn’t live together with Rindy, Therese knew. It was useless to
dream of it. But it was more than enough that Carol promised in words it
would be the same.

Near the border of Nebraska and Wyoming, they stopped for dinner at a
large restaurant built like a lodge in an evergreen forest. They were
almost the only people in the big dining room, and they chose a table
near the fireplace. They spread out the road map and decided to head
straight for Salt Lake City. They might stay there for a few days, Carol
said, because it was an interesting place, and she was tired of driving.

“Lusk,” Therese said, looking at the map. “What a sexy sounding name.”

Carol put her head back and laughed. “Where is it?”

“On the road.”

Carol picked up her wine glass and said, “Chateau Neuf-du-Pape in
Nebraska. What’ll we drink to?”

“Us.”

It was something like the morning in Waterloo, Therese thought, a time
too absolute and flawless to seem real, though it was real, not merely
props in a play—their brandy glasses on the mantel, the row of deers’
horns above, Carol’s cigarette lighter, the fire itself. But at moments
she felt like an actor, remembered only now and then her identity with a
sense of surprise, as if she had been playing in these last days the
part of someone else, someone fabulously and excessively lucky. She
looked up at the fir branches fixed in the rafters, at the man and woman
talking inaudibly together at a table against the wall, at the man alone
at his table, smoking his cigarette slowly. She thought of the man
sitting with the newspaper in the hotel in Waterloo. Didn’t he have the
same colorless eyes and the long creases on either side of his mouth? Or
was it only that this moment of consciousness was so much the same as
that other moment?

They spent the night in Lusk, ninety miles away.




                           chapter seventeen


“Mrs. H. F. Aird?” The desk clerk looked at Carol after she had signed
the register. “Are you Mrs. Carol Aird?”

“Yes.”

“Message for you.” He turned around and got it from a pigeonhole. “A
telegram.”

“Thank you.” Carol glanced at Therese with a little lift of her brows
before she opened it. She read it, frowning, then turned to the clerk.
“Where’s the Belvedere Hotel?”

The clerk directed her.

“I’ve got to pick up another telegram,” Carol said to Therese. “Want to
wait here while I get it?”

“Who from?”

“Abby.”

“All right. Is it bad news?”

The frown was still in her eyes. “Don’t know until I see it. Abby just
says there’s a telegram for me at the Belvedere.”

“Shall I have the bags taken up?”

“Well—just wait. The car is parked.”

“Why can’t I come with you?”

“Of course, if you want to. Let’s walk. It’s only a couple of blocks
away.”

Carol walked quickly. The cold was sharp. Therese glanced around her at
the flat, orderly looking town, and remembered Carol’s saying that Salt
Lake City was the cleanest town in the United States. When the Belvedere
was in sight, Carol suddenly looked at her and said, “Abby’s probably
had a brainstorm and decided to fly out and join us.”

In the Belvedere, Therese bought a newspaper while Carol went to the
desk. When Therese turned to her, Carol was just lowering the telegram
after reading it. There was a stunned expression on her face. She came
slowly toward Therese, and it flashed through Therese’s mind that Abby
was dead, that this second message was from Abby’s parents.

“What’s the matter?” Therese asked.

“Nothing. I don’t know yet.” Carol glanced around and slapped the
telegram against her fingers. “I’ve got to make a phone call. It might
take a few minutes.” She looked at her watch.

It was a quarter to two. The hotel clerk said she could probably get New
Jersey in about twenty minutes. Meanwhile, Carol wanted a drink. They
found a bar in the hotel.

“What is it? Is Abby sick?”

Carol smiled. “No. I’ll tell you later.”

“Is it Rindy?”

“No!” Carol finished her brandy.

Therese walked up and down in the lobby while Carol was in the telephone
booth. She saw Carol nod slowly several times, saw her fumble to get a
cigarette lighted, but by the time Therese got there to light it for
her, Carol had it and motioned her away. Carol talked for three or four
minutes, then came out and paid her bill.

“What is it, Carol?”

Carol stood looking out the doorway of the hotel for a moment. “Now we
go to the Temple Square Hotel,” she said.

There they picked up another telegram. Carol opened it and glanced at
it, and tore it up as they walked to the door.

“I don’t think we’ll stay here tonight,” Carol said. “Let’s go back to
the car.”

They went back to the hotel where Carol had gotten the first telegram.
Therese said nothing to her, but she felt something had happened that
meant Carol had to get back East immediately. Carol told the clerk to
cancel their room reservation.

“I’d like to leave a forwarding address in case of any other messages,”
she said. “That’s the Brown Palace, Denver.”

“Right you are.”

“Thank you very much. That’s good for the next week at least.”

In the car, Carol said, “What’s the next town west?”

“West?” Therese looked at the map. “Wendover. This is that stretch. A
hundred and twenty-seven miles.”

“Christ!” Carol said suddenly. She stopped the car completely and took
the map and looked at it.

“What about Denver?” Therese asked.

“I don’t want to go to Denver.” Carol folded the map and started the
car. “Well, we’ll do it anyway. Light me a cigarette, will you, darling?
And watch out for the next place to get something to eat.”

They hadn’t had lunch yet, and it was after three. They had talked about
this stretch last night, the straight road west from Salt Lake City
across the Great Salt Lake Desert. They had plenty of gas, Therese
noticed, and probably the country wasn’t entirely deserted, but Carol
was tired. They had been driving since six that morning. Carol drove
fast. Now and then she pressed the pedal down to the floor and held it
there a long while before letting up. Therese glanced at her
apprehensively. She felt they were running away from something.

“Anything behind us?” Carol asked.

“No.” On the seat between them, Therese could see a piece of the
telegram sticking out of Carol’s handbag. GET THIS. JACOPO. was all she
could read. She remembered Jacopo was the name of the little monkey in
the back of the car.

They came to a gas station café standing all by itself like a wart on
the flat landscape. They might have been the first people who had
stopped there in days. Carol looked at her across the white oilcloth
table, and sank back in the straight chair. Before she could speak, an
old man in an apron came from the kitchen in back, and told them there
was nothing but ham and eggs, so they ordered ham and eggs and coffee.
Then Carol lighted a cigarette and leaned forward, looking down at the
table.

“Do you know what’s up?” she said. “Harge has had a detective following
us since Chicago.”

“A detective? What for?”

“Can’t you guess?” Carol said in almost a whisper.

Therese bit her tongue. Yes, she could guess. Harge had found out they
were traveling together. “Abby told you?”

“Abby found out.” Carol’s fingers slid down her cigarette and the fire
burned her. When she got the cigarette out of her mouth, her lip began
to bleed.

Therese looked around her. The place was empty. “Following us?” she
asked. “_With_ us?”

“He may be in Salt Lake City now. Checking on all the hotels. It’s a
very dirty business, darling. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.” Carol sat back
restlessly in her chair. “Maybe I’d better put you on a train and send
you home.”

“All right—if you think that’s the best idea.”

“You don’t have to be mixed up in this. Let them follow me to Alaska, if
they want to. I don’t know what they’ve got so far. I don’t think much.”

Therese sat rigidly on the edge of her chair. “What’s he doing—making
notes about us?”

The old man was coming back, bringing them glasses of water.

Carol nodded. “Then there’s the dictaphone trick,” she said as the man
went away. “I’m not sure if they’ll go that far. I’m not sure if Harge
would do that.” The corner of her mouth trembled. She stared down at one
spot on the worn white oilcloth. “I wonder if they had time for a
dictaphone in Chicago. It’s the only place we stayed more than ten
hours. I rather hope they did. It’s so ironic. Remember Chicago?”

“Of course.” She tried to keep her voice steady, but it was pretense,
like pretending self-control when something you loved was dead in front
of your eyes. They would have to separate here. “What about Waterloo?”
She thought suddenly of the man in the lobby.

“We got there late. It wouldn’t have been easy.”

“Carol, I saw someone—I’m not sure, but I think I saw him twice.”

“Where?”

“In the lobby in Waterloo the first time. In the morning. Then I thought
I saw the same man in that restaurant with the fireplace.” It was only
last night, the restaurant with the fireplace.

Carol made her tell completely about both times and describe the man
completely. He was hard to describe. But now she racked her brain to
extract the last detail she could, even to the color of his shoes. And
it was odd and rather terrifying, dragging up what was probably a
figment of her imagination and tying it to a situation that was real.
She felt she might even be lying to Carol as she watched Carol’s eyes
grow more and more intense.

“What do you think?” Therese asked.

Carol sighed. “What can anyone think? Just watch out for him the third
time.”

Therese looked down at her plate. It was impossible to eat. “It’s about
Rindy, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She put down her fork without taking the first bite, and reached
for a cigarette. “Harge wants her—in toto. Maybe with this, he thinks he
can do it.”

“Just because we’re traveling together?”

“Yes.”

“I should leave you.”

“Damn him,” Carol said quietly, looking off at a corner of the room.

Therese waited. But what was there to wait for? “I can get a bus
somewhere from here, and then get a train.”

“Do you want to go?” Carol asked.

“Of course, I don’t. I just think it’s best.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Afraid? No.” She felt Carol’s eyes appraise her as severely as at that
moment in Waterloo, when she had told Carol she loved her.

“Then I’m damned if you’ll go. I want you with me.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes. Eat your eggs. Stop being silly.” And Carol even smiled a little.
“Shall we go to Reno as we’d planned?”

“Any place.”

“And let’s take our time.”

A few moments later, when they were on the road, Therese said again,
“I’m still not sure it was the same man the second time, you know.”

“I think you’re sure,” Carol said. Then suddenly on the long straight
road, she stopped the car. She sat for a moment in silence, looking down
the road. Then she glanced at Therese. “I can’t go to Reno. That’s a
little too funny. I know a wonderful place just south of Denver.”

“Denver?”

“Denver,” Carol said firmly, and backed the car around.




                            chapter eighteen


In the morning, they lay in each other’s arms long after the sun had
come into the room. The sun warmed them through the window of the hotel
in the tiny town whose name they hadn’t noticed. There was snow on the
ground outside.

“There’ll be snow in Estes Park,” Carol said to her.

“What’s Estes Park?”

“You’ll like it. Not like Yellowstone. It’s open all year.”

“Carol, you’re not worried, are you?”

Carol pulled her close. “Do I act like I’m worried?”

Therese was not worried. That first panic had vanished. She was
watching, but not as she had watched yesterday afternoon just after Salt
Lake City. Carol wanted her with her, and whatever happened they would
meet it without running. How was it possible to be afraid and in love,
Therese thought. The two things did not go together. How was it possible
to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And
every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they
possessed a miracle.

The road into Estes Park slanted downward. The snowdrifts piled higher
and higher on either side, and then the lights began, strung along the
fir trees, arching over the road. It was a village of brown logged
houses and shops and hotels. There was music, and people walked in the
bright street with their heads lifted up, as if they were enchanted.

“I do like it,” Therese said.

“It doesn’t mean you don’t have to watch out for our little man.”

They brought the portable phonograph up to their room, and played some
records they had just bought and some old ones from New Jersey. Therese
played “Easy Living” a couple of times, and Carol sat across the room
watching her, sitting on the arm of a chair with her arms folded.

“What a rotten time I give you, don’t I?”

“Oh, Carol—” Therese tried to smile. It was only a mood of Carol’s, only
a moment. But it made Therese feel helpless.

Carol looked around at the window. “And why didn’t we go to Europe in
the first place? Switzerland. Or fly out here at least.”

“I wouldn’t have liked that at all.” Therese looked at the yellow suède
shirt that Carol had bought for her, that hung over the back of a chair.
Carol had sent Rindy a green one. She had bought some silver earrings, a
couple of books, and a bottle of Triple Sec. Half an hour ago, they had
been happy, walking through the streets together. “It’s that last rye
you got downstairs,” Therese said. “Rye depresses you.”

“Does it?”

“Worse than brandy.”

“I’m going to take you to the nicest place I know this side of Sun
Valley,” she said.

“What’s the matter with Sun Valley?” She knew Carol liked skiing.

“Sun Valley just isn’t the place,” Carol said mysteriously. “This place
is near Colorado Springs.”

In Denver, Carol stopped and sold her diamond engagement ring at a
jeweler’s. Therese felt a little disturbed by it, but Carol said the
ring meant nothing to her and she loathed diamonds anyway. And it was
quicker than wiring her bank for money. Carol wanted to stop at a hotel
a few miles out from Colorado Springs, where she had been before, but
she changed her mind almost as soon as they got there. It was too much
like a resort, she said, so they went to a hotel that backed on the town
and faced the mountains.

Their room was long from the door to the square floor-length windows
that overlooked a garden, and beyond, the red and white mountains. There
were touches of white in the garden, odd little pyramids of stone, a
white bench or a chair, and the garden looked foolish compared to the
magnificent land that surrounded it, the flat sweep that rose up into
mountains upon mountains, filling the horizon like half a world. The
room had blond furniture about the color of Carol’s hair, and there was
a bookcase as smooth as she could want it, with some good books amid the
bad ones, and Therese knew she would never read any of them while they
were here. A painting of a woman in a large black hat and a red scarf
hung above the bookcase, and on the wall near the door was spread a pelt
of brown leather, not a real pelt but something someone had cut out of a
piece of brown suède. Above it was a tin lantern with a candle. Carol
also rented the room next to them, which had a connecting door, though
they did not use it even to put their suitcases in. They planned to stay
a week, or longer if they liked it.

On the morning of the second day, Therese came back from a tour of
inspection of the hotel grounds and found Carol stooped by the bed
table. Carol only glanced at her, and went to the dressing table and
looked under that, and then to the long built-in closet behind the wall
panel.

“That’s that,” Carol said. “Now let’s forget it.”

Therese knew what she was looking for. “I hadn’t thought of it,” she
said. “I feel like we’ve lost him.”

“Except that he’s probably gotten to Denver by now,” Carol said calmly.
She smiled, but she twisted her mouth a little. “And he’ll probably drop
in down here.”

It was so, of course. There was even the remotest chance that the
detective had seen them when they drove back through Salt Lake City, and
followed them. If he didn’t find them in Salt Lake City, he might
inquire at the hotels. She knew that was why Carol had left the Denver
address, in fact, because they hadn’t intended to go to Denver. Therese
flung herself in the armchair, and looked at Carol. Carol took the
trouble to search for a dictaphone, but her attitude was arrogant. She
had even invited trouble by coming here. And the explanation, the
resolution of those contradictory facts was nowhere but in Carol
herself, unresolved, in her slow, restless step as she walked to the
door now and turned, in the nonchalant lift of her head, and in the
nervous line of her eyebrows that registered irritation in one second
and in the next were serene. Therese looked at the big room, up at the
high ceiling, at the large square, plain bed, the room that for all its
modernness had a curiously old-fashioned, ample air about it that she
associated with the American West, like the oversized Western saddles
she had seen in the riding stable downstairs. A kind of cleanness, as
well. Yet Carol looked for a dictaphone. Therese watched her, walking
back toward her, still in her pajamas and robe. She had an impulse to go
to Carol, crush her in her arms, pull her down on the bed, and the fact
that she didn’t now made her tense and alert, filled her with a
repressed but reckless exhilaration.

Carol blew her smoke up into the air. “I don’t give a damn. I hope the
papers find out about it and rub Harge’s nose in his own mess. I hope he
wastes fifty thousand dollars. Do you want to take that trip that
bankrupts the English language this afternoon? Did you ask Mrs. French
yet?”

They had met Mrs. French last night in the game room of the hotel. She
hadn’t a car, and Carol had asked her if she would like to take a drive
with them today.

“I asked her,” Therese said. “She said she’d be ready right after
lunch.”

“Wear your suède shirt.” Carol took Therese’s face in her hands, pressed
her cheeks, and kissed her. “Put it on now.”

It was a six- or seven-hour trip to the Cripple Creek gold mine, over
Ute Pass and down a mountain. Mrs. French went with them, talking the
whole time. She was a woman of about seventy, with a Maryland accent and
a hearing aid, ready to get out of the car and climb anywhere, though
she had to be helped every foot of the way. Therese felt very anxious
about her, though she actually disliked even touching her. She felt if
Mrs. French fell, she would break in a million pieces. Carol and Mrs.
French talked about the State of Washington, which Mrs. French knew
well, since she had lived there for the past few years with one of her
sons. Carol asked a few questions, and Mrs. French told her all about
her ten years of traveling since her husband’s death, and about her two
sons; the one in Washington and the one in Hawaii who worked for a
pineapple company. And obviously Mrs. French adored Carol, and they were
going to see a lot more of Mrs. French. It was nearly eleven when they
got back to the hotel. Carol asked Mrs. French to have supper in the bar
with them, but Mrs. French said she was too tired for anything but her
shredded wheat and hot milk, which she would have in her room.

“I’m glad,” Therese said when she had gone. “I’d rather be alone with
you.”

“Really, Miss Belivet? Whatever do you mean?” Carol asked as she opened
the door into the bar. “You’d better sit down and tell me all about
that.”

But they were not alone in the bar more than five minutes. Two men, one
named Dave and the other whose name Therese at least did not know and
did not care to, came over and asked to join them. They were the two who
had come over last night in the game room and asked Carol and her to
play gin rummy. Carol had declined last night. Now she said, “Of course,
sit down.” Carol and Dave began a conversation that sounded very
interesting, but Therese was seated so that she couldn’t participate
very well. And the man next to Therese wanted to talk about something
else, a horseback trip he had just made around Steamboat Springs. After
supper, Therese waited for a sign from Carol to leave, but Carol was
still deep in conversation. Therese had read about that special pleasure
people got from the fact that someone they loved was attractive in the
eyes of other people, too. She simply didn’t have it. Carol looked at
her every now and then and gave her a wink. So Therese sat there for an
hour and a half, and managed to be polite, because she knew Carol wanted
her to be.

The people who joined them in the bar and sometimes in the dining room
did not annoy her so much as Mrs. French, who went with them somewhere
almost every day in the car. Then an angry resentment that Therese was
actually ashamed of would rise in her because someone was preventing her
from being alone with Carol.

“Darling, did you ever think you’ll be seventy-one, too, some day?”

“No,” Therese said.

But there were other days when they drove out into the mountains alone,
taking any road they saw. Once they came upon a little town they liked
and spent the night there, without pajamas or toothbrushes, without past
or future, and the night became another of those islands in time,
suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute.
Or perhaps it was nothing but happiness, Therese thought, a complete
happiness that must be rare enough, so rare that very few people ever
knew it. But if it was merely happiness, then it had gone beyond the
ordinary bounds and become something else, become a kind of excessive
pressure, so that the weight of a coffee cup in her hand, the speed of a
cat crossing the garden below, the silent crash of two clouds seemed
almost more than she could bear. And just as she had not understood a
month ago the phenomenon of sudden happiness, she did not understand her
state now, which seemed an aftermath. It was more often painful than
pleasant, and consequently she was afraid she had some grave and unique
flaw. She was as afraid sometimes as if she were walking about with a
broken spine. If she ever had an impulse to tell Carol, the words
dissolved before she began, in fear and in her usual mistrust of her own
reactions, the anxiety that her reactions were like no one else’s, and
that therefore not even Carol could understand them.

In the mornings, they generally drove out somewhere in the mountains and
left the car so they could climb up a hill. They drove aimlessly over
the zigzagging roads that were like white chalk lines connecting
mountain point to mountain point. From a distance, one could see clouds
lying about the projecting peaks, so it seemed they flew along in space,
a little closer to heaven than to earth. Therese’s favorite spot was on
the highway above Cripple Creek, where the road clung suddenly to the
rim of a gigantic depression. Hundreds of feet below, lay the tiny
disorder of the abandoned mining town. There the eye and the brain
played tricks with each other, for it was impossible to keep a steady
concept of the proportion below, impossible to compare it on any human
scale. Her own hand held up in front of her could look Lilliputian or
curiously huge. And the town occupied only a fraction of the great scoop
in the earth, like a single experience, a single commonplace event, set
in a certain immeasurable territory of the mind. The eye, swimming in
space, returned to rest on the spot that looked like a box of matches
run over by a car, the man-made confusion of the little town.

Always Therese looked for the man with the creases on either side of his
mouth, but Carol never did. Carol had not even mentioned him since their
second day at Colorado Springs, and now ten days had passed. Because the
restaurant of the hotel was famous, new people came every evening to the
big dining room, and Therese always glanced about, not actually
expecting to see him, but as a kind of precaution that had become a
habit. But Carol paid no attention to anyone except Walter, their
waiter, who always came up to ask what kind of cocktail they wanted that
evening. Many people looked at Carol, however, because she was generally
the most attractive woman in the room. And Therese was so delighted to
be with her, so proud of her, she looked at no one else but Carol. Then
as she read the menu, Carol would slowly press Therese’s foot under the
table to make her smile.

“What do you think about Iceland in the summer?” Carol might ask,
because they made a point of talking about travel, if there was a
silence when they first sat down.

“Must you pick such cold places? When’ll I ever work?”

“Don’t be dismal. Shall we invite Mrs. French? Think she’d mind our
holding hands?”

One morning, there were three letters—from Rindy, Abby, and Dannie. It
was Carol’s second letter from Abby, who had had no further news before,
and Therese noticed Carol opened Rindy’s letter first. Dannie wrote that
he was still waiting to hear the outcome of two interviews about jobs
and reported that Phil said Harkevy was going to do the sets for the
English play called _The Faint Heart_ in March.

“Listen to this,” Carol said. “‘Have you seen any armadillos in
Colorado? Can you send me one, because the chameleon got lost. Daddy and
I looked everywhere in the house for him. But if you send me the
armadillo it will be big enough not to get lost.’ New paragraph. ‘I got
90 in spelling but only 70 in arithmetic. I hate it. I hate the teacher.
Well I must be closing. Love to you and to Abby. Rindy. XX. P.S. Thank
you very much for the leather shirt. Daddy bought me a two-wheel bike
regular size that he said I was too small for Christmas. I am not too
small. It is a beautiful bike.’ Period. What’s the use? Harge can always
top me.” Carol put the letter down and picked up Abby’s.

“Why did Rindy say ‘Love to you and to Abby’?” Therese asked. “Does she
think you’re with Abby?”

“No.” Carol’s wooden letter opener had stopped halfway through Abby’s
envelope. “I suppose she thinks I write to her,” she said, and finished
slitting the envelope.

“I mean, Harge wouldn’t have told her that, would he?”

“No, darling,” Carol said preoccupiedly, reading Abby’s letter.

Therese got up and crossed the room, and stood by the window looking out
at the mountains. She should write to Harkevy this afternoon, she
thought, and ask him if there was a chance of an assistant’s job with
his group in March. She began composing the letter in her head. The
mountains looked back at her like majestic red lions, staring down their
noses. Twice she heard Carol laugh, but she did not read any of the
letter aloud to her.

“No news?” Therese asked when she was finished.

“No news.”

Carol taught her to drive on the roads around the foot of the mountains,
where a car almost never passed. Therese learned faster than she had
ever learned anything before, and after a couple of days, Carol let her
drive in Colorado Springs. In Denver, she took a test and got a license.
Carol said she could do half the driving back to New York, if she wanted
to.

He was sitting one evening at the dinner hour at a table by himself to
the left of Carol and behind her. Therese choked on nothing, and put her
fork down. Her heart began to beat as if it would hammer its way out of
her chest. How had she gotten halfway through the meal without seeing
him? She lifted her eyes to Carol’s face and saw Carol watching her,
reading her with the gray eyes that were not quite so calm as a moment
ago. Carol had stopped in the middle of saying something.

“Have a cigarette,” Carol said, offering her one, lighting it for her.
“He doesn’t know that you can recognize him, does he?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t let him find out.” Carol smiled at her, lighted her own
cigarette, and looked away in the opposite direction from the detective.
“Just take it easy,” Carol added in the same tone.

It was easy to say, easy to have thought she could look at him when she
saw him next, but what was the use of trying when it was like being
struck in the face with a cannon ball?

“No baked Alaska tonight?” Carol said, looking at the menu. “That breaks
my heart. You know what we’re going to have?” She called to the waiter.
“Walter!”

Walter came smiling, ardent to serve them, just as he did every evening.
“Yes, madame.”

“Two Remy Martins, please, Walter,” Carol told him.

The brandy helped very little, if at all. The detective did not once
look at them. He was reading a book that he had propped up on the metal
napkin holder, and even now Therese felt a doubt as strong as in the
café outside Salt Lake City, an uncertainty that was somehow more
horrible than the positive knowledge would be that he was the detective.

“Do we have to go past him, Carol?” Therese asked. There was a door in
back of her, into the bar.

“Yes. That’s the way we go out.” Carol’s eyebrows lifted with her smile,
exactly as on any other night. “He can’t do anything to us. Do you
expect him to pull a gun?”

Therese followed her, passed within twelve inches of the man whose head
was lowered toward his book. Ahead of her she saw Carol’s figure bend
gracefully as she greeted Mrs. French, who was sitting alone at a table.

“Why didn’t you come and join us?” Carol said, and Therese remembered
that the two women Mrs. French usually sat with had left today.

Carol even stood there a few moments talking with Mrs. French, and
Therese marveled at her but she couldn’t stand there herself, and went
on, to wait for Carol by the elevators.

Upstairs, Carol found the little instrument fastened up in a corner
under the bed table. Carol got the scissors and using both hands cut
through the wire that disappeared under the carpet.

“Did the hotel people let him in here, do you think?” Therese asked,
horrified.

“He probably had a key to fit.” Carol yanked the thing loose from the
table and dropped it on the carpet, a little black box with a trail of
wire. “Look at it, like a rat,” she said. “A portrait of Harge.” Her
face had flushed suddenly.

“Where does it go to?”

“To some room where it’s recorded. Probably across the hall. _Bless_
these fancy wall to wall carpets!”

Carol kicked the dictaphone toward the center of the room.

Therese looked at the little rectangular box, and thought of it drinking
up their words last night. “I wonder how long it’s been there?”

“How long do you think he could have been here without your seeing him?”

“Yesterday at the worst.” But even as she said it, she knew she could be
wrong. She couldn’t have seen every face in the hotel.

And Carol was shaking her head. “Would it take him nearly two weeks to
trace us from Salt Lake City to here? No, he just decided to have dinner
with us tonight.” Carol turned from the bookshelf with a glass of brandy
in her hand. The flush had left her face. Now she even smiled a little
at Therese. “Clumsy fellow, isn’t he?” She sat down on the bed, swung a
pillow behind her and leaned back. “Well, we’ve been here just about
long enough, haven’t we?”

“When do you want to go?”

“Maybe tomorrow. We’ll get ourselves packed in the morning and take off
after lunch. What do you think?”

Later, they went down to the car and took a drive, westward into the
darkness. We shall not go farther west, Therese thought. She could not
stamp out the panic that danced in the very core of her, that she felt
due to something gone before, something that had happened long ago, not
now, not this. She was uneasy, but Carol was not. Carol was not merely
pretending coolness, she really was not afraid. Carol said, what could
he do, after all, but she simply didn’t want to be spied upon.

“One other thing,” Carol said. “Try and find out what kind of car he’s
in.”

That night, talking over the road map about their route tomorrow,
talking as matter of factly as a couple of strangers, Therese thought
surely tonight would not be like last night. But when they kissed good
night in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response
in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials which put
together inevitably created desire.




                            chapter nineteen


Therese could not find out what kind of car he had, because the cars
were locked in separate garages, and though she had a view of the
garages from the sunroom, she did not see him come out that morning.
Neither did they see him at lunchtime.

Mrs. French insisted that they come into her room for a cordial, when
she heard they were leaving. “You must have a stirrup cup,” Mrs. French
said to Carol. “Why I haven’t even got your address yet!”

Therese remembered that they had promised to exchange flower bulbs. She
remembered a long conversation in the car one day about bulbs that had
cemented their friendship. Carol was incredibly patient to the last. One
would never have guessed, seeing Carol sitting on Mrs. French’s sofa
with the little glass Mrs. French kept filling, that she was in a hurry
to get away. Mrs. French kissed them both on the cheek when they said
good-by.

From Denver, they took a highway northward toward Wyoming. They stopped
for coffee at the kind of place they always liked, an ordinary
restaurant with a counter and a juke box. They put nickels into the juke
box, but it was not the same as before. Therese knew it would not be the
same for the rest of the trip, though Carol talked of going to
Washington even yet, and perhaps up into Canada. Therese could feel that
Carol’s goal was New York.

They spent the first night in a tourist camp that was built like a
circle of tepees. While they were undressing, Carol looked up at the
ceiling where the tepee poles came to a point, and said boredly, “The
trouble some idiots go to,” and for some reason it struck Therese as
hysterically funny. She laughed until Carol got tired of it and
threatened to make her drink a tumbler of brandy, if she didn’t stop.
And Therese was still smiling, standing by the window with a brandy in
her hand, waiting for Carol to come out of the shower, when she saw a
car drive up beside the large office tepee and stop. After a moment, the
man who had gone into the office came out and looked around in the dark
area within the circle of tepees, and it was his prowling step that
arrested her attention. She was suddenly sure without seeing his face or
even his figure very clearly that he was the detective.

“Carol!” she called.

Carol pushed the shower curtain aside and glanced at her and stopped
drying herself. “Is it—”

“I don’t know, but I think so,” she said, and saw the anger spread
slowly over Carol’s face and stiffen it, and it shocked Therese to
sobriety, as if she had just realized an insult, to herself or to Carol.

“Chr-rist!” Carol said, and flung the towel at the floor. She drew on
her robe and tied the belt of it. “Well—what’s he doing?”

“I think he’s stopping here.” Therese stood back at the edge of the
window. “His car’s still in front of the office, anyway. If we turn out
the light, I’ll be able to see a lot better.”

Carol groaned. “Oh, don’t. I couldn’t. It bores me,” she said with the
utmost boredom and disgust.

And Therese smiled, twistedly, and checked another insane impulse to
laugh, because Carol would have been furious if she had laughed. Then
she saw the car roll under the garage door of a tepee across the circle.
“Yes, he’s stopping here. It’s a black two-door sedan.”

Carol sat down on the bed with a sigh. She smiled at Therese, a quick
smile of fatigue and boredom, of resignation and helplessness and anger.
“Take your shower. And then get dressed again.”

“But I don’t know if it’s him at all.”

“That’s just the hell of it, darling.”

Therese took a shower and lay down in her clothes beside Carol. Carol
had turned out the light. She was smoking cigarettes in the dark, and
said nothing to her until finally she touched her arm and said, “Let’s
go.” It was three thirty when they drove out of the tourist camp. They
had paid their bill in advance. There was no light anywhere, and unless
the detective was watching them with his light out, no one had observed
them.

“What do you want to do, sleep again somewhere?” Carol asked her.

“No. Do you?”

“No. Let’s see how much distance we can make.” She pressed the pedal to
the floor. The road was clear and smooth as far as the headlights swept.

As dawn was breaking, a highway patrolman stopped them for speeding, and
Carol had to pay a twenty-two dollar fine in a town called Central City,
Nebraska. They lost thirty miles by having to follow the patrolman back
to the little town, but Carol went through with it without a word,
unlike herself, unlike the time she had argued and cajoled the patrolman
out of an arrest for speeding, and a New Jersey speed cop at that.

“Irritating,” Carol said when they got back into the car, and that was
all she said, for hours.

Therese offered to drive, but Carol said she wanted to. And the flat
Nebraska prairie spread out before them, yellow with wheat stubble,
brown-splotched with bare earth and stone, deceptively warm looking in
the white winter sun. Because they went a little slower now, Therese had
a panicky sensation of not moving at all, as if the earth drifted under
them and they stood still. She watched the road behind them for another
patrol car, for the detective’s car, and for the nameless, shapeless
thing she felt pursuing them from Colorado Springs. She watched the land
and the sky for the meaningless events that her mind insisted on
attaching significance to, the buzzard that banked slowly in the sky,
the direction of a tangle of weeds that bounced over a rutted field
before the wind, and whether a chimney had smoke or not. Around eight
o’clock, an irresistible sleepiness weighted her eyelids and clouded her
head, so she felt scarcely any surprise when she saw a car behind them
like the car she watched for, a two-door sedan of dark color.

“There’s a car like that behind us,” she said. “It’s got a yellow
license plate.”

Carol said nothing for a minute, but she glanced in the mirror and blew
her breath out through pursed lips. “I doubt it. If it is, he’s a better
man than I thought.” She was slowing down. “If I let him pass, do you
think you can recognize him?”

“Yes.” Couldn’t she recognize the blurriest glimpse of him by now?

Carol slowed almost to a stop and took the road map and laid it across
the wheel and looked at it. The other car approached, and it was him
inside, and went by.

“Yes,” Therese said. The man hadn’t glanced at her.

Carol pressed the gas pedal down. “You’re sure, are you?”

“Positive.” Therese watched the speedometer go up to sixty-five and
over. “What are you going to do?”

“Speak to him.”

Carol slacked her speed as they closed the distance. They drew alongside
of the detective’s car, and he turned to look at them, the wide straight
mouth unchanging, the eyes like round gray dots, expressionless as the
mouth. Carol waved her hand downward. The man’s car slowed.

“Roll your window down,” Carol said to Therese.

The detective’s car pulled over into the sandy shoulder of the road and
stopped.

Carol stopped her car with its rear wheels on the highway, and spoke
across Therese. “Do you like our company or what?” she asked.

The man got out of his car and closed his door. Some three yards of
ground separated the cars, and the detective crossed half of it and
stood. His dead little eyes had darkish rims around their gray irises,
like a doll’s blank and steady eyes. He was not young. His face looked
worn by the weathers he had driven it through, and the shadow of his
beard deepened the bent creases on either side of his mouth.

“I’m doing my job, Mrs. Aird,” he said.

“That’s pretty obvious. It’s nasty work, isn’t it?”

The detective tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail and lighted it in the
gusty wind with a slowness that suggested a stage performance. “At least
it’s nearly over.”

“Then why don’t you leave us alone,” Carol said, her voice as tense as
the arm that supported her on the steering wheel.

“Because I have orders to follow you on this trip. But if you’re going
back to New York, I won’t have to any more. I advise you to go back,
Mrs. Aird. Are you going back now?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Because I’ve got some information—information that I’d say was in your
interest to go back and take care of.”

“Thanks,” Carol said cynically. “Thanks so much for telling me. It’s not
in my plans to go back just yet. But I can give you my itinerary, so you
can leave us alone and catch up on your sleep.”

The detective looked at her with a false and meaningless smile, not like
a person at all, but like a machine wound up and set on a course. “I
think you’ll go back to New York. I’m giving you sound advice. Your
child is at stake. I suppose you know that, don’t you?”

“My child is my property!”

A crease twitched in his cheek. “A human being is not property, Mrs.
Aird.”

Carol raised her voice. “Are you going to tag along the rest of the
way?”

“Are you going back to New York?”

“No.”

“I think you will,” the detective said, and he turned away slowly toward
his car.

Carol stepped on the starter. She reached for Therese’s hand and
squeezed it for a moment in reassurance, and then the car shot forward.
Therese sat up with her elbows on her knees and her hands pressed to her
forehead, yielding to a shame and shock she had never known before, that
she had repressed before the detective.

“Carol!”

Carol was crying, silently. Therese looked at the downward curve of her
lips that was not like Carol at all, but rather like a small girl’s
twisted grimace of crying. She stared incredulously at the tear that
rolled over Carol’s cheekbone.

“Get me a cigarette,” Carol said.

When Therese handed it to her, lighted, she had wiped the tear away, and
it was over. Carol drove for a minute, slowly, smoking the cigarette.

“Crawl in the back and get the gun,” Carol said.

Therese did not move for a moment.

Carol glanced at her. “Will you?”

Therese slid agilely in her slacks over the back seat, and dragged the
navy-blue suitcase onto the seat. She opened the clasps and got out the
sweater with the gun.

“Just hand it to me,” Carol said calmly. “I want it in the side pocket.”
She reached her hand over her shoulder, and Therese put the white handle
of the gun into it, and crawled back into the front seat.

The detective was still following them, half a mile behind them, back of
the horse and farm wagon that had turned into the highway from a dirt
road. Carol held Therese’s hand and drove with her left hand. Therese
looked down at the faintly freckled fingers that dug their strong cool
tips into her palm.

“I’m going to talk to him again,” Carol said, and pressed the gas pedal
down steadily. “If you want to get out, I’ll put you off at the next gas
station or something and come back for you.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” Therese said. Carol was going to demand the
detective’s records, and Therese had a vision of Carol hurt, of his
pulling a gun with an expert’s oily speed and firing it before Carol
could even pull the trigger. But those things didn’t happen, wouldn’t
happen, she thought, and she set her teeth. She kneaded Carol’s hand in
her fingers.

“All right. And don’t worry. I just want to talk to him.” She swung the
car suddenly into a smaller road off the highway to the left. The road
went up between sloping fields, and turned and went through woods. Carol
drove fast, though the road was bad. “He’s coming on, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

There was one farmhouse set in the rolling hills, and then nothing but
scrubby, rocky land and the road that kept disappearing around the
curves before them. Where the road clung to a sloping hill, Carol went
round a curve and stopped the car carelessly, half in the road.

She reached for the side pocket and pulled the gun out. She opened
something on it, and Therese saw the bullets inside. Then Carol looked
through the windshield, and let her hands with the gun fall in her lap.
“I’d better not, better not,” she said quickly, and dropped the gun back
in the side pocket. Then she pulled the car up, and straightened it by
the side of the hill. “Stay in the car,” she said to Therese, and got
out.

Therese heard the detective’s car. Carol walked slowly toward the sound,
and then the detective’s car came around the curve, not fast, but his
brakes shrieked, and Carol stepped to the side of the road. Therese
opened the door slightly, and leaned on the window sill.

The man got out of his car. “Now what?” he said, raising his voice in
the wind.

“What do you think?” Carol came a little closer to him. “I’d like
everything you’ve got about me—dictaphone tapes and whatever.”

The detective’s brows hardly rose over the pale dots of his eyes. He
leaned against the front fender of his car, smirking with his wide thin
mouth. He glanced at Therese and back at Carol. “Everything’s sent away.
I haven’t a thing but a few notes. About times and places.”

“All right, I’d like to have them.”

“You mean, you want to buy them?”

“I didn’t say that, I said I’d like to have them. Do you prefer to sell
them?”

“I’m not one you can buy off,” he said.

“What’re you doing this for anyway, if not money?” Carol asked
impatiently. “Why not make a little more? What’ll you take for what
you’ve got?”

He folded his arms. “I told you everything’s sent away. You’d be wasting
your money.”

“I don’t think you mailed the dictaphone records yet from Colorado
Springs,” Carol said.

“No?” he asked sarcastically.

“No. I’ll give you whatever you ask for them.”

He looked Carol up and down, glanced at Therese, and again his mouth
widened.

“Get them—tapes, records or whatever they are,” Carol said, and the man
moved.

He walked around his car to the luggage compartment, and Therese heard
his keys jingle as he opened it. Therese got out of the car, unable to
sit there any longer. She walked to within a few feet of Carol and
stopped. The detective was reaching for something in a big suitcase.
When he straightened up, the raised lid of the compartment knocked his
hat off. He stepped on the brim to hold it from the wind. He had
something in one hand now, too small to see.

“There’s two,” he said. “I guess they’re worth five hundred. They’d be
worth more if there weren’t more of them in New York.”

“You’re a fine salesman. I don’t believe you,” Carol said.

“Why? They’re in a hurry for them in New York.” He picked up his hat,
and closed the luggage compartment. “But they’ve got enough now. I told
you you’d better go back to New York, Mrs. Aird.” He ground his
cigarette out in the dirt, twisting his toe in front of him. “Are you
going back to New York now?”

“I don’t change my mind,” Carol said.

The detective shrugged. “I’m not on any side. The sooner you go back to
New York, the sooner we can call it quits.”

“We can call it quits right now. After you give me those, you can take
off and keep going in the same direction.”

The detective had slowly extended his hand in a fist, like the fist in a
guessing game in which there might be nothing. “Are you willing to give
me five hundred for these?” he asked.

Carol looked at his hand, then opened her shoulder strap bag. She took
out her billfold, and then her checkbook.

“I prefer cash,” he said.

“I haven’t got it.”

He shrugged again. “All right, I’ll take a check.”

Carol wrote it, resting it on the fender of his car.

Now as he bent over, watching Carol, Therese could see the little black
object in his hand. Therese came closer. The man was spelling his name.
When Carol gave him the check, he dropped the two little boxes in her
hand.

“How long have you been collecting them?” Carol asked.

“Play them and see.”

“I didn’t come out here to joke!” Carol said, and her voice broke.

He smiled, folding the check. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. What you’ve
gotten from me isn’t all of it. There’s plenty in New York.”

Carol fastened her bag, and turned toward her car, not even looking at
Therese. Then she stopped and faced the detective again. “If they’ve got
all they want, you can knock off now, can’t you? Have I got your promise
to do that?”

He was standing with his hand on his car door, watching her. “I’m still
on the job, Mrs. Aird—still working for my office. Unless you want to
catch a plane for home now. Or for some other place. Give me the slip.
I’ll have to tell my office something—not having the last few days at
Colorado Springs—something more exciting than this.”

“Oh, let them invent something exciting!”

The detective’s smile showed a little of his teeth. He got back into his
car. He shoved his gear, put his head out to see behind him, and backed
the car in a quick turn. He drove off toward the highway.

The sound of his motor faded fast. Carol walked slowly toward the car,
got in and sat staring through the windshield at the dry rise of earth a
few yards ahead. Her face was as blank as if she had fainted.

Therese was beside her. She put her arm around Carol’s shoulder. She
squeezed the cloth shoulder of the coat, and felt as useless as any
stranger.

“Oh, I think it’s mostly bluff,” Carol said suddenly.

But it had made Carol’s face gray, had taken the energy out of her
voice.

Carol opened her hand and looked at the two little round boxes. “Here’s
as good a place as any.” She got out of the car, and Therese followed
her. Carol opened a box and took out the coil of tape that looked like
celluloid. “Tiny, isn’t it. I suppose it burns. Let’s burn it.”

Therese struck the match in the shelter of the car. The tape burned
fast, and Therese dropped it on the ground, and then the wind blew it
out. Carol said not to bother, they could throw both of them in a river.
Carol was sitting in the car, smoking a cigarette.

“What time is it?” Carol asked.

“Twenty to twelve.” She got back in the car, and Carol started
immediately, back down the road toward the highway.

“I’m going to call Abby in Omaha, and then my lawyer.”

Therese looked at the road map. Omaha was the next big town, if they
made a slight turn south. Carol looked tired, and Therese felt her
anger, still unappeased, in the silence she kept. The car jolted over a
rut, and Therese heard the bump and clink of the can of beer that rolled
somewhere under the front seat, the beer they had not been able to open
that first day. She was hungry, had been sickly hungry for hours.

“How about my driving?”

“All right,” Carol said tiredly, relaxing as if she surrendered. She
slowed the car quickly.

Therese slid across her, under the wheel. “And how about stopping for a
breakfast?”

“I couldn’t eat.”

“Or a drink.”

“Let’s get it in Omaha.”

Therese sent the speedometer up to sixty-five, and held it just under
seventy. It was Highway 30. Then two seventy-five into Omaha, and the
road was not first class. “You don’t believe him about dictaphone
records in New York, do you?”

“Don’t talk about it!—I’m sick of it!”

Therese squeezed the wheel, then deliberately relaxed. She sensed a
tremendous sorrow hanging over them, ahead of them, that was just
beginning to reveal the edge of itself, that they were driving into. She
remembered the detective’s face and the barely legible expression that
she realized now was malice. It was malice she had seen in his smile,
even as he said he was on no side, and she could feel in him a desire
that was actually personal to separate them, because he knew they were
together. She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that
the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and
Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster
between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

“I’m thinking of that check,” Carol said.

It fell like another stone inside her. “Do you think they’re going over
the house?” Therese asked.

“Possibly. Just possibly.”

“I don’t think they’d find it. It’s way under the runner.” But there was
the letter in the book. A curious pride lifted her spirit for an
instant, and vanished. It was a beautiful letter, and she would rather
they found it than the check, though as to incrimination they would
probably have the same weight, and they would make the one as dirty as
the other. The letter she had never given, and the check she had never
cashed. It was more likely they would find the letter, certainly.
Therese could not bring herself to tell Carol of the letter, whether
from plain cowardice or a desire to spare Carol any more now, she didn’t
know. She saw a bridge ahead. “There’s a river,” she said. “How about
here?”

“Good enough.” Carol handed her the little boxes. She had put the
half-burned tape back in its box.

Therese got out and flung them over the metal rail, and did not watch.
She looked at the young man in overalls walking onto the bridge from the
other side, hating the senseless antagonism in herself against him.

Carol telephoned from a hotel in Omaha. Abby was not at home, and Carol
left a message that she would call at six o’clock that evening, when
Abby was expected. Carol said it was of no use to call her lawyer now,
because he would be out to lunch until after two by their time. Carol
wanted to wash up, and then have a drink.

They had Old Fashioneds in the bar of the hotel, in complete silence.
Therese asked for a second when Carol did, but Carol said she should eat
something instead. The waiter told Carol that food was not served in the
bar.

“She wants something to eat,” Carol said firmly.

“The dining room is across the lobby, madame, and there’s a coffee
shop—”

“Carol, I can wait,” Therese said.

“Will you please bring me the menu? She prefers to eat here,” Carol said
with a glance at the waiter.

The waiter hesitated, then said, “Yes, madame,” and went to get the
menu.

While Therese ate scrambled eggs and sausage, Carol had her third drink.
Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, “Darling, can I ask you
to forgive me?”

The tone hurt Therese more than the question. “I love you, Carol.”

“But do you see what it means?”

“Yes.” But that moment of defeat in the car, she thought, that had been
only a moment, as this time now was only a situation. “I don’t see why
it should mean this forever. I don’t see how this can destroy anything,”
she said earnestly.

Carol took her hand down from her face and sat back, and now in spite of
the tiredness she looked as Therese always thought of her—the eyes that
could be tender and hard at once as they tested her, the intelligent red
lips strong and soft, though the upper lip trembled the least bit now.

“Do you?” Therese asked, and she realized suddenly it was a question as
big as the one Carol had asked her without words in the room in
Waterloo. In fact, the same question.

“No. I think you’re right,” Carol said. “You make me realize it.”

Carol went to telephone. It was three o’clock. Therese got the check,
then sat there waiting, wondering when it was going to be over, whether
the reassuring word would come from Carol’s lawyer or from Abby, or
whether it was going to get worse before it got better. Carol was gone
about half an hour.

“My lawyer hasn’t heard anything,” she said. “And I didn’t tell him
anything. I can’t. I’ll have to write it.”

“I thought you would.”

“Oh, you did,” Carol said with her first smile that day. “What do you
say we get a room here? I don’t feel like traveling any more.”

Carol had her lunch sent up to their room. They both lay down to take a
nap, but when Therese awakened at a quarter to five, Carol was gone.
Therese glanced around the room, noticing Carol’s black gloves on the
dressing table, and her moccasins side by side near the armchair.
Therese sighed, tremulously, unrefreshed by her sleep. She opened the
window and looked down. It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn’t
remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and
people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either
side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump. She looked off at the
drab little skyline of gray buildings and closed her eyes on it. Then
she turned around and Carol was in the room, standing by the door,
watching her.

“Where have you been?” Therese asked.

“Writing that damned letter.”

Carol crossed the room and caught Therese in her arms. Therese felt
Carol’s nails through the back of her jacket.

When Carol went to the telephone, Therese left the room and wandered
down the hall toward the elevators. She went down to the lobby and sat
there reading an article on weevils in the _Corngrower’s Gazette_, and
wondered if Abby knew all that about corn weevils. She watched the
clock, and after twenty-five minutes went upstairs again.

Carol was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette. Therese waited for her
to speak.

“Darling, I’ve got to go to New York,” Carol said.

Therese had been sure of that. She came to the foot of the bed. “What
else did Abby say?”

“She saw the fellow named Bob Haversham again.” Carol raised herself on
her elbow. “But he certainly doesn’t know as much as I do at this point.
Nobody seems to know anything, except that trouble’s brewing. Nothing
much can happen until I get there. But I’ve got to be there.”

“Of course.” Bob Haversham was the friend of Abby’s who worked in
Harge’s firm in Newark, not a close friend either of Abby’s or Harge’s,
just a link, a slim link between the two of them, the one person who
might know something of what Harge was doing, if he could recognize a
detective, or overhear part of a telephone call, in Harge’s office. It
was worth almost nothing, Therese felt.

“Abby’s going to get the check,” Carol said, sitting up on the bed,
reaching for her moccasins.

“Has she got a key?”

“I wish she had. She’s got to get it from Florence. But that’ll be all
right. I told her to tell Florence I wanted a couple of things sent to
me.”

“Can you tell her to get a letter, too? I left a letter to you in a book
in my room. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t know you were
going to have Abby go there.”

Carol gave her a frowning glance. “Anything else?”

“No. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

Carol sighed, and stood up. “Oh, let’s not worry any more. I doubt if
they’ll bother about the house, but I’ll tell Abby about the letter
anyway. Where is it?”

“In the _Oxford Book of English Verse_. I think I left it on top of the
bureau.” She watched Carol glance around the room, looking anywhere but
at her.

“I don’t want to stay here tonight after all,” Carol said.

Half an hour later, they were in the car going eastward. Carol wanted to
reach Des Moines that night. After a silence of more than an hour, Carol
suddenly stopped the car at the edge of the road, bent her head, and
said, “Damn!”

She could see the darkish sinks under Carol’s eyes in the glare of
passing cars. Carol hadn’t slept at all last night. “Let’s go back to
that last town,” Therese said. “It’s still about seventy-five miles to
Des Moines.”

“Do you want to go to Arizona?” Carol asked her, as if all they had to
do was turn around.

“Oh, Carol—why talk about it?” A feeling of despair came over her
suddenly. Her hands were shaking as she lighted a cigarette. She gave
the cigarette to Carol, and lighted one for herself.

“Because I want to talk about it. Can you take another three weeks off?”

“Of course.” Of course, of course. What else mattered except being with
Carol, anywhere, anyhow? There was the Harkevy show in March, Harkevy
might recommend her for a job somewhere else, but the jobs were
uncertain and Carol was not.

“I shouldn’t have to stay in New York more than a week at most, because
the divorce is all set, Fred, my lawyer, said so today. So why don’t we
have a few more weeks in Arizona? Or New Mexico? I don’t want to hang
around New York the rest of the winter.” Carol drove slowly. Her eyes
were different now. They had come alive, like her voice.

“Of course I’d like to. Anywhere.”

“All right. Come on. Let’s get to Des Moines. How about you driving a
while?”

They changed places. It was a little before midnight when they got to
Des Moines and found a hotel room.

“Why should you go back to New York at all?” Carol asked her. “You could
keep the car and wait for me somewhere like Tucson or Santa Fe, and I
could fly back.”

“And leave you?” Therese turned from the mirror where she was brushing
her hair.

Carol smiled. “What do you mean, leave me?”

It had taken Therese by surprise, and now she saw an expression on
Carol’s face, even though Carol looked at her intently, that made her
feel shut off, as if Carol had thrust her away in a back corner of her
mind to make room for something more important. “Just leave you now, I
meant,” Therese said, turning back to the mirror. “No, it might be a
good idea. It’s quicker for you.”

“I thought you might prefer staying somewhere in the West. Unless you
want to do something in New York those few days,” Carol’s voice was
casual.

“I don’t.” She dreaded the cold days in Manhattan, when Carol would be
too busy to see her. And she thought of the detective. If Carol flew,
she wouldn’t be haunted by his trailing her. She tried to imagine it
already, Carol arriving in the East alone, to face something she didn’t
yet know, something impossible to prepare for. She imagined herself in
Santa Fe, waiting for a telephone call, waiting for a letter from Carol.
But to be two thousand miles away from Carol, she could not imagine that
so easily. “Only a week, Carol?” she asked, drawing the comb along her
part again, flicking the long, fine hair to one side. She had gained
weight, but her face was thinner, she noticed suddenly, and it pleased
her. She looked older.

In the mirror, she saw Carol come up behind her, and there was no answer
but the pleasure of Carol’s arms sliding around her, that made it
impossible to think, and Therese twisted away more suddenly than she
meant to, and stood by the corner of the dressing table looking at
Carol, bewildered for a moment by the elusiveness of what they talked
about, time and space, and the four feet that separated them now and the
two thousand miles. She gave her hair another stroke. “Only about a
week?”

“That’s what I said,” Carol replied with a smile in her eyes, but
Therese heard the same hardness in it as in her own question, as if they
exchanged challenges. “If you mind keeping the car, I can have it driven
East.”

“I don’t mind keeping it.”

“And don’t worry about the detective. I’ll wire Harge that I’m on my
way.”

“I won’t worry about that.” How could Carol be so cold about it, Therese
wondered, thinking of everything else but their leaving each other? She
put the hairbrush down on the dressing table.

“Therese, do you think I’m going to enjoy it?”

And Therese thought of the detectives, the divorce, the hostility, all
Carol had to face. Carol touched her cheek, pressed both palms hard
against her cheeks so her mouth opened like a fish’s, and Therese had to
smile. Therese stood by the dressing table and watched her, watching
every move of her hands, of her feet as she peeled off her stockings and
stepped into her moccasins again. There were no words, she thought,
after this point. What else did they need to explain, or ask, or promise
in words? They did not even need to see each other’s eyes. Therese
watched her pick up the telephone, and then she lay face down on the
bed, while Carol made her plane reservation for tomorrow, one ticket,
one way, tomorrow at eleven A.M.

“Where do you think you’ll go?” Carol asked her.

“I don’t know. I might go back to Sioux Falls.”

“South Dakota?” Carol smiled at her. “You wouldn’t prefer Santa Fe? It’s
warmer.”

“I’ll wait and see it with you.”

“Not Colorado Springs?”

“No!” Therese laughed, and got up. She took her toothbrush into the
bathroom. “I might even take a job somewhere for a week.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Any kind. Just to keep me from thinking of you, you know.”

“I want you to think of me. Not a job in a department store.”

“No.” Therese stood by the bathroom door, watching Carol take off her
slip and put her robe on.

“You’re not worrying about money again, are you?”

Therese slid her hands into her robe pockets and crossed her feet. “If
I’m broke, I don’t care. I’ll start worrying when it’s used up.”

“I’m going to give you a couple of hundred tomorrow for the car.” Carol
pulled Therese’s nose as she passed by. “And you’re not to use that car
to pick up any strangers.” Carol went into the bathroom and turned on
the shower.

Therese came in after her. “I thought I was using this john.”

“I’m using it, but I’ll let you come in.”

“Oh, thanks.” Therese took off her robe as Carol did.

“Well?” Carol said.

“Well?” Therese stepped under the shower.

“Of all the nerve.” Carol got under it, too, and twisted Therese’s arm
behind her, but Therese only giggled.

Therese wanted to embrace her, kiss her, but her free arm reached out
convulsively and dragged Carol’s head against her, under the stream of
water, and there was the horrible sound of a foot slipping.

“Stop it, we’ll fall!” Carol shouted. “For Christ’s sake, can’t two
people take a shower in peace?”




                             chapter twenty


In Sioux Falls, Therese stopped the car in front of the hotel they had
stayed in before, the Warrior Hotel. It was nine thirty in the evening.
Carol had got home about an hour ago, Therese thought. She was to call
Carol at midnight.

She took a room, had her bags carried up, then went out for a walk
through the main street. There was a movie house, and it occurred to her
she had never seen a movie with Carol. She went in. But she was in no
mood to follow the picture, even though there was a woman in it whose
voice was a little like Carol’s, not at all like the flat nasal voices
she heard all around her. She thought of Carol, over a thousand miles
away now, thought of sleeping alone tonight, and she got up and wandered
out on the street again. There was the drugstore where Carol had bought
cleansing tissues and toothpaste one morning. And the corner where Carol
had looked up and read the street names—Fifth and Nebraska streets. She
bought a pack of cigarettes at the same drugstore, walked back to the
hotel and sat in the lobby, smoking, savoring the first cigarette since
she had left Carol, savoring the forgotten state of being alone. It was
only a physical state. She really did not feel at all alone. She read
some newspapers for a while, then took the letters from Dannie and Phil,
that had come in the last days at Colorado Springs, out of her handbag
and glanced over them.

   I saw Richard two nights ago in the Palermo all by himself
   [Phil’s letter said]. I asked about you and he said he wasn’t
   writing to you. I gather there has been a small rupture, but I
   didn’t press for information. He was in no mood for talking. And
   we are not too chummy lately, as you know.... Have been talking
   you up to an angel named Francis Puckett who will put up fifty
   thousand if a certain play from France comes over in April. Shall
   keep you posted, as there is not even a producer yet.... Dannie
   sends his love, I am sure. He is leaving soon for somewhere
   probably, he has that look, and I’ll have to scout for new winter
   quarters or find a roommate.... Did you get the clippings I sent
   you on _Small Rain_?

                                                         Best, Phil

Dannie’s short letter was:

   Dear Therese,

   There is a possibility I may go out to the Coast at the end of
   the month to take a job in California. I must decide between this
   (a lab job) and an offer in a commercial chemical place in
   Maryland. But if I could see you in Colorado or anywhere else for
   a while, I would leave a little early. Shall probably take the
   California job, as I think it has better prospects. So would you
   let me know where you’ll be? It doesn’t matter. There are a lot
   of ways of getting to California. If your friend wouldn’t mind,
   it would be nice to spend a few days with you somewhere. I’ll be
   in New York until the 28 of February anyway.

                                                              Love,
                                                             Dannie

She had not yet answered him. She would send him an address tomorrow, as
soon as she found a room somewhere in the town. But as to the next
destination, she would have to talk to Carol about that. And when would
Carol be able to say? She wondered what Carol might already have found
tonight in New Jersey, and Therese’s courage sank dismally. She reached
for a newspaper and looked at the date. February fifteenth. Twenty-nine
days since she had left New York with Carol. Could it be so few days?

Upstairs in her room, she put the call through to Carol, and bathed and
got into pajamas. Then the telephone rang.

“Hel-_lo_,” Carol said, as if she had been waiting a long while. “What’s
the name of that hotel?”

“The Warrior. But I’m not going to stay here.”

“You didn’t pick up any strangers on the road, did you?”

Therese laughed. Carol’s slow voice went through her as if she touched
her. “What’s the news?” Therese asked.

“Tonight? Nothing. The house is freezing and Florence can’t get here
till day after tomorrow. Abby’s here. Do you want to say hello to her?”

“Not right there with you.”

“No-o. Upstairs in the green room with the door shut.”

“I _don’t_ really want to talk to her now.”

Carol wanted to know everything she had done, how the roads were, and
whether she had on the yellow pajamas or the blue ones. “I’ll have a
hard time getting to sleep tonight without you.”

“Yes.” Immediately, out of nowhere, Therese felt tears pressing behind
her eyes.

“Can’t you say anything but yes?”

“I love you.”

Carol whistled. Then silence. “Abby got the check, darling, but no
letter. She missed my wire, but there isn’t any letter anyway.”

“Did you find the book?”

“We found the book, but there’s nothing in it.”

Therese wondered if the letter could be in her own apartment after all.
But she had a picture of the letter in the book, marking a place. “Do
you think anybody’s been through the house?”

“No. I can tell by various things. Don’t worry about that. Will you?”

A moment later, Therese slid down into bed and pulled her light out.
Carol had asked her to call tomorrow night, too. For a while the sound
of Carol’s voice was in her ears. Then a melancholy began to seep into
her. She lay on her back with her arms straight at her sides, with a
sense of empty space all around her, as if she were laid out ready for
the grave, and then she fell asleep.

The next morning, Therese found a room she liked in a house on one of
the streets that ran uphill, a large front room with a bay window full
of plants and white curtains. There was a four-poster bed and an oval
hooked rug on the floor. The woman said it was seven dollars a week, but
Therese said she was not sure if she would be here a week, so she had
better take it by the day.

“That’ll be the same thing,” the woman said. “Where’re you from?”

“New York.”

“Are you going to live here?”

“No. I’m just waiting for a friend to join me.”

“Man or a woman?”

Therese smiled. “A woman,” she said. “Is there any space in those
garages in back? I’ve got a car with me.”

The woman said there were two garages empty, and that she didn’t charge
for the garages, if people lived here. She was not old, but she stooped
a little and her figure was frail. Her name was Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper.
She had been keeping roomers for fifteen years, she said, and two of the
three she had started with were still here.

The same day, she made the acquaintance of Dutch Huber and his wife who
ran the diner near the public library. He was a skinny man of about
fifty with small curious blue eyes. His wife Edna was fat and did the
cooking, and talked a great deal less than he. Dutch had worked in New
York for a while years ago. He asked her questions about sections of the
city she happened not to know at all, while she mentioned places Dutch
had never heard of or had forgotten, and somehow the slow, dragging
conversation made them both laugh. Dutch asked her if she would like to
go with him and his wife to the motorcycle races that were to be held a
few miles out of town on Saturday, and Therese said yes.

She bought cardboard and glue and worked on the first of the models she
meant to show Harkevy when she got back to New York. She had it nearly
done when she went out at eleven thirty to call Carol from the Warrior.

Carol was not in and no one answered. Therese tried until one o’clock,
then went back to Mrs. Cooper’s house.

Therese reached her the next morning around ten thirty. Carol said she
had talked over everything with her lawyer the day before, but there was
nothing she or her lawyer could do until they knew Harge’s next move.
Carol was a little short with her, because she had a luncheon
appointment in New York and a letter to write first. She seemed anxious
for the first time about what Harge was doing. She had tried to call him
twice without being able to reach him. But it was her brusqueness that
disturbed Therese most of all.

“You haven’t changed your mind about anything?” Therese said.

“Of course not, darling. I’m giving a party tomorrow night. I’ll miss
you.”

Therese tripped on the hotel threshold as she went out, and she felt the
first hollow wave of loneliness break over her. What would she be doing
tomorrow night? Reading in the library until it closed at nine? Working
on another set? She went over the names of the people Carol had said
were coming to the party—Max and Clara Tibbett, the couple who had a
greenhouse on some highway near Carol’s house and whom Therese had met
once, Carol’s friend Tessie she had never met, and Stanley McVeigh, the
man Carol had been with the evening they went to Chinatown. Carol hadn’t
mentioned Abby.

And Carol hadn’t said to call tomorrow.

She walked on, and the last moment she had seen Carol came back as if it
were happening in front of her eyes again. Carol waving from the door of
the plane at the Des Moines airport, Carol already small and far away,
because Therese had had to stand back of the wire fence across the
field. The ramp had been moved away, but Therese had thought, there were
still a few seconds of time before they closed the door, and then Carol
had appeared again, just long enough to stand still in the doorway for a
second, to find her again, and make the gesture of blowing her a kiss.
But it meant an absurd lot that she had come back.

Therese drove out to the motorcycle races on Saturday, and took Dutch
and Edna with her, because Carol’s car was bigger. Afterward, they
invited her to supper at their house, but she did not accept. There
hadn’t been a letter from Carol that day, and she had expected a note at
least. Sunday depressed her, and even the drive she took up the Big
Sioux River to Dell Rapids in the afternoon did not change the scene
inside her mind.

Monday morning, she sat in the library reading plays. Then around two,
when the noonday rush was slacking off in Dutch’s diner, she went in and
had some tea, and talked with Dutch while she played the songs on the
juke box that she and Carol had used to play. She had told Dutch that
the car belonged to the friend for whom she was waiting. And gradually,
Dutch’s intermittent questions led her to tell him that Carol lived in
New Jersey, that she would probably fly out, that Carol wanted to go to
New Mexico.

“Carol does?” Dutch said, turning to her as he polished a glass.

Then a strange resentment rose in Therese because he had said her name,
and she made a resolution not to speak of Carol again at all, not to
anyone in the city.

Tuesday the letter came from Carol, nothing but a short note, but it
said Fred was more optimistic about everything, and it looked as if
there would be nothing but the divorce to worry about and she could
probably leave the twenty-fourth of February. Therese began to smile as
she read it. She wanted to go out and celebrate with someone, but there
was no one, so there was nothing to do but take a walk, have a lonely
drink at the bar of the Warrior, and think of Carol five days away.
There was no one she would have wanted to be with, except perhaps
Dannie. Or Stella Overton. Stella was jolly, and though she couldn’t
have told Stella anything about Carol—whom could she tell?—it would have
been good to see her now. She had meant to write Stella a card days ago,
but she hadn’t yet.

She wrote to Carol late that night.

   The news is wonderful. I celebrated with a single daiquiri at the
   Warrior. Not that I am conservative, but did you know that one
   drink has the kick of three when you are alone?... I love this
   town because it all reminds me of you. I know you don’t like it
   any more than any other town, but that isn’t the point. I mean
   you are here as much as I can bear you to be, not being here....

Carol wrote:

   I never liked Florence. I say this as a prelude. It seems
   Florence found the note you wrote to me and sold it to Harge—at a
   price. She is also responsible for Harge’s knowing where we (or
   at least I) were going, I’ve no doubt. I don’t know what I left
   around the house or what she might have overheard, I thought I
   was pretty silent, but if Harge took the trouble to bribe her and
   I’m sure he did, there’s no telling. They picked us up in
   Chicago, anyway. Darling, I had no idea how far this thing had
   gone. To give you the atmosphere—nobody tells me anything, things
   are just suddenly discovered. If anyone is in possession of the
   facts, it is Harge. I spoke with him on the phone, and he refuses
   to tell me anything, which of course is calculated to terrorize
   me into giving all my ground before the fight has even begun.
   They don’t know me, any of them, if they think I will. The fight
   of course is over Rindy, and yes, darling, I’m afraid there will
   be one, and I can’t leave the 24th. That much Harge did tell me
   when he sprang the letter this morning on the phone. I think the
   letter may be his strongest weapon (the dictaphone business only
   went on in Colorado S. so far as I can possibly imagine) hence
   his letting me know about it. But I can imagine the kind of
   letter it is, written even before we took off, and there’ll be a
   limit to what even Harge can read into it. Harge is merely
   threatening—in the peculiar form of silence—hoping I will back
   out completely as far as Rindy is concerned. I won’t, so there
   will come some kind of a showdown, I hope not in court. Fred is
   prepared for anything however. He is wonderful, the only person
   who talks straight to me, but unfortunately he knows least of all
   too.

   You ask if I miss you. I think of your voice, your hands, and
   your eyes when you look straight into mine. I remember your
   courage that I hadn’t suspected, and it gives me courage. Will
   you call me, darling? I don’t want to call you if your phone is
   in the hall. Call me collect around 7 P.M. preferably, which is 6
   your time.

And Therese was about to call her that day when a telegram came:

   DON’T TELEPHONE FOR A WHILE. EXPLAIN LATER. ALL MY LOVE, DARLING.
   CAROL.

Mrs. Cooper watched her reading it in the hall. “That from your friend?”
she asked.

“Yes.”

“Hope nothing’s the matter.” Mrs. Cooper had a way of peering at people,
and Therese lifted her head deliberately.

“No, she’s coming,” Therese said. “She’s been delayed.”




                           chapter twenty-one


Albert Kennedy, Bert to people he liked, lived in a room at the back of
the house, and was one of Mrs. Cooper’s original lodgers. He was
forty-five, a native of San Francisco, and more like a New Yorker than
anyone Therese had met in the town, and this fact alone inclined her to
avoid him. Often he asked Therese to go to the movies with him, but she
had gone only once. She was restless and she preferred to wander about
by herself, mostly just looking and thinking, because the days were too
cold and windy for any outdoor sketching. And the scenes she had liked
at first had grown too stale to sketch, from too much looking, too much
waiting. Therese went to the library almost every evening, sat at one of
the long tables looking over half a dozen books, and then took a
meandering course homeward.

She came back to the house only to wander out again after a while,
stiffening herself against the erratic wind, or letting it turn her down
streets she would not otherwise have followed. In the lighted windows
she would see a girl seated at a piano, in another a man laughing, in
another a woman sewing. Then she remembered she could not even call
Carol, admitted to herself she did not even know what Carol was doing at
this moment, and she felt emptier than the wind. Carol did not tell her
everything in her letters, she felt, did not tell her the worst.

In the library, she looked at books with photographs of Europe in them,
marble fountains in Sicily, ruins of Greece in sunlight, and she
wondered if she and Carol would really ever go there. There was still so
much they had not done. There was the first voyage across the Atlantic.
There were simply the mornings, mornings anywhere, when she could lift
her head from a pillow and see Carol’s face, and know that the day was
theirs and that nothing would separate them.

And there was the beautiful thing, transfixing the heart and the eyes at
once, in the dark window of an antique shop in a street where she had
never been. Therese stared at it, feeling it quench some forgotten and
nameless thirst inside her. Most of its porcelain surface was painted
with small bright lozenges of colored enamel, royal blue and deep red
and green, outlined with coin gold as shiny as silk embroidery, even
under its film of dust. There was a gold ring at the rim for the finger.
It was a tiny candlestick holder. Who had made it, she wondered, and for
whom?

She came back the next morning and bought it to give to Carol.

A letter from Richard had come that morning, forwarded from Colorado
Springs. Therese sat down on one of the stone benches in the street
where the library was, and opened it. It was on business stationery: The
Semco Bottled Gas Company. Cooks—Heats—Makes Ice. Richard’s name was at
the top as General Manager of the Port Jefferson Branch.

   Dear Therese,

   I have Dannie to thank for telling me where you are. You may
   think this letter unnecessary and perhaps it is to you. Perhaps
   you are still in that fog you were, when we talked that evening
   in the cafeteria. But I feel it is necessary to make one thing
   clear, and that is that I no longer feel the way I did even two
   weeks ago, and the letter I wrote you last was nothing but a last
   spasmodic effort, and I knew it was hopeless when I wrote it, and
   I knew you wouldn’t answer and I didn’t want you to. I know I had
   stopped loving you then, and now the uppermost emotion I feel
   toward you is one that was present from the first—disgust. It is
   your hanging onto this woman to the exclusion of everyone else,
   this relationship which I am sure has become sordid and
   pathological by now, that disgusts me. I know that it will not
   last, as I said from the first. It is only regrettable that you
   will be disgusted later yourself, in proportion to how much of
   your life you waste now with it. It is rootless and infantile,
   like living on lotus blossoms or some sickening candy instead of
   the bread and meat of life. I have often thought of those
   questions you asked me the day we were flying the kite. I wish I
   had acted then before it was too late, because I loved you enough
   then to try to rescue you. Now I don’t.

   People still ask me about you. What do you expect me to tell
   them? I intend to tell them the truth. Only that way can I get it
   out of myself—and I can no longer bear to carry it around with
   me. I have sent a few things you had at the house back to your
   apartment. The slightest memory or contact with you depresses me,
   makes me not want to touch you or anything concerned with you.
   But I am talking sense and very likely you are not understanding
   a word of it. Except maybe this: I want nothing to do with you.

                                                            Richard

She saw Richard’s thin soft lips tensed in a straight line as they must
have looked when he wrote the letter, a line that still did not keep the
tiny, taut curl in the upper lip from showing—she saw his face clearly
for a moment, and then it vanished with a little jolt that seemed as
muffled and remote from her as the clamor of Richard’s letter. She stood
up, put the letter back in the envelope, and walked on. She hoped he
succeeded in purging himself of her. But she could only imagine him
telling other people about her with that curious attitude of passionate
participation she had seen in New York before she left. She imagined
Richard telling Phil as they stood some evening at the Palermo bar,
imagined him telling the Kellys. She wouldn’t care at all, whatever he
said.

She wondered what Carol was doing now, at ten o’clock, at eleven in New
Jersey. Listening to some stranger’s accusations? Thinking of her, or
was there time for that?

It was a fine day, cold and almost windless, bright with sun. She could
take the car and drive somewhere. She had not used the car for three
days. Suddenly she realized she did not want to use it. The day she had
taken it out and driven it up to ninety on the straight road to Dell
Rapids, exultant after a letter from Carol, seemed very long ago.

Mr. Bowen, another of the roomers, was on the front porch when she came
back to Mrs. Cooper’s house. He was sitting in the sun with his legs
wrapped in a blanket and his cap pulled down over his eyes as if he were
asleep, but he called out, “Hi, there! How’s my girl?”

She stopped and chatted with him for a while, asked him about his
arthritis, trying to be as courteous as Carol had always been with Mrs.
French. They found something to laugh at, and she was still smiling when
she went to her room. Then the sight of the geranium ended it.

She watered the geranium and set it at the end of the window sill, where
it would get the sun for the longest time. There was even brown at the
tips of the smallest leaves at the top. Carol had bought it for her in
Des Moines just before she took the plane. The pot of ivy had died
already—the man in the shop had warned them it was delicate, but Carol
had wanted it anyway—and Therese doubted that the geranium would live.
But Mrs. Cooper’s motley collection of plants flourished in the bay
window.

“I walk and walk around the town,” she wrote to Carol, “but I wish I
could keep walking in one direction—east—and finally come to you. When
can you come, Carol? Or shall I come to you? I really cannot stand being
away from you so long....”

She had her answer the next morning. A check fluttered out of Carol’s
letter onto Mrs. Cooper’s hall floor. The check was for two hundred and
fifty dollars. Carol’s letter—the long loops looser and lighter, the
t-bars stretching the length of the word—said that it was impossible for
her to come out within the next two weeks, if then. The check was for
her to fly back to New York and have the car driven East.

“I’d feel better if you took the plane. Come now and don’t wait,” was
the last paragraph.

Carol had written the letter in haste, had probably snatched a moment to
write it, but there was a coldness in it, too, that shocked Therese. She
went out and walked dazedly to the corner and dropped the letter she had
written the night before into the mailbox anyway, a heavy letter with
three airmail stamps on it. She might see Carol within twelve hours. The
thought did not bring any reassurance. Should she leave this morning?
This afternoon? What had they done to Carol? She wondered if Carol would
be furious if she telephoned her, if it would precipitate some crisis
into a total defeat if she did?

She was sitting at a table somewhere with coffee and orange juice in
front of her, before she looked at the other letter in her hand. In the
upper left corner she could just make out the scrawly handwriting. It
was from Mrs. R. Robichek.

   Dear Therese,

   Thank you very much for the delicious sausage that came last
   month. You are a nice sweet girl and I am glad to have the
   opportunity to thank you many times. It was nice of you to think
   of me making such a long trip. I enjoy the pretty post cards,
   specially the big one from Sioux Falls. How is in South Dakota?
   Are mountains and cowboys? I have never had chance to travel
   except Pennsylvania. You are a lucky girl, so young and pretty
   and kind. Myself I still work. The store is just the same.
   Everything is the same but it is colder. Please visit me when you
   come back. I cook a nice dinner for you not from delicatessen.
   Thank you for the sausage again. I lived from it for many days,
   really something special and nice. With best regards and yours
   truly.

                                                      Ruby Robichek

Therese slid off the stool, left some money on the counter and ran out.
She ran all the way to the Warrior Hotel, put the call in and waited
with the receiver against her ear until she heard the telephone ringing
in Carol’s house. No one answered. It rang twenty times and no one
answered. She thought of calling Carol’s lawyer, Fred Haymes. She
decided she shouldn’t. Neither did she want to call Abby.

That day it rained, and Therese lay on her bed in her room, staring up
at the ceiling, waiting for three o’clock, when she intended to
telephone again. Mrs. Cooper brought her a tray of lunch around midday.
Mrs. Cooper thought she was sick. Therese could not eat the food,
however, and she did not know what to do with it.

She was still trying to reach Carol at five o’clock. Finally the ringing
stopped and there was confusion on the wire, a couple of operators
questioning each other about the call, and the first words Therese heard
from Carol were “Yes, damn it!” Therese smiled and the ache went out of
her arms.

“Hello?” Carol said brusquely.

“Hello?” The connection was bad. “I got the letter—the one with the
check. What happened, Carol?... What?”

Carol’s harassed sounding voice repeated through the crackling
interference, “_This wire I think is tapped, Therese...._ Are you all
right? Are you coming home? I can’t talk very long now.”

Therese frowned, wordless. “Yes, I suppose I can leave today.” Then she
blurted, “What is it, Carol? I really can’t stand this, not knowing
anything!”

“_Therese!_” Carol drew the word all across Therese’s words, like a
deletion. “Will you come home so I can talk to you?”

Therese thought she heard Carol sigh impatiently. “But I’ve got to know
now. Can you see me at all when I come back?”

“Hang onto yourself, Therese.”

Was this the way they talked together? Were these the words they used?
“But can you?”

“I don’t know,” Carol said.

A chill ran up her arm, into the fingers that held the telephone. She
felt Carol hated her. Because it was her fault, her stupid blunder about
the letter Florence had found. Something had happened and perhaps Carol
couldn’t and wouldn’t even want to see her again. “Has the court thing
started yet?”

“It’s finished. I wrote you about that. I can’t talk any longer.
Good-by, Therese.” Carol waited for her to reply. “I’ve got to say
good-by.”

Therese put the receiver slowly back on the hook.

She stood in the hotel lobby, staring at the blurred figures around the
front desk. She pulled Carol’s letter out of her pocket and read it
again, but Carol’s voice was closer, saying impatiently, “Will you come
home so I can talk to you?” She pulled the check out and looked at it
again, upside down, and slowly tore it up. She dropped the pieces into a
brass spittoon.

But the tears did not come until she got back to the house and saw her
room again, the double bed that sagged in the middle, the stack of
letters from Carol on the desk. She couldn’t stay here another night.

She would go to a hotel for the night, and if the letter Carol had
mentioned wasn’t here tomorrow morning, she would leave anyway.

Therese dragged her suitcase down from the closet and opened it on the
bed. The folded corner of a white handkerchief stuck out of one of the
pockets. Therese took it out and lifted it to her nose, remembering the
morning in Des Moines when Carol had put it there, with the dash of
perfume on it, and the derisive remark Carol had made about putting it
there, that she had laughed at. Therese stood with her hand on the back
of a chair and the other hand clenched in a fist that rose and fell
aimlessly, and what she felt was as blurred as the desk and the letters
that she frowned at in front of her. Then her hand reached out suddenly
for the letter propped against the books at the back of the desk. She
hadn’t seen the letter before, though it was in plain view. Therese tore
it open. This was the letter Carol had meant. It was a long letter, and
the ink was pale blue on some pages and dark on others, and there were
words crossed out. She read the first page, then went back and read it
again.

                                                             Monday

   My darling,

   I am not even going into court. This morning I was given a
   private showing of what Harge intended to bring against me. Yes,
   they have a few conversations recorded—namely Waterloo, and it
   would be useless to try to face a court with this. I should be
   ashamed, not for myself oddly enough, but for my own child, to
   say nothing of not wanting you to have to appear. Everything was
   very simple this morning—I simply surrendered. The important
   thing now is what I intend to do in the future, the lawyers said.
   On this depends whether I would ever see my child again, because
   Harge has with ease now complete custody of her. The question was
   would I stop seeing you (and others like you, they said!). It was
   not so clearly put. There were a dozen faces that opened their
   mouths and spoke like the judges of doomsday—reminding me of my
   duties, my position, and my future. (What future have they fixed
   up for me? Are they going to look in on it in six months?)—I said
   I would stop seeing you. I wonder if you will understand,
   Therese, since you are so young and never even knew a mother who
   cared desperately for you. For this promise, they present me with
   their wonderful reward, the privilege of seeing my child a few
   weeks of the year.

   Hours later—

   Abby is here. We talk of you—she sends you her love as I send
   mine. Abby reminds me of the things I know already—that you are
   very young and you adore me. Abby does not think I should send
   this to you, but tell you when you come. We have just had quite
   an argument about it. I tell her she does not know you as well as
   I, and I think now she does not know me as well as you in some
   ways, and those ways are the emotions. I am not very happy today,
   my sweet. I am drinking my ryes and you would tell me they
   depress me, I know. But I wasn’t prepared for these days after
   those weeks with you. They were happy weeks—you knew it more than
   I did. Though all we have known is only a beginning. I meant to
   try to tell you in this letter that you don’t even know the rest
   and perhaps you never will and are not supposed to—meaning
   destined to. We never fought, never came back knowing there was
   nothing else we wanted in heaven or hell but to be together. Did
   you ever care for me that much, I don’t know. But that is all
   part of it and all we have known is only a beginning. And it has
   been such a short time. For that reason it will have shorter
   roots in you. You say you love me however I am and when I curse.
   I say I love you always, the person you are and the person you
   will become. I would say it in a court if it would mean anything
   to those people or possibly change anything, because those are
   not the words I am afraid of. I mean, darling, I shall send you
   this letter and I think you will understand why I do, why I told
   the lawyers yesterday I would not see you again and why I had to
   tell them that, and I would be underestimating you to think you
   could not and to think you would prefer delay.

She stopped reading and stood up, and walked slowly to her writing
table. Yes, she understood why Carol had sent the letter. Because Carol
loved her child more than her. And because of that, the lawyers had been
able to break her, to force her to do exactly what they wanted her to
do. Therese could not imagine Carol forced. Yet here it was in Carol’s
writing. It was a surrender. Therese knew no situation in which she was
the stake could have wrested from Carol. For an instant there came the
fantastic realization that Carol had devoted only a fraction of herself
to her, Therese, and suddenly the whole world of the last month, like a
tremendous lie, cracked and almost toppled. In the next instant, Therese
did not believe that. Yet the fact remained, she had chosen her child.
She stared at Richard’s envelope on her table, and felt all the words
she wanted to say to him, that she had never said to him, rising in a
torrent inside her. What right had he to talk about whom she loved or
how? What did he know about her? What had he ever known?

   ... exaggerated and at the same time minimized [she read on
   another page of Carol’s letter]. But between the pleasure of a
   kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a
   gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its
   value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their
   pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or
   not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a
   question of pleasure after all, and what’s the use of debating
   the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football game—or a
   Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I’ll leave that to the
   philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow
   demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact
   a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men).
   Someone brought “aesthetics” into the argument, I mean against me
   of course. I said did they really want to debate that—it brought
   the only laugh in the whole show. But the most important point I
   did not mention and was not thought of by anyone—that the rapport
   between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it
   can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want
   just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing
   that happens between men and women. It was said or at least
   implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the
   depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good
   deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on
   like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one
   person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial
   thing—that is degeneration. Or to live against one’s grain, that
   is degeneration by definition.

   Darling, I pour all this out to you [the next lines were crossed
   out]. You will undoubtedly handle your future better than I. Let
   me be a bad example to you. If you are hurt now beyond what you
   think you can bear and if it makes you—either now or one day—hate
   me, and this is what I told Abby, then I shan’t be sorry. I may
   have been that one person you were fated to meet, as you say, and
   the only one, and you can put it all behind you. Yet if you
   don’t, for all this failure and the dismalness now, I know what
   you said that afternoon is right—it needn’t be like this. I do
   want to talk with you once when you come back, if you’re willing,
   unless you think you can’t.

   Your plants are still thriving on the back porch. I water them
   every day....

Therese could not read any more. Beyond her door she heard footsteps
slowly descending the stairs, walking more confidently across the hall.
When the footsteps were gone, she opened her door and stood there a
moment, struggling against an impulse to walk straight out of the house
and leave everything behind her. Then she went down the hall to Mrs.
Cooper’s door in the rear.

Mrs. Cooper answered her knock, and Therese said the words she had
prepared, about leaving that night. She watched Mrs. Cooper’s face that
didn’t listen to her but only reacted to the sight of her own face, and
Mrs. Cooper seemed suddenly her own reflection, that she could not turn
away from.

“Well, I’m sorry, Miss Belivet. I’m sorry if your plans have gone
wrong,” she said, while her face registered only shock and curiosity.

Then Therese went back to her room and began to pack, laying in the
bottom of her suitcase the cardboard models she had folded flat, and
then her books. After a moment, she heard Mrs. Cooper approaching her
door slowly, as if she carried something, and Therese thought, if she
was bringing her another tray, she would scream. Mrs. Cooper knocked.

“Where shall I forward your mail to, honey, in case there’s any more
letters?” Mrs. Cooper asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to write and let you know.” Therese felt
lightheaded and sickish when she straightened up.

“You’re not starting back for New York this late at night, are you?”
Mrs. Cooper called anything after six “night.”

“No,” Therese said. “I’ll just go a little ways.” She was impatient to
be alone. She looked at Mrs. Cooper’s hand bulging the gray checked
apron under the waistband, at the cracked soft house shoes worn paper
thin on these floors, that had walked these floors years before she came
here and would go on in the same foot tracks years after she was gone.

“Well, you be sure and let me hear how you make out,” Mrs. Cooper said.

“Yes.”

She drove to a hotel, a different hotel from the one where she had
always called Carol. Then she went out for a walk, restlessly, avoiding
all the streets she had been in with Carol. She might have driven to
another town, she thought, and stopped, half decided to go back to the
car. Then she walked on, not caring, actually, where she was. She walked
until she was cold, and the library was the closest place to go and get
warm. She passed the diner and glanced in. Dutch saw her, and with the
familiar dip of his head, as if he had to look under something to see
her through the window, he smiled and waved to her. Automatically, her
hand waved back, good-by, and suddenly she thought of her room in New
York, with the dress still on the studio couch, and the corner of the
carpet turned back. If she could only reach out now and pull the carpet
flat, she thought. She stood staring down the narrowish, solid looking
avenue with its round street lights. A single figure walked along the
sidewalk toward her. Therese went up the library steps.

Miss Graham, the librarian, greeted her as usual, but Therese did not go
into the main reading room. There were two or three people there
tonight, the baldheaded man with the black-rimmed glasses who was often
at the middle table, and how often had she sat in that room with a
letter from Carol in her pocket? With Carol beside her. She climbed the
stairs, passed the history and art room on the second floor, up to the
third floor where she had never been before. There was a single large
dusty looking room with glass-front bookcases around the walls, a few
oil paintings and marble busts on pedestals.

Therese sat down at one of the tables, and her body relaxed with an
ache. She put her head down on her arms on the table, suddenly limp and
sleepy, but in the next second, she slid the chair back and stood up.
She felt prickles of terror in the roots of her hair. She had been
somehow pretending until this moment that Carol was not gone, that when
she went back to New York, she would see Carol and everything would be,
would have to be as it had been before. She glanced nervously around the
room, as if looking for some contradiction, some redress. For a moment,
she felt her body might shatter apart of itself, or might hurl itself
through the glass of the long windows across the room. She stared at a
pallid bust of Homer, the inquisitively lifted eyebrows delineated
faintly by dust. She turned to the door, and for the first time noticed
the picture over the lintel.

It was only similar, she thought, not quite the same, not the same, but
the recognition had shaken her at the core, was growing as she looked at
it, and she knew the picture was exactly the same, only much larger, and
she had seen it many times in the hall that led to the music room before
they had taken it down when she was still small—the smiling woman in the
ornate dress of some court, the hand poised just below the throat, the
arrogant head half turned, as if the painter had somehow caught her in
motion so that even the pearls that hung from each ear seemed to move.
She knew the short, firmly modeled cheeks, the full coral lips that
smiled at one corner, the mockingly narrowed lids, the strong, not very
high forehead that even in the picture seemed to project a little over
the living eyes that knew everything beforehand, and sympathized and
laughed at once. It was Carol. Now in the long moment while she could
not look away from it, the mouth smiled and the eyes regarded her with
nothing but mockery, the last veil lifted and revealing nothing but
mockery and gloating, the splendid satisfaction of the betrayal
accomplished.

With a shuddering gasp, Therese ran under the picture and down the
stairs. In the downstairs hall, Miss Graham said something to her, an
anxious question, and Therese heard her own reply like an idiot’s
babble, because she was still gasping, fighting for breath, and she
passed Miss Graham and rushed out of the building.




                           chapter twenty-two


In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but
they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere,
and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world
was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the
world come back to life? How would its salt come back?

She walked to the hotel. In her room, she wet a face towel with cold
water to put over her eyes. The room was chilly, so she took off her
dress and shoes and got into bed.

From outside, a shrill voice, muted in empty space, cried: “Hey,
_Chicago Sun-Times_!”

Then silence, and she debated trying to fall asleep, while fatigue
already began to rock her unpleasantly, like drunkenness. Now there were
voices in the hall, talking of a misplaced piece of luggage, and a sense
of futility overwhelmed her as she lay there with the wet, medicinally
smelling face towel over her swollen eyes. The voices wrangled, and she
felt her courage running out, and then her will, and in panic she tried
to think of the world outside, of Dannie and Mrs. Robichek, of Frances
Cotter at the Pelican Press, of Mrs. Osborne, and of her own apartment
still in New York, but her mind refused to survey or to renounce, and
her mind was the same as her heart now and refused to renounce Carol.
The faces swam together like the voices outside. There was also the face
of Sister Alicia, and of her mother. There was the last room she had
slept in at school. There was the morning she had sneaked out of the
dormitory very early and run across the lawn like a young animal crazy
with spring, and had seen Sister Alicia running crazily through a field
herself, white shoes flashing like ducks through the high grass, and it
had been minutes before she realized that Sister Alicia was chasing an
escaped chicken. There was the moment, in the house of some friend of
her mother’s, when she had reached for a piece of cake and had upset the
plate on the floor, and her mother had slapped her in the face. She saw
the picture in the hall at school, it breathed and moved now like Carol,
mocking and cruel and finished with her, as if some evil and
long-destined purpose had been accomplished. Therese’s body tensed in
terror, and the conversation went on and on in the hall obliviously,
falling on her ear with the sharp, alarming sound of ice cracking
somewhere out on a pond.

“What do you mean you did?”

“No....”

“If you did, the suitcase would be downstairs in the checkroom....”

“Oh, I told you....”

“But you want me to lose a suitcase so you won’t lose your job!”

Her mind attached meaning to the phrases one by one, like some slow
translator that lagged behind, and at last got lost.

She sat up in bed with the end of a bad dream in her head. The room was
nearly dark, its shadows deep and solid in the corners. She reached for
the lamp switch and half closed her eyes against the light. She dropped
a quarter into the radio on the wall, and turned the volume quite loud
at the first sound she got. It was a man’s voice, and then music began,
a lilting, Oriental-sounding piece that had been among the selections in
music appreciation class at school. “In a Persian Market,” she
remembered automatically, and now its undulant rhythm that had always
made her think of a camel walking took her back to the rather small room
at the Home, with the illustrations from Verdi operas around the walls
above the high wainscoting. She had heard the piece occasionally in New
York, but she had never heard it with Carol, had not heard it or thought
of it since she had known Carol, and now the music was like a bridge
soaring across time without touching anything. She picked up Carol’s
letter opener from the bed table, the wooden knife that had somehow
gotten into her suitcase when they packed, and she squeezed the handle
and rubbed her thumb along its edge, but its reality seemed to deny
Carol instead of affirm her, did not evoke her so much as the music they
had never heard together. She thought of Carol with a twist of
resentment, Carol like a distant spot of silence and stillness.

Therese went to the basin to wash her face in cold water. She should get
a job, tomorrow if she could. That had been her idea in stopping here,
to work for two weeks or so, not to weep in hotel rooms. She should send
Mrs. Cooper the hotel name as an address, simply for courtesy’s sake. It
was another of the things she must do, although she did not want to. And
was it worth while to write to Harkevy again, she wondered, after his
polite but explicit note in Sioux Falls. “... I should be glad to see
you again when you come to New York, but it is impossible for me to
promise anything this spring. It would be a good idea for you to see Mr.
Ned Bernstein, the co-producer, when you get back. He can tell you more
of what is happening in designing studios than I can....” No, she
wouldn’t write again about that.

Downstairs, she bought a picture post card of Lake Michigan, and
deliberately wrote a cheerful message on it to Mrs. Robichek. It seemed
false as she wrote it, but walking away from the box where she had
dropped it, she was conscious suddenly of the energy in her body, the
spring in her toes, the youth in her blood that warmed her cheeks as she
walked faster, and she knew she was free and blessed compared to Mrs.
Robichek, and what she had written was not false, because she could so
well afford it. She was not crumpled or half blind, not in pain. She
stood by a store window and quickly put on some more lipstick. A gust of
wind made her step to catch her balance. But she could feel in the
wind’s coldness its core of spring, like a heart warm and young inside
it. Tomorrow morning, she would start to look for a job. She should be
able to live on the money she had left, and save whatever she earned to
get back to New York on. She could wire her bank for the rest of her
money, of course, but that was not what she wanted. She wanted two weeks
of working among people she didn’t know, doing the kind of work a
million other people did. She wanted to step into someone else’s shoes.

She answered an advertisement for a receptionist-filing clerk that said
little typing required and call in person. They seemed to think she
would do, and she spent all morning learning the files. Then one of the
bosses came in after lunch and said he wanted a girl who knew some
shorthand. Therese didn’t. The school had taught her typing, but not
shorthand, so she was out.

She looked through the help-wanted columns again that afternoon. Then
she remembered the sign on the fence of the lumberyard not far from the
hotel. “Girl wanted for general office work and stock. $40 weekly.” If
they didn’t demand shorthand, she might qualify. It was around three
when she turned into the windy street where the lumberyard lay. She
lifted her head and let the wind blow her hair back from her face. And
she remembered Carol saying, I like to see you walking. When I see you
from a distance, I feel you’re walking on the palm of my hand and you’re
about five inches high. She could hear Carol’s soft voice under the
babble of the wind, and she grew tense, with bitterness and fear. She
walked faster, ran a few steps, as if she could run out of that morass
of love and hate and resentment in which her mind suddenly floundered.

There was a wooden shack of an office at the side of the lumberyard. She
went in and spoke with a Mr. Zambrowski, a slow moving baldheaded man
with a gold watch chain that barely stretched across his front. Before
Therese asked him about shorthand, he volunteered that he didn’t need
it. He said he would try her out the rest of the afternoon and tomorrow.
Two other girls came in for the job the next morning, and Mr. Zambrowski
took their names, but before noon, he said the job was hers.

“If you don’t mind getting here at eight in the morning,” Mr. Zambrowski
said.

“I don’t mind.” She had come in at nine that morning. But she would have
gotten there at four in the morning if he had asked her to.

Her hours were from eight to four thirty, and her duties consisted
simply in checking the mill shipments to the yard against the orders
received, and in writing letters of confirmation. She did not see much
lumber from her desk in the office, but the smell of it was in the air,
fresh as if the saws had just exposed the surface of the white pine
boards, and she could hear it bouncing and rattling as the trucks pulled
into the center of the yard. She liked the work, liked Mr. Zambrowski,
and liked the lumberjacks and truck drivers who came into the office to
warm their hands at the fire. One of the lumberjacks named Steve, an
attractive young man with a golden stubble of beard, invited her a
couple of times to have lunch with him in the cafeteria down the street.
He asked her for a date on Saturday night, but Therese did not want to
spend a whole evening with him or with anyone yet.

One night, Abby telephoned her.

“Do you know I had to call South Dakota twice to find you?” Abby said
irritably. “What’re you doing out there? When’re you coming back?”

Abby’s voice brought Carol as close as if it were Carol she heard. It
brought the hollow tightness in her throat again, and for a moment she
couldn’t answer anything.

“Therese?”

“Is Carol there with you?”

“She’s in Vermont. She’s been sick,” Abby’s hoarse voice said, and there
was no smile in it now. “She’s taking a rest.”

“She’s too sick to call me? Why don’t you tell me, Abby? Is she getting
better or worse?”

“Better. Why didn’t you try to call to find out?”

Therese squeezed the telephone. Yes, why hadn’t she? Because she had
been thinking of a picture instead of Carol. “What’s the matter with
her? Is she—”

“That’s a fine question. Carol wrote you what happened, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do you expect her to bounce up like a rubber ball? Or chase you
all over America? What do you think this is, a game of hide and seek?”

All the conversation of that lunch with Abby crashed down on Therese. As
Abby saw it, the whole thing was her fault. The letter Florence had
found was only the final blunder.

“When’re you coming back?” Abby asked.

“In about ten days. Unless Carol wants the car sooner.”

“She doesn’t. She won’t be home in ten days.”

Therese forced herself to say, “About that letter—the one I wrote—do you
know if they found it before or after?”

“Before or after what?”

“After the detectives started following us.”

“They found it afterward,” Abby said, sighing.

Therese set her teeth. But it didn’t matter what Abby thought of her,
only what Carol thought. “Where is she in Vermont?”

“I wouldn’t call her if I were you.”

“But you’re not me and I want to call her.”

“Don’t. That much I can tell you. I can give her any message—that’s
important.” And there was a cold silence. “Carol wants to know if you
need any money and what about the car.”

“I don’t need any money. The car’s all right.” She had to ask one more
question. “What does Rindy know about this?”

“She knows what the word divorce means. And she wanted to stay with
Carol. That doesn’t make it easier for Carol, either.”

Very well, very well, Therese wanted to say. She wouldn’t trouble Carol
by telephoning, by writing, by any messages, unless it was a message
about the car. She was shaking when she put the telephone down. And she
immediately picked it up again. “This is room six eleven,” she said. “I
don’t want to take any more long distance calls—none at all.”

She looked at Carol’s letter opener on the bed table, and now it meant
Carol, the person of flesh and blood, the Carol with freckles and the
corner nicked off one tooth. Did she owe Carol anything, Carol the
person? Hadn’t Carol been playing with her, as Richard had said? She
remembered Carol’s words, “When you have a husband and child it’s a
little different.” She frowned at the letter opener, not understanding
why it had become only a letter opener suddenly, why it was a matter of
indifference to her whether she kept it or threw it away.

Two days later, a letter arrived from Abby enclosing a personal check
for a hundred and fifty dollars that Abby told her to “forget about.”
Abby said she had spoken with Carol, and that Carol would like to hear
from her, and she gave Carol’s address. It was a rather cold letter, but
the gesture of the check was not cold. It hadn’t been prompted by Carol,
Therese knew.

“Thank you for the check,” Therese wrote back to her. “It’s terribly
nice of you, but I won’t use it and I don’t need it. You ask me to write
to Carol. I don’t think I can or that I should.”

Dannie was sitting in the hotel lobby one afternoon when she came home
from work. She could not quite believe it was he, the dark-eyed young
man who got up from the chair smiling and came slowly toward her. Then
the sight of his loose black hair, mussed a little more by the upturned
coat collar, the symmetrical broad smile, was as familiar as if she had
seen him only the day before.

“Hello, Therese,” he said. “Surprised?”

“Well, terrifically. I’d given you up. No word from you in—two weeks.”
She remembered the twenty-eighth was the day he said he would leave New
York, and it was the day she had come to Chicago.

“I’d just about given you up,” Dannie said, laughing. “I got delayed in
New York. I guess it’s lucky I did, because I tried to telephone you and
your landlady gave me your address.” Dannie’s fingers kept a firm grip
on her elbow. They were walking slowly toward the elevators. “You look
wonderful, Therese.”

“Do I? I’m awfully glad to see you.” There was an open elevator in front
of them. “Do you want to come up?”

“Let’s go have something to eat. Or is it too early? I didn’t have any
lunch today.”

“It’s certainly not too early, then.”

They went to a place Therese knew about, that specialized in steaks.
Dannie even ordered cocktails, though he usually never drank.

“You’re here by yourself?” he said. “Your landlady in Sioux Falls told
me you left by yourself.”

“Carol couldn’t come out finally.”

“Oh. And you decided to stay out longer?”

“Yes.”

“Until when?”

“Until just about now. I’m going back next week.”

Dannie listened with his warm dark eyes fixed on her face, without any
surprise. “Why don’t you just go west instead of east and spend a little
time in California. I’ve got a job in Oakland. I have to be there day
after tomorrow.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Researching—just what I asked for. I came out better than I thought I
would on my exams.”

“Were you first in the class?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it. They weren’t graded like that. You didn’t
answer my question.”

“I want to get back to New York, Dannie.”

“Oh.” He smiled, looking at her hair, her lips, and it occurred to her
Dannie had never seen her with this much make-up on. “You look grown up
all of a sudden,” he said. “You changed your hair, didn’t you?”

“A little.”

“You don’t look frightened any more. Or even so serious.”

“That pleases me.” She felt shy with him, yet somehow close, a closeness
charged with something she had never felt with Richard. Something
suspenseful, that she enjoyed. A little salt, she thought. She looked at
Dannie’s hand on the table, at the strong muscle that bulged below the
thumb. She remembered his hands on her shoulders that day in his room.
The memory was a pleasant one.

“You did miss me a little, didn’t you, Terry?”

“Of course.”

“Did you ever think you might care something about me? As much as you
did for Richard, for instance?” he asked with a note of surprise in his
own voice, as if it were a fantastic question.

“I don’t know,” she said quickly.

“But you’re not still thinking about Richard, are you?”

“You must know I’m not.”

“Who is it then? Carol?”

She felt suddenly naked, sitting there opposite him. “Yes. It was.”

“But not now?”

Therese was amazed that he could say the words without any surprise, any
attitude at all. “No. It’s—I can’t talk to anyone about it, Dannie,” she
finished, and her voice sounded deep and quiet in her ears, like the
voice of another person.

“Don’t you want to forget it, if it’s past?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know just how you mean that.”

“I mean, are you sorry?”

“No. Would I do the same thing again? Yes.”

“Do you mean with somebody else, or with her?”

“With her,” Therese said. The corner of her mouth went up in a smile.

“But the end was a fiasco.”

“Yes. I mean I’d go through the end, too.”

“And you’re still going through it.”

Therese didn’t say anything.

“Are you going to see her again? Do you mind if I ask you all these
questions?”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “No, I’m not going to see her again. I don’t
want to.”

“But somebody else?”

“Another woman?” Therese shook her head. “No.”

Dannie looked at her and smiled, slowly. “That’s what matters. Or
rather, that’s what makes it not matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re so young, Therese. You’ll change. You’ll forget.”

She did not feel young. “Did Richard talk to you?” she asked.

“No. I think he wanted to one night, but I cut it off before he got
started.”

She felt the bitter smile on her mouth, and she took a last pull on her
short cigarette and put it out. “I hope he finds somebody to listen to
him. He needs an audience.”

“He feels jilted. His ego’s suffering. Don’t ever think I’m like
Richard. I think people’s lives are their own.”

Something Carol had said once came suddenly to her mind: every adult has
secrets. Said as casually as Carol said everything, stamped as indelibly
in her brain as the address she had written on the sales slip in
Frankenberg’s. She had an impulse to tell Dannie the rest, about the
picture in the library, the picture in the school. And about the Carol
who was not a picture, but a woman with a child and a husband, with
freckles on her hands and a habit of cursing, of growing melancholy at
unexpected moments, with a bad habit of indulging her will. A woman who
had endured much more in New York than she had in South Dakota. She
looked at Dannie’s eyes, at his chin with the faint cleft. She knew that
up to now she had been under a spell that prevented her from seeing
anyone in the world but Carol.

“Now what are you thinking?” he asked.

“Of what you said once in New York, about using things and throwing them
away.”

“Did she do that to you?”

Therese smiled. “I shall do it.”

“Then find someone you’ll never want to throw away.”

“Who won’t wear out,” Therese said.

“Will you write to me?”

“Of course.”

“Write me in three months.”

“Three months?” But suddenly she knew what he meant. “And not before?”

“No.” He was looking at her steadily. “That’s a fair time, isn’t it?”

“Yes. All right. It’s a promise.”

“Promise me something else—take tomorrow off so you can be with me. I’ve
got till nine tomorrow night.”

“I can’t, Dannie. There’s work to do—and I’ve got to tell him anyway
that I’m leaving in another week.” Those weren’t quite the reasons, she
knew. And perhaps Dannie knew, looking at her. She didn’t want to spend
tomorrow with him, it would be too intense, he would remind her too much
of herself, and she still was not ready.

Dannie came round to the lumberyard the next day at noon. They had
intended to have lunch together, but they walked and talked on Lake
Shore Drive for the whole hour instead. That evening at nine, Dannie
took a plane westward.

Eight days later, she started for New York. She meant to move away from
Mrs. Osborne’s as soon as possible. She wanted to look up some of the
people she had run away from last fall. And there would be other people,
new people. She would go to night school this spring. And she wanted to
change her wardrobe completely. Everything she had now, the clothes she
remembered in her closet in New York, seemed juvenile, like clothes that
had belonged to her years ago. In Chicago she had looked around in the
stores and hungered for the clothes she couldn’t buy yet. All she could
afford now was a new haircut.




                          chapter twenty-three


Therese went into her old room, and the first thing she noticed was that
the carpet corner lay flat. And how small and tragic the room looked.
And yet hers, the tiny radio on the bookshelf, and the pillows on the
studio couch, as personal as a signature she had written long ago and
forgotten. Like the two or three set models hanging on the walls that
she deliberately avoided looking at.

She went to the bank and took out a hundred of her last two hundred
dollars, and bought a black dress and a pair of shoes.

Tomorrow, she thought, she would call Abby and arrange something about
Carol’s car, but not today.

That same afternoon, she made an appointment with Ned Bernstein, the
co-producer of the English show for which Harkevy was to do the sets.
She took three of the models she had made in the West and also the
_Small Rain_ photographs to show him. An apprentice job with Harkevy, if
she got it, wouldn’t pay enough to live on, but there were other
sources, other than department stores, anyway. There was television, for
instance.

Mr. Bernstein looked at her work indifferently. Therese said she hadn’t
spoken to Mr. Harkevy yet, and asked Mr. Bernstein if he knew anything
about his taking on helpers. Mr. Bernstein said that was up to Harkevy,
but as far as he knew, he didn’t need any more assistants. Neither did
Mr. Bernstein know of any other set studio that needed anyone at the
moment. And Therese thought of the sixty-dollar dress. And of the
hundred dollars left in the bank. And she had told Mrs. Osborne she
might show the apartment any time she wished, because she was moving.
Therese hadn’t yet any idea where. She got up to leave, and thanked Mr.
Bernstein anyway for looking at her work. She did it with a smile.

“How about television?” Mr. Bernstein asked. “Have you tried to start
that way? It’s easier to break into.”

“I’m going over to see someone at Dumont later this afternoon.” Mr.
Donohue had given her a couple of names last January. Mr. Bernstein gave
her some more names.

Then she telephoned Harkevy’s studio. Harkevy said he was just going
out, but she could drop her models by his studio today and he could look
at them tomorrow morning.

“By the way, there’ll be a cocktail party at the St. Regis for Genevieve
Cranell tomorrow at about five o’clock. If you care to drop in,” Harkevy
said, with his staccato accent that made his soft voice as precise as
mathematics, “at least we’ll be sure to see each other tomorrow. Can you
come?”

“Yes. I’d love to come. Where in the St. Regis?”

He read from the invitation. Suite D. Five to seven o’clock. “I shall be
there by six.”

She left the telephone booth feeling as happy as if Harkevy had just
taken her into partnership. She walked the twelve blocks to his studio,
and left the models with a young man there, a different young man from
the one she had seen in January. Harkevy changed his assistants often.
She looked around his workroom reverently before she closed the door.
Perhaps he would let her come soon. Perhaps she would know tomorrow.

She went into a drugstore on Broadway and called Abby in New Jersey.
Abby’s voice was entirely different from the way it had sounded in
Chicago. Carol must be much better, Therese thought. But she did not ask
about Carol. She was calling to arrange about the car.

“I can come and get it if you want me to,” Abby said. “But why don’t you
call Carol about it? I know she’d like to hear from you.” Abby was
actually bending over backward.

“Well—” Therese didn’t want to call her. But what was she afraid of?
Carol’s voice? Carol herself? “All right. I’ll take the car to her,
unless she doesn’t want me to. In that case, I’ll call you back.”

“When? This afternoon?”

“Yes. In a few minutes.”

Therese went to the door of the drugstore and stood there for a few
moments, looking out at the Camel advertisement with the giant face
puffing smoke rings like gigantic doughnuts, at the low-slung,
sullen-looking taxis maneuvering like sharks in the after-matinee rush,
at the familiar hodgepodge of restaurant and bar signs, awnings, front
steps and windows, that reddish-brown confusion of the side street that
was like hundreds of streets in New York. She remembered walking in a
certain street in the West Eighties once, the brownstone fronts,
overlaid and overlaid with humanity, human lives, some beginning and
some ending there, and she remembered the sense of oppression it had
given her, and how she had hurried through it to get to the avenue. Only
two or three months ago. Now the same kind of street filled her with a
tense excitement, made her want to plunge headlong into it, down the
sidewalk with all the signs and theater marquees and rushing, bumping
people. She turned and walked back to the telephone booths.

A moment later, she heard Carol’s voice.

“When did you get in, Therese?”

There was a brief, fluttering shock at the first sound of her voice, and
then nothing. “Yesterday.”

“How are you? Do you still look the same?” Carol sounded repressed, as
if someone might be with her, but Therese was sure there was no one
else.

“Not exactly. Do you?”

Carol waited. “You sound different.”

“I am.”

“Am I going to see you? Or don’t you want to. Once.” It was Carol’s
voice, but the words were not hers. The words were cautious and
uncertain. “What about this afternoon? Have you got the car?”

“I’ve got to see a couple of people this afternoon. There won’t be
time.” When had she ever refused Carol when Carol wanted to see her?
“Would you like me to drive the car out tomorrow?”

“No, I can come in for it. I’m not an invalid. Did the car behave
itself?”

“It’s in good shape,” Therese said. “No scratches anywhere.”

“And you?” Carol asked, but Therese didn’t answer anything. “Shall I see
you tomorrow? Do you have any time in the afternoon?”

They arranged to meet in the bar of the Ritz Tower on Fifty-seventh
Street at four thirty, and then they hung up.

Carol was a quarter of an hour late. Therese sat waiting for her at a
table where she could see the glass doors that led into the bar, and
finally she saw Carol push open one of the doors, and the tension broke
in her with a small dull ache. Carol wore the same fur coat, the same
black suède pumps she had worn the day Therese first saw her, but now a
red scarf set off the blond lifted head. She saw Carol’s face, thinner
now, alter with surprise, with a little smile, as Carol caught sight of
her.

“Hello,” Therese said.

“I didn’t even know you at first.” And Carol stood by the table a
moment, looking at her, before she sat down. “It’s nice of you to see
me.”

“Don’t say that.”

The waiter came, and Carol ordered tea. So did Therese, mechanically.

“Do you hate me, Therese?” Carol asked her.

“No.” Therese could smell Carol’s perfume faintly, that familiar
sweetness that was strangely unfamiliar now, because it did not evoke
what it had once evoked. She put down the match cover she had been
crushing in her hand. “How can I hate you, Carol?”

“I suppose you could. You did for a while, didn’t you?” Carol said, as
if she told her a fact.

“Hate you? No.” Not quite, she might have said. But she knew that
Carol’s eyes were reading it in her face.

“And now—you’re all grown up—with grown-up hair and grown-up clothes.”

Therese looked into her gray eyes that were more serious now, somehow
wistful, too, despite the assurance of the proud head, and she looked
down again, unable to fathom them. She was still beautiful, Therese
thought with a sudden pang of loss. “I’ve learned a few things,” Therese
said.

“What?”

“That I—” Therese stopped, her thoughts obstructed suddenly by the
memory of the portrait in Sioux Falls.

“You know, you look very fine,” Carol said. “You’ve come out all of a
sudden. Is that what comes of getting away from me?”

“No,” Therese said quickly. She frowned down at the tea she didn’t want.
Carol’s phrase “come out” had made her think of being born, and it
embarrassed her. Yes, she had been born since she left Carol. She had
been born the instant she saw the picture in the library, and her
stifled cry then was like the first yell of an infant, being dragged
into the world against its will. She looked at Carol. “There was a
picture in the library at Sioux Falls,” she said. Then she told Carol
about it, simply and without emotion, like a story that had happened to
somebody else.

And Carol listened, never taking her eyes from her. Carol watched her as
she might have watched from a distance someone she could not help.
“Strange,” Carol said quietly. “And horrifying.”

“It was.” Therese knew Carol understood. She saw the sympathy in Carol’s
eyes, too, and she smiled, but Carol did not smile back. Carol was still
staring at her. “What are you thinking?” Therese asked.

Carol took a cigarette. “What do you think? Of that day in the store.”

Therese smiled again. “It was so wonderful when you came over to me. Why
did you come to me?”

Carol waited. “For such a dull reason. Because you were the only girl
not busy as hell. You didn’t have a smock either, I remember.”

Therese burst out laughing. Carol only smiled, but she looked suddenly
like herself, as she had been in Colorado Springs, before anything had
happened. All at once, Therese remembered the candlestick in her
handbag. “I brought you this,” she said, handing it to her. “I found it
in Sioux Falls.”

Therese had only twisted some white tissue around it. Carol opened it on
the table.

“I think it’s charming,” Carol said. “It looks just like you.”

“Thank you. I thought it looked like you.” Therese looked at Carol’s
hand, the thumb and the tip of the middle finger resting on the thin rim
of the candlestick, as she had seen Carol’s fingers on the saucers of
coffee cups in Colorado, in Chicago, and places forgotten. Therese
closed her eyes.

“I love you,” Carol said.

Therese opened her eyes, but she did not look up.

“I know you don’t feel the same about me. Do you?”

Therese had an impulse to deny it, but could she? She didn’t feel the
same. “I don’t know, Carol.”

“That’s the same thing.” Carol’s voice was soft, expectant, expecting
affirmation or denial.

Therese stared at the triangles of toast on the plate between them. She
thought of Rindy. She had put off asking about her. “Have you seen
Rindy?”

Carol sighed. Therese saw her hand draw back from the candlestick. “Yes,
last Sunday for an hour or so. I suppose she can come and visit me a
couple of afternoons a year. Once in a blue moon. I’ve lost completely.”

“I thought you said a few weeks of the year.”

“Well, a little more happened—privately between Harge and me. I refused
to make a lot of promises he asked me to make. And the family came into
it, too. I refused to live by a list of silly promises they’d made up
like a list of misdemeanors—even if it did mean that they’d lock Rindy
away from me as if I were an ogre. And it did mean that. Harge told the
lawyers everything—whatever they didn’t know already.”

“God,” Therese whispered. She could imagine what it meant, Rindy
visiting one afternoon, accompanied by a staring governess who had been
forewarned against Carol, told not to let the child out of her sight,
probably, and Rindy would soon understand all that. What would be the
pleasure in a visit at all? Harge—Therese did not want to say his name.
“Even the court was kinder,” she said.

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t promise very much in court. I refused
there, too.”

Therese smiled a little in spite of herself, because she was glad Carol
had refused, that Carol had still been that proud.

“But it wasn’t a court, you know, just a round-table discussion. Do you
know how they made that recording in Waterloo? They drove a spike into
the wall, probably just about as soon as we got there.”

“A _spike_?”

“I remember hearing somebody hammering something. I think it was when
we’d just finished in the shower. Do you remember?”

“No.”

Carol smiled. “A spike that picks up sound like a dictaphone. He had the
room next to us.”

Therese didn’t remember the hammering, but the violence of all of it
came back, shattering, destroying—

“It’s all over,” Carol said. “You know, I’d almost prefer not to see
Rindy at all any more. I’m never going to demand to see her, if she
stops wanting to see me. I’ll just leave that up to her.”

“I can’t imagine her ever not wanting to see you.”

Carol’s eyebrows lifted. “Is there any way of predicting what Harge can
do to her?”

Therese was silent. She looked away from Carol, and saw a clock. It was
five thirty-five. She should be at the cocktail party before six, she
thought, if she went at all. She had dressed for it, in the new black
dress with a white scarf, in her new shoes, with her new black gloves.
And how unimportant the clothes seemed now. She thought suddenly of the
green woolen gloves that Sister Alicia had given her. Were they still in
the ancient tissue at the bottom of her trunk? She wanted to throw them
away.

“One gets over things,” Carol said.

“Yes.”

“Harge and I are selling the house, and I’ve taken an apartment up on
Madison Avenue. And a job, believe it or not. I’m going to work for a
furniture house on Fourth Avenue as a buyer. Some of my ancestors must
have been carpenters.” She looked at Therese. “Anyway, it’s a living and
I’ll like it. The apartment’s a nice big one—big enough for two. I was
hoping you might like to come and live with me, but I guess you won’t.”

Therese’s heart took a jump, exactly as it had when Carol had telephoned
her that day in the store. Something responded in her against her will,
made her feel happy all at once, and proud. She was proud that Carol had
the courage to do such things, to say such things, that Carol always
would have the courage. She remembered Carol’s courage, facing the
detective on the country road. Therese swallowed, trying to swallow the
beating of her heart. Carol had not even looked at her. Carol was
rubbing her cigarette end back and forth in the ash tray. To live with
Carol? Once that had been impossible, and had been what she wanted most
in the world. To live with her and share everything with her, summer and
winter, to walk and read together, to travel together. And she
remembered the days of resenting Carol, when she had imagined Carol
asking her this, and herself answering no.

“Would you?” Carol looked at her.

Therese felt she balanced on a thin edge. The resentment was gone now.
Nothing but the decision remained now, a thin line suspended in the air,
with nothing on either side to push her or pull her. But on the one
side, Carol, and on the other an empty question mark. On the one side,
Carol, and it would be different now, because they were both different.
It would be a world as unknown as the world just past had been when she
first entered it. Only now, there were no obstacles. Therese thought of
Carol’s perfume that today meant nothing. A blank to be filled in, Carol
would say.

“Well,” Carol said smiling, impatient.

“No,” Therese said. “No, I don’t think so.” Because you would betray me
again. That was what she had thought in Sioux Falls, what she had
intended to write or say. But Carol had not betrayed her. Carol loved
her more than she loved her child. That was part of the reason why she
had not promised. She was gambling now as she had gambled on getting
everything from the detective that day on the road, and she lost then,
too. And now she saw Carol’s face changing, saw the little signs of
astonishment and shock so subtle that perhaps only she in the world
could have noticed them, and Therese could not think for a moment.

“That’s your decision,” Carol said.

“Yes.”

Carol stared at her cigarette lighter on the table. “That’s that.”

Therese looked at her, wanting still to put out her hands, to touch
Carol’s hair and to hold it tight in all her fingers. Hadn’t Carol heard
the indecision in her voice? Therese wanted suddenly to run away, to
rush quickly out the door and down the sidewalk. It was a quarter to
six. “I’ve got to go to a cocktail party this afternoon. It’s important
because of a possible job. Harkevy’s going to be there.” Harkevy would
give her some kind of a job, she was sure. She had called him at noon
today about the models she had left at his studio. Harkevy had liked
them all. “I got a television assignment yesterday, too.”

Carol lifted her head, smiling. “My little big shot. Now you look like
you might do something good. Do you know, even your voice is different?”

“Is it?” Therese hesitated, finding it harder and harder to sit there.
“Carol, you could come to the party if you want to. It’s a big party in
a couple of rooms at a hotel—welcoming the woman who’s going to do the
lead in Harkevy’s play. I know they wouldn’t mind if I brought someone.”
And she didn’t know quite why she was asking her, why Carol would
possibly want to go to a cocktail party now any more than she did.

Carol shook her head. “No, thanks, darling. You’d better run along by
yourself. I’ve got a date at the Elysée in a minute as a matter of
fact.”

Therese gathered her gloves and her handbag in her lap. She looked at
Carol’s hands, the pale freckles sprinkled on their backs—the wedding
ring was gone now—and at Carol’s eyes. She felt she would never see
Carol again. In two minutes, less, they would part on the sidewalk. “The
car’s outside. Out in front to the left. And here’s the keys.”

“I know, I saw it.”

“Are you going to stay on?” Therese asked her. “I’ll take care of the
check.”

“I’ll take care of the check,” Carol said. “Go on, if you have to.”

Therese stood up. She couldn’t leave Carol sitting here at the table
where their two teacups were, with the ashes of their cigarettes in
front of her. “Don’t stay. Come out with me.”

Carol glanced up with a kind of questioning surprise in her face. “All
right,” she said. “There are a couple of things of yours out at the
house. Shall I—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Therese interrupted her.

“And your flowers. Your plants.” Carol was paying the check the waiter
had brought over. “What happened to the flowers I gave you?”

“The flowers you gave me—they died.”

Carol’s eyes met hers for a second, and Therese looked away.

They parted on the sidewalk, at the corner of Park Avenue and
Fifty-seventh Street. Therese ran across the avenue, just making it
ahead of the green lights that released a pack of cars behind her, that
blurred her view of Carol when she turned on the other sidewalk. Carol
was walking slowly away, past the Ritz Tower doorway, and on. And that
was the way it should be, Therese thought, not with a lingering
handclasp, not with backward glances. Then as she saw Carol touch the
handle of the car door, she remembered the beer can still under the
front seat, remembered its clink as she had driven up the ramp from the
Lincoln Tunnel coming into New York. She had thought then, she must get
it out before she gave the car back to Carol, but she had forgotten.
Therese hurried on to the hotel.

People were already spilling out of the two doorways into the hall, and
a waiter was having difficulty pushing his rolling table of ice buckets
into the room. The rooms were noisy, and Therese did not see Bernstein
or Harkevy anywhere. She didn’t know anyone, not a soul. Except one
face, a man she had talked to months ago, somewhere, about a job that
didn’t materialize. Therese turned around. A man poked a tall glass into
her hand.

“Mademoiselle,” he said with a flourish. “Are you looking for one of
these?”

“Thank you.” She didn’t stay with him. She thought she saw Mr. Bernstein
over in the corner. There were several women with big hats in the way.

“Are you an actress?” the same man asked her, thrusting with her through
the crowd.

“No. A stage designer.”

It was Mr. Bernstein, and Therese sidled between a couple of groups of
people and reached him. Mr. Bernstein held out a plump, cordial hand to
her, and got up from his radiator seat.

“Miss Belivet!” he shouted. “Mrs. Crawford, the make-up consultant—”

“Let’s not talk business!” Mrs. Crawford shrieked.

“Mr. Stevens, Mr. Fenelon,” Mr. Bernstein went on, and on and on, until
she was nodding to a dozen people and saying “How do you do?” to about
half of them. “And Ivor—Ivor!” Mr. Bernstein called.

There was Harkevy, a slim figure with a slim face and a small mustache,
smiling at her, reaching a hand over for her to shake. “Hello,” he said,
“I’m glad to see you again. Yes, I liked your work. I see your anxiety.”
He laughed a little.

“Enough to let me squeeze in?” she asked.

“You want to know,” he said, smiling. “Yes, you can squeeze in. Come up
to my studio tomorrow at about eleven. Can you make that?”

“Yes.”

“Come and join me later. I must say good-by to these people who are
leaving.” And he went away.

Therese set her drink down on the edge of a table, and reached for a
cigarette in her handbag. It was done. She glanced at the door. A woman
with upswept blond hair, with bright, intense blue eyes had just come
into the room and was causing a small furor of excitement around her.
She had quick, positive movements as she turned to greet people, to
shake hands, and suddenly Therese realized she was Genevieve Cranell,
the English actress who was to play the lead. She looked different from
the few stills Therese had seen of her. She had the kind of face that
must be seen in action to be attractive.

“Hello, hello!” she called to everyone finally as she glanced around the
room, and Therese saw the glance linger on her for an instant, while in
Therese there took place a shock a little like that she had known when
she had seen Carol for the first time, and there was the same flash of
interest in the woman’s blue eyes that had been in her own, she knew,
when she saw Carol. And now it was Therese who continued to look, and
the other woman who glanced away, and turned around.

Therese looked down at the glass in her hand, and felt a sudden heat in
her face and her finger tips, the rush inside her that was neither quite
her blood nor her thoughts alone. She knew before they were introduced
that this woman was like Carol. And she was beautiful. And she did not
look like the picture in the library. Therese smiled as she sipped her
drink. She took a long pull at the drink to steady herself.

“A flower, madame?” A waiter was extending a tray full of white orchids.

“Thank you very much.” Therese took one. She had trouble with the pin,
and someone—Mr. Fenelon or Mr. Stevens it was—came up and helped.
“Thanks,” she said.

Genevieve Cranell was coming toward her, with Mr. Bernstein behind her.
The actress greeted the man with Therese as if she knew him very well.

“Did you meet Miss Cranell?” Mr. Bernstein asked Therese.

Therese looked at the woman. “My name is Therese Belivet.” She took the
hand the woman extended.

“How do you do? So you’re the set department?”

“No. Only part of it.” She could still feel the handclasp when the woman
released her hand. She felt excited, wildly and stupidly excited.

“Isn’t anybody going to bring me a drink?” Miss Cranell asked anybody.

Mr. Bernstein obliged. Mr. Bernstein finished introducing Miss Cranell
to the people around him who hadn’t met her. Therese heard her tell
someone that she had just gotten off a plane and that her luggage was
piled in the lobby, and while she spoke, Therese saw her glance at her a
couple of times past the men’s shoulders. Therese felt an exciting
attraction in the neat back of her head, in the funny, careless lift of
her nose at the end, the only careless feature of her narrow, classic
face. Her lips were rather thin. She looked extremely alert, and
imperturbably poised. Yet Therese sensed that Genevieve Cranell might
not talk to her again at the party for the simple reason that she
probably wanted to.

Therese made her way to a wall mirror, and glanced to see if her hair
and her lipstick were still all right.

“Therese,” said a voice near her. “Do you like champagne?”

Therese turned and saw Genevieve Cranell. “Of course.”

“Of course. Well, toddle up to six-nineteen in a few minutes. That’s my
suite. We’re having an inner circle party later.”

“I feel very honored,” Therese said.

“So don’t waste your thirst on highballs. Where did you get that lovely
dress?”

“Bonwit’s—it’s a wild extravagance.”

Genevieve Cranell laughed. She wore a blue woolen suit that actually
looked like a wild extravagance. “You look so young, I don’t suppose
you’ll mind if I ask how old you are.”

“I’m twenty-one.”

She rolled her eyes. “Incredible. Can anyone still be only twenty-one?”

People were watching the actress. Therese was flattered, terribly
flattered, and the flattery got in the way of what she felt, or might
feel, about Genevieve Cranell.

Miss Cranell offered her cigarette case. “For a while, I thought you
might be a minor.”

“Is that a crime?”

The actress only looked at her, her blue eyes smiling, over the flame of
her lighter. Then as the woman turned her head to light her own
cigarette, Therese knew suddenly that Genevieve Cranell would never mean
anything to her, nothing apart from this half hour at the cocktail
party, that the excitement she felt now would not continue, and not be
evoked again at any other time or place. What was it that told her?
Therese stared at the taut line of her blond eyebrow as the first smoke
rose from her cigarette, but the answer was not there. And suddenly a
feeling of tragedy, almost of regret, filled Therese.

“Are you a New Yorker?” Miss Cranell asked her.

“_Vivy!_”

The new people who had just come in the door surrounded Genevieve
Cranell and bore her away. Therese smiled again, and finished her drink,
felt the first soothing warmth of the Scotch spreading through her. She
talked with a man she had met briefly in Mr. Bernstein’s office
yesterday, and with another man she didn’t know at all, and she looked
at the doorway across the room, the doorway that was an empty rectangle
at that moment, and she thought of Carol. It would be like Carol to come
after all, to ask her once more. Or rather, like the old Carol, but not
like this one. Carol would be keeping her appointment now at the Elysée
bar. With Abby? With Stanley McVeigh? Therese looked away from the door,
as if she were afraid Carol might appear, and she would have to say
again, “No.” Therese accepted another highball, and felt the emptiness
inside her slowly filling with the realization she might see Genevieve
Cranell very often, if she chose, and though she would never become
entangled, might be loved herself.

One of the men beside her asked, “Who did the sets for _The Lost
Messiah_, Therese? Do you remember?”

“Blanchard?” she answered out of nowhere, because she was still thinking
of Genevieve Cranell, with a feeling of revulsion, of shame, for what
had just occurred to her, and she knew she would never be. She listened
to the conversation about Blanchard and someone else, even joined in,
but her consciousness had stopped in a tangle where a dozen threads
crossed and knotted. One was Dannie. One was Carol. One was Genevieve
Cranell. One went on and on out of it, but her mind was caught at the
intersection. She bent to take a light for her cigarette, and felt
herself fall a little deeper into the network, and she clutched at
Dannie. But the strong black thread did not lead anywhere. She knew as
if some prognostic voice were speaking now that she would not go further
with Dannie. And loneliness swept over her again like a rushing wind,
mysterious as the thin tears that covered her eyes suddenly, too thin to
be noticed, she knew, as she lifted her head and glanced at the doorway
again.

“Don’t forget.” Genevieve Cranell was beside her, patting her arm,
saying quickly, “Six-nineteen. We’re adjourning.” She started to turn
away and came back. “You are coming up? Harkevy’s coming up, too.”

Therese shook her head. “Thanks, I—I thought I could, but I remember
I’ve got to be somewhere else.”

The woman looked at her quizzically. “What’s the matter, Therese? Did
anything go wrong?”

“No.” She smiled, moving toward the door. “Thanks for asking me. No
doubt I’ll see you again.”

“No doubt,” the actress said.

Therese went into the room beside the big one and got her coat from the
pile on the bed. She hurried down the corridor toward the stairs, past
the people who were waiting for the elevator, among them Genevieve
Cranell, and Therese didn’t care if she saw her or not as she plunged
down the wide stairs as if she were running away from something. Therese
smiled to herself. The air was cool and sweet on her forehead, made a
feathery sound like wings past her ears, and she felt she flew across
the streets and up the curbs. Toward Carol. And perhaps Carol knew at
this moment, because Carol had known such things before. She crossed
another street, and there was the Elysée awning.

The headwaiter said something to her in the foyer, and she told him,
“I’m looking for somebody,” and went on to the doorway.

She stood in the doorway, looking over the people at the tables in the
room where a piano played. The lights were not bright, and she did not
see her at first, half hidden in the shadow against the far wall, facing
her. Nor did Carol see her. A man sat opposite her, Therese did not know
who. Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on
either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it
was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now,
because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all
over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol,
in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they
would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she
was about to go to her, Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her
incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing,
before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting
that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked toward her.


   This Bantam Book contains the complete text of the original
   edition. Not one word has been changed or omitted. The low-priced
   Bantam edition is made possible by the large sale and effective
   promotion of the original edition, published by Coward-McCann,
   Inc.




                          Transcriber’s Notes


The original spelling was mostly preserved. A few obvious typographical
and punctuation errors as well as variations in hyphenation were
silently amended. All other changes are shown here (before/after):

   [p. 1]:
   ... Therese ate nervously, with the “Welcome to Frankenberg” ...
   ... Therese ate nervously, with the “Welcome to
       Frankenberg’s” ...

   [p. 22]:
   ... what day, what she had to do, the soldier substance that made ...
   ... what day, what she had to do, the solider substance that made ...

   [p. 47]:
   ... from key chain on the dashboard? The stand of Christmas ...
   ... from the key chain on the dashboard? The stand of Christmas ...

   [p. 63]:
   ... of inches taller than Therese. It had began to snow about an ...
   ... of inches taller than Therese. It had begun to snow about an ...

   [p. 95]:
   ... real. She went to the window and looked out at the gay ...
   ... real. She went to the window and looked out at the gray ...

   [p. 127]:
   ... nose, the full lower mace, the receding twist of blond hair ...
   ... nose, the full lower face, the receding twist of blond hair ...

   [p. 205]:
   ... tomorrow, on ticket, one way, tomorrow at eleven A.M. ...
   ... tomorrow, one ticket, one way, tomorrow at eleven A.M. ...




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