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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79242 ***
+
+
+   “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. ...
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79242 ***
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+<title>The price of salt | Project Gutenberg</title>
+   <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg"  type="image/x-cover">
+   <!-- TITLE="The price of salt" -->
+   <!-- AUTHOR="Claire Morgan" -->
+   <!-- LANGUAGE="en" -->
+   <!-- PUBLISHER="Bantam" -->
+   <!-- DATE="1953" -->
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+
+
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79242 ***</div>
+
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+<div class="centerpic">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter blurb chapter">
+<p class="first">
+<span class="bl">“Are you tired?”</span> Carol asked calmly.
+The question seemed not of now
+but of always.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="bl">“Yes.”</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class="bl">“Come with me,”</span> Carol
+said.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+<h1 class="title">
+THE<br>
+PRICE<br>
+OF<br>
+SALT
+</h1>
+
+<p class="aut">
+by CLAIRE MORGAN
+</p>
+
+<p class="pub">
+<span class="logo"><img src="images/logo.jpg" alt=""></span>
+Bantam Books · New York
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter impressum chapter">
+<p class="c">
+THE PRICE OF SALT
+</p>
+
+<p class="u c">
+A BANTAM BOOK published by arrangement with<br>
+Coward-McCann, Inc.
+</p>
+
+<p class="mt c">
+<span class="sc">Printing History</span>
+</p>
+
+  <div class="table">
+<table class="runs">
+<tbody>
+   <tr>
+      <td class="col1">Coward-McCann Edition Published</td>
+      <td class="col2">May,</td>
+      <td class="col3">1952</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+      <td class="col1">1st Printing</td>
+      <td class="col2">April,</td>
+      <td class="col3">1952</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+      <td class="col1">Bantam Edition Published</td>
+      <td class="col2">September,</td>
+      <td class="col3">1953</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+      <td class="col1">1st Printing</td>
+      <td class="col2">August,</td>
+      <td class="col3">1953</td>
+   </tr>
+</tbody>
+</table>
+  </div>
+<p class="c mt u">
+Copyright, 1952, by Coward-McCann, Inc.<br>
+All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must<br>
+not be reproduced in any form without permission.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+  <div class="box">
+<p>
+Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its
+trade mark, consisting of the words “<span class="sc">Bantam Books</span>”
+and the portrayal of a bantam, is registered in the U.S.
+Patent Office and in other countries. <em>Marca Registrada</em>
+</p>
+
+  </div>
+<p class="mt c">
+Printed in the United States of America
+</p>
+
+<p class="c u">
+<span class="sc">Bantam Books</span>, 25 West 45th Street,<br>
+New York 36, New York
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="frontmatter chapter">
+<p class="ded">
+TO EDNA, JORDY, AND JEFF
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-1">
+<a id="page-1" class="pagenum" title="1"></a>
+chapter one
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+The lunch hour in the coworkers’ cafeteria at Frankenberg’s
+had reached its peak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese ate nervously, with the “Welcome to Frankenberg<a id="corr-0"></a>’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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She turned the page quickly, and saw in big black script
+across two pages: “<em>Are You Frankenberg Material?</em>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-2" class="pagenum" title="2"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-3" class="pagenum" title="3"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must learn to trust people, Therese. Remember that,”
+Sister Alicia had often told her. And often, quite often,
+Therese tried to apply it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sister Alicia,” Therese whispered carefully, the sibilant
+syllables comforting her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese sat up again and picked up her fork, because the
+cleanup boy was working in her direction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-4" class="pagenum" title="4"></a>
+like ancient cloth, and still she had not worn the gloves.
+Finally, they were too small to wear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Someone moved the sugar container, and the propped booklet
+fell flat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re a new girl, aren’t you?” The voice was shrill and
+clear in the din, almost a sweet voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you getting along all right?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you getting along all right?” the woman repeated, for
+there was a great clatter of voices and dishes all around them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese moistened her lips. “Yes, thank you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you like it here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Finished?” A young man in a white apron gripped the
+woman’s plate with an imperative thumb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-5" class="pagenum" title="5"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Awrr rr rr rrgh! it said as it hurled itself blindly into the
+papier-mâché tunnel. And Urr rr rr rrgh! as it emerged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-6" class="pagenum" title="6"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This morning, Therese turned away quickly from the train,
+and went on toward the doll department where she worked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Hendrickson, section manager of the doll department,
+was dragging dolls from the stock shelves and seating them,
+splay legged, atop the glass counters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you have the dolls that wet?” a woman asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d like this doll, but with a yellow dress,” a woman said,
+<a id="page-7" class="pagenum" title="7"></a>
+pushing a doll toward her, and Therese turned and got the
+doll she wanted out of a stock shelf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are the Drinksy-Wetsy dolls all this size?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-8" class="pagenum" title="8"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello,” said Mrs. Robichek, so indifferently that Therese
+was crushed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’ll get out,” Therese said reassuringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you have food at home?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, I’m going to buy something later.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese’s impulse to protest politely lasted only a moment.
+“Thank you. I’d like to come.” Then she saw a cellophane
+<a id="page-9" class="pagenum" title="9"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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 <span class="v">V</span> 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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-10" class="pagenum" title="10"></a>
+and tiny white buttons that came to a <span class="v">V</span> down the front of
+the narrow bodice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese realized she was relating all her troubles and her
+<a id="page-11" class="pagenum" title="11"></a>
+bad luck so that she, Therese, would understand why she had
+sunk so low as to work in a department store.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It fits?” Mrs. Robichek asked confidently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you like it?” Mrs. Robichek asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You like it, yes?” Mrs. Robichek asked as confidently as
+ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Therese said firmly, admitting it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+<a id="page-12" class="pagenum" title="12"></a>
+Mrs. Robichek was the hunchbacked keeper of the dungeon.
+And she had been brought here to be tantalized.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter? A pin stick you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <em>this</em> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It might already be too late. As in a nightmare, Therese
+stood in the room in her white slip, shivering, unable to
+move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter? You cold? It’s hot.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese trembled violently. She was suddenly out of control.
+It was a chill, not merely fright or tiredness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-13" class="pagenum" title="13"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A line from Richard’s Eliot came to Therese. <em>That is not
+what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.</em> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-14" class="pagenum" title="14"></a>
+I shall wait fifteen minutes until she is asleep and then go,
+Therese thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-2">
+<a id="page-15" class="pagenum" title="15"></a>
+chapter two
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A real job? Where?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A job!” she whispered to herself. The magic word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-16" class="pagenum" title="16"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard came up the steps at a run, smiling. “Did Phil call?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good. That means he’s coming.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In a few minutes, I guess. He probably won’t stay long.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does it really sound like a definite job?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Phil says so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you know what kind of play it is?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know anything except they need somebody for
+sets, and why not you?” Richard looked her over critically,
+<a id="page-17" class="pagenum" title="17"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Soso. That’s something I want to work on at home,” he
+said carelessly. “We had that redheaded model today, the one
+I like.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you have to work this Saturday?” she asked, still
+afraid to talk about the job.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hope not. Are you free?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She remembered now, she was not. “I’m free Friday,” she
+said resignedly. “Saturday’s a late day.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right.” She liked that and so did Richard, sitting up
+in front of the big empty gas tank, and driving anywhere, as
+<a id="page-18" class="pagenum" title="18"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stole it? From where?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard gave a hooting laugh and stood up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Show me the bread you meant.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doorbell shrieked right beside the refrigerator, and she
+jumped for the button.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s them,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were two young men. Richard introduced them as
+<a id="page-19" class="pagenum" title="19"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you in the theatre, too?” she asked Dannie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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 <em>Small Rain</em>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A comedy?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Comedy. Three acts. Have you done any sets so far by
+yourself?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How many sets will it take?” Richard asked, just as she
+was about to answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Georgia?” Richard smiled. “Whatever happened with her
+and Rudy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is this one of your sets?” Dannie asked her, looking at the
+<a id="page-20" class="pagenum" title="20"></a>
+cardboard model that hung on the wall, and when she nodded,
+he got up to see it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s very attractive,” Dannie said, peering behind one of the
+little suspended figures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a model for <em>Petrushka</em>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’re due in half an hour, Phil,” Dannie repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then a moment later, they were all standing up, putting on
+their coats.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s eat out somewhere, Terry,” Richard said. “How about
+the Czech place up on Second?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you a doctor?” she asked Dannie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he said, “That’s a long way from stage designing,
+isn’t it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded. “Quite a long way.” She started to ask him if
+<a id="page-21" class="pagenum" title="21"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He smiled broadly, showing square white teeth. “Yes. To
+the subway. But Phil wants a bite somewhere first.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter?” Dannie asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you cold?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Not at all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-22" class="pagenum" title="22"></a>
+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 <a id="corr-1"></a>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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dannie was watching her. She was held by his thoughtful
+<a id="page-23" class="pagenum" title="23"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you worried about that job?” Dannie was standing
+beside her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She half listened to Phil’s conversation with Richard. They
+were talking about boat reservations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks very much. I’d like to.” It probably wouldn’t be,
+she thought, but it was nice of him to ask her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“March sounds all right,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s nothing to stop us, is there? I don’t care if I don’t
+finish the winter term at school.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese called up Phil to thank him, but nobody answered
+the telephone. She wrote him a note, in care of the Black Cat
+Theatre.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-3">
+<a id="page-24" class="pagenum" title="24"></a>
+chapter three
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you have a doll made of cloth that cries?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wotcha lookin’ fuh?” Miss Santini asked her. Miss Santini
+had a cold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Made of cloth? With pigtails?” Miss Martucci, a lean,
+<a id="page-25" class="pagenum" title="25"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you have any stiff-legged dolls? One that stands up?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Merry Christmas to you!” Therese said, smiling. It was the
+first merry Christmas she had heard from a customer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you had your relief yet, Miss Belivet?” Mrs. Hendrickson
+asked her, as sharply as if she reproached her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese hadn’t had it. She got her pocketbook and the novel
+<a id="page-26" class="pagenum" title="26"></a>
+she was reading from the shelf under the wrapping counter.
+The novel was Joyce’s <em>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</em>,
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hall to the employees’ rest rooms was blocked by big
+shipping carts piled high with boxes. Therese waited to get
+through.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pixie!” one of the shipping cart boys shouted to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled a little because it was silly. Even down in the
+cloakroom in the basement, they yelled “Pixie!” at her morning
+and night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pixie, waiting for me?” the raw-edged voice roared again,
+over the crash and bump of the stock carts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She got through, and dodged a shipping cart that hurtled
+toward her with a clerk aboard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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 <em>he</em> is, Mr. Frankenberg?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yoo-hoo! Pixie!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah’m juss bahdin mah tahm, Pixie!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-27" class="pagenum" title="27"></a>
+“It’s all right, thanks,” she said to a girl who bent over her
+for a moment, and the girl went away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“May I see one of those valises?” the woman asked, and
+leaned on the counter, looking down through the glass top.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Davis saw her and gasped, but Therese said, “I need
+it,” and went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-28" class="pagenum" title="28"></a>
+She opened the show window and took the suitcase down
+and laid it on the counter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It doesn’t matter,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right. I’d like this. That’s C.O.D. And what about
+clothes? Do these come with it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! Will this get to New Jersey before Christmas?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, it’ll arrive Monday.” If it didn’t, Therese thought,
+she would deliver it herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mrs. H. F. Aird,” the woman’s soft, distinct voice said, and
+Therese began to print it on the green C.O.D. slip.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You won’t make any mistakes, will you?” the woman’s
+voice asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-29" class="pagenum" title="29"></a>
+“That’s a C.O.D. order?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked into Mrs. Hendrickson’s ugly, meaningless
+face. “Yes, Mrs. Hendrickson.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese got the doll and dropped it with a clatter on the
+glass counter, and the woman glanced at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sounds unbreakable,” the woman said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-30" class="pagenum" title="30"></a>
+“It’ll come Monday at the latest. That’s two days before
+Christmas.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good. I don’t mean to make you nervous.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a rotten job, isn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.” Therese folded the C.O.D. slips around the white
+string, and fastened them with a pin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So forgive me for complaining.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-31" class="pagenum" title="31"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you,” Therese called down to Mrs. Osborne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wash it tonight and see me tomorrow night,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s too late. I can’t sleep if my head’s wet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll wash it tomorrow night. We won’t use the tub, just a
+couple of buckets.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-32" class="pagenum" title="32"></a>
+“Well, what about that art show Saturday? It’s open Saturday
+afternoon.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But Saturday’s the day I have to work to nine. I can’t get
+away till nine thirty.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh. Well, I’ll stay around school and meet you on the corner
+about nine thirty. Forty-fourth and Fifth. All right?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Anything new today?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. With you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I’m going to see about boat reservations tomorrow.
+I’ll call you tomorrow night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese did not telephone Stella at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What?” Miss Martucci answered, unable to hear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Belivet!” somebody yelled, and a whistle blew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re wanted on the telephone,” Mrs. Hendrickson told
+her, pointing to the telephone by the wrapping table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello?” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello, is this coworker six forty-five A, Therese Belivet?”
+the operator’s voice said over clickings and buzzings. “Go
+ahead.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello?” she repeated, and barely heard an answer. She
+dragged the telephone off the table and into the stockroom a
+<a id="page-33" class="pagenum" title="33"></a>
+few feet away. The wire did not quite reach, and she had to
+stoop on the floor. “Hello?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello,” the voice said. “Well—I wanted to thank you for
+the Christmas card.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh. Oh, you’re—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This is Mrs. Aird,” she said. “Are you the one who sent it?
+Or not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it? Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must be the girl in the toy department.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was extremely nice of you to send me the card,” the
+woman said politely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Shall I meet you downstairs at the Thirty-fourth Street entrance
+at about twelve?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right. I—” Therese remembered now she went to work
+at one sharp tomorrow. She had the morning off. She put her
+<a id="page-34" class="pagenum" title="34"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sow—ry,” Mrs. Zabriskie said irritatedly, plowing out
+the door again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello?” Therese repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The line was dead.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-4">
+<a id="page-35" class="pagenum" title="35"></a>
+chapter four
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+“Hello,” the woman said, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing.” At least, the woman had recognized her, Therese
+thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you have any preference as to restaurants?” the woman
+asked on the sidewalk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. It’d be nice to find a quiet one, but there aren’t any in
+this neighborhood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, certainly.” It was twelve fifteen already. Therese knew
+she would be terribly late, and it didn’t matter at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-36" class="pagenum" title="36"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You haven’t been working there very long, have you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Only about two weeks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you won’t be much longer—probably.” She offered
+Therese a cigarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And do you often get inspired to send post cards?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Post cards?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Christmas cards?” She smiled at herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course not,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, here’s to Christmas.” She touched Therese’s glass and
+drank. “Where do you live? In Manhattan?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman nodded to the waiter, and two more drinks arrived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-37" class="pagenum" title="37"></a>
+“I like this.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m glad.” Therese smiled, wondering if she were serious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re a very pretty girl,” she said. “And very sensitive,
+too, aren’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese said, “I’m sure you thought it was a man who sent
+you the Christmas card, didn’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I did,” she said through a smile. “I thought it just might
+be a man in the ski department who’d sent it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sorry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-38" class="pagenum" title="38"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How is it you live alone?” the woman asked, and before
+Therese knew it, she had told the woman her life story.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What could be duller than past history!” Therese said,
+smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Maybe futures that won’t have any history.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What kind of a name is Belivet?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s Czech. It’s changed,” Therese explained awkwardly.
+“Originally—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s very original.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s your name?” Therese asked. “Your first name?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My name? Carol. Please don’t ever call me Carole.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please don’t ever call me Thereese,” Therese said, pronouncing
+the “th.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-39" class="pagenum" title="39"></a>
+“How do you like it pronounced? Therese?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you do on Sundays?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t always know. Nothing in particular. What do you
+do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What a strange girl you are.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Flung out of space,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-5">
+<a id="page-40" class="pagenum" title="40"></a>
+chapter five
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you been inside?” she asked. She was ten minutes
+late.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course not. I was waiting.” He pressed his cold lips
+and nose into her cheek. “Did you have a rough day?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, thanks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-41" class="pagenum" title="41"></a>
+“I got our reservations today,” Richard said. “The <em>President
+Taylor</em> sailing March seventh. I talked with the ticket fellow,
+and I think he can get us outside rooms, if I keep after him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“March seventh?” She heard the start of excitement in her
+voice, though she did not want to go to Europe now at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“About ten weeks off,” Richard said, taking her hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, of course, Terry!” And he laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wish we could share one together,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Share what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t feel like sitting still. Let’s have it later.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-42" class="pagenum" title="42"></a>
+Richard took her arm. “You haven’t enough respect for technique,
+little girl.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re not looking,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s exhausting. I’ve had enough when you have.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And they all looked envious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What about tomorrow?” Richard asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tomorrow?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know. The family asked if you could come out this
+Sunday and have dinner with us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A dress—but that’s so much work.” Therese had a vision
+of Mrs. Semco’s embroidered blouses, white blouses with rows
+<a id="page-43" class="pagenum" title="43"></a>
+upon rows of stitches. Mrs. Semco was proud of her needlework.
+Therese did not feel she should accept such a colossal
+labor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She loves it,” Richard said. “Well, what about tomorrow?
+Want to come out around noon?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think I want to this Sunday. They haven’t made any
+great plans, have they?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Richard said, disappointed. “You just want to work
+or something tomorrow?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. I’d rather.” She didn’t want Richard to know about
+Carol, or even ever meet her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not even take a drive somewhere?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think so, thanks.” Therese didn’t like his holding
+her hand now. His hand was moist, which made it icy cold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t think you’ll change your mind?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was his cousin by marriage, whom Therese had only
+seen once or twice. “How is Esther?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just the same.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, I’m not,” she said, feeling inarticulate and resenting it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are now. I can tell. After all, don’t you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What,” she prompted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-44" class="pagenum" title="44"></a>
+“Well—if you want to call it all off, Richard.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s not what I mean, Terry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Terry, you know I’d rather be with you than anyone else in
+the world. That’s the hell of it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, if it’s hell—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you love me at all, Terry? How do you love me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-45" class="pagenum" title="45"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Terry, darling—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard’s lips parted in a stunned way. Therese could not
+bear to look at the frown above them. “Why not?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because. Because I can’t,” she said, every word agony. “Because
+I don’t want to sleep with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, Terry!” Richard laughed. “I’m sorry I asked you.
+Forget about it, honey, will you? And in Europe, too?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-6">
+<a id="page-46" class="pagenum" title="46"></a>
+chapter six
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Therese turned around and saw Carol in a car drawn
+up by the curb across the street. Therese walked toward her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hi!” Carol called, and leaned over to open the door for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello. I thought you weren’t coming.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Awfully sorry I’m late. Are you freezing?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Shall we go out to the house? Where would you like to
+go?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s go out to the house. It’s pretty out there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They drove uptown. It was like riding inside a rolling mountain
+that could sweep anything before it, yet was absolutely obedient
+to Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you like driving?” Carol asked without looking at her.
+She had a cigarette in her mouth. She drove with her hands
+<a id="page-47" class="pagenum" title="47"></a>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you had breakfast?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Better have some coffee. It’s there in the thermos.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were out of the tunnel. Carol stopped by the side of
+the road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked at the coffee gratefully. “Where’d it come
+from?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled. “Do you always want to know where things
+come from?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <a id="corr-3"></a>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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you like the country?” Carol asked as they turned into
+a smaller road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-48" class="pagenum" title="48"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a lovely house,” Therese said, and saw Carol’s little
+smile that was tinged with impatience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, thanks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol looked around the living room, and the same puzzled
+dissatisfaction came back to her face. “Let’s go upstairs. It’s
+more comfortable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My favorite room,” Carol said, walking out of it. “But
+that’s my room over there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-49" class="pagenum" title="49"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have a little girl, haven’t you?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol opened a wall panel in the hall. “Yes,” she said.
+“Would you like a coke?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What would you like to do?” Carol asked. “Take a walk?
+Play some records?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m very content,” Therese told her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-50" class="pagenum" title="50"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol looked at her. “How do you become a poet?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By feeling things—too much, I suppose,” Therese answered
+conscientiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And how do you become a thief?” Carol licked something
+off her thumb and frowned. “You don’t want any caramel pudding,
+do you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, yes,” Therese smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not many? Just three or four?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Like you?” Therese met her eyes steadily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Some.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come and play something.” And when Therese started to
+refuse, she said imperatively, “Oh, I don’t care how you play.
+Just play something.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-51" class="pagenum" title="51"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you tired?” Carol asked calmly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question seemed not of now but of always. “Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come with me,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went with Carol upstairs again. Therese pulled herself
+up by the banister and was reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think a nap wouldn’t hurt you,” Carol said, turning
+down the flowered cotton bedspread and the top blanket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks, I’m not really—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Slip your shoes off,” Carol said softly, but in a tone that
+commanded obedience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked at the bed. She had hardly slept the night
+before. “I don’t think I shall sleep, but if I do—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol’s eyebrows frowned, though she smiled a little.
+<a id="page-52" class="pagenum" title="52"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re a child,” Carol said, like a reproach. She lifted her
+head. “What would you like?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese remembered what she had thought of in the restaurant,
+and she set her teeth in shame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What would you like?” Carol repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing, thanks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What would you like, a drink?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The corner of Carol’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Some hot
+milk,” she mocked. Then she left the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I let it boil and it’s got a scum on it,” Carol said annoyedly.
+“I’m sorry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is that the way you like it? Plain like that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ug,” Carol said, and sat down on the arm of a chair and
+watched her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+<a id="page-53" class="pagenum" title="53"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 id="page-54" class="pagenum" title="54"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sorry I took it. I never told anyone but you. Some day
+I want to give it back.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese did not answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you think you’ll ever want to see her again? Maybe
+in a few years from now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does Richard know all this?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-55" class="pagenum" title="55"></a>
+“I’ll never cry again,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, you will.” And a match scraped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese took another cleansing tissue from the bed table and
+blew her nose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who else is in your life besides Richard?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Moved where?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled. “Disappeared! I like that. And how lucky you
+are to be able to do it. You’re free. Do you realize that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese said nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Carol answered herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the telephone rang, sudden and long like the shriek
+of a hysterical woman in the hall, and they saw each other
+start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-56" class="pagenum" title="56"></a>
+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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Shouldn’t I leave?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She knew Carol did not want to take another drive. Therese
+started to straighten the bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Leave the bed.” Carol was watching her from the hall.
+“Just close the door.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who is it that’s coming?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol turned and went into the green room. “My husband,”
+she said. “Hargess.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the doorbell chimed downstairs, and the latch clicked
+at the same time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No end prompt today,” Carol murmured. “Come down,
+Therese.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese felt sick with dread suddenly, not of the man but
+of Carol’s annoyance at his coming.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Harge, this is Miss Belivet,” Carol said. “Mr. Aird.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do you do?” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-57" class="pagenum" title="57"></a>
+“Pictures on the wall?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man was silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol and Therese went downstairs. In the living room
+Carol sat down, but Therese did not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Play some more, if you like,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Play some,” Carol said firmly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese was frightened by the sudden white anger in her
+eyes. “I can’t,” Therese said, stubborn as a mule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Carol subsided. Carol even smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t find that watercolor set. I thought it was in my
+room,” he said complainingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know where it is.” Carol got up and started toward the
+stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I suppose you want me to take her something for Christmas,”
+Harge said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks, I’ll give the things to her.” Carol went up the
+stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They are just divorced, Therese thought, or about to be
+divorced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese felt the disdain and incivility in the question, like
+the sting of a slap in the face. “Yes, from New York,” she
+answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-58" class="pagenum" title="58"></a>
+said to her. He put the overcoat on as he walked to the door.
+“Friend of Abby’s?” he murmured to Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A friend of mine,” Carol answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you going to take the presents to Rindy? When?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What if I gave her nothing, Harge?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Harge, what’s the purpose?” Carol said wearily. “Especially
+when you’re so disagreeable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because it concerns Rindy.” Then his voice faded unintelligibly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It doesn’t matter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.” She couldn’t have borne Carol’s driving her home and
+driving back alone tonight in the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were silent also in the car. Therese opened the door as
+soon as the car stopped at the station.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s a train in about four minutes,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese blurted suddenly, “Will I see you again?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol only smiled at her, a little reproachfully, as the window
+between them rose up. “Au revoir,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, of course, she would see her again, Therese
+thought. An idiotic question!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The car backed fast and turned away into the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-59" class="pagenum" title="59"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-7">
+<a id="page-60" class="pagenum" title="60"></a>
+chapter seven
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” he said at last.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can’t you give me anything for it?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lip came out farther. “Maybe fifty cents.” And he tossed
+it back across the counter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again the thumb and forefinger were eloquent of scorn,
+turning the coin like filth. “Two fifty.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In ten minutes, Therese was back. She pawned the silver
+medallion for two dollars and fifty cents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-61" class="pagenum" title="61"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll take it,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s seventy-one eighteen with the tax,” the salesgirl said.
+“Do you want that gift wrapped?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-62" class="pagenum" title="62"></a>
+couldn’t remember the slightest clue as to Carol’s taste in
+books. She put the book down hurriedly and left.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upstairs in the doll department, Miss Santini was strolling
+along behind the counter, offering everybody candy from a
+big box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Take two,” she said to Therese. “Candy department sent
+’em up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese signed for it in a scribble, and tore it open. It said:
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="noindent">
+<span class="scall">MEET YOU DOWNSTAIRS AT 5PM. CAROL.</span>
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You look happy,” Mrs. Zabriskie said dismally to her as
+she went by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-63" class="pagenum" title="63"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol was waiting for her in the foyer where they had met
+before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello!” Therese said. “I’m through.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Through what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Through with working. Here.” But Carol seemed depressed,
+and it dampened Therese instantly. She said anyway,
+“I was awfully happy to get the telegram.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t know if you’d be free. Are you free tonight?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <a id="corr-4"></a>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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Therese said, still happy in spite of herself, though
+Carol’s mood was disquieting. Therese felt something had
+happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you suppose there’s a place to get a cup of coffee
+around here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. A little farther east.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-64" class="pagenum" title="64"></a>
+up the handbag. She didn’t want to do it when Carol was
+with her, even though the package would be wrapped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did something happen?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Probably Carol had had to break an engagement she had
+looked forward to, Therese thought. Carol would of course be
+busy on Christmas Eve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not keeping you from doing anything now?” Carol
+asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled and reached for her hand. Indifferently, Carol
+squeezed her hand and dropped it. “Yes, I’ll wait.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol was still there, her coffee only half finished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t want my coffee,” Therese said, because Carol
+seemed ready to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My car’s downtown. Let’s get a taxi down.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This is better.” Carol shed her coat as she drove. “Throw
+it in back, will you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-65" class="pagenum" title="65"></a>
+the window beside her, and every time the car sped, the
+wind burst through and wrapped its cold arms around her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s where Abby lives,” Carol said, nodding across the
+river.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese did not even see any special lights. “Who’s Abby?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Abby? My best friend.” Then Carol looked at her. “Aren’t
+you cold with this window open?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What happened, Carol? Are you getting a divorce now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol sighed. “Yes, a divorce,” she said quite calmly, and
+started the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And he has the child?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just tonight.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese was about to ask another question, when Carol
+said, “Let’s talk about something else.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A car went by with the radio playing Christmas carols and
+everyone singing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you sleep with him?” Carol asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I did. Two or three times.” Therese told her about those
+times, the first time and the three times afterward. She was
+<a id="page-66" class="pagenum" title="66"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sometimes it takes time,” Carol said. “Don’t you believe
+in giving people another chance?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But why? It isn’t pleasant. And I’m not in love with him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you think you might be, if you got this worked out?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is that the way people fall in love?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol looked up at the deer’s head on the wall behind the
+counter. “No,” she said, smiling. “What do you like about
+Richard?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Lots of people have families.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese tried again. “He’s flexible. He changes. He’s not
+like most men that you can label doctor or—or insurance
+salesman.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mean you weren’t in love?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She waited, until the word from nowhere, false, guilty,
+moved her lips, “No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you’d like to be.” Carol was smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is Harge still in love with you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol looked down at her lap, impatiently, and perhaps she
+was shocked at her bluntness, Therese thought, but when
+<a id="page-67" class="pagenum" title="67"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does he like Rindy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dotes on her.” Carol glanced at her smiling. “If he’s
+in love with anyone, it’s Rindy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What kind of a name is that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And—Harge didn’t?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like to know all about you,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To love someone?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What Carol said about curiosity, she knew was true. “What
+other ways?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol gave her a glance. “I think that’s for each person to
+find out. I wonder if I can get a drink here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left.
+<a id="page-68" class="pagenum" title="68"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I really don’t care about going anywhere—for myself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve been in that rotten store all day, and we haven’t
+done a thing to celebrate your liberation.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I just like to be here with you,” Therese said, and hearing
+the explanatory tone in her voice, she smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol shook her head, not looking at her. “Child, child,
+where do you wander—all by yourself?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s do the tree now,” Carol said as soon as they entered
+the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-69" class="pagenum" title="69"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re very good at that,” Carol said, surveying the tree
+from the hearth. “It’s superb. Everything but presents.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing. Do you know what time it is?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The radio had signed off. Therese saw the mantel clock. It
+was after one. “It’s Christmas,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’d better stay the night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you have to do tomorrow?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol got her drink from the radio top. “Don’t you have to
+see Richard?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can drive you in early.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you busy tomorrow?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol finished the last inch of her drink. “Yes,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese stared at Carol’s pack of cigarettes on the coffee
+table. She had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She
+<a id="page-70" class="pagenum" title="70"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What?” Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re tired. Come on to bed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled suddenly. “Nothing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she heard Carol’s whisper, as clearly as if all three of
+<a id="page-71" class="pagenum" title="71"></a>
+them were in the same room together, “Are you going to bed
+or getting up?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You nitwit,” Carol whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You alone?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh-oh.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s all right. Do you want to come in?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman got out of the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese went to the door of her room and opened it. Carol
+was just coming into the hall, tying the belt of her robe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sorry I wakened you,” Carol said. “Go back to bed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t mind. Can I come down?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, of <em>course</em>!” Carol smiled suddenly. “Get a robe out
+of the closet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese got a robe, probably a robe of Harge’s, she thought,
+and went downstairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who made the Christmas tree?” the woman was asking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were in the living room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She did.” Carol turned to Therese. “This is Abby. Abby
+Gerhard, Therese Belivet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello,” Abby said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You make a fine tree,” Abby told her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will everybody stop whispering?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abby chafed her hands together and followed Carol into the
+kitchen. “Got any coffee, Carol?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-72" class="pagenum" title="72"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m going to tell him that,” Carol said. “I can’t resist.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was something about a Boy Scout pocket gadget for
+Harge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you old enough to smoke?” she asked Therese, offering
+her a red box that said Craven A’s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol put her spoon down. “Abby, what is this?” she asked
+with an air of embarrassment that Therese had never seen
+before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks, I’d like one,” Therese said, taking a cigarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abby settled her elbows on the table. “Well, what’s what?”
+she asked Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I suspect you’re a little tight,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-73" class="pagenum" title="73"></a>
+“Driving for hours in the open air? I left New Rochelle at
+two, got home and found your message, and here I am.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought,
+probably did nothing all day except what she felt like doing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?” Abby said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well—I didn’t win the first round,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abby drew on her cigarette, showing no surprise at all. “For
+how long?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For three months.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Starting when?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s not set already, is it?” Abby asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not doing anything early. Dinner’s at two today.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Call me sometime.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sure.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not much in the mood,” Carol said, but Therese
+heard the play of possibility in it nevertheless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abby squirmed a little and looked around her. “This place
+is gloomy as a coalpit in the mornings, isn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled a little. A coalpit, with the sun beginning to
+yellow the window sill, and the evergreen tree beyond it?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Was it a good party?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-74" class="pagenum" title="74"></a>
+“Mm,” Abby said indifferently. “Do you know someone
+called Bob Haversham?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Really.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t tell him I knew one of the bosses.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What time is it?” Carol asked after a moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abby looked at her wrist watch, a small watch set in a pyramid
+of gold panels. “Seven thirty. About. Do you care?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Want to sleep some more, Therese?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I’m fine.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll drive you in whenever you have to go,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where’d you meet Carol?” Abby yelled at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese felt she might almost, but not quite, have told
+Abby the truth. “In a store,” Therese yelled back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh?” Abby drove erratically, whipping the big car around
+curves, putting on speed where one didn’t expect it. “Do you
+like her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course!” What a question! Like asking her if she believed
+in God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sure,” Abby said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And thanks for the ride in.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-75" class="pagenum" title="75"></a>
+Abby smiled. “Sure you don’t want me to take you anywhere
+else?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, thanks,” Therese said, smiling, too, because Abby
+would certainly have been glad to take her even to Brooklyn
+Heights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-8">
+<a id="page-76" class="pagenum" title="76"></a>
+chapter eight
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+“And now you make a wish,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese wished it. She wished for Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re not supposed to tell,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You can tell in Russia.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I’m not in Russia.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The radio roared louder suddenly, voices singing a carol.
+Therese drank the rest of the pink eggnog in her glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I want to go up to your room,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard took her hand, and they started up the stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ri—chard?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The aunt with the cigarette holder was calling him from the
+living room door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like my sweater,” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m glad.” Therese swept her full skirt in an arc and sat
+on the edge of Richard’s bed. The heavy Norwegian sweater
+<a id="page-77" class="pagenum" title="77"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How about a real shot? That stuff downstairs is sickening.”
+Richard got his bottle of whisky from his closet floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese shook her head. “No, thanks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This’d be good for you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re different today,” Richard said so abruptly that a
+thrill of peril passed down her body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Maybe it’s the dress,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-78" class="pagenum" title="78"></a>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pretty?” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese sat up. “It’s a beauty!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s go fly it now,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What roof?” Richard’s mother asked shrilly. “This roof?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-79" class="pagenum" title="79"></a>
+“I’m going to make you that dress!” Richard’s mother called
+to Therese, wagging her finger admonishingly. “I know your
+measurements!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard groaned, failing again. He was trying to get the
+kite up by running with it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, but it’s not steady.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s found its own wind!” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, but it’s slow.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What a gloomy Gus! Can I hold it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wait’ll I get it higher.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard pumped at it with long swings of his arms, but the
+<a id="page-80" class="pagenum" title="80"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Best we can do,” Richard said. “It can’t carry any more
+string.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Want to take it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Jerk it!” Richard said. “Keep working it up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Maybe the string’s too heavy,” she said. It was a new
+string, soft and white and fat as a worm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“String’s very light. Look now. Now it’s going!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now it was climbing in short, upward darts, as if it had
+found its own mind suddenly, and a will to escape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let out more string!” she shouted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+<a id="page-81" class="pagenum" title="81"></a>
+She felt the kite meant something, this particular kite, at this
+minute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Richard?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard laughed, a short, hoarse laugh. “Never till you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, you were. You told me about two times.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If I count those, I might count twelve others, too,”
+Richard said quickly, with the bluntness of preoccupation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The kite was starting to take arcing steps downward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese kept her voice on the same level. “Were you ever
+in love with a boy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A boy?” Richard repeated, surprised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps five seconds passed before he said, “No,” in a
+positive and final tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard’s face looked the same as it might have if they
+had been talking about politics. “Did I ever know any? No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went on, winding the kite. “But those things don’t just
+happen. There’s always some reason for it in the background.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” she said agreeably. Therese had thought back into the
+background. The nearest she could remember to being “in
+<a id="page-82" class="pagenum" title="82"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What!” Richard smiled. “Fall in love with a girl? Of
+course not! My God, you haven’t, have you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Therese said, in an odd, inconclusive tone, but Richard
+did not seem to notice the tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s going again. Look, Terry!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s no more string!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m going to cut it!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard came running over, laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-83" class="pagenum" title="83"></a>
+“Don’t!” she said angrily. “Are you crazy?” Her hands
+were tired, but she clung all the harder to the stick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s cut it! It’s more fun!” And Richard bumped into her
+rudely, because he was looking up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s only a kite!” Richard laughed, craning up at the nothingness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s only a kite!” Richard repeated. “I can make another
+kite!”
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-9">
+<a id="page-84" class="pagenum" title="84"></a>
+chapter nine
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+Therese started to get dressed, then changed her mind.
+She was still in her robe, reading the script of <em>Small Rain</em>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doorbell sounded in three quick rings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked down the stairwell, and saw Carol was carrying
+something. She ran down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s empty. It’s for you,” Carol said, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s terribly good looking!” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you like it? I don’t even know if you need a suitcase.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Work the combination and see if you like the inside.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese did. “I like the smell, too,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you busy? If you are, I’ll leave.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-85" class="pagenum" title="85"></a>
+“No. Sit down. I’m not doing anything—except reading a
+play.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What play?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A play I have to do sets for.” She realized suddenly she
+had never mentioned stage designing to Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sets for?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes—I’m a stage designer.” She took Carol’s coat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No—just a few hundred. But if I get a job, they’ll let me
+pay it off in installments.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks. I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d like to do it for you. You shouldn’t be bothered paying
+off two thousand dollars at your age.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks. But I won’t be ready for one for another couple
+of years.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol lifted her head and blew her smoke out in a thin
+stream. “Oh, they don’t really keep track of apprenticeships,
+do they?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled. “No. Of course not. Would you like a
+drink? I’ve got a bottle of rye.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-86" class="pagenum" title="86"></a>
+“Yes. I’m better when I have someone to cook for. I can
+make good omelettes. Do you like them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Carol said flatly, and Therese laughed. “Why don’t
+you show me some of your work?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <em>Petrushka</em> set on the wall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But it’s the same thing,” Therese said. “The same thing
+as the drawings, only in model form.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“About what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“About you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Carol said. “What do you have to pay for an apartment
+like this?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fifty a month.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol clicked her tongue. “Doesn’t leave you much out of
+your salary, does it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese bent over her portfolio, tying it up. “No. But I’ll be
+making more soon. I won’t be living here forever either.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Always,” Carol said, smiling, too. She pushed her fingers
+through her hair. “I think I shall take a trip after all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For how long?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just a month or so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese set the portfolio in the closet. “How soon will you
+be going?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Right away. I suppose as soon as I can arrange everything.
+And there isn’t much to arrange.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-87" class="pagenum" title="87"></a>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol looked up at her, and then at the ceiling. “I don’t
+think she’s free in the first place.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese stared at her. She had touched something, mentioning
+Abby. But Carol’s face was unreadable now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol didn’t answer. She was looking at the flower box in
+the bookshelf. “What kind of plants are these?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t know?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol turned around, smiling. “Just plants,” she repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What about tonight?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Furniture? In stores?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-88" class="pagenum" title="88"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good. I’d like to meet him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese pressed the bell, then heard Richard’s firm, hopping
+steps on the stairs. She opened the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello,” Richard said. “I decided—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Richard, this is Mrs. Aird,” Therese said. “Richard Semco.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do you do?” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard nodded, with almost a bow. “How do you do,” he
+said, his blue eyes stretched wide.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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 <em>lebkuchen</em>.” He nodded at the box
+and smiled, disarmingly. “Anybody want some now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please sit down,” Therese said to Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, I’m going,” she answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll give you half, Terry, then I’ll be going too,” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked at Carol, and Carol smiled at her nervousness
+and sat down on a corner of the couch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-89" class="pagenum" title="89"></a>
+“Anyway, don’t let me rush you off,” Richard said, lifting
+the paper with the cake in it to a kitchen shelf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re not. You’re a painter, aren’t you, Richard?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Carol said with another smile. “I’m nothing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The hardest thing to be.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it? Are you a good painter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will be. I can be,” said Richard, unperturbed. “Have you
+got any beer, Terry? I’ve got an awful thirst.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought we might go to a movie tonight, Terry. I’d like
+to see that thing at the Victoria. Do you want to?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t tonight. I’ve got a date with Mrs. Aird.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh.” Richard looked at Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good-by,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol gave her a wink as she went down the stairs. “Be a
+good girl,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where’d the suitcase come from?” Richard asked when
+she came back in the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a present.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter, Terry?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing’s the matter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did I interrupt anything important? Who is she?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese picked up Carol’s empty glass. There was a little
+lipstick at the rim. “She’s a woman I met at the store.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did she give you that suitcase?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s quite a present. Is she that rich?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese glanced at him. Richard’s aversion to the wealthy,
+to the bourgeois, was automatic. “Rich? You mean the mink
+<a id="page-90" class="pagenum" title="90"></a>
+coat? I don’t know. I did her a favor. I found something she
+lost in the store.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh?” he said. “What? You didn’t say anything about it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh. Damned nice reward.” He frowned. “Terry, what is
+it? You’re not still sore about that silly kite, are you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is that what you’re worried about?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What makes you think I’m worried?” She turned around.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re in another of those miles-away moods again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hmm. Do you want to go?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I said I would.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard stood up. “Yep,” he said casually, with a sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese watched him idle over to the couch and stand there,
+looking down at the manuscript. Then he bent over, studying
+<a id="page-91" class="pagenum" title="91"></a>
+the title page, and the cast pages. He looked at his wrist watch,
+and then at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why don’t I read it now?” he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard sat up, smiling a little, surprisedly. “’S matter,
+Terry?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Richard, I feel like being alone—the rest of the afternoon.
+Would you mind?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-92" class="pagenum" title="92"></a>
+“Oh, swell. Thanks.” He took it in both hands. It was still
+wrapped. “Where’d you find it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Frankenberg’s. Of all places.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Frankenberg’s.” Richard smiled. “It’s six bucks, isn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, that’s all right.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard had his wallet out. “But I asked you to get it for
+me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Never mind, really.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol called at ten past six. Did she feel like going to
+Chinatown, Carol asked. Therese said, of course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Some sort of Christmas benefit cocktail party?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol laughed. “Hurry up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese flew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who’s he?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“An old friend. Seeing more of me now that Harge and I
+are separating.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked at her. Carol had a wonderful little smile in
+her eyes tonight. “Do you like him?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Soso,” Carol said. “Driver, will you make that Chinatown
+instead of the other?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-93" class="pagenum" title="93"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-10">
+<a id="page-94" class="pagenum" title="94"></a>
+chapter ten
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-95" class="pagenum" title="95"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese took a deep breath of relief. “Yes,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A set grows out of the needs of the actors. This isn’t a
+ballet set you’re designing, Miss Belivet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded, looking at the model, too, and trying to see how
+it possibly was better, possibly more functional.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The carpenter’s coming in this afternoon about four. We’ll
+get together and have a talk about this.” Mr. Donohue went
+out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <a id="corr-7"></a>gray
+<a id="page-96" class="pagenum" title="96"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is your name Beliver?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese turned to the girl in the doorway. “Belivet. Telephone?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The phone by the lights.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks.” Therese hurried, hoping it was Carol, knowing
+more likely it was Richard. Carol hadn’t yet called her here.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello, this is Abby.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Abby?” Therese smiled. “How’d you know I was here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You told me, remember? I’d like to see you. I’m not far
+away. Have you had lunch yet?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They agreed to meet at the Palermo, a restaurant a block or
+two from the Black Cat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hi,” Abby said as she came up. “You’re looking very chipper.
+I almost didn’t recognize you. Would you like a drink?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese shook her head. “No, thanks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mean, you’re so happy without it?” Abby asked, and
+she chuckled with that secret amusement that in Abby was
+somehow not offensive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How is Carol?” Therese asked. She had not seen Carol in
+three days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She’s very fine,” Abby said, watching her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The waiter came, and Abby asked him if he could recommend
+the mussels and the scaloppine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-97" class="pagenum" title="97"></a>
+“Excellent, madame!” He beamed at her as if she were a
+special customer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Abby said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Try the mussels.” Abby was eating hers with gusto. “Carol
+likes these, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you known Carol a long time?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Um-hm,” Abby nodded, looking at her with the bright
+eyes that revealed nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you know her husband, too, of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abby nodded again, silently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled a little. Abby was out to question her, she
+felt, but not to disclose anything about herself or about Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did you always live by yourself?” Abby asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-98" class="pagenum" title="98"></a>
+“Yes. Since I got out of school.” Therese sipped her wine.
+“Do you? Or do you live with your family?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With my family. But I’ve got my own half of the house.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And do you work?” Therese ventured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So I’ve heard.” Therese smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think you believe me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, I do. Do you still work at that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m on reserve. Just in time of emergency, I work. Like
+Easter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese watched Abby’s fork cutting the scaloppine into
+small bites before she picked any up. “Do you take trips a lot
+with Carol?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A lot? No, why?” Abby asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How’d you meet Carol?” Abby asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Didn’t Carol tell you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She just said she met you at Frankenberg’s when you had a
+job there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, that’s how,” Therese said, feeling a resentment in
+her against Abby building up, incontrollably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You just started talking?” Abby asked with a smile, lighting
+a cigarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-99" class="pagenum" title="99"></a>
+“I waited on her,” Therese said, and stopped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you mind telling me who started talking first?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You like her a lot, don’t you?” Abby asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese explored it for hostility. It was not hostile, but jealous.
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do I? Why do you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abby’s eyes still laughed. “I’ve known Carol since she was
+four years old.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese said nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re awfully young, aren’t you? Are you twenty-one?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Not quite.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know Carol’s got a lot of worries right now, don’t
+you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And she’s lonely now,” Abby added, her eyes watching.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you mean that’s why she sees me?” Therese asked
+calmly. “Do you want to tell me I shouldn’t see her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d never hurt Carol,” Therese said. “Do you think I
+would?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-100" class="pagenum" title="100"></a>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese put her cigarette out. “Is Carol going to be there?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. She won’t be. But they’re all easy to get along with.
+It’s a small party.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks. I don’t think I should go. I may have to work late
+today, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh. I was going to give you the address anyway, but if you
+won’t come—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abby said, “Carol thinks a lot of you, you know. She says
+you have a lot of talent.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does she?” Therese said, only half believing it. “She never
+told me.” She wanted to walk faster, but Abby held their pace
+back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must know she thinks a lot of you, if she wants you to
+take a trip with her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sure she will. You’ll go with her, won’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-101" class="pagenum" title="101"></a>
+Abby stopped walking. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to her.
+“I think I understand better now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Understand what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just—that you win.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Win what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What,” Abby echoed with her head up, looking up at the
+corner of a building, at the sky, and Therese suddenly felt furiously
+impatient.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese took it. “So long,” she said. She watched Abby walking
+toward Washington Square, her step quicker now, her curly
+head high.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese went into the drugstore at the next corner and called
+Carol. She got the maid and then Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter?” Carol asked. “You sound low.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing. It’s dull at work.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you doing anything tonight? Would you like to come
+out?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dannie!” she called.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dannie turned and walked toward her. “Come by for a few
+minutes?” he yelled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dannie smiled down at her. “What time is it? I’ve been
+studying till I’m blind.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-102" class="pagenum" title="102"></a>
+“It clears my head.” He held the iron gate for her that led
+to his door. “Phil’s out somewhere.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Umm. Vaguely.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-103" class="pagenum" title="103"></a>
+you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs
+that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes
+hidden forever.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Me?” he said, smiling. “Do you want to be my friend?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. But you’re about the strongest person I know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Really? Shall I enumerate my shortcomings?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t remember to take my laundry either.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled. “<em>Even</em> 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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perversities? That’s only a subterfuge. A word used by the
+poets.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought it was used by the psychologists,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-104" class="pagenum" title="104"></a>
+“What?” he persisted, frowning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Like the lunch I just had,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With whom?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Except in your mind? That can still be a loss.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Everything’s not as simple as a lot of combinations,”
+Therese added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“About the match?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-105" class="pagenum" title="105"></a>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She thought of the green woolen gloves of Sister Alicia that
+she had neither worn nor thrown away. “Yes,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are,” he said, looking at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why did you—” She stopped, because the kiss had so mingled
+tenderness and roughness, she didn’t know how to take
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘<em>Why</em>,’ Terry,” he said, turning away from her, smiling.
+“Did you mind?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-106" class="pagenum" title="106"></a>
+“No,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would Richard mind?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I suppose.” She buttoned her coat. “I must go,” she said,
+moving toward the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dannie swung the door open for her, smiling his easy smile,
+as if nothing had happened. “Come back tomorrow? Come
+for lunch.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I don’t work.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And we couldn’t possibly have lunch.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right, come Monday.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right.” She smiled, too, and put her hand out automatically
+and Dannie shook it once, politely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-11">
+<a id="page-107" class="pagenum" title="107"></a>
+chapter eleven
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese said nothing. She hadn’t told Carol all the conversation
+at lunch, but she didn’t want to talk about Abby any more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you want to sit in a more comfortable chair?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What else did Abby say that bothers you?” Carol asked,
+still looking straight before her, down her long legs in the
+navy-blue slacks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol seemed tired. She was worried about other things,
+Therese thought, more important things than this. “Nothing.
+Does it bother you, Carol?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bother me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re different with me tonight.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol glanced at her. “You imagine,” she said, and the
+pleasant vibration of her voice faded into silence again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The page she had written last night, Therese thought, had
+nothing to do with this Carol, was not addressed to her. <em>I feel
+I am in love with you</em>, she had written, <em>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.</em>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think Abby likes me,” Therese remarked. “I don’t
+think she wants me to see you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s not true. You’re imagining again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-108" class="pagenum" title="108"></a>
+“Whose party?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know. She said uptown. She said you wouldn’t be
+there, so I didn’t particularly want to go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where uptown?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She didn’t say. Just that one of the girls giving it was an
+actress.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese got up, and sat down at the very foot of the glider.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mustn’t think Abby feels that way about you. I know
+her well enough to know she wouldn’t.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But Abby’s incredibly clumsy sometimes in the way she
+talks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol poked her with the back of her toe. “Hop up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will there be anything else, ma’am?” Florence asked.
+“Shall I put out the lights?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, I like the lights. We won’t need anything else, thanks.
+Did Mrs. Riordan call?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not yet, ma’am.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you tell her I’m out when she does?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-109" class="pagenum" title="109"></a>
+“Yes, ma’am.” Florence hesitated, “I was wondering if you
+were finished with that new book, ma’am. The one about the
+Alps.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Go in my room and get it, if you’d like it, Florence. I don’t
+think I want to finish it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you, ma’am. Good night, ma’am. Good night, miss.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good night,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Carol was pouring the coffee, Therese asked, “Have
+you decided how soon you’re going away?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Maybe in about a week.” Carol handed her the demitasse
+with cream in it. “Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just that I’ll miss you. Of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There it was, Therese thought, as casual as if she suggested
+their taking a walk together. “You mentioned it to Abby,
+didn’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Carol said. “Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Therese said. No, but it was the undercurrents, it was
+worse. She felt Carol’s hands leave her shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Abby’s a very old friend of mine,” Carol said. “I talk over
+everything with her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, do you think you’d like to go?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-110" class="pagenum" title="110"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is it?” Carol asked, watching her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese felt Carol had been reading all her thoughts. “It’s
+a picture of Rindy,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of Rindy? Let’s see it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese had supposed that from the conversation in the
+kitchen that morning with Abby. “Is that in New Jersey, too?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh. But you’ll see her again before March, won’t you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A few times. Probably not much.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked at Carol’s hand holding the photograph, beside
+her on the glider, carelessly. “Won’t she miss you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, but she’s very fond of her father, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fonder than she is of you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-111" class="pagenum" title="111"></a>
+“You didn’t see her Christmas, did you?” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You won’t even visit her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why isn’t the family cordial?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do they criticize you for?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They sound horrid.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sometimes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-112" class="pagenum" title="112"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know that,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t see how he could be so much in love with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <em>know</em>, know anything,
+<a id="page-113" class="pagenum" title="113"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re the young generation,” Carol said. “And what have
+you got to say?” She sat down on the glider.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Or a city.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you’re even afraid to take a little trip with me. You’re
+afraid because you think you haven’t got enough money.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s not it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese was smiling. “I don’t care about the money,” she
+said quietly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just that,” Therese said. “I’ve got the money to go. I’ll go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol stared at her. Therese saw the sullenness leave her
+face, and then Carol began to smile, too, with surprise, a little
+incredulously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, all right,” Carol said. “I’m delighted.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m delighted.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-114" class="pagenum" title="114"></a>
+“What brought this happy change about?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Doesn’t she really know, Therese thought. “You do seem
+to care whether I go or not,” Therese said simply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went out and across the hall, to the door of Carol’s
+room. “What are you doing?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fine.” A smile spread over her face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why don’t you get ready for bed first? It’s late, do you
+know that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It always gets late with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is that a compliment?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t feel like going to bed tonight.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol crossed the hall to the green room. “You get ready.
+You’ve got circles under your eyes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-115" class="pagenum" title="115"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was Carol on the telephone again?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I don’t like it,” she heard Carol say, half angry, half
+joking, “one damn bit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<em>... it’s easy to live ... when you’re in love ...</em>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do I know what kind of people they are?...
+Oh-ho! Is that so?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, we’re going,” Carol said emphatically. “Well, I am.
+Don’t I sound it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<em>... 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 ...</em>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol said, “That’s nobody’s business but mine, is it?...
+Nonsense!” and Therese smiled at her vehemence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese closed the door. The phonograph had dropped another
+record.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why don’t you come say hello to Abby?” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese had ducked behind the bathroom door because she
+was naked. “Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come along,” Carol said, and Therese put on a robe and
+went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello,” Abby said. “I hear you’re going.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is that news to you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you forgive me if I was rude today?” Abby said for
+the second time. “I like you O.K., Therese.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Cut it, cut it!” Carol called down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She wants to talk to you again,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-116" class="pagenum" title="116"></a>
+“Tell Abigail I’m in the tub.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese told her, and got away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol had brought a bottle and two little glasses into the
+room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter with Abby?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know. But why did she want to have lunch with me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well—I guess a lot of reasons. Try some of this stuff.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It just seems vague,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What does?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The whole lunch.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol gave her a glass. “Some things are always vague, darling.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the first time Carol had called her darling. “What
+things?” Therese asked. She wanted an answer, a definite answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol sighed. “A lot of things. The most important things.
+Taste your drink.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese sipped it, sweet and dark brown, like coffee, with
+the sting of alcohol. “Tastes good.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You would think so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do you drink it if you don’t like it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hum it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She whistled part of it, and Carol smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Easy Living,’” Carol said. “That’s an old one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d like to hear it again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d like you to get to bed. I’ll play it again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol went into the green room, and stayed there while it
+played. Therese stood by the door of her room, listening,
+smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<em>... I’ll never regret ... the years I’m giving ...
+<a id="page-117" class="pagenum" title="117"></a>
+They’re easy to give, when you’re in love ... I’m happy to
+do whatever I do for you ...</em>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hey!” Carol called. “Have you ever been to Wyoming?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s time you saw America.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I won’t.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, some people do.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tell me more about Harge,” she said as she dried herself.
+“What does he do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A lot of things.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I mean, what’s his business?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Real estate investment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s he like? Does he like to go to the theater? Does
+he like people?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled. “Not yours.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can I have some more of this?” Therese asked, looking at
+the liqueur bottle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can I kiss you good night?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol was folding the road map, pursing her lips as if she
+<a id="page-118" class="pagenum" title="118"></a>
+would whistle, waiting. “No,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why not?” Anything seemed possible tonight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll give you this instead.” Carol pulled her hand out of
+her pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a check. Therese read the sum, two hundred dollars,
+made out to her. “What’s this for?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I don’t need it,” Therese said. “Thanks. I don’t care
+if I spend the union money.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No back talk,” Carol interrupted her. “It gives me pleasure,
+remember?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To give me pleasure?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese’s smile broadened. “Yes,” she said, and picked up
+the little glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right,” Carol said. “I’ll think. Good night.” Carol had
+stopped by the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a funny way of saying good night, Therese thought,
+on such an important night. “Good night,” Therese answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-12">
+<a id="page-119" class="pagenum" title="119"></a>
+chapter twelve
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+January.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A young man named Red Malone and a baldheaded carpenter
+worked with her on the <em>Small Rain</em> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,
+<a id="page-120" class="pagenum" title="120"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh. Do you suppose you—or he could arrange for me to
+see Harkevy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And don’t forget to call Kettering,” Mr. Baltin said as he
+left.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, how’s the old Cat?” Phil asked her, dragging up a
+stool for her. “Working Saturdays, too?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The cast didn’t work. Just my department,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When’s the opening?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The twenty-first.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look,” Richard said. He pointed to a spot of dark-green
+paint on her skirt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know. I did that days ago.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What would you like to drink?” Phil asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard’s mouth was down at both corners. “Had to pinch
+<a id="page-121" class="pagenum" title="121"></a>
+hit for some driver who was sick. Ran out of gas in the middle
+of Long Island.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll paint if you’ll sit for me,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese hesitated uncomfortably. “I just don’t feel in the
+mood for sitting these days.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right. It’s not important.” He smiled. “But how can I
+ever paint you if you’ll never sit?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why don’t you do it out of the air?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Phil slid his hand out and held the bottom of her glass.
+“Don’t drink that. Have something better. I’ll drink this.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right. I’ll try a rye and water.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <em>Metamorphosis</em>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I might,” Therese said. “Are you really going to try to get
+it produced?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why not?” Phil’s dark eyes challenged her above his smile.
+He snapped his fingers at the barman. “Check?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll pay,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, you won’t. This is mine.” Phil had his old black
+wallet in his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His play would never be produced, Therese thought, might
+not even be finished, because Phil’s moods were capricious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll be moving along,” Phil said. “Drop by soon, Terry.
+Cheerio, Rich.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She watched him go off and up the little front stairs, shabbier
+<a id="page-122" class="pagenum" title="122"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I hear you took Phil sandwiches and beer New Year’s Day,”
+Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. He called up and said he had a hangover.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why didn’t you mention it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I forgot, I suppose. It wasn’t important.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you did, you had plenty of people to get them for you.
+We’d eaten and drunk everything in Phil’s house. Remember?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard nodded his long head, still smiling the downward,
+disgruntled smile. “And you were alone with him, just the two
+of you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If any other girl did that, I’d suspect something was brewing
+and I’d be right,” Richard went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think you’re being silly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Whoever said I was? Phil?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-123" class="pagenum" title="123"></a>
+“He hasn’t any right to say that. I don’t discuss you with
+him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s Phil suddenly got against you?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s not the point!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is the point?” she said impatiently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, Terry, let’s stop it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard plunged his cigarette into the ash tray on the bar.
+“What do you want to do tonight?” he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-124" class="pagenum" title="124"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Want to eat here? Are you hungry yet?” Richard asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Let’s go somewhere else.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So they went out and walked north, in the general direction
+of where Sam and Joan lived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese rehearsed the first words until all their sense was
+rubbed out. “Remember Mrs. Aird, the woman you met in my
+house that day?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sure.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“West? California?” Richard said surprisedly. “Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well—do you know her as well as that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve seen her a few times.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When would you be leaving?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Around the eighteenth.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of this month?—Then you won’t get to see your show.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s so much to miss.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then it’s definite?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was silent a moment. “What kind of a person is she?
+She doesn’t drink or anything, does she?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.” Therese smiled. “Does she look like she drinks?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I think she’s very good looking, in fact. It’s just
+damned surprising, that’s all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You so seldom make up your mind about anything. You’ll
+probably change your mind again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-125" class="pagenum" title="125"></a>
+“Maybe I can see her again sometime with you. Why don’t
+you arrange it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard didn’t continue and neither did Therese. They did
+not mention Carol again that evening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol looked at her. “Did you tell Richard we might go on
+a trip?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. Last night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“West?” Richard asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d like to go up to the Northwest. It depends on the
+roads.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-126" class="pagenum" title="126"></a>
+“Washington’s my home state,” Carol said. “Practically.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Shall I hunt up some peanuts?” Richard asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you feed squirrels out where you live?” Richard asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Squirrels and chipmunks,” Carol replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What dull things they talked of, Therese thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Rumpelmayer’s is right here,” Richard said. “Do you like
+Rumpelmayer’s?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-127" class="pagenum" title="127"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, none of that, thanks,” Carol said, shaking her head
+at the great tray of pastry the waitress was holding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Richard chose something, chose two pastries, though
+Therese had declined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <a id="corr-8"></a>face, the receding twist of blond hair
+above the usual hairline. Carol must have seen him, only
+three tables away to her left.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Therese saw Carol mash out a long cigarette. Richard
+had stopped talking. They were ready to leave. Therese was
+<a id="page-128" class="pagenum" title="128"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol,” Harge said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello, Harge.” She turned to Therese and Richard.
+“Would you excuse me a minute?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can we get free now, Terry?” Richard asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sorry,” Carol said as she rejoined them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh.” Richard frowned. “I had those concert tickets for tonight,
+you know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese remembered suddenly. “Alex’s. I forgot. I’m
+sorry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He said gloomily, “It’s not important.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’d rather see her than me, wouldn’t you?” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Was that her husband?” Richard’s eyes narrowed under
+his frown. “What is this, Terry?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s what?” she said. “I don’t know her husband.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard waited a moment, then the frown left his eyes. He
+smiled, as if he conceded he had been unreasonable. “Sorry. I
+<a id="page-129" class="pagenum" title="129"></a>
+just took it for granted I’d see you tonight.” He walked toward
+Carol. “Good night,” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked as if he were leaving by himself, and Carol said,
+“Are you going downtown? Maybe I can drop you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m walking, thanks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought you two had a date,” Carol said to Therese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese glanced at Richard, and saw that he had heard her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bye-bye, Therese,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good night,” Richard called.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good night,” Therese said, and watched Carol pull the
+taxi door shut after her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So,” Richard said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To her surprise, Richard stepped back and said angrily, “All
+right, don’t!” and turned away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-13">
+<a id="page-130" class="pagenum" title="130"></a>
+chapter thirteen
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+Richard began it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do you like her so much?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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. <em>I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched,
+and you are raining down upon me.</em>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve got a hell of a crush on her,” Richard announced,
+explanatorily and resentfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t understand,” she said. She felt so very sure of
+herself. <em>I will comb you like music caught in the heads of all
+the trees in the forest....</em>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not fair to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s she doing, amusing herself with you? And then one
+day she’ll get tired of you and kick you out.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-131" class="pagenum" title="131"></a>
+“You’re in a daze!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He frowned. “Leave you alone?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mean, about Europe, too?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just because I don’t want to argue with you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s worse than being lovesick, because it’s so completely unreasonable.
+Don’t you understand that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No, she didn’t understand a word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat back. “Wednesday, next Saturday, you won’t feel like
+this at all. You haven’t known her three weeks yet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Therese, you’re like a person gone so crazy, you think
+you’re saner than ever!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, let’s stop it!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-132" class="pagenum" title="132"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do you make so much out of it?” she asked. “You’re
+practically in a frenzy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You make enough out of it to want to say good-by to me!
+What do you know about her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do <em>you</em> know about her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did she ever make any passes at you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wonder sometimes why you think you like me, or did like
+me. Because you didn’t even know me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You don’t know yourself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s not true,” Richard said sullenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+<a id="page-133" class="pagenum" title="133"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well—yes. It’s part of your hanging on when you know it’s
+hopeless, and when you know you’ll finally let go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will not!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Richard, there’s no point—!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re going to change your mind, you know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She understood that. It was like a song he kept singing to
+her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What logic,” he said, rubbing the heel of his hand into his
+eye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-134" class="pagenum" title="134"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese turned and tossed into the overnight bag her toothbrush
+and her hairbrush, then remembered she had a toothbrush
+at Carol’s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just what do you want from her, Therese? Where’s it going
+to go from here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why are you so interested?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard sighed, and twisted the newspaper in his hands. “I’m
+interested in <em>you</em>. 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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She didn’t answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Damn!” Richard threw the newspaper at the bookshelf, and
+turned his back on her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-135" class="pagenum" title="135"></a>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Terry!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Madonna lay in three or four pieces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Never mind it,” she said. Her heart was beating as if she
+were angry, or fighting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To hell with it!” she said, pushing the pieces aside with her
+shoe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Richard left a moment later, slamming the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re not used to thinking of other people’s feelings,”
+Carol said bluntly to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were in the kitchen fixing a late dinner, because Carol
+had given the maid the evening off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What real reason have you to think he’s not in love with
+you?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Maybe I just don’t understand how he works. But it doesn’t
+seem like love to me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-136" class="pagenum" title="136"></a>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know—I think it fascinates him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It probably does.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A classic—” Her voice sounded tight and stifled. “A classic
+is something with a basic human situation.”
+</p>
+
+<p class="tb">
+* * *
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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
+<a id="page-137" class="pagenum" title="137"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Florence was in the kitchen when she went down, but she
+had only just started the coffee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-138" class="pagenum" title="138"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does she? She always used to eat two.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well—she doesn’t now,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Shouldn’t you measure that egg anyway, miss?” Florence
+gave her the pleasant professional smile. “Here’s the egg timer,
+top of the stove.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wish there were more plays that happened out of doors,”
+Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you think of first when you start to make a set?”
+Carol asked. “What do you start from?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The mood of the play, I suppose. What do you mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you think of the kind of play it is, or of something you
+want to see?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think you’re rather subjective. That’s amateurish, isn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-139" class="pagenum" title="139"></a>
+“Not always.” But she knew what Carol meant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think a look at the West would do you good. When did
+you say you had to be back? The middle of February?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, now I don’t—I just heard yesterday.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean? It fell through? The Philadelphia
+job?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They called me up. They want somebody from Philadelphia.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, baby. I’m sorry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You weren’t going to tell me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, I was.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sometime on the trip.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you very disappointed?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Therese said positively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They heated the last cup of coffee and took it out to the white
+chair on the lawn and shared it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I’d particularly like to see you in one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-140" class="pagenum" title="140"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese did not want to see him. “Would you like for me to
+take a walk?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled. “No. Stay up here and read a book, if you want
+to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese got the book she had bought yesterday, the <em>Oxford
+Book of English Verse</em>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Harge, this is Miss Belivet. I think you met her once,”
+Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Harge’s eyes narrowed a little, then opened. “Oh, yes. How
+do you do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do you do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Florence came in, and Carol handed the flower box to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would you put these in something?” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, here’s that pipe. I thought so.” Harge reached behind
+the ivy on the mantel, and brought forth a pipe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Everything is fine at home?” Carol asked as she sat down at
+the end of the sofa.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-141" class="pagenum" title="141"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“May I take one for Rindy?” Harge asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, we were,” Carol said. “By the way, I’d like to drive
+over one afternoon next week. Perhaps Tuesday.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Harge thought a moment. “All right. I’ll tell her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll speak to her on the phone. I meant tell your family.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Harge nodded once, in acquiescence, then looked at Therese.
+“Yes, I remember you. Of course. You were here about three
+weeks ago. Before Christmas.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. One Sunday.” Therese stood up. She wanted to leave
+them alone. “I’ll go upstairs,” she said to Carol. “Good-by, Mr.
+Aird.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Harge made her a little bow. “Good-by.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she went up the stairs, she heard Harge say, “Well, many
+happy returns, Carol. I’d like to say it. Do you mind?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol’s birthday, Therese thought. Of course, Carol wouldn’t
+have told her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come in.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol said you do stage designing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-142" class="pagenum" title="142"></a>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Therese!” Carol called suddenly. “Come down!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, ma’am.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol winked at Therese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” Carol laughed. “It’s not. It’s my wedding anniversary.
+Get your coat and let’s go.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they backed out of the driveway, Carol said, “If there’s
+anything I can’t stand, it’s a hypocrite.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What did he say?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing of any importance.” Carol was still smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you said he was a hypocrite.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Par excellence.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pretending all this good humor?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh—just partially that.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did he say anything about me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-143" class="pagenum" title="143"></a>
+“Carol, I never took that check, you know,” Therese remarked
+suddenly. “I stuck it under the cloth on the table by
+the bed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What made you think of that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know. Do you want me to tear it up? I started to
+that night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you insist,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-14">
+<a id="page-144" class="pagenum" title="144"></a>
+chapter fourteen
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese was just closing the car door, when Mrs. Osborne
+called her from the front steps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Telephone call!” Mrs. Osborne shouted, and reluctantly
+Therese got out, thinking it was Richard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<em>Winter Town</em>. 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
+<a id="page-145" class="pagenum" title="145"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know any address to give you yet,” Therese said.
+“I know we’ll get to Chicago.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Phil said he might drop her a letter general delivery there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Was that Richard?” Carol asked when she came back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Phil McElroy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So you haven’t heard from Richard?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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. “<span class="scall">I HAVE NOT CHANGED. NEITHER HAVE YOU.
+WRITE TO ME. I LOVE YOU. RICHARD.</span>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think you should call him,” Carol said. “Call him from
+my house.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were going to spend the night at Carol’s house and
+leave early in the morning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you put on that dress tonight?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll try it on. It looks like a wedding dress.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look,” Therese said, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s so elaborate.” She didn’t want to wear it, because it
+made her think of Richard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What the hell kind of style is it, Russian?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese gave a laugh. She liked the way Carol cursed, always
+casually, and when no one else could hear her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-146" class="pagenum" title="146"></a>
+“Is it?” Carol repeated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese was going upstairs. “Is it what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where did you get this habit of not answering people?”
+Carol demanded, her voice suddenly harsh with anger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Go ahead,” Carol said, turning away. “Go on up and take
+it off.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Abby brought it? Last night?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I suppose.” Carol went on to the car with the monkey
+and a suitcase.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-147" class="pagenum" title="147"></a>
+have heard Abby’s car last night. Therese helped Carol arrange
+the suitcases and the lap rug in the back of the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why didn’t she come in?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, that’s Abby,” Carol said with a smile, with the fleeting
+shyness that always surprised Therese. “Why don’t you
+go call Richard?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Call his family then. Aren’t you going to thank them for
+the box they sent you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was going to write them a letter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Call them now, and you won’t have to write them a letter.
+It’s much nicer to call anyway.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Semco answered the telephone. Therese praised the
+dress and Mrs. Semco’s needlework, and thanked her for all
+the food and the wine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese said yes. And she promised she would write. Afterward,
+she felt better because she had called.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“... at—uh—Mr. Byron’s. It’s a farm. Have you ever
+been there, Mother?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where is it, sweetheart?” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At Mr. Byron’s. He has horses. But not the kind you
+would like.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh. Why not?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, these are heavy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-148" class="pagenum" title="148"></a>
+Therese tried to hear anything in the shrill, rather matter-of-fact
+voice that resembled Carol’s voice, but she couldn’t.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello,” Rindy said. “Mother?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m still here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve got to say good-by now. Daddy’s ready to leave.”
+And she coughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you got a cough?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then don’t cough into the phone.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wish you would take me on the trip.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I can’t because you’re in school. But we’ll have trips
+this summer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can you still call me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She sounds so serious,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She was telling me all about the big day yesterday. Harge
+let her play hooky.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese took a sip from Carol’s half-finished coffee on the
+kitchen table, drank from the place where the lipstick was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-149" class="pagenum" title="149"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why so silent?” Carol asked. “What’s the matter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know what I forgot?” Carol said. “A raincoat. I’ll
+have to pick one up somewhere.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol, did you get that check?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That check I gave you?—You said you were going to tear
+it up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t. It’s still under the cloth.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, it’s not important,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When they stopped for gas, Therese tried to buy some stout,
+which Carol liked sometimes, at a grocery store next to the
+<a id="page-150" class="pagenum" title="150"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caviar. How very, very nice of them,” Carol said, looking
+inside a sandwich. “Do you like caviar?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I wish I did.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. “It’s an acquired
+taste. Acquired tastes are always more pleasant—and
+hard to get rid of.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I remember.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How’d you happen to put cream in it that day?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought you’d like it. Why were you so nervous?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-151" class="pagenum" title="151"></a>
+“Did you say Washington was your home state?” Therese
+asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was born there, and my father’s there now. I wrote him
+I might visit him, if we get out that far.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does he look like you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do I look like him, yes—more than like my mother.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s strange to think of you with a family,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because I just think of you as you. <em>Sui generis.</em>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled, her head lifted as she drove. “All right, go
+ahead.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Brothers and sisters?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes. Therese could imagine her, like a shadow of Carol,
+with all Carol’s features weakened and diluted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I never told you about the train in Frankenberg’s,” Therese
+remarked to Carol. “Did you notice it when you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“An electric train?” Carol interrupted her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese had been smiling, but something constricted her
+heart suddenly. It was too complicated to go into, and the
+conversation stopped there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol ordered some soup for both of them. They were stiff
+and cold from the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-152" class="pagenum" title="152"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol answered. “No, I haven’t. I suppose you’ve been. Did
+you make the village in the window?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded. “Took me five years to make.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-153" class="pagenum" title="153"></a>
+“Therese—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“See anything else?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol picked up her change. “What woman?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t really want to send her anything.” Therese wanted
+suddenly to leave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol frowned at her through her cigarette smoke. “Do it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t want to. Let’s go, Carol.” It was like the nightmare
+again, when she couldn’t get away from her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Send it,” Carol said. “Close the door and send her something.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Please don’t mention her again, will you, Carol? Promise
+me.”
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-15">
+<a id="page-154" class="pagenum" title="154"></a>
+chapter fifteen
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s your fault for opening the window so high,” Therese
+said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol pulled the curtain across, and Therese heard the
+shower come on with a rush. “Ah, divinely hot!” Carol said.
+“Better than last night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a luxurious tourist cabin, with a thick carpet and
+wood-paneled walls and everything from cellophane-sealed
+shoe rags to television.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ohio. Noted for rivers, rubber, and certain railroads. On
+our left the famous Chillicothe drawbridge, where twenty-eight
+Hurons once massacred a hundred—morons.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-155" class="pagenum" title="155"></a>
+“No.” Therese wrapped the gun up again and put it back
+as she had found it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Darling, I forgot my towel. I think it’s on a chair.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese took a shower, and when she came out, Carol was
+standing at the mirror, almost dressed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During breakfast, Therese said, “Why did you bring that
+gun along, Carol?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it loaded?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, it’s loaded. Harge got a permit, because we had a
+burglar at the house once.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can you use it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-156" class="pagenum" title="156"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Anything?” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just a post card. From Dannie. He’s finished his exams.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know a few people here,” she said sleepily. “Shall we
+look somebody up?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-157" class="pagenum" title="157"></a>
+But Carol fell asleep before they quite decided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why don’t you ring for some cocktails?” Carol’s voice said
+behind her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What kind would you like?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What kind would you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Martinis.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol whistled. “Double Gibsons,” Carol interrupted her as
+she was telephoning. “And a plate of canapés. Might as well
+get four Martinis.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cocktails arrived, and Therese paid for them instead of
+signing. She could never pay a bill except behind Carol’s back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you wear your black suit?” Therese asked when Carol
+came in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We’ll be a half hour drinking these.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your powers of persuasion are irresistible.” Carol took the
+suit into the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the suit she had worn the day they had had the first
+lunch together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-158" class="pagenum" title="158"></a>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re beautiful,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My little orphan,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the
+word when Carol said it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What does your mother look like?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You really don’t think she’ll ever want to see you again?”
+Carol was standing at the mirror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What about your father’s family. Didn’t you say he had a
+brother?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-159" class="pagenum" title="159"></a>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s your mother’s name now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-160" class="pagenum" title="160"></a>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol, would you mind—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It just is. It’s terribly funny,” Therese said, still laughing,
+laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re giggly on champagne,” Carol said as she put the
+light out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What road do we take out?” Carol’s face looked happier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Twenty, going west.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dubuque,” Therese said, looking at the map. “Or Waterloo
+looks fairly big, but it’s about two hundred miles away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We might make it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They took Highway 20 toward Freeport and Galena, which
+was starred on the map as the home of Ulysses S. Grant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What did Abby say?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing much. Just a very nice letter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You wish Abby’d come along, don’t you?” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re so different since you got the letter from her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol looked at her across the table. “Darling, it’s just a silly
+<a id="page-161" class="pagenum" title="161"></a>
+letter. You can even read it if you want to.” Carol reached for
+her handbag, but she did not get the letter out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Here’s where we stay the night,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’re you standing there for?” Carol asked. “Get to bed,
+sleepyhead.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol, I love you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you know I love you?” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol took her pajamas into the bedroom, and stood for a
+moment, looking down at the basin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m going out,” Carol said. “But I’ll be back right away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can I sleep with you?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-162" class="pagenum" title="162"></a>
+“Did you see the bed?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Go to sleep,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-163" class="pagenum" title="163"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My angel,” Carol said. “Flung out of space.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What town is this?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol laughed. “This? This is Waterloo.” She reached for a
+cigarette. “Isn’t that awful.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-16">
+<a id="page-164" class="pagenum" title="164"></a>
+chapter sixteen
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The <em>Courier</em> and the <em>Tribune</em>,” she said to the man, taking
+them, and even to utter words was as strange as the names of
+the newspapers she bought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-165" class="pagenum" title="165"></a>
+there were tears in her eyes. It was hard to find words, locked
+in Carol’s arms, closer than kissing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why did you wait so long?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because—I thought there wouldn’t be a second time, that I
+wouldn’t want it. But that’s not true.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese thought of Abby, and it was like a slim shaft of bitterness
+dropping between them. Carol released her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Was it?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ve made me so happy ever since I’ve known you,”
+Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think you can judge.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can judge this morning.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I love you,” Therese said, just to hear the words. “I love
+you, I love you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-166" class="pagenum" title="166"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did you ever do that with Abby?” Therese asked abruptly
+that evening in the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol’s eyes understood suddenly and she blinked. “What
+questions you ask,” she said. “Of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course. She had known it. “And now—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Therese—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She asked stiffly, “Was it very much the same as with me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled. “No, darling.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you think it’s more pleasant than sleeping with
+men?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her smile was amused. “Not necessarily. That depends. Who
+have you ever known except Richard?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, don’t you think you’d better try some others?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese was speechless for a moment, but she tried to be
+casual, drumming her fingers on the book in her lap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I mean sometime, darling. You’ve got a lot of years ahead.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you just a habit?” she asked, smiling, but she heard
+the resentment in her voice. “You mean it’s nothing but that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Therese—of all times to get so melancholic.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-167" class="pagenum" title="167"></a>
+Carol started a little, and put her foot down. “Abby has
+loved me practically all her life—even as you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese stared at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll tell you about it one day. Whatever happened is past.
+Months and months ago,” she said, so softly Therese could
+hardly hear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Only months?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tell me now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This isn’t the time or the place.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s never a time,” Therese said. “Didn’t you say there
+never was a right time?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did I say that? About what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Were you in school with her?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-168" class="pagenum" title="168"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese stared at her, not knowing if it was jealousy or
+shock or anger that was suddenly jumbling everything. “And
+after that?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But if you felt the same way about her—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For two months?” Carol said. “When you have a husband
+and child, you know, it’s a little different.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-169" class="pagenum" title="169"></a>
+Different from her, Carol meant, because she hadn’t any responsibilities.
+“Is it? You can just start and stop?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When you haven’t got a chance,” Carol answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re hardly in a state to talk.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why are you so cynical?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Cynical? Am I?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s letting up,” Carol said. “How about going on and finding
+a good brandy somewhere? Or is this a dry state?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s French brandy,” Carol said. “Someday we’ll go to
+France.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Harge knows about Abby, doesn’t he?” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. He asked me something about her a few months ago—and
+I told him the whole thing from start to finish.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You did—” She thought of Richard, imagined how Richard
+would react. “Is that why you’re getting the divorce?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mean—he certainly must have been jealous.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. Because however I chose to tell it, I suppose it came
+<a id="page-170" class="pagenum" title="170"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And taken Rindy with you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know. I know the fact that Rindy existed stopped
+me from leaving Harge then.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you regret it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you afraid now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol was silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am not afraid,” she said stubbornly, lifting her head,
+drawing on her cigarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does he still talk about it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Is it anything to talk about? Is it anything to be proud
+of?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it anything to be ashamed of?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. You know that, don’t you?” Carol asked in her even,
+distinct voice. “In the eyes of the world it’s an abomination.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The way she said it, Therese could not quite smile. “You
+don’t believe that.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“People like Harge’s family.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They’re not the whole world.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-171" class="pagenum" title="171"></a>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why don’t you stop?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll try. The trouble is, I like to indulge you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re exactly the right person for me to know,” Therese
+said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Am I?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He’s not going to know about it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you still want to go to Washington?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Absolutely, if you’ve got the time. Can you stay away all
+of February?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol glanced at her. “As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t,”
+she said with a little smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-172" class="pagenum" title="172"></a>
+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....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you mean that about not writing to him? That’s your
+decision?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s say no more,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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—<em>America</em>. 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
+<a id="page-173" class="pagenum" title="173"></a>
+warned them about ice on the road directly west, so they took
+another highway going south.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What brought this on?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I mean—what was I ever trying to do but this? I’m happy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s going to happen when we get back to New York?
+It can’t be the same, can it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Carol said. “Till you get tired of me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese laughed. She heard the soft snap of Carol’s scarf
+end in the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We might not be living together, but it’ll be the same.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-174" class="pagenum" title="174"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Lusk,” Therese said, looking at the map. “What a sexy
+sounding name.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol put her head back and laughed. “Where is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“On the road.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol picked up her wine glass and said, “Chateau Neuf-du-Pape
+in Nebraska. What’ll we drink to?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They spent the night in Lusk, ninety miles away.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-17">
+<a id="page-175" class="pagenum" title="175"></a>
+chapter seventeen
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+“Mrs. H. F. Aird?” The desk clerk looked at Carol after
+she had signed the register. “Are you Mrs. Carol Aird?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Message for you.” He turned around and got it from a pigeonhole.
+“A telegram.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clerk directed her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve got to pick up another telegram,” Carol said to Therese.
+“Want to wait here while I get it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who from?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Abby.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right. Is it bad news?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Shall I have the bags taken up?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well—just wait. The car is parked.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why can’t I come with you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course, if you want to. Let’s walk. It’s only a couple of
+blocks away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-176" class="pagenum" title="176"></a>
+flashed through Therese’s mind that Abby was dead, that this
+second message was from Abby’s parents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is it? Is Abby sick?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled. “No. I’ll tell you later.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it Rindy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No!” Carol finished her brandy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is it, Carol?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol stood looking out the doorway of the hotel for a moment.
+“Now we go to the Temple Square Hotel,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There they picked up another telegram. Carol opened it and
+glanced at it, and tore it up as they walked to the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think we’ll stay here tonight,” Carol said. “Let’s go
+back to the car.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d like to leave a forwarding address in case of any other
+messages,” she said. “That’s the Brown Palace, Denver.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Right you are.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you very much. That’s good for the next week at
+least.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the car, Carol said, “What’s the next town west?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“West?” Therese looked at the map. “Wendover. This is that
+stretch. A hundred and twenty-seven miles.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Christ!” Carol said suddenly. She stopped the car completely
+and took the map and looked at it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-177" class="pagenum" title="177"></a>
+“What about Denver?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Anything behind us?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.” On the seat between them, Therese could see a piece
+of the telegram sticking out of Carol’s handbag. <span class="scall">GET THIS.
+JACOPO.</span> was all she could read. She remembered Jacopo was
+the name of the little monkey in the back of the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you know what’s up?” she said. “Harge has had a detective
+following us since Chicago.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A detective? What for?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can’t you guess?” Carol said in almost a whisper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese bit her tongue. Yes, she could guess. Harge had
+found out they were traveling together. “Abby told you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked around her. The place was empty. “Following
+us?” she asked. “<em>With</em> us?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+<a id="page-178" class="pagenum" title="178"></a>
+Carol sat back restlessly in her chair. “Maybe I’d better put you
+on a train and send you home.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right—if you think that’s the best idea.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese sat rigidly on the edge of her chair. “What’s he
+doing—making notes about us?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old man was coming back, bringing them glasses of
+water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We got there late. It wouldn’t have been easy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol, I saw someone—I’m not sure, but I think I saw him
+twice.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you think?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol sighed. “What can anyone think? Just watch out for
+him the third time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-179" class="pagenum" title="179"></a>
+Therese looked down at her plate. It was impossible to eat.
+“It’s about Rindy, isn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just because we’re traveling together?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I should leave you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Damn him,” Carol said quietly, looking off at a corner of
+the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese waited. But what was there to wait for? “I can get a
+bus somewhere from here, and then get a train.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you want to go?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course, I don’t. I just think it’s best.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you afraid?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then I’m damned if you’ll go. I want you with me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you mean that?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. Eat your eggs. Stop being silly.” And Carol even
+smiled a little. “Shall we go to Reno as we’d planned?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Any place.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And let’s take our time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Denver?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Denver,” Carol said firmly, and backed the car around.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-18">
+<a id="page-180" class="pagenum" title="180"></a>
+chapter eighteen
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’ll be snow in Estes Park,” Carol said to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s Estes Park?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’ll like it. Not like Yellowstone. It’s open all year.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol, you’re not worried, are you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol pulled her close. “Do I act like I’m worried?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do like it,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It doesn’t mean you don’t have to watch out for our little
+man.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-181" class="pagenum" title="181"></a>
+“What a rotten time I give you, don’t I?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, Carol—” Therese tried to smile. It was only a mood of
+Carol’s, only a moment. But it made Therese feel helpless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Worse than brandy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m going to take you to the nicest place I know this side of
+Sun Valley,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter with Sun Valley?” She knew Carol liked
+skiing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sun Valley just isn’t the place,” Carol said mysteriously.
+“This place is near Colorado Springs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-182" class="pagenum" title="182"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s that,” Carol said. “Now let’s forget it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese knew what she was looking for. “I hadn’t thought of
+it,” she said. “I feel like we’ve lost him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-183" class="pagenum" title="183"></a>
+the bed, and the fact that she didn’t now made her tense and
+alert, filled her with a repressed but reckless exhilaration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I asked her,” Therese said. “She said she’d be ready right
+after lunch.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wear your suède shirt.” Carol took Therese’s face in her
+hands, pressed her cheeks, and kissed her. “Put it on now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m glad,” Therese said when she had gone. “I’d rather be
+alone with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But they were not alone in the bar more than five minutes.
+<a id="page-184" class="pagenum" title="184"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Darling, did you ever think you’ll be seventy-one, too, some
+day?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-185" class="pagenum" title="185"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-186" class="pagenum" title="186"></a>
+the menu, Carol would slowly press Therese’s foot under the
+table to make her smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Must you pick such cold places? When’ll I ever work?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t be dismal. Shall we invite Mrs. French? Think she’d
+mind our holding hands?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <em>The Faint Heart</em> in March.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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. <span class="scall">P.S.</span> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why did Rindy say ‘Love to you and to Abby’?” Therese
+asked. “Does she think you’re with Abby?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I mean, Harge wouldn’t have told her that, would he?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, darling,” Carol said preoccupiedly, reading Abby’s letter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-187" class="pagenum" title="187"></a>
+heard Carol laugh, but she did not read any of the letter aloud
+to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No news?” Therese asked when she was finished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No news.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have a cigarette,” Carol said, offering her one, lighting it
+for her. “He doesn’t know that you can recognize him, does
+he?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Walter came smiling, ardent to serve them, just as he did
+every evening. “Yes, madame.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Two Remy Martins, please, Walter,” Carol told him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-188" class="pagenum" title="188"></a>
+“Do we have to go past him, Carol?” Therese asked. There
+was a door in back of her, into the bar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did the hotel people let him in here, do you think?” Therese
+asked, horrified.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where does it go to?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To some room where it’s recorded. Probably across the hall.
+<em>Bless</em> these fancy wall to wall carpets!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol kicked the dictaphone toward the center of the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How long do you think he could have been here without
+your seeing him?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-189" class="pagenum" title="189"></a>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When do you want to go?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Maybe tomorrow. We’ll get ourselves packed in the morning
+and take off after lunch. What do you think?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One other thing,” Carol said. “Try and find out what kind
+of car he’s in.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-19">
+<a id="page-190" class="pagenum" title="190"></a>
+chapter nineteen
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-191" class="pagenum" title="191"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol!” she called.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol pushed the shower curtain aside and glanced at her
+and stopped drying herself. “Is it—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol groaned. “Oh, don’t. I couldn’t. It bores me,” she said
+with the utmost boredom and disgust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I don’t know if it’s him at all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s just the hell of it, darling.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-192" class="pagenum" title="192"></a>
+advance. There was no light anywhere, and unless the detective
+was watching them with his light out, no one had observed
+them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you want to do, sleep again somewhere?” Carol
+asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Do you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Irritating,” Carol said when they got back into the car,
+and that was all she said, for hours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s a car like that behind us,” she said. “It’s got a yellow
+license plate.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol said nothing for a minute, but she glanced in the
+mirror and blew her breath out through pursed lips. “I doubt
+<a id="page-193" class="pagenum" title="193"></a>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.” Couldn’t she recognize the blurriest glimpse of him
+by now?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” Therese said. The man hadn’t glanced at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol pressed the gas pedal down. “You’re sure, are you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Positive.” Therese watched the speedometer go up to sixty-five
+and over. “What are you going to do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Speak to him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Roll your window down,” Carol said to Therese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The detective’s car pulled over into the sandy shoulder of
+the road and stopped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol stopped her car with its rear wheels on the highway,
+and spoke across Therese. “Do you like our company or what?”
+she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m doing my job, Mrs. Aird,” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s pretty obvious. It’s nasty work, isn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then why don’t you leave us alone,” Carol said, her voice
+as tense as the arm that supported her on the steering wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-194" class="pagenum" title="194"></a>
+“No, I’m not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because I’ve got some information—information that I’d
+say was in your interest to go back and take care of.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My child is my property!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A crease twitched in his cheek. “A human being is not property,
+Mrs. Aird.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol raised her voice. “Are you going to tag along the rest
+of the way?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you going back to New York?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think you will,” the detective said, and he turned away
+slowly toward his car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Get me a cigarette,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Crawl in the back and get the gun,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese did not move for a moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol glanced at her. “Will you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese slid agilely in her slacks over the back seat, and
+<a id="page-195" class="pagenum" title="195"></a>
+dragged the navy-blue suitcase onto the seat. She opened the
+clasps and got out the sweater with the gun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese heard the detective’s car. Carol walked slowly toward
+<a id="page-196" class="pagenum" title="196"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man got out of his car. “Now what?” he said, raising
+his voice in the wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you think?” Carol came a little closer to him.
+“I’d like everything you’ve got about me—dictaphone tapes
+and whatever.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right, I’d like to have them.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You mean, you want to buy them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t say that, I said I’d like to have them. Do you prefer
+to sell them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not one you can buy off,” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He folded his arms. “I told you everything’s sent away.
+You’d be wasting your money.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t think you mailed the dictaphone records yet from
+Colorado Springs,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No?” he asked sarcastically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I’ll give you whatever you ask for them.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked Carol up and down, glanced at Therese, and
+again his mouth widened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Get them—tapes, records or whatever they are,” Carol
+said, and the man moved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s two,” he said. “I guess they’re worth five hundred.
+<a id="page-197" class="pagenum" title="197"></a>
+They’d be worth more if there weren’t more of them in New
+York.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re a fine salesman. I don’t believe you,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t change my mind,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The detective shrugged. “I’m not on any side. The sooner
+you go back to New York, the sooner we can call it quits.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We can call it quits right now. After you give me those,
+you can take off and keep going in the same direction.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol looked at his hand, then opened her shoulder strap
+bag. She took out her billfold, and then her checkbook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I prefer cash,” he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I haven’t got it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shrugged again. “All right, I’ll take a check.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol wrote it, resting it on the fender of his car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How long have you been collecting them?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Play them and see.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t come out here to joke!” Carol said, and her voice
+broke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-198" class="pagenum" title="198"></a>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, let them invent something exciting!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, I think it’s mostly bluff,” Carol said suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it had made Carol’s face gray, had taken the energy
+out of her voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What time is it?” Carol asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Twenty to twelve.” She got back in the car, and Carol
+started immediately, back down the road toward the highway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m going to call Abby in Omaha, and then my lawyer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-199" class="pagenum" title="199"></a>
+“How about my driving?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right,” Carol said tiredly, relaxing as if she surrendered.
+She slowed the car quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese slid across her, under the wheel. “And how about
+stopping for a breakfast?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I couldn’t eat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Or a drink.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s get it in Omaha.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t talk about it!—I’m sick of it!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m thinking of that check,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It fell like another stone inside her. “Do you think they’re
+going over the house?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Possibly. Just possibly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-200" class="pagenum" title="200"></a>
+now, she didn’t know. She saw a bridge ahead. “There’s a
+river,” she said. “How about here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good enough.” Carol handed her the little boxes. She had
+put the half-burned tape back in its box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She wants something to eat,” Carol said firmly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The dining room is across the lobby, madame, and there’s
+a coffee shop—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol, I can wait,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you please bring me the menu? She prefers to eat
+here,” Carol said with a glance at the waiter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The waiter hesitated, then said, “Yes, madame,” and went
+to get the menu.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tone hurt Therese more than the question. “I love you,
+Carol.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But do you see what it means?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-201" class="pagenum" title="201"></a>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I think you’re right,” Carol said. “You make me realize
+it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My lawyer hasn’t heard anything,” she said. “And I didn’t
+tell him anything. I can’t. I’ll have to write it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought you would.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where have you been?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Writing that damned letter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol crossed the room and caught Therese in her arms. Therese
+felt Carol’s nails through the back of her jacket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <em>Corngrower’s Gazette</em>, and wondered if Abby knew all that
+about corn weevils. She watched the clock, and after twenty-five
+minutes went upstairs again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette. Therese
+waited for her to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-202" class="pagenum" title="202"></a>
+“Darling, I’ve got to go to New York,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese had been sure of that. She came to the foot of the
+bed. “What else did Abby say?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Abby’s going to get the check,” Carol said, sitting up on the
+bed, reaching for her moccasins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Has she got a key?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol gave her a frowning glance. “Anything else?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In the <em>Oxford Book of English Verse</em>. I think I left it on
+top of the bureau.” She watched Carol glance around the room,
+looking anywhere but at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t want to stay here tonight after all,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-203" class="pagenum" title="203"></a>
+“Do you want to go to Arizona?” Carol asked her, as if all
+they had to do was turn around.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because I want to talk about it. Can you take another three
+weeks off?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course I’d like to. Anywhere.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right. Come on. Let’s get to Des Moines. How about
+you driving a while?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They changed places. It was a little before midnight when
+they got to Des Moines and found a hotel room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And leave you?” Therese turned from the mirror where she
+was brushing her hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled. “What do you mean, leave me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+<a id="page-204" class="pagenum" title="204"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t mind keeping it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And don’t worry about the detective. I’ll wire Harge that
+I’m on my way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Therese, do you think I’m going to enjoy it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-205" class="pagenum" title="205"></a>
+down on the bed, while Carol made her plane reservation for
+tomorrow, <a id="corr-10"></a>one ticket, one way, tomorrow at eleven <span class="scall">A.M.</span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where do you think you’ll go?” Carol asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know. I might go back to Sioux Falls.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“South Dakota?” Carol smiled at her. “You wouldn’t prefer
+Santa Fe? It’s warmer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll wait and see it with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not Colorado Springs?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No!” Therese laughed, and got up. She took her toothbrush
+into the bathroom. “I might even take a job somewhere for a
+week.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What kind of a job?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Any kind. Just to keep me from thinking of you, you
+know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I want you to think of me. Not a job in a department store.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.” Therese stood by the bathroom door, watching Carol
+take off her slip and put her robe on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re not worrying about money again, are you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese came in after her. “I thought I was using this john.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m using it, but I’ll let you come in.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, thanks.” Therese took off her robe as Carol did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?” Therese stepped under the shower.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of all the nerve.” Carol got under it, too, and twisted Therese’s
+arm behind her, but Therese only giggled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stop it, we’ll fall!” Carol shouted. “For Christ’s sake, can’t
+two people take a shower in peace?”
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-20">
+<a id="page-206" class="pagenum" title="206"></a>
+chapter twenty
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="noindent">
+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
+<a id="page-207" class="pagenum" title="207"></a>
+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
+<em>Small Rain</em>?
+</p>
+
+<p class="sign">
+Best, Phil
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Dannie’s short letter was:
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="addr">
+Dear Therese,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="sign">
+Love,<br>
+Dannie
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upstairs in her room, she put the call through to Carol, and
+bathed and got into pajamas. Then the telephone rang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hel-<em>lo</em>,” Carol said, as if she had been waiting a long while.
+“What’s the name of that hotel?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The Warrior. But I’m not going to stay here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You didn’t pick up any strangers on the road, did you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese laughed. Carol’s slow voice went through her as if
+she touched her. “What’s the news?” Therese asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-208" class="pagenum" title="208"></a>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not right there with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No-o. Upstairs in the green room with the door shut.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I <em>don’t</em> really want to talk to her now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.” Immediately, out of nowhere, Therese felt tears
+pressing behind her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can’t you say anything but yes?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I love you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol whistled. Then silence. “Abby got the check, darling,
+but no letter. She missed my wire, but there isn’t any letter anyway.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did you find the book?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We found the book, but there’s nothing in it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I can tell by various things. Don’t worry about that.
+Will you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’ll be the same thing,” the woman said. “Where’re you
+from?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-209" class="pagenum" title="209"></a>
+“New York.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you going to live here?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I’m just waiting for a friend to join me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Man or a woman?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled. “A woman,” she said. “Is there any space in
+those garages in back? I’ve got a car with me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol was not in and no one answered. Therese tried until
+one o’clock, then went back to Mrs. Cooper’s house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You haven’t changed your mind about anything?” Therese
+said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-210" class="pagenum" title="210"></a>
+“Of course not, darling. I’m giving a party tomorrow night.
+I’ll miss you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Carol hadn’t said to call tomorrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-211" class="pagenum" title="211"></a>
+New Jersey, that she would probably fly out, that Carol wanted
+to go to New Mexico.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol does?” Dutch said, turning to her as he polished a
+glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She wrote to Carol late that night.
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="noindent">
+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....
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Carol wrote:
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="noindent">
+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
+<a id="page-212" class="pagenum" title="212"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <span class="scall">P.M.</span>
+preferably, which is 6 your time.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+And Therese was about to call her that day when a telegram
+came:
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="noindent">
+<span class="scall">DON’T TELEPHONE FOR A WHILE. EXPLAIN LATER. ALL
+MY LOVE, DARLING. CAROL.</span>
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+Mrs. Cooper watched her reading it in the hall. “That from
+your friend?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hope nothing’s the matter.” Mrs. Cooper had a way of
+peering at people, and Therese lifted her head deliberately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, she’s coming,” Therese said. “She’s been delayed.”
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-21">
+<a id="page-213" class="pagenum" title="213"></a>
+chapter twenty-one
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-214" class="pagenum" title="214"></a>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She came back the next morning and bought it to give to
+Carol.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="addr">
+Dear Therese,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-215" class="pagenum" title="215"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="sign">
+Richard
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-216" class="pagenum" title="216"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’d feel better if you took the plane. Come now and don’t
+wait,” was the last paragraph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<a id="page-217" class="pagenum" title="217"></a>
+<p class="addr">
+Dear Therese,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="sign">
+Ruby Robichek
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello?” Carol said brusquely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello?” The connection was bad. “I got the letter—the one
+with the check. What happened, Carol?... What?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol’s harassed sounding voice repeated through the crackling
+interference, “<em>This wire I think is tapped, Therese....</em>
+Are you all right? Are you coming home? I can’t talk very
+long now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-218" class="pagenum" title="218"></a>
+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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<em>Therese!</em>” Carol drew the word all across Therese’s words,
+like a deletion. “Will you come home so I can talk to you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese thought she heard Carol sigh impatiently. “But
+I’ve got to know now. Can you see me at all when I come
+back?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hang onto yourself, Therese.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Was this the way they talked together? Were these the
+words they used? “But can you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese put the receiver slowly back on the hook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-219" class="pagenum" title="219"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="date">
+Monday
+</p>
+
+<p class="addr">
+My darling,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hours later—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-220" class="pagenum" title="220"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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,
+<a id="page-221" class="pagenum" title="221"></a>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p class="noindent">
+... 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,
+<a id="page-222" class="pagenum" title="222"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your plants are still thriving on the back porch. I water
+them every day....
+</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where shall I forward your mail to, honey, in case there’s
+any more letters?” Mrs. Cooper asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to write and let you know.”
+Therese felt lightheaded and sickish when she straightened up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re not starting back for New York this late at night,
+are you?” Mrs. Cooper called anything after six “night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-223" class="pagenum" title="223"></a>
+“Well, you be sure and let me hear how you make out,”
+Mrs. Cooper said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-224" class="pagenum" title="224"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-22">
+<a id="page-225" class="pagenum" title="225"></a>
+chapter twenty-two
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From outside, a shrill voice, muted in empty space, cried:
+“Hey, <em>Chicago Sun-Times</em>!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-226" class="pagenum" title="226"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean you did?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you did, the suitcase would be downstairs in the checkroom....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, I told you....”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you want me to lose a suitcase so you won’t lose your
+job!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her mind attached meaning to the phrases one by one, like
+some slow translator that lagged behind, and at last got lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese went to the basin to wash her face in cold water.
+<a id="page-227" class="pagenum" title="227"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked through the help-wanted columns again that
+<a id="page-228" class="pagenum" title="228"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you don’t mind getting here at eight in the morning,”
+Mr. Zambrowski said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-229" class="pagenum" title="229"></a>
+on Saturday night, but Therese did not want to spend a whole
+evening with him or with anyone yet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One night, Abby telephoned her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Therese?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is Carol there with you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She’s too sick to call me? Why don’t you tell me, Abby?
+Is she getting better or worse?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Better. Why didn’t you try to call to find out?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s a fine question. Carol wrote you what happened,
+didn’t she?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When’re you coming back?” Abby asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In about ten days. Unless Carol wants the car sooner.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She doesn’t. She won’t be home in ten days.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese forced herself to say, “About that letter—the one
+I wrote—do you know if they found it before or after?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Before or after what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“After the detectives started following us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They found it afterward,” Abby said, sighing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese set her teeth. But it didn’t matter what Abby
+thought of her, only what Carol thought. “Where is she in
+Vermont?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wouldn’t call her if I were you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-230" class="pagenum" title="230"></a>
+“But you’re not me and I want to call her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t need any money. The car’s all right.” She had to
+ask one more question. “What does Rindy know about this?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She knows what the word divorce means. And she wanted
+to stay with Carol. That doesn’t make it easier for Carol,
+either.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello, Therese,” he said. “Surprised?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-231" class="pagenum" title="231"></a>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do I? I’m awfully glad to see you.” There was an open
+elevator in front of them. “Do you want to come up?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s go have something to eat. Or is it too early? I didn’t
+have any lunch today.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s certainly not too early, then.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They went to a place Therese knew about, that specialized
+in steaks. Dannie even ordered cocktails, though he usually
+never drank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You’re here by yourself?” he said. “Your landlady in Sioux
+Falls told me you left by yourself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Carol couldn’t come out finally.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh. And you decided to stay out longer?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Until when?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Until just about now. I’m going back next week.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What kind of a job?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Researching—just what I asked for. I came out better than
+I thought I would on my exams.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Were you first in the class?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know. I doubt it. They weren’t graded like that.
+You didn’t answer my question.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I want to get back to New York, Dannie.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A little.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-232" class="pagenum" title="232"></a>
+“You don’t look frightened any more. Or even so serious.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You did miss me a little, didn’t you, Terry?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know,” she said quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you’re not still thinking about Richard, are you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must know I’m not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who is it then? Carol?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She felt suddenly naked, sitting there opposite him. “Yes.
+It was.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But not now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you want to forget it, if it’s past?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know. I don’t know just how you mean that.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I mean, are you sorry?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Would I do the same thing again? Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you mean with somebody else, or with her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With her,” Therese said. The corner of her mouth went
+up in a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But the end was a fiasco.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. I mean I’d go through the end, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you’re still going through it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese didn’t say anything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you going to see her again? Do you mind if I ask you
+all these questions?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t mind,” she said. “No, I’m not going to see her
+again. I don’t want to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But somebody else?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-233" class="pagenum" title="233"></a>
+“Another woman?” Therese shook her head. “No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dannie looked at her and smiled, slowly. “That’s what matters.
+Or rather, that’s what makes it not matter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I mean, you’re so young, Therese. You’ll change. You’ll
+forget.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not feel young. “Did Richard talk to you?” she
+asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. I think he wanted to one night, but I cut it off before
+he got started.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He feels jilted. His ego’s suffering. Don’t ever think I’m
+like Richard. I think people’s lives are their own.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now what are you thinking?” he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of what you said once in New York, about using things
+and throwing them away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did she do that to you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled. “I shall do it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then find someone you’ll never want to throw away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who won’t wear out,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you write to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Write me in three months.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Three months?” But suddenly she knew what he meant.
+“And not before?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-234" class="pagenum" title="234"></a>
+“No.” He was looking at her steadily. “That’s a fair time,
+isn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. All right. It’s a promise.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Promise me something else—take tomorrow off so you can
+be with me. I’ve got till nine tomorrow night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="chapter" id="chapter-0-23">
+<a id="page-235" class="pagenum" title="235"></a>
+chapter twenty-three
+</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p class="first">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tomorrow, she thought, she would call Abby and arrange
+something about Carol’s car, but not today.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <em>Small Rain</em> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-236" class="pagenum" title="236"></a>
+“How about television?” Mr. Bernstein asked. “Have you
+tried to start that way? It’s easier to break into.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. I’d love to come. Where in the St. Regis?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read from the invitation. Suite D. Five to seven o’clock.
+“I shall be there by six.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When? This afternoon?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. In a few minutes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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,
+<a id="page-237" class="pagenum" title="237"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment later, she heard Carol’s voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When did you get in, Therese?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a brief, fluttering shock at the first sound of her
+voice, and then nothing. “Yesterday.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not exactly. Do you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol waited. “You sound different.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, I can come in for it. I’m not an invalid. Did the car
+behave itself?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s in good shape,” Therese said. “No scratches anywhere.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you?” Carol asked, but Therese didn’t answer anything.
+“Shall I see you tomorrow? Do you have any time in
+the afternoon?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They arranged to meet in the bar of the Ritz Tower on
+Fifty-seventh Street at four thirty, and then they hung up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol was a quarter of an hour late. Therese sat waiting for
+<a id="page-238" class="pagenum" title="238"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hello,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t say that.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The waiter came, and Carol ordered tea. So did Therese,
+mechanically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you hate me, Therese?” Carol asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I suppose you could. You did for a while, didn’t you?”
+Carol said, as if she told her a fact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hate you? No.” Not quite, she might have said. But she
+knew that Carol’s eyes were reading it in her face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And now—you’re all grown up—with grown-up hair and
+grown-up clothes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That I—” Therese stopped, her thoughts obstructed suddenly
+by the memory of the portrait in Sioux Falls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-239" class="pagenum" title="239"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol took a cigarette. “What do you think? Of that day in
+the store.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled again. “It was so wonderful when you came
+over to me. Why did you come to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese had only twisted some white tissue around it. Carol
+opened it on the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think it’s charming,” Carol said. “It looks just like you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I love you,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese opened her eyes, but she did not look up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know you don’t feel the same about me. Do you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese had an impulse to deny it, but could she? She
+didn’t feel the same. “I don’t know, Carol.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s the same thing.” Carol’s voice was soft, expectant,
+expecting affirmation or denial.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-240" class="pagenum" title="240"></a>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought you said a few weeks of the year.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As a matter of fact, I didn’t promise very much in court. I
+refused there, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese smiled a little in spite of herself, because she was
+glad Carol had refused, that Carol had still been that proud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A <em>spike</em>?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I remember hearing somebody hammering something. I
+think it was when we’d just finished in the shower. Do you
+remember?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol smiled. “A spike that picks up sound like a dictaphone.
+He had the room next to us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese didn’t remember the hammering, but the violence
+of all of it came back, shattering, destroying—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-241" class="pagenum" title="241"></a>
+her, if she stops wanting to see me. I’ll just leave that up to
+her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t imagine her ever not wanting to see you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol’s eyebrows lifted. “Is there any way of predicting what
+Harge can do to her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One gets over things,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would you?” Carol looked at her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese felt she balanced on a thin edge. The resentment
+<a id="page-242" class="pagenum" title="242"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well,” Carol said smiling, impatient.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s your decision,” Carol said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol stared at her cigarette lighter on the table. “That’s
+that.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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 id="page-243" class="pagenum" title="243"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know, I saw it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you going to stay on?” Therese asked her. “I’ll take
+care of the check.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll take care of the check,” Carol said. “Go on, if you
+have to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It doesn’t matter,” Therese interrupted her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And your flowers. Your plants.” Carol was paying the
+check the waiter had brought over. “What happened to the
+flowers I gave you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The flowers you gave me—they died.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Carol’s eyes met hers for a second, and Therese looked away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-244" class="pagenum" title="244"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mademoiselle,” he said with a flourish. “Are you looking
+for one of these?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you an actress?” the same man asked her, thrusting
+with her through the crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. A stage designer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Miss Belivet!” he shouted. “Mrs. Crawford, the make-up
+consultant—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s not talk business!” Mrs. Crawford shrieked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Enough to let me squeeze in?” she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come and join me later. I must say good-by to these people
+who are leaving.” And he went away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-245" class="pagenum" title="245"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A flower, madame?” A waiter was extending a tray full of
+white orchids.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did you meet Miss Cranell?” Mr. Bernstein asked Therese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese looked at the woman. “My name is Therese Belivet.”
+She took the hand the woman extended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do you do? So you’re the set department?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No. Only part of it.” She could still feel the handclasp
+when the woman released her hand. She felt excited, wildly
+and stupidly excited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<a id="page-246" class="pagenum" title="246"></a>
+“Isn’t anybody going to bring me a drink?” Miss Cranell
+asked anybody.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese made her way to a wall mirror, and glanced to see
+if her hair and her lipstick were still all right.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Therese,” said a voice near her. “Do you like champagne?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese turned and saw Genevieve Cranell. “Of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course. Well, toddle up to six-nineteen in a few minutes.
+That’s my suite. We’re having an inner circle party later.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I feel very honored,” Therese said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So don’t waste your thirst on highballs. Where did you get
+that lovely dress?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bonwit’s—it’s a wild extravagance.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m twenty-one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She rolled her eyes. “Incredible. Can anyone still be only
+twenty-one?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miss Cranell offered her cigarette case. “For a while, I
+thought you might be a minor.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is that a crime?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-247" class="pagenum" title="247"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you a New Yorker?” Miss Cranell asked her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<em>Vivy!</em>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the men beside her asked, “Who did the sets for
+<em>The Lost Messiah</em>, Therese? Do you remember?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<a id="page-248" class="pagenum" title="248"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Therese shook her head. “Thanks, I—I thought I could, but
+I remember I’ve got to be somewhere else.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman looked at her quizzically. “What’s the matter,
+Therese? Did anything go wrong?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.” She smiled, moving toward the door. “Thanks for
+asking me. No doubt I’ll see you again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No doubt,” the actress said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The headwaiter said something to her in the foyer, and she
+told him, “I’m looking for somebody,” and went on to the
+doorway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<a id="page-249" class="pagenum" title="249"></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="bantam">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="trnote chapter">
+<p class="transnote">
+Transcriber’s Notes
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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>
+
+
+
+<ul>
+
+<li>
+... Therese ate nervously, with the “Welcome to Frankenberg” ...<br>
+... Therese ate nervously, with the “Welcome to Frankenberg<a href="#corr-0"><span class="underline">’s</span></a>” ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... what day, what she had to do, the <span class="underline">soldier</span> substance that made ...<br>
+... what day, what she had to do, the <a href="#corr-1"><span class="underline">solider</span></a> substance that made ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... from key chain on the dashboard? The stand of Christmas ...<br>
+... from <a href="#corr-3"><span class="underline">the</span></a> key chain on the dashboard? The stand of Christmas ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... of inches taller than Therese. It had <span class="underline">began</span> to snow about an ...<br>
+... of inches taller than Therese. It had <a href="#corr-4"><span class="underline">begun</span></a> to snow about an ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... real. She went to the window and looked out at the <span class="underline">gay</span> ...<br>
+... real. She went to the window and looked out at the <a href="#corr-7"><span class="underline">gray</span></a> ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... nose, the full lower <span class="underline">mace</span>, the receding twist of blond hair ...<br>
+... nose, the full lower <a href="#corr-8"><span class="underline">face</span></a>, the receding twist of blond hair ...<br>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+... tomorrow, <span class="underline">on</span> ticket, one way, tomorrow at eleven A.M. ...<br>
+... tomorrow, <a href="#corr-10"><span class="underline">one</span></a> ticket, one way, tomorrow at eleven A.M. ...<br>
+</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79242 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
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+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
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+[Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook [#79242](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79242)