Fletcher Flora

Take Me Home

Chapter 1

Henry Harper was a young man who lived in two rooms above a secondhand bookstore. All he wanted to do in the world was to write, but he was forced by circumstances to do other things besides. He was naturally forced by the same circumstances to do most of his writing at times when sane and sensible men are sleeping or making love or getting drunk or expressing their sense and sanity in some other accepted way.

That’s what Henry had been doing this particular night, which was the night of a Saturday. He had been writing a book that he had hoped someday to finish, and he had been, in a way, a little drunk himself. He had been drunk for hours on words, but now he was sober, and nothing he had done was good, and nothing would be good that he would ever do. His head ached, and he was filled with sodden despair. It was, he saw, three o’clock in the morning. Since it was impossible to sleep, he went down the street to the Greek’s for a cup of coffee.

He felt better in the street. A sharp wind was blowing down the narrow way between old buildings. It slashed his face and blew from his brain the stale litter of leftover words. In the Greek’s, behind steamed windows, there was only one customer besides himself. A girl. She sat huddled over a cup at the counter, wrapped closely in a black wool coat as if she were very cold. The cup was empty, drained of what it had held, and so was her face. There was something imperiled in the emptiness, a precarious adjustment to the brief sanctuary of an all-night diner. The Greek himself was behind the counter.

“Hello, Henry,” the Greek said.

His name was George. He had a last name too, but it was too difficult to say comfortably and had fallen in disuse.

“Hello, George,” Henry said. “Black coffee.”

“You don’t need to say it, Henry. It’s always the same. Always black coffee.”

“Don’t make a moral issue of it, George. Just draw the coffee.”

“It’s three o’clock in the morning. It’s no time to be drinking coffee.”

“Any time’s a time to be drinking coffee.”

“Sure. Coffee and cigarettes. Cigarettes and coffee. A man lives on them, but not for long. You look bad, Henry. You’ll die young.”

There was that about George. He was compassionate. He was filled with concern and pity. He was an olive-tinted mass of fat compassion with an oily, earnest face. He grieved in his large and limpid, black eyes for all young men who died young from smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee.

“A man can’t sleep after drinking black coffee,” he said.

“I don’t want to sleep.”

To secure his position, Henry lit a cigarette that he didn’t want. George picked up a cup and turned to the shining urn behind him.

“How does the book go?” he said.

“It goes badly.”

“You always say it goes badly.”

“Because it always does.”

George was very interested in the progress of the book. He didn’t believe it when Henry said that it was going badly. One of his greatest concerns was that Henry would die from cigarettes and black coffee before the book was finished.

Henry buried his nose in the rich vapor rising from his cup. He was feeling gradually a little better. What he had accomplished didn’t seem so bad now, although not so good as he wished. It was never so good.

“You should take better care of yourself,” George said. “Why don’t you get a haircut?”

Half a dozen stools away, the girl moved. She lifted her eyes and stared for a moment blindly at bright labels of canned soup on a shelf behind the counter. Then she lowered them slowly and began staring again into the empty cup. Henry glanced at her briefly and back to George, and George lifted his heavy shoulders in a small confession of ignorance and impotence. There were far too many troubles in the world even for a compassionate Greek.

“Off the street,” he said. “She has no place to go.”

“How do you know?”

“Who sits and looks into an empty cup when there is a place to go?”

“Maybe she has a place but doesn’t want to go there.”

“It’s the same thing.”

The girl stood up abruptly and came toward them. She was wearing nothing on her head, but her brown hair fitted like a ragged cap around her thin and empty face. “Pay for my coffee,” she said to Henry.

“Like hell I will,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Why should I?”

“Because I don’t have any money.”

“Too bad for you.”

“Is a lousy dime so important?”

“It’s all right,” George said. “It’s on the house. Compliments of George.”

The girl turned her head and looked at the Greek for a moment without speaking, as if she were considering whether or not it would be proper to accept his offer. She didn’t appear to be grateful. As a matter of fact, she gave the impression of feeling that he was meddling in a matter that did not concern him.

“It wouldn’t hurt the son of a bitch to pay for my coffee,” she said.

“Look out who you’re calling names,” Henry said.

“He’s a poor writer,” George said. “He has to watch his dimes carefully.”

“What does he write?” she said.

“He’s writing a book,” George said. “He’ll be famous.” She stared at Henry as if she had caught him in the worst kind of perversion. It was a relief, however, to see an expression, even an unpleasant one, invade the emptiness of her thin face.

“It’ll be a lousy book,” she said. “No one will buy it.”

“Not at all,” George said. “It’s going badly at the moment, but later it will go better.”

George had become an authority on writers and understood that they had to be handled with care. His air of authority was plainly not acceptable to the girl, however. She inspected him with a faint expression of revulsion.

“You’re just a fat, greasy Greek,” she said. “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“Say,” George said, “I give you a good cup of coffee and you call me names. What’s the matter with you, anyhow?”

“Maybe you think I ought to kiss your fat tail for a lousy cup of coffee,” she said.

Turning, she walked up along the line of stools at the counter and went outside into the narrow street beyond the steamed glass. George watched her go with his large, limpid eyes. For a moment, when she opened the front door, he felt compassionately in his own warm flesh the cold cut of the wind.

“She has troubles,” he said. “That’s apparent.”

“She’s crazy,” Henry said.

“Because she has troubles, she hates everyone. That’s the way it happens. When my wife left me for an Italian acrobat, I hated everyone for months. It was impossible to get along with me.”

“I didn’t know you ever had a wife.”

“It was a long time ago. She came from Salonika as a girl. I seldom think of her.”

Henry didn’t answer. He lifted his cup in both hands and drank some of the hot coffee.

“She was very young,” George said.

“Naturally,” Henry said. “As a girl, she couldn’t be anything else.”

“Not my wife. The one who was here.”

“Was she?”

“Under her coat, she was very thin. Did you notice?”

“No, I didn’t. Anyhow, it’s better to be a thin, young girl, even with troubles, than a fat, greasy Greek or a son of a bitch.”

Henry finished his coffee and stood up. He put two dimes on the counter beside the empty cup.

“You have given me one dime too many,” George said.

“I know how many dimes I gave you,” Henry said.

He walked to the door and paused to turn the collar of his coat up around his neck.

“I hope the book goes well,” George said.

“It will go lousy,” Henry said, “and no one will buy it.” He opened the door and went out, and there at the corner, leaning against a lamp post in dirty yellow light and a kind of arrogant indolence, was the girl. He started past here without speaking, but at the last moment he discovered that it was something he couldn’t do, even though he had a strong feeling that it would probably be a mistake to do anything else. Stopping a step or two beyond her in the yellow light, he turned and stared at her, and he saw that the Greek was right, that her body under the coat was very thin, but it seemed somehow to be a natural thinness appropriate to her character and chemistry, and not the thinness that would come from not having enough to eat for too long a time.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“As you see,” she said, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Don’t you have any place to go?”

“That’s a reasonable conclusion, isn’t it? If I had a place to go, I’d go there.”

“Don’t you have any money at all?”

“I have a little, but not with me.”

“Where is it?”

“At the place I came from.”

“Why don’t you go there and get it?”

“Because I don’t want to. I don’t suppose a chintzy son of a bitch like you would give a girl a cigarette.”

“I might if she asked me properly.”

“Really? What would you consider properly?”

“With a little respect and courtesy.”

“Will you please give me a cigarette?”

“That’s better.”

He gave her a cigarette and struck a match for her, holding it cupped in his hands against the wind. The tiny light flared up from the protective bowl of flesh and spread across her thin face as she leaned down to suck the flame. He was surprised, and somehow touched, as if it were a special concession to him, to see that she was rather pretty in a taut and sullen way.

“I paid for the coffee after all,” he said.

“Actually?” She straightened, drawing smoke deeply into her lungs and releasing it to the wind on a deep sigh. “Thanks all to hell.”

“All right. Now that you’ve got your cigarette, there s no need to behave decently any longer. I can see that. Why don’t you go find a nice warm alley to spend the rest of the night in?”

Crossing the intersection, he started down the block, and it was not until he had gone almost halfway to the next corner that he became aware that she was following him. She had moved so silently behind him that he never heard her at all, not the least sound above the wind of her heels striking the concrete walk, and it was only the sudden leaping of her shadow in a small island of light that told him she was there. He stopped and wheeled around, and she also stopped in the same instant, and be thought in that instant that he could detect in her a kind of wariness and apprehension. She was abusive and insolent, the Greek had said, because she was filled with hate for everyone on earth. These attitudes could also be, he thought, a front for fear.

“What do you want?” he said. “Why are you following me?”

“I want to go with you.”

“Go with me where?”

“Take me home with you.”

“No. That’s impossible. It’s a crazy idea.”

“I wouldn’t be any trouble to you.”

“The hell you wouldn’t.”

“I promise I wouldn’t.”

“No, thanks.”

“You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

“I’d damn well be sorry if I did.”

“It wouldn’t hurt you to give me a place to sleep and stay warm.”

Staring at her in amazement, he had a sudden odd sensation of gaseousness, of being lighter than air and in imminent danger of rising through the dirty light into upper darkness.

“Well, by God,” he said, “this is a switch! You abuse me and curse me and behave in general like a bitch, and now you want to move in with me.”

“If I say I’m sorry for the way I acted, will you let me come?”

“No.”

“Why not? I tell you I wouldn’t be any bother. I promise.”

“You’re pretty good at making promises, aren’t you? At breaking them too, I’ll bet.”

“All right. It’s apparent that you’re determined to make me sleep in an alley. If I die of the cold, it’s no skin off your tail.”

She started back the way they had come, and there was a display of desperate pride in the rigidity of her thin back, in each carefully measured and conscious step. He felt himself choke with pity, and he softly cursed the pity and himself and his bad luck in meeting her.

“Wait a minute,” he called.

She stopped and turned toward him, waiting beyond the perimeter of light, a pale shadow against the dark street stretching out behind her.

“You’d have to get out tomorrow,” he said.

“All right.”

“Don’t get the idea that you’re going to hang around and live off me until you’re damn good and ready to leave.”

“Don’t worry. You said I’ll have to leave tomorrow, and I will.”

“Later today, I mean. Sunday. Not tomorrow.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Come on, then. Let’s go.”

He started walking on at a quickened pace, not looking back, but aware of her behind him just the same, matching steps, measuring and maintaining between them the distance that had existed at the start. And then, after crossing another intersection and moving perhaps fifty feet along the block, he suddenly knew that she was no longer there. Turning, he saw her standing quietly under the lamp at the corner. They stood staring at each other for half a minute before she began to advance very slowly, almost reluctantly, stooping again at the distance from him that she seemed to have established in her mind as being appropriate and proper.

“I don’t think I’ll go home with you after all,” she said.

“Well, for God’s sake, make up your mind. Don’t imagine for a minute that I’m anxious to have you come.”

“If I were to come, what would you expect of me?”

“I’d expect a little civility and gratitude, that’s all, but I doubt that I’d get any.”

“I thought you might expect me to sleep with you.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“Why should it make you laugh? I suppose you’d be justified in expecting it under the circumstances.”

“Listen to me. I’ve been working all night, and I’m tired. I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last female on earth and it was my last chance. Besides, you’re not my type. You’re too skinny, and you’ve got a nasty disposition, and you’d probably accuse me of taking advantage of you. Go sleep in an alley if you choose.”

“I’d prefer to go with you and be warm.”

“In that case, stop standing here in the cold.”

Once more under way, he felt her following at the established interval. Stopping, he felt her stop.

“Why are you walking behind me?” he said. “If you’re coming, walk beside me. It makes me uncomfortable to have you walking back there like a servant or something.”

“I thought you might prefer it.”

“I don’t. I prefer to have you up here. If it’s not too offensive to you, that is.”

“I don’t mind walking beside you.”

She came even, and they walked on, a distance by this time of slightly more than another block to the second-hand book store with his rooms above. Using his key, he unlocked the street door to the stairway leading up, and using the same key on the landing at the top, unlocked the door to the first of his two rooms, which was the living room. She went past him into the room and stood waiting a couple of steps inside while he closed the door behind them. He had left a lamp burning on the table where he had been working. His typewriter stood in position, loaded with a yellow second sheet on which several lines had been typed and x-ed out, and the top of the table surrounding the machine was littered with two hundred more of the yellow sheets covered with words and words and inexorable x’s where words had failed. Additional sheets were crumpled and scattered about the floor.

“Here we are,” he said.

She looked at the scant furnishings, old and worn and ugly, the stained and faded walls. She reeked, it seemed to him, of an irritating air of disdain.

“It isn’t much,” she said.

“It suits me.”

“You must be easily pleased.”

“It’s a place to go, at least. That’s more than you’ve got.”

“It’s warm, I admit. That’s something.”

“It seems to me that you’re mighty goddamn particular for a beggar.”

“Well, you needn’t get so angry about it. You’re surely aware that it’s nothing to be proud of.”

“If you don’t care for it, you don’t have to stay. No one asked you in the first place.”

“Under the terms of our agreement, I’m willing to stay.”

“Thanks a lot. It’s very generous of you.”

“You must be very poor.”

“I’m not rich. If you thought I was, it was your mistake.”

“I should think a writer would make quite a bit of money.”

“Some writers don’t make any money at all.”

“Why don’t they quit writing, then?”

“Because they’re writers.”

“Don’t you make any money at all from writing?”

“I’ve made a little in the past, but not for quite a while.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve been writing a novel and haven’t had anything to sell.”

“If you ask me, you’d better quit writing the novel and write something to sell instead. Then you might be able to live in a little better place.”

Abruptly, as if she were acting suddenly upon a decision slowly reached, she unbuttoned her coat, removed it, and tossed it into a chair. Walking across to a ratty, brown, frieze sofa, she sat down and stretched her legs in front of her. She was wearing a gray wool dress that did not look shabby or cheap, although not new or expensive, and the thinness of her body, which had been a suggestion under the coat, was now clearly apparent.

After stretching and yawning, she kicked off her shoes. She did look very young, as the Greek had said, and he wondered for the first time what her age was.

“How old are you?” he said.

She yawned again, stretching, and looked up at him from the corners of her eyes with a sly expression. Her hair had a soft luster, gathering the light. It was a soft golden color, thick and full, brushed back over the ears at the sides. At the moment it was badly tousled by the wind, but it was palpably clean, and he had a notion it would have the smell, if he were to bury his nose in it, of scented soap.

“I’m twenty-four,” she said.

“You don’t look it.”

“Don’t I? I feel at least three times that.”

“Are you in trouble of some kind?”

“If I am, it’s my own.”

“That’s right. I only hope you keep it to yourself. Why don’t you want to go back to the place you came from?”

“I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ve run away from home, haven’t you?”

“Run away? I told you I’m twenty-four, and that’s the truth. I’m old enough to go where I please.”

“You do have a home, don’t you?”

“I used to have one, but not any more.”

“What happened to it?”

“Nothing happened to it, except that it’s not mine any more. My family doesn’t want me. They consider me a disgrace.”

“Are you?”

“I suppose I am. At least they think so.”

“Do you have a husband?”

“No, God, no! Why do you keep asking questions? You tell me to keep my trouble to myself, but at the same time you keep trying to get it out of me. It’s not sensible.”

“Oh, hell. There’s no use whatever in trying to come to terms with you. That’s plain enough.”

Before she could respond, he turned and walked out of the littered living room and through the bedroom into the tiny bathroom that had been built, as an afterthought, in one corner. After turning on the light above the lavatory, he splashed his face with cold water and tried, with a brush and paste, to wash some of the feverish night out of his mouth. He was drawn tight, his nerves on edge, and although he was tired, it was still impossible to sleep. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know the name of his guest, and that it had not, in spite of their unusual arrangement, seemed important enough to compel him to learn it. There was no assurance, of course, even if he asked, that she would tell him, or tell him, at any rate, the truth. When he went back into the living room, she had stretched out on the sofa with her arms folded up and her fingers laced beneath her hand.

“It has just come into my mind that I don’t know your name,” he said.

“Has it? I don’t know yours either, for that matter.”

“It’s Henry Harper.”

“Mine’s Ivy, if it makes any difference to you. Ivy Galvin.”

“Do you know something? I believe it really is.”

“Of course it is. Did you think I’d give you a false name?”

“I thought you’d probably either give me a false one or none at all.”

“You’re suspicious of everything, aren’t you? Well, I’m warm now, and I’m getting sleepy. I believe I could sleep for a while. Would you mind letting me alone?”

“Not at all. It would be a pleasure.”

“Thanks very much.”

She shut her eyes, as if by this small act she could achieve seclusion, and her breathing assumed with completion of the act an added depth and rhythm. In the posture and semblance of sleeping, she looked exposed and terribly vulnerable.

“I’ll get you a cover,” he said.

“I don’t need a cover. It’s warm enough in here without one.”

“At least you’ll need a pillow.”

“I’ll take a pillow if you have an extra one, but what I’d like more than anything else is a drink of whiskey. Do you happen to have any?”

“I have some bourbon in the bedroom.”

“I think, if I had a drink of whiskey, that I could go right off to sleep.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

He went into the bedroom to a chest of drawers, where the piece of a bottle stood in the midst of several tumblers. He poured about three fingers into two of the tumblers, got a pillow from the bed, and carried the tumblers and the pillow back into the living room. Ivy Galvin, or whoever she was if she was not Ivy Galvin, opened her eyes and sat up immediately on the edge of the sofa, her knees and ankles together in a position of unconscious propriety. She took the tumbler he offered and drank the whiskey in two swallows with only the briefest interval between.

“Thank you,” she said. “Are you going to work some more?”

“No.”

“It’s all right if you want to. Don’t let me interfere.”

“I won’t. It’s just that you reach a point when it goes bad, or seems to go bad, even if it doesn’t really, and there’s no use trying any longer.”

“That’s true in everything.”

She set her empty glass on the floor beside the sofa and lay down again with her head on the pillow. Her eyes closed, she began to breathe, as she had before, with depth and rhythm. He drank his own whiskey and sat down in the chair at the table and began to gather the scattered yellow sheets of his manuscript, putting them in order. This done, he began reading, but reading at this time was a mistake, because he was tired and satiated with words, and everything seemed worse than it was. The whiskey began to work on him a little, making him slightly drowsy, and he pushed his typewriter back and lay his head for a moment on the edge of the table where the typewriter had been, and the moment stretched on and on and became nearly an hour, and he wakened abruptly with his head splitting and a dull pain between his shoulders. Standing, he turned off the lamp on the table and walked in darkness into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his shoes. He thought that another swallow of whiskey would do him good, and so he got up and took the swallow from the bottle and then lay down across the bed for a minute, for just a minute before undressing and getting into bed properly, and this minute across the bed, like the moment at the table, stretched on and on into the day, the particular Sunday that this day was.

Chapter 2

She was really Ivy Galvin. That was her name.

She lay quietly on the worn sofa, one hand holding the other beneath her small breasts and her ankles touching in a position that was the prone equivalent of the one in which she had sat erect, a few minutes ago, to accept her whiskey. Except for her deep and rhythmic breathing, a technique she had developed in the methodical seduction of quietude, she had the appearance of having been laid out neatly for burial. She was feeling relaxed and at ease now, not so much from warmth and whiskey as from the assurance, at last clearly established, that Henry Harper, the odd young man she was using in her exigency, was not in the least interested in what she could not possibly give.

It was not true that she wanted to sleep, for she had found that sleep was treacherous. What she really wanted was to achieve and sustain for as long as possible the marginal twilight area between waking and sleeping in which she felt absolutely detached and inviolate, removed alike from the hard, bright threats above and the symbolisms of the same threats in the stirring darkness below. She wished that she could live in this twilight always, and she had become quite expert, as a matter of fact, in sustaining it precariously for long periods of time, but it was impossible, of course, to sustain it, as she wished, forever. Sooner or later she would descend in spite of herself into the waiting darkness of hostile symbols, which were very bad, and sooner or later after that she would rise inevitably to the shapes and names and terms of reality, which were never any better and usually worse.

Her eyes were not completely closed, although they appeared to be. Through her lowered lashes she watched Henry Harper with a kind of dreamy intentness upon the smallest details of what he did. She did not watch him because she was interested or concerned, but only because he was useful as a neuter distraction that helped her remain a little longer in her interim twilight. She saw him drink his whiskey and sit down and gather his papers. His head in the light of the lamp had a massive and shaggy look, and she thought with the detachment that was now possible to her that he looked completely spent and almost pitiable, committed to his own aberrations, whatever they were, and his own consequent loneliness. After a while he lay his head on the table and did not move for a long while.

Realizing that he had gone to sleep in his chair, she wondered if his sleep was sound and deep, as hers was not, or if it was disturbed by symbols, as hers was. This was something that did not bear thinking about, however, because it threatened the detachment she wished to sustain, and she began, as another distraction, to count slowly to herself, forming without sound with her lips the shape of the numbers, to see how high she could go before she stirred, but the time it took was too long to survive, and she was asleep a full quarter of an hour before he got up suddenly and turned out the light and left the room.

For a while she was neither more nor less than she appeared to be, a girl asleep in a posture of primness on a worn sofa, but then, as the windows on the street side of the room began to lighten, which was about seven o’clock in the morning of that day, she wakened in her sleep to another morning of another day in another place, and she was, in the time and place of her waking, another person.

She was, for one thing, much younger. She was much younger, and the day was soft and bright and beautiful, and she thought for these two reasons, because she was young and the day was beautiful, that she would put on a beautiful dress. She selected one from her closet and examined it, and it was just the kind of dress for that kind of day, pale blue and silken to the touch, although it was really polished cotton. It had a short bodice with a full skirt of yards and yards of material flaring out from a tiny waist, which would make a stiff petticoat necessary underneath, and so she selected the petticoat to wear also, and around the hem of the petticoat there was an inch of real lace that was supposed to show, just slightly, beneath the hem of the skirt of the dress.

She laid the dress and the petticoat side by side on her bed and went into the bathroom and bathed with scented soap, and then she put on a white bathrobe that had tiny blue roses scattered all over it, which was rather ridiculous when you came to think of it, inasmuch as there was no such thing as a blue rose, so far as she knew. Wearing the white robe and thinking of the pale blue dress and feeling clean and perfumed and almost as beautiful as the morning, she went back into the bedroom to the dressing table that had a mirror as big as the one her mother used. With the silver-backed brush that had been given to her by an aunt, she began to brush her hair. She pulled the brush through her hair and lifted it above her head to begin a second stroke, and then she stopped, the brush suspended in the beginning of the stroke, and stared in amazement at the reflection of her face in the glass. It was really rather funny, almost ludicrous, for there were three large brown stains on her face, and she began to laugh at herself and watch herself laughing back from the glass, wondering how in the world she could have bathed so carefully and still have failed to remove the stains. She couldn’t think where she might have acquired the stains, but it didn’t really matter, since they were there, as she could clearly see, and there was nothing to do but wash her face again.

She washed it in the lavatory, using very hot water and a stronger soap, but the stains were stubborn and refused to leave, and all of a sudden she understood that they were never going to leave, never in the world, even if she scrubbed herself every hour of every day for the rest of her life. Filled with terror and monstrous grief, she threw herself on the bed beside the blue dress and the petticoat, and at that instant her Cousin Lila came into the room and began to stroke her hands and arms in an attempt to comfort her, and everywhere that Lila’s fingers touched there was instantly another stain that would never leave. Pulling away with a cry of anguish, she sprang to her feet and began to run across the room to the door, and she was wakened by the cry and the action in the middle of a strange room that she could not remember ever having seen before.

And then she remembered that it was the room of Henry Harper, an odd and antagonistic fellow who had agreed to let her sleep here until tomorrow, or today, which it now was. The last she’d seen of him, he’d been sitting in a chair with his head on the table, the one right over there, but now he was gone. In the gray light that filtered through the dirty glass of the front windows, she could see the empty chair and the table and the typewriter and a stack of yellow sheets beside the typewriter, but she could not see Henry Harper anywhere, and she wondered where he was. There was another room, of course, a bedroom with a bath built into the corner, and it was probably that he was in there, in the bedroom, where he would naturally have gone if he wanted to sleep. She walked over to the door of the bedroom and looked in, and there he was, sure enough, not lying properly in the bed, as he should have been, but lying sprawled across it on his face, fully clothed, as if he had simply fallen there in exhaustion and had failed to get up again.

Turning away, she crossed the living room to one of the front windows and stood looking down into the street. The street was narrow and dirty and utterly dismal in the gray morning light. Across the way, in the recessed doorway of a pawnshop, over which hung the old and identifying sign of the Medici, were several sheets of a newspaper that had been driven there in the night by the wind. Just below her and a little to the right, attached at a right angle to the face of the building in which she stood, was a sign that said “USED BOOKS” in large white letters, and in smaller letters underneath, “BOUGHT AND SOLD.” She could read the words clearly from her position, and they seemed to her in their innocence to be a gross obscenity, a tiny part of the monstrous distortion of all things that was effect of her depression. She had no watch, but she could tell by the quality of the light that it was still early, which left ahead of her the most of an interminable day, and she wondered in despair how she would live it, and if she did, how she would then live the one that would surely follow it.

She wondered if Henry Harper had any cigarettes. He must have some somewhere, because she remembered that he had given her one on the street outside the diner where they had met. She looked around the room and could not see any, and so she walked softly into the bedroom and found part of a package lying on his dresser with some loose change and a pocket knife and a folder of paper matches. She helped herself to three of the cigarettes and the folder of matches and went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The smoke did not taste good, mostly because she had been unable to brush her teeth for quite a while, but she accepted this as being appropriate, natural enough in a life where nothing at all was any good, and it amounted to nothing more than another minute factor in the grand sum of her depression and despair. She had lived in her depression now for far too long, and it was nothing she had been able to do anything about, she had tried, and it had made Lila furious. It was, she supposed, one of the reasons Lila had tried to kill her.

Now she had deliberately thought about it, after trying so hard not to think about it at all, and it seemed like a long time ago that it had happened, far back in the remote and incredible past of yesterday. Something so remote could surely be thought of without particular trauma, could be considered calmly, or at least without excessive emotion, in the hope that something beneficial might come of it, something recovered that had been lost, something learned that had not been learned before, or had been forgotten. She was not actually optimistic that any of these things would result from her thinking, however calmly, or anything good at all, but anyhow it was sometimes easier in the long run to think than it was not to think, and it was a kind of relief for a while, even though it did not last.

So Lila had tried to kill her. There was no question about that. It was only by the merest chance that she escaped, and if she had not escaped, no one would ever have known that she had been deliberately killed, for Lila was far too clever to be found out, and it would have been considered either an accident or suicide, whichever under the circumstances seemed most likely. Her relationship with Lila had started going bad ages ago, long before remote yesterday, and it had gone steadily from bad to worse, and the most terrible part of it was that it had been, until yesterday, all kept carefully under the surface of a terrifying cordiality. So far as she could understand it, for this deterioration of a relationship that had once seemed the only true and possible one in her shrunken world, there were two reasons, and neither was a reason that she could change.

In the first place, she had not been a cheerful or pleasant companion. She admitted that. It’s difficult to be cheerful or pleasant when one is burdened constantly, more and more heavily as time goes on, by a complex feeling of guilt and danger and loneliness, and it is impossible not to have such a feeling, or to hide it forever, when one is insecure in one’s position. She was like an apostate who, having no longer any belief in God, still fears God’s judgment. And then, in the second place, Lila had simply grown away from her and wished to be rid of her, but there was danger in this for Lila, or Lila thought there was, for she did not trust her little cousin any longer, and there was no telling what harm the cousin might do, in ignorance or fear or malice or all together, if she were deserted and left to her own devices. Lila was beautiful and talented and ambitious, and if it was compulsory for her to be one thing, it was imperative for her to appear to be something else. Therefore, she had tried to kill, and it was something, after all, that could be thought about afterward in the room of a stranger without grief or anger or exorbitant sense of loss.

Ivy Galvin lit another cigarette and closed her eyes and saw herself clearly. She was standing at the glass doers of their bedroom, hers and Lila’s, staring across the small terrace outside and down into the interior court of the apartment building in which they lived, and Lila opened the door behind her and came into the room. Lila was wearing one of her beautiful tailored suits, the silvery-gray one, and she was, in spite of her day’s work, which must have been arduous, as perfectly groomed in detail as she had been when she left in the morning.

“Hello, darling,” Lila said.

“Hello, Cousin Lila.”

Ivy did not turn away from the glass doors. She continued to look out across the terrace into the interior court. Lila, for an instant, looked annoyed, the thinnest shadow of an expression on the smooth cameo of her face. She removed the tailored jacket of her silvery-gray suit and began carefully to remove her wrist watch and the sapphire ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Cousin. I’ve told you and told you that I dislike it.”

“I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“Considering everything, it’s rather ridiculous, don’t you think?”

“I suppose it is?”

“Sometimes I think you do it purposely to annoy me.”

“No. I just forget, that’s all. I always called you Cousin at home.”

“Well, you’re no longer home.” Lila stared at Ivy’s back, and now the shadow on the cameo was a suggestion of slyness. “Perhaps you don’t do it purposely. Perhaps it’s an unconscious expression of hostility.”

“I don’t think so. It’s only a habit.”

“Are you feeling hostile, Ivy?”

“What makes you think I am?”

“Never mind. I see we are about to get into a session of answering questions with questions, which will get us nowhere at all. Have you had a good day?”

“It’s been just an ordinary day.”

“Meaning that it has been a bad one. You have many bad days, don’t you, Ivy? I wish I knew what is the matter with you.”

“There’s nothing the matter with me.”

“Obviously there’s something. Do you think you ought to see someone?”

Lila removed her blouse and skirt and sat down on the bed to remove her shoes and stockings. She did not look at Ivy now, but she somehow gave the impression of doing so. In the room, suddenly, there was at atmosphere of urgent waiting.

“What do you mean, someone?” Ivy said.

“A doctor.”

“No. I don’t need a doctor.”

“You needn’t be so intense about it. It was only a suggestion.”

“I don’t want to see one.”

“Don’t, then. It’s entirely up to you. As a matter of fact, I agree that it’s not necessary and possibly wouldn’t be very wise. Haven’t you dressed today?”

“No. I didn’t see any use in it.”

“You should dress and go out more often.”

“There’s no place to go.”

“On the contrary, there are many places to go.”

“Anyhow, there is no place to go that I want to go, and therefore there’s no sense in going.”

“Perhaps if you tried it, you’d think differently. You should develop an interest in something to keep your mind occupied. You never read a book or look at pictures or listen to music or do anything at all that might divert you and give you pleasure.”

“I’m not clever like you. I’m no good at such things.”

“It doesn’t require a very clever person to read and look at pictures and listen to music. At least you’re not illiterate.”

“That’s something, isn’t it? Thanks for reassuring me.”

“Oh, please don’t imagine slights where none was intended, Ivy. I’m only trying to be helpful.”

“I don’t need any help. I only need to be left alone.”

“Pardon me. If that’s what you need, we should be able to arrange it with no difficulty whatever.”

She stood up in her shimmering white slip at the same moment that Ivy turned from the door. Lifting her hands to her head, she began to remove the pins from the black bun on the back of her neck, and the bun became fluid under her fingers and spilled down between her shoulders in a dark stream. In the movements and features of her body there was the hard and disciplined grace of a ballerina. Watching her, Ivy experienced again the intense and tortured reaction of adoration and submission that she had felt almost the first moment of their meeting.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.

“Didn’t you?” How, precisely, did you mean it?”

“I didn’t mean anything precisely. It’s only that I’m always depressed and afraid of something.”

“Afraid? Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m afraid of what may happen to me.”

“Would you like me to tell you what your trouble is?”

“I don’t think so. I’d rather not hear it.”

“Nevertheless, I think I’ll tell you. Your trouble is, darling, that you have neither the courage to be what you are, nor to become what you are not. You would, I think, be better off dead. When you are like this, which is now almost always, you are not tolerable to yourself or to anyone else. I’m really getting rather sick of you. Did you know that? I’m sick of your moods and your whining and your sad, sad face. You are no longer a pleasure to me, and so far as I can see there is no other excuse for your existence, and certainly none for your living here. Why don’t you go home?”

“You know perfectly well that I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“They wouldn’t have me.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure. They might. They could lock you in your room and pretend to everybody that you had a lingering and fatal illness of some sort. And perhaps you have. Anyhow, it would be just like them.”

“I’ll not go back to them. I’ll go away from here, if that’s what you want, but I’ll not go back.”

“You’d never survive on your own. You’re too ineffectual.”

“I could find a job and another place to stay. I may not be so helpless as you imagine.”

“What kind of job? As a waitress? As a clerk in a store? Don’t be absurd. You are incapable of doing anything worthwhile. In the end, you’d have to find someone else to keep you, if you didn’t get yourself into serious trouble first, and where would you be then? Worse off than ever, I imagine. You would go on and on getting worse and worse off, until you had destroyed yourself and possibly others. If you won’t go home, you will have to stay with me, that’s all there is to be said about it.”

Lila walked over to her dressing table and dropped the hairpins from her black bun into a glass tray and went on without stopping into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. After a minute or two the shower began to run behind the door, and Ivy sat down stiffly on a frail brocaded chair and folded her hands’ in her lap and looked steadily at the hands. It was beginning to get dark in the court outside the glass doors, and darker in the room than out. Between five and six, that meant. Closer to six. It was true, she thought, what Lila had said. It was true that she, Ivy, could do nothing worthwhile and would surely come to a bad end if she tried. It was for her, after all was said and done, only a question of which end of possible ends was a little less bad than the others. The truth was, she wished nowadays only to sit quite still, as she now was, and do nothing whatever. The sound of the shower stopped, and she sat and listened to the silence where the sound had been. Pretty soon Lila came back into the room and turned on a light above the mirror of the dressing table and began to make a selection of clothing from drawers and a closet.

“Where are you going?” Ivy asked. Her attention locked upon Lila’s naked figure — the white, glowing flesh, the smooth curve of breasts that had known the touch of her fingers, the wide sweep of hips, the enticing length of thigh and calf.

“Out,” Lila said, turning to face Ivy so that the lush richness of her breasts were exposed to Ivy’s feverish glance. There was an odd, taunting look in Lila’s knowing eyes which informed Ivy that Lila was completely aware of the effect of her nudity upon her.

“Are you going to dinner?” Ivy asked. Her voice was a hoarse whisper and there was a dryness in her throat that came from the memory of all the times she had been together with Lila. She felt her breathing quicken and had to fight down an urge to run toward Lila and gather her soft, perfumed flesh in her arms. There was an ache deep inside her, an ache of remembrance of things past, a longing for the sure touch of Lila’s fingers on her body, a pulsating wish to lose herself in the perfumed mystery of Lila’s flesh.

“Yes,” Lila answered curtly.

“Who is taking you?”

“A man. Someone at the agency. I’m meeting him at a cocktail lounge.”

“Have you been with him before?” Ivy asked, forcing herself to stare at her hands, hoping in that manner to quiet the emotional disturbance in her.

“Yes. Several times.”

“Why do you go?”

“Because he’s useful to me. He’s been useful before, and he’ll be useful again.”

“I don’t understand how you can do it.”

“I know you don’t. You’d be better off if you did.”

“Is it possible to be two persons?”

“I’m not two persons. I’m one person who can adjust at different times to different conditions.”

“Is it necessary for you to go tonight?”

“Not absolutely. I’m going because I want to.”

“Please don’t.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because I want you to stay here with me.”

“No, thank you. You’re not very entertaining company these days.”

“I don’t feel like staying alone.”

“Only a little while ago you were saying that it was exactly what you needed.”

“I said I didn’t mean it. Sometimes when I’m alone too long. I begin thinking about killing myself. I’m afraid I might do it.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance.”

While they were talking, Lila was dressing, and now she slipped her dress over her head and stared at Ivy levelly across the distance that separated them. Her face softened, and she seemed suddenly to regret her words.

“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s not so bad as you imagine, and I don’t wish to be cruel. Just zip me up, darling, and I’ll make you comfortable before I leave.”

She walked over to Ivy and turned her back, and Ivy, standing, pulled up the zipper and locked it. Lila’s shoulders above the dress were as smooth and flawless as her cameo face.

“What do you mean?” Ivy said.

“About making you comfortable?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll put you to bed and give you a sedative. Something to make you sleep. It will prevent you from dreaming, and you’ll feel better in the morning. Tomorrow’s Sunday, you know. I’ll be home with you all day.”

“I never take sedatives.”

“It won’t hurt you this once. It’s the kind I take all the time. You have the most fantastic ideas about what’s harmful.”

Lila went to the dressing table again, where she brushed her hair a few strokes and restored the luxurious, dark bun. Then she fixed her face and moved on into the bathroom. Ivy got into bed, sitting erect with her back against the headboard. She heard water running, and the brittle sound of glass against glass. Lila returned with a crystal tumbler half full of a deep pink liquid.

“Here you are,” Lila said. “It will be a little bitter, but not too bad. Just drink it quickly.”

Ivy drank the liquid and slipped down under the covers with her head on her pillow. The bed and the pillow were wonderfully soft, and it would be, she thought, a kind of minor and healing miracle if she could only sleep deeply and quietly through the night, as Lila had promised, without dreams.

“Will you be late?” she said.

“Probably. I may not be back until morning.”

“If I’m asleep when you come, wake me up.”

“We’ll see. Don’t worry about it.”

Lila got her fur coat from the closet and turned off the light above the mirror. In the total darkness that followed for a few seconds the extinction of the light, she spoke again.

“I’ll put some records on the phonograph in the living room.”

“It doesn’t matter. You needn’t bother with it.”

“No. I’ll put them on. I know you’re indifferent to music, but it will soothe you and help you get to sleep sooner. The phonograph will shut itself off when the records are finished.”

She went past the foot of the bed and across the room in the darkness. In the living room, she turned on a table lamp, and the light of the lamp approached the door between the rooms and entered a little way into the darkness. The phonograph began to play softly, the hall door opened and closed, and Ivy, lying alone and sedated in the suddenly enormous apartment, did not know what the music was, its name or its composer, but she knew that it lifted on strings a little of the weight of the night and what the night held, and that Lila, who had been cruel, had in the end been kind.

She lay utterly motionless, except as she moved to breathe, listening to muted strings from one record to another, and the strings no longer seemed to be in the living room, where they had been in the beginning, but above her in the darkness near the ceiling, and they seemed to keep rising and rising, or she kept sinking and sinking, the distance between her and the receding strings becoming vast and incalculable, like the distance to a star, and then all of a sudden the sound of the strings was gone entirely, leaving a profound and terrifying silence, and someone leaned over the foot of her bed in the darkness and silence and terror and said quite clearly: You would, I think, be better off dead.

Lila had said that. She had said it with calm, unequivocal cruelty, and later she had become inexplicably kind and had mixed a sedative, which Ivy had drunk, and had gone away casually to meet a man for dinner so that Ivy could go quietly to sleep and die sleeping quietly. It was revealed to Ivy in a blinding flash of insight a sudden rising into consciousness of a pattern of truth that had formed and cohered without conscious thinking in a deep and primitive part of her brain. In the morning, after enough time had lapsed, Lila would return and find her dead, or nearly dead, and Lila would tell how she had been depressed, had talked of suicide, and it would all be very logical and acceptable, and there were certain people who would receive the news with relief and thankfulness.

The bottle of sedative was in the bathroom, in the little medicine cabinet above the lavatory. Or the bottle in which the sedative had been. Ivy had seen it there only today, when she had found the initiative, somehow, to go and brush her teeth, and she had noticed specifically that the bottle was nearly full, and had wondered vaguely why Lila used the sedative in liquid form when it would have been so much simpler to take as capsules. Anyhow, it was now imperative to go and look at the bottle, to see if it was still nearly full or not, and Ivy swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. The darkness shifted and swayed treacherously, but at the same time was a kind of fluid and tangible mass that pressed upon her and served to hold her erect. Walking very carefully, with one arm stretched ahead of her to feel the way, she went into the bathroom and turned on the light above the little mirror which was also the door of the medicine cabinet, and the bottle was in the cabinet, and it was empty.

There, there, there. That was the proof of it. She had taken enough of the sedative to kill her, and if she did not wish to die it was necessary to take some kind of action against it. Her mind, for some reason, in spite of the sedative and unreasonable fear of death, was working quits well. It would never do to call a doctor, and it would do even less to call the police. It would not even do to go for help to another inhabitant of the building. It was perfectly clear, if she was to be helped at all, that she must help herself, and the first thing that must clearly be done was to get rid of the sedative inside her. She had no idea how fast it might work, how quickly be absorbed into her blood where it could not be retrieved, but it was certain that it would work more quickly as a liquid than as a capsule, and even now it might be too late. She went over to the commode and got down onto her knees in front of it and gagged herself with the first two fingers of her right hand, and quite a lot of bitter pink fluid came up through her throat and out her mouth to stain the clear water in the porcelain bowl. She knelt there for two or three minutes, retching, and then she stood up and pressed the fingers of her hands against her temples and tried to think what she should do next, if there was anything at all to be done.

But of course there was. It was imperative to keep moving. She had read or heard that somewhere. It was imperative to fight off sleep with physical action, and it would help, also, if the air was clear and cold and not smotheringly warm, as the air in the apartment was. Her stomach settled, she went back into the bedroom aid stripped and began to dress for the street in the first necessary articles of clothing that came to hand. Finally dressed after what seemed an interminable time, although it was no more than a few minutes, she went out of the apartment and down by the stairs to the street, and she was feeling oddly remote and detached from all things around her, which had no shape or character, as if she were floating just out of contact, or were, perhaps, simply going to sleep on her feet.

She began walking the streets without conscious direction, and she did not know how long she walked, or how far, except that it was a great distance and a long time. In the beginning the streets seemed to be broad and brightly lighted with many people on them, but later they became narrow and dark with hardly any people at all. Fragments stuck in her mind, places she had been and things she had seen, and she especially remembered afterward a very tall man in a blue and red uniform outside a swinging door, a bridge lighted at intervals by yellow bulbs above a giant whispering of black water, a stone bench in front of a cast-statue where she wished to sit and rest for a while but is not because she did not dare. And finally, after ages, she was on a narrow street outside an all-night diner, and she was absolutely too exhausted to walk any farther, and she desperately wanted something hot to drink.

There was a dark, fat man behind the counter in the diner. He looked like a Greek, she thought. He put a cup of coffee in front of her and walked away down the counter, where he stood idly, and after a while a young man came in and sat down and began to talk with the Greek. She had finished her coffee by this time and was thinking that she would have to go, although she didn’t know where, and then, for the first time, she realized that she had no money, not even enough to pay for the coffee she had drunk, no money at all. Oddly enough, considering what had happened to her and what might yet happen, her inability to pay for the coffee assumed the dimensions of an enormous problem. It was somehow essential for the coffee to be paid for, and perhaps it was because she must demonstrate that she was clever enough to take care of herself after all, in spite of what Lila had said. She looked from the corners of her eyes at the young man sitting on the stool down the counter. He was a shaggy, unkempt young man, his black hair growing on his neck, but there was a lost and dogged quality in his rather gaunt face that seemed to suggest his own aberrations at odds with the world, and she had the strangest and most incredible feeling that it might be possible to be his friend.

Acting with compulsive abruptness, she went down and asked him to pay for the coffee, but he was mean and chintzy after all, the son of a bitch, although he did claim later, after she had waited on the street for him to come out, that he had paid.

She waited for him for two good reasons. She needed a place to rest and get warm, which he might have and share, and she continued to feel strangely, regardless of his meanness about the coffee, that the two of them, she and he, had a common denominator in a general way, although certainly not exactly. And so she had waited, and she had come home with him, and here she was, and the crazy part of it, the monstrous and ugly joke of it, was why in the world she had gone to all the trouble.

Thinking she was dying, she had made herself live and had forgotten that living was not something she really cared to go on doing. Yes, it was funny, a great joke she had played on herself. Sitting on Henry Harper’s sofa, she lit the third of Henry Harper’s cigarettes and began to laugh at the joke. She laughed and laughed with a hard, internal laughter that shook her body and made her bind, but then she quit laughing and began to think calmly and rationally to determine if the joke might not yet be turned in her favor, the mistake of living corrected. What she should have done, of course, was to lie sensibly in her bed and let death come to her gently as it started, thanks to Lila, and it would have been all over by this time, the dying done, and she would not now have this day to live, nor any of the days after, but it was too late to think about that, what she should have done. What she had to think about now was what could yet be done, and it might be done very simply if only Henry Harper kept sedatives.

It seemed reasonable to assume that he might, a fellow who worked all hours and clearly had trouble sleeping. There was time enough, too. Plenty of time. It was still very early, Henry Harper had not slept more than three or four hours at the most and would certainly go on sleeping hours longer, and by the time he wakened it would have been time enough. Even if it hadn’t, even if he wakened too soon, he would probably think that she was only sleeping naturally and would let her go on sleeping until it was too late. If only, to begin with, he had the sedatives.

She got up and went into the bedroom. Henry Harper was lying as he had been before, face down across the bed with his arms outflung as it he were reaching in his sleep for the horizontal extremities of a cross. She went on into the little bathroom in the corner, where she looked carefully among other items for a bottle or a box that might contain what she wanted, but there was none. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she thought about using a razor blade on her wrist, for she understood that it could be done under water with little or no pain, but the idea was revolting and impossible, and then she saw the old-fashioned water heater in a corner with the gas ring underneath. She went back into the bedroom and opened its single window, and then she went in to the living room and opened its two, both of them overlooking the street, after which she returned to the bedroom and covered Henry Harper with a blanket that was folded at the foot of the bed. She did not think it was necessary, since time would not now be so important a factor, but she feared, nevertheless, that the cold air might waken him before she was ready, and it was just as well to take every precaution. In the tiny bathroom, she closed the door and stuffed toilet paper tightly in the cracks around it. This was meticulous work and took quite a bit of time, and it was with vast relief and satisfaction that she finally sat down on the floor beside the water heater and listened to the sound of gas pouring from two dozen holes into the room.

It did not enter her mind, not once, that she was doing Henry Harper a very bad turn.

Chapter 3

It was determined by a distended bladder that she should not die. The bladder belonged to Henry Harper. Waking, he was aware first of the nagging discomfort that had broken his sleep, and then he was instantly afterward aware of the cold air coming in the open window. He could not remember having opened the window, and in fact he could remember, after a moment’s consideration, that he definitely hadn’t opened it. He had taken a last swallow from the bottle, and then he had lain down across the bed for a moment and had obviously fallen asleep, and in the meanwhile, while he was sleeping, someone lad opened the window and had covered him with a blanket, which was something else he could definitely remember not having done for himself. Then he thought of the girl in the other room who called herself Ivy Galvin and who was clearly in some kind of trouble, and he hoped that she didn’t start trying to be ingratiating about windows and blankets and things like that, for it would only make it more difficult to lack her out when the time came, which was not long off, but first, before doing anything else, he would have to get up and relieve the distension of his bladder.

He threw the blanket aside and sat up on the edge of the bed and held his head for a moment in his hands. His temples throbbed, and his eyes felt sore and hot under granulated lids. With the index finger of each hand he pressed against his eyes until the pain became unbearable, and then he removed the pressure and felt for a moment afterward, in the abrupt departure of pain, an illusion of clarity and well-being. Rising in the moment of illusion, he went over to the bathroom door and tried to open it, but the door seemed to be stuck, resisting his effort. He turned the knob as far clockwise as it would go and pulled again, and the door snapped open suddenly in a thin shower of tissue before a gust of gas. He saw Ivy Gavin sitting on the floor with her back against the tub in attitude of definitive peace, and in an instant the stuck door, the tissue, the gas and the girl all slipped into position in a significant relationship. He was always a little proud afterward, thinking back, of the decisiveness of his reaction. Lunging across the room, he closed the tap of the ring beneath the water heater, and almost in the same motion, with hardly a break or change of direction, he gathered up the girl and carried her into the bedroom. In his mind with fear and incipient anger was a small entity of compassion, the thought that she was so light, so very light, hardly anything at all in his arms.

Laying her on the bed in the cold air from the window, he listened with sickening relief to the ragged and reassuring sound of her breathing, and as his fear diminished with the evidence that she was not dead and would not likely die, he became proportionately furious that she had, with no consideration of him whatever, placed him in a position that would have been, without the sheerest good luck of a distended bladder, extremely difficult if not disastrous. He wondered if there were anything more that he should do to help her, but he couldn’t think what it would be, unless it were to loosen her clothing so that she could breathe more freely, and after thinking about it for a few seconds, in a kind of deliberate retaliation to the dirty trick she had played on him, he removed her dress and slip entirely, holding her with one arm in a sitting position as he pulled them over her head. The thinness of her body, he saw now, as he had guessed last night on the windy street, was truly the thinness of small bones. She was incongruously delicate and strong, childish and mature, and there was in the center of his anger, as he looked at her, an aching core that was not anger at all. Reluctantly, he covered her with the blanket and sat beside her to watch and wait until she recovered consciousness.

It seemed like a long time. It was very cold in the room because of the open window, and pretty soon he got up and put on his overcoat and sat down again. Later, when he felt that the gas was gone, or nearly so, he went over and closed the window, but the room stayed cold, although the radiator was hot, and so he went out into the other room and found the two windows there open also. He closed them and returned to the bed and sat down once more on the edge, and Ivy Galvin stirred and made a soft, whimpering sound and opened her eyes and immediately closed them again.

“I’m sick,” she said.

“It damn well serves you right,” he said.

She retched and rolled off the bed onto her feet and started for the bathroom. After three steps, she sank slowly to her knees with her arms reaching blindly for support.

She remained in that position, on her knees with her arms spread, and when he reached her and picked her up, her eyes were shut and her face reposed and her sickness apparently past. She was breathing quietly and deeply. Laying her on the bed and covering her again with the blanket, he stood looking down at her with a feeling of desperation. “Are you all right?” he said.

She shook her head, not so much, he thought, in answer to his question as to indicate that she wanted him to leave her alone. Well, he would leave her alone, all right, if that was what she wanted. He would leave her alone gladly until she had recovered sufficiently to dress and get out and go wherever she had to go, and that would be the end of her, and good riddance. Turning away, he was reminded by his bladder that he had not yet done what he had got up to do, and so he went into the bathroom and did it. Then he went back through the bedroom into the living room and sat down at the table and looked at his stack of manuscript. He wondered dully if he would ever in the world get it finished, and if he did, in time, if it would be worth the finishing. After half an hour, he went back into the bedroom and found Ivy Galvin lying quietly on her back with her eyes open. Turning her head on the pillow, she stared at him with undisguised malice.

“I suppose you think I ought to thank you,” she said.

“Not at all,” he said. “You’ve made it perfectly clear from the beginning that you don’t believe in thanking anyone for anything.”

“Why can’t you mind your own business?”

“Well, I’ll be damned if you aren’t the most incredible female I’ve ever been unlucky enough to meet! I’d like to remind you, in case you’ve forgotten, that you’ve been imposing yourself on me in every way that suited you, and I don’t mind telling you that I’ve had enough. What the hell do you mean by trying to kill yourself in my bathroom?”

“I can do as I please with myself. It’s not your affair.”

“The hell it isn’t! And what was I supposed to do with you after you were dead? Dump you in the alley? Simply call the morgue to come and get you? By God, do you suppose a body is something that can be disposed of without any explanations or any trouble at all?”

The malice in her expression was replaced by a kind of surprised acceptance of his point, and he had the impression, fantastic as it was, that she had not considered previously for a single instant the enormity of the consequences to him of what she had tried to do to herself.

“I didn’t think of that,” she said.

“Of course you didn’t. You never think of anyone but yourself.”

“Well, don’t feel so abused about it. I’m not dead, thanks to your meddling, and it’s apparent that I’m in no danger of dying.”

“Not because you didn’t try.”

“Perhaps I’ll try again.”

“All right. Better luck next time. Don’t think for a minute I care if you die or not, just so you do it somewhere else. When you get away from here, wherever you go, you can do as you like with yourself, whatever it may be.”

“You’re a mean bastard, aren’t you?”

“I don’t like women who try to leave their dead bodies in my bathroom, if that’s what you mean.”

“All you can think of is the little bit of trouble it would have caused you. You don’t care in the least what may happen to me.”

“That’s right. Not in the least.”

“In that case, I’d better go away at once.”

“The sooner the better.”

“I’m sorry I ever came.”

“So am I.”

“It would have been better to sleep in an alley.”

“You can sleep in an alley tonight.”

She had been lying quite still, only her eyes and lips moving, but now she sat up abruptly and turned back the blanket. Instantly she was still again, caught and fixed in rigidity as she stared down at her nearly naked body. After a few frozen seconds, she lay back, covering herself, and he realized from the harshness of her breathing and the crimson stains in her cheeks that she was exorbitantly furious.

“Where are my clothes?” she said.

“On the chair over there.”

“Hand them to me.”

“Why should I? Get them yourself.”

“You’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?”

“Not at all. You’re nothing much to look at, you know.”

“If you know what’s good for you, you had better get out of here.”

“It’s my room, and I’ll get out when I’m damn good and ready.”

“I suppose it gave you a cheap thrill to take my clothes off when I couldn’t help myself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve had more pleasure taking the panties off a lamb chop.”

“If you ever put your filthy hands on me again, I’ll kill you.”

“No danger. I never want to see you again, let alone touch you.”

His anger was at least equal to hers. She had imposed on him and put him in danger and was now accusing him unfairly of motives he hadn’t had, and he was confused, as well as angry, and desperately sick, besides, of her and her troubles, whatever they were precisely, and all he wanted was to be rid of her forever as quickly as could be. Retrieving her dress and slip, he threw them across the bed with a violence indicative of his anger.

“Let me tell you something,” he said. “I’ve only tried to help you when you needed it, which was a bad mistake, for all I’ve had from you is abuse and trouble and nasty allusions to your precious virtue, for the love of God, and if you want to do me a good turn for the one I tried to do you, you will get dressed and go find a place to kill yourself where no one else will be involved.”

He went out into the other room and sat down on the worn frieze sofa. He noticed in an ash tray the crushed butts of the three cigarettes Ivy Galvin had smoked, and he wondered if she had got up to smoke them in the night or if she had smoked them this morning after waking. He thought, wrongly, that she had probably smoked them in the night when she could not sleep for thinking about whatever it was that made her want to die, and he saw her suddenly with extraordinary vividness in his mind as she had not actually been, huddled alone in the dark in the room of a stranger that was the only place she could find in the end to go. Seeing her so, he felt his anger drain out of him, and he began to wish that he had not spoken to her with deliberate cruelty, or that he could, having spoken, take back what he had said. He cursed and closed his eyes and waited for her to come in, which she did about ten minutes later.

“Could you give me a little money?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“You could if you would.”

“All right, then. I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I only have a little, and I need it for myself.”

“I suppose that’s so. You’re obviously very poor.”

“You said last night that you have some money at the place you came from. Why don’t you go there and get it?”

“I don’t want to.”

“You mean you’re afraid to?”

“No. Not exactly. I just don’t want to.”

“Where are you going?”

“When I leave here?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Somewhere.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said with quiet despair. “You don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t have any money to get you there. What’s going to happen to you?”

“I don’t know that, either. Something.”

“Well, it’s not my fault. I’m not responsible for what you are, or what you’ve done, or anything that may happen.”

“That’s true. You’re not. I don’t blame you for not giving me any money, and I don’t blame you for being angry.”

“I’m not angry. I was angry in the bedroom, but I’m over it.”

“You were right to be angry. You’ve been very kind, and I’ve been a perfect bitch. I’m ashamed of myself.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be.”

“I am. I’m grateful and ashamed. Thank you for giving me a warm place to stay.”

“It’s all right. It was nothing.”

“I think I’d better go now. Good-by.”

Looking at her, his despair mounting, he knew already, although he was not ready to admit it, that he could not send her off to somewhere with nothing. He wondered, if she would try again to commit suicide, and if she would succeed if she tried. It did not seem possible that she could go on and on failing. He had a mental picture of her in the city morgue, a slim and childish body in a stark box that pulled out of a wall like a drawer. He had never been in a morgue and had no clear idea of what one was like, but he was certain that it would be bleak and cold and inhospitable to the dead.

“Look,” he said. “There’s no hurry about leaving. Sit down for a while.”

“I thought you wanted me to leave as soon as possible.”

“I was angry when I said that. I told you I’ve got over it.”

“Nevertheless, I ought to leave at once. It will only be harder to go if I delay.”

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

“How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

“I don’t know. Quite a while. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m not hungry.”

“I might be able to spare you a little money after all.”

“I wouldn’t want to take it. I’d be ashamed.”

“Oh, nonsense. I wish you’d sit down and stay a little longer. I’d like to talk with you.”

She shrugged and sat down in a chair facing him, smoothing the skirt of her wool dress over her knees. Her legs, he saw, were quite good, with slender ankles and clean lines curving nicely to the calves. She was, in fact, a pretty girl altogether, and she would be, he felt, even prettier if only she would take the trouble to make the most of what she had. It would be a pity if she were actually to come, sooner or later, to the bad end she seemed to be looking for. As he watched her, he was reminded suddenly of someone else he had once known.

“What is there to talk about?” she said.

“Tell me about yourself.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“There must be something.”

“Nothing interesting. Nothing you’d care to hear.”

“If you want me to give you some money or try to help you, you could at least tell me the truth.”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“It’s pretty obvious.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Because you tried to kill yourself, and almost did. No one tries to kill himself over nothing.”

She folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at them. He thought at first that she was considering an answer, but after a long period of silence it seemed that she had merely decided not to make any answer at all.

“All right,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Then she looked up from her folded hands, and he saw that his first impression had been right, that she had been considering an answer all the while.

“It’s evident,” she said, “that I tried to kill myself because I didn’t want to go on living. The truth is, someone I loved tried to kill me last night, and I saved my life by walking and walking and refusing to die, and then later, this morning, I decided it would be better to die after all, and so I tried, as you know, but it was no use. It’s rather silly, isn’t it, when you stop to think about it?”

“Who tried to kill you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’d rather not tell you.”

“Because no one did?”

“No. It’s true. Why should I lie about it?”

“Why should you lie about anything? I’ve got a notion you’re pretty good at it. Maybe you think it’s fun. Maybe it’s essential to your ego.”

“If I tell you what happened, will you believe me? There’s no point in telling you if you won’t.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“All right, then. I’ve been living with my cousin. Her name is Lila Galvin. Her father, who is dead, was my father’s brother. She’s very beautiful and clever, and I loved her, and for a long time she loved me, but then I began to bore her and become a nuisance, and she doesn’t love me anymore. I don’t think she trusts me, either, and she’s afraid that I may destroy her. Or destroy, at least, the kind of life she has made for herself. It isn’t true, I wouldn’t do anything deliberately to hurt her, but she thinks I might, and that’s why she tried to kill me. Because she wants to be rid of me and is afraid of what I may say or do. Do you understand?”

She was looking at him levelly, holding his eyes, and he saw in hers an expression that he thought was composed of the pride and pain of masochism. He was convinced that she was deriving, now that she had begun to talk, a kind of intense and morbid pleasure from exposing in herself what he would surely consider shameful, even if she did not. And it was true that he did. He considered it shameful, and it made him sick. Not the aberrance itself, which was common enough, but the specific existence of the aberrance in this particular person — this thin girl with folded hands and pained eyes who was beginning to be someone he liked, and who might have become, with better luck on different terms, someone he could have loved.

“I think I do,” he said.

“Well, then,” she said, “that’s the way I am, and that’s what happened, and now I hope we needn’t talk about it any more.”

“How do you know she tried to kill you? Your Cousin Lila. What did she do?”

“Oh, it was very clever and almost worked, and it would probably have been much better if it had. It would have been so easy, simply a matter of going to sleep and never waking, and there was even music to die by. I wasn’t feeling well, very depressed, which is the way I often feel, and she put me to bed and gave me too much sleeping medicine and went away. You see how it would have been? She’d have come back and found me dead, and it would have seemed like suicide, and that’s exactly what everyone would have thought it was.”

“How do you know she gave you too much sleeping medicine? How did you discover it? Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”

“No. I didn’t imagine it. She had been angry with me and had said that I would be better off dead, and later, after she had gone and I was lying in bed in the dark with the music playing. I suddenly remembered what she had said, and I was certain that I would die if I didn’t do something to prevent it. I got up and looked at the bottle the medicine had been in, and the bottle was empty, and I had seen earlier that it was almost full. There was no question about it. None at all. She had given me too much, and I was dying painlessly, as she wished, and when I knew this, although I had no particular desire to live, it was somehow imperative that I not die. It makes no sense at all, does it? Anyhow, that’s the way it was, and I had heard that the thing to do was to keep moving and not, above all, to go to sleep, and so I dressed and started walking in the streets. After a long time I was too tired to walk any farther, and that’s when I went into the diner where we met. You were nasty and chintzy about the coffee.”

“Never mind the coffee. If all this is true, what do you intend to do about it?”

“Nothing. What is there to do?”

“Well, if this cousin of yours tried to kill you, you should at least report it to the police.”

“No, no. That’s not possible. Surely you can see that. Anyhow, it would do no good, and possibly a great deal of harm. I don’t want to cause Lila any trouble.”

“By God, if she tried to kill me, I’d want to make all the trouble for her that I could.”

“You don’t understand. You’re just like all the others I’ve known. You’re ignorant and bigoted and don’t understand in the least how things can be.”

“Look, now. Don’t start abusing me again. I have trouble enough getting along with you as it is. If this lovely cousin of yours tried to kill you, as you said, we’ve got to do something about it, and that’s ail there is to it. Would you like me to go and see her?”

“God, no! Why should I want that? What could you do?”

“I could scare the hell out of her, at least. I could give her as bad a time as she’s given you.”

“You leave her alone. Do you-hear me? Leave her alone. If I’d thought you were going to have a lot of crazy ideas about doing things, I wouldn’t have told you what happened.”

“Oh, all right. She’s your cousin, and it’s your life she tried to take. If it pleases you to be generous with a murderous queer, go right ahead.”

“And don’t call her names. Just keep still about her if you can’t speak decently.”

“I didn’t call her anything she isn’t. You’d better start learning to face the truth. And you’d better start learning to know who wants to be your friend and who doesn’t”

“Do you want to be my friend? Is that what you mean?”

“I doubt that anyone could be your friend. You wouldn’t allow it. You’re so damned abusive and offensive that you’d alienate anyone after a little while.”

“Is that so? I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

He grinned suddenly, and she grinned back, her small face lighting and assuming a loveliness that almost made it another face altogether, and then all at once they were laughing and laughing, together and at each other, and when they were done and quiet again, they felt relieved and much better and nearly comfortable.

“If we’re both difficult and offensive,” he said, “we at least have something in common.”

“Is it possible to be friends with a man? I hope so. It would be nice to be friends if he didn’t eventually want to be something more.”

“Maybe if you were good friends long enough you would begin to feel different about being something more.”

“Do you think so? It would make everything so much simpler and better if I could.”

“It might be possible. I don’t know. It seems reasonable to me that you learned to be what you are, and it’s just as reasonable, though probably harder, that you could learn to be something else.”

“It’s encouraging to hear you say so. I like you very much, and I’m sorry I’ve been so bitchy, even though I know very well that I’d be bitchy again and again if we were going on knowing each other.”

“Would you like to go on knowing each other?”

“I think so. I think I’d like to try. Would you?”

“Whether I would or not is beside the point. The point is, you don’t want to leave, because you have no place to go, and I’m not going to kick you out, because I’m not tough enough or mean enough or smart enough, whatever it would take to do it, and so you will have to stay here with me, and later we may be able to work something out. There’s one thing you’ve got to stop, however, and that’s thinking all the time that I’m about to ravish you, or some damn thing like that. I may want to, and probably will want to under the circumstances, but I won’t.”

“Do you really want me to stay?”

“Let’s not press the point. I’m willing to have you if you behave yourself and quit giving me hell for every little thing I do, or that you imagine. I haven’t enough money to buy you clothes or other things you’ll need, however. One of us will simply have to go and get what you have in the place you came from.”

“All right. I’ll go myself tomorrow. I’ll go and come right back. I’m determined not to be a coward about it any longer.”

She got up suddenly and sat down beside him on the sofa. Leaning toward him, very carefully not touching him the least bit more than she intended, she brushed her lips softly across his cheek, and he was aware of the enormous effort it required and the exorbitant concession that it was.

“Thank you,” she said. “I hope we can be friends. I’ll try very hard, honestly.”

“Oh, hell,” he said with quiet despair. “Oh, hell.”

Chapter 4

The next morning, which was the morning of Monday, Henry Harper was gone when Ivy Galvin wakened. There was a penciled note on his work table, and under the note there were five one-dollar bills. The note said that Henry had gone to work, and it was the first time, reading the words, that she realized that he must surely have a job of some kind, since he was earning nothing from his writing, and that he would have to go to his job today, since it was Monday. The five dollars, the note said, were for breakfast and lunch and taxi fare to and from the place she needed to go, and he hoped that it was enough, for it was, in any event, all he had to spare.

She had slept well in the night for a change, no dreams at all, and she was feeling better this particular Monday morning than she had felt any morning of any day for a long, long while. The note was encouraging too. It made her feel warm and important in a minor way, giving her at least five dollars’ worth of significance to someone who was under no obligation to do anything for her that he did not really want to do. She was sorry she had called him chintzy and a son of a bitch and all the bad names she had called him. She resolved hereafter to be as good as possible as much of the time as possible, but she was honest enough with herself to concede that it was unlikely that she could suddenly start being good consistently when she had so little practice at it.

After bathing and dressing, she decided that she would start immediately for the apartment to get her possessions. There was no telephone in the rooms with which to call a taxi, however, and the street outside was not the kind of street on which taxis would ordinarily cruise. Anyhow, surprisingly enough, she was hungry and wanted something to eat before starting. Late yesterday afternoon, after they had settled things between them, she and Henry had gone down to the Greek’s to eat a really substantial dinner that Henry had paid for, and here she was already hungry again the morning after. She could not remember the last time she had been hungry in the morning, it had been so long ago, and she thought that her hunger was surely a good sign of things getting better generally.

She went downstairs to the street and down the street to the Greek’s. The little diner was beginning to assume in her mind a position of priority. She was fond of it for the part it had played in the changes she had made, or was making, and she was prepared to be just as fond of the Greek himself if he was willing to forgive her for calling him fat and greasy. He came down behind the counter to where she sat, his fat face creased amiably, and it was apparent that either he did not remember her at all or was willing to start over on better terms.

“Do you remember me?” she said.

“To be sure,” he said. “You’re the girl with trouble and no dime, and I’m a fat, greasy Greek.”

“I’m sorry I called you that. I hope you will forgive me.”

“It’s not necessary to forgive the truth. It’s true that I’m fat, and it’s true that I’m a Greek. I’d prefer not to be called greasy, however, even though that’s also true.”

“Nevertheless, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“Willingly.”

“Fat men are very pleasant, I think, and the Greeks have an honorable history.”

“It’s agreeable of you to say so. Will you have something to eat?”

“Yes. I’d like some toast and coffee.”

“I suggest an egg and some bacon besides.”

“No egg. I can’t tolerate an egg. Two strips of bacon, perhaps.”

While the toast and bacon were being prepared, she sat on the stool at the counter with her sense of acceptance growing warmer and bigger inside her. It was very pleasant to sit there in amiable association with the fat, honorable Greek. It was even more pleasant to know that one had been accepted on reasonable terms by someone who knew the worst about her. The pretense of being what one is not, the sustenance over a long period of time of an enormous deception, is at best difficult, and at worst destructive, as it had nearly been with her. It was such a relief to be honestly understood in one way by one person that she wished now to be understood in all ways by all persons. She wished her young relationship with Henry Harper, for instance, to be clearly understood by this fat, honorable Greek who was at the moment bringing her toast and bacon and coffee. There was also, she saw, a little paper cup of jelly.

“Did Henry come here for breakfast this morning?” she said.

“Henry Harper?” George said.

“Yes. He was gone this morning when I woke up.”

The Greek possessed, after all, being the proprietor of a successful diner, his full share of sophistication. He attached naturally to her stark statement an embroidery of details that were not true, but even so, allowing for his ignorance of all the facts, it was creditable that he showed no reaction except a polite interest in her small affairs “Henry’s a problem,” he said. “He hardly ever eats breakfast.”

“Perhaps I can make him understand that breakfast is important.”

“It would be a service if you could. He doesn’t take proper care of himself. He drinks black coffee late at night and refuses to have breakfast in the morning.”

“Well, it’s obvious that he’s very opinionated. I have learned that already. He’s very kind, though, for all that, and has given me a warm place to stay. I’m going to live with him for the time being.”

Into the Greek’s amiable countenance, despite his reliable sophistication, there now crept an expression of concern.

“Are you convinced,” he said, “that it’s the best arrangement?”

“We have come to a mutually satisfactory agreement. You needn’t worry about it.”

“I have a natural concern for Henry, you understand.”

“Yes, I do. I noticed it immediately.”

“It’s really the book. It would be too bad if anything interfered with the writing of the book.”

“I promise not to interfere.”

“A certain amount of interference arises inevitably from certain situations.”

“Distractions, you mean. However, you don’t have a full understanding of the arrangement. It’s possible that I may even be helpful in the writing of the book.”

“Let us hope so,” George said.

But it was evident that he was not convinced and was still concerned. He was forced to depart to serve another customer, but he kept glancing at Ivy from the corners of his eyes, evaluating her potential as a distraction as opposed to a help, and when he returned to her after a few minutes it was obvious that he considered the distractive potential, in terms of his own susceptibility to such things in his youth, to be the greater of the two.

“One can only pray for the best,” he said.

“As for me,” Ivy said, “I’ve never found prayer to be particularly helpful. It doesn’t matter, however, because you are concerning yourself needlessly. Do you have a telephone?”

“Yes. A business phone.”

“I wonder if you’d call a taxi for me. I have to go someplace to get a few things.”

He called the taxi, which arrived shortly, and she paid for her breakfast with one of the dollar bills and received her change.

“The breakfast was very good,” she said. “Especially the coffee.”

“I’m famous for my excellent coffee,” he said.

“Your fame is deserved. Well, I must go now. Good-by.”

“Good-by. I hope you will return.”

“It’s more than likely that I shall,” she said.

Outside in the taxi, she told the driver where she wanted to go and sat back in the seat to watch the streets slip past beyond the glass. She was in much better contact with things than she had been for some time, and everything was, in fact, quite ordinary and dependable, exactly what it was represented to be, and not the distorted and treacherous element of a hostile world that was, incongruously, at once remote and imminently threatening. She felt that she had done quite well with the Greek. She was very pleased with the way she had done. She had been, after apologizing for her previous rudeness, amiable and casual. It would be necessary, if she were to succeed in living normally, to achieve an attitude of amiable casualness with people who wished her no harm, if not actually good, and it was certain that she had made a good beginning with the Greek. Her pleasure and confidence were somewhat shaken when she realized suddenly that they were approaching the apartment building in which she had lived with Lila so long ago, but then she remembered that Lila would almost certainly have a modeling engagement for the day, and that it would not, therefore, be necessary to see her or talk with her, and she felt relieved and again pleased and confident.

But she did not have her key to the apartment. She had come away without it, as she had come away without everything else except the clothes she wore, and so she was forced to find the superintendent of the building and ask him to let her in with his key. He was, fortunately, in his own apartment on the ground floor, and they went up together in the elevator, and Ivy, after thanking him for his help, closed the door of the apartment behind her and leaned against it. She shut her eyes and took a deep, deep breath and waited for the slow recession of the familiar, free-floating fear that had risen within her. When she opened her eyes again, Lila was standing in the doorway to the bedroom watching her.

Strangely enough, Lila did not seem at all angry. If the color was heightened in her cheeks, which was often a sign in her of anger, it was nullified by her lips, which were smiling, and her eyes, in which there was relief. She was wearing, Ivy noticed with an appreciation of detail that was rather remarkable under the circumstances, a soft white blouse tucked into the waistband of a pair of tight lounging pants of a style she always wore so beautifully over her slim and elegant legs. She possessed the same kind of perfection that she did in the sleek, full-page photographs in the slick magazines that Ivy had often looked at with an intense resentment that anyone could see and admire her also for no more than the price of the magazine.

“Where in God’s name have you been?” Lila said.

“Away,” Ivy said. “With a friend.”

“A friend? What friend?”

“No one you know. A man.”

“Are you out of your mind? I believe you are.”

“You may think as you please about me. I don’t care.”

“Well, I know I was cruel to you the other night, and I’m sorry. I’m glad you’ve finally regained your sanity and come back where you belong. I’ve been sick with worry about you.”

“I only came to get my clothes and other things. I’m not going to stay. I’m never going to stay here again.”

“Nonsense. Where on earth will you go?”

“Back where I came from.”

“To this man?”

“Yes.”

“Do you imagine for a minute that I believe such an absurdity? You’re lying to me. There’s certainly no man at all.”

She said this with such an air of conviction that it was suddenly imperative to Ivy that the existence of Henry Harper be made absolutely clear and unquestioned as a kind of critical truth from which everything else must develop from this point.

“There is,” she said. “His name is Henry Harper, and he lives in two rooms over a bookstore on Market Street. I met him the night I left here. I went home with him, and I’ve been there with him ever since. He’s really very kind, although a little contrary and difficult. He has agreed to let me stay with him until I can make other arrangements.”

“You’re out of your mind. You definitely are. Are you trying deliberately to destroy yourself?”

“Perhaps you think it would be better to remain here and be murdered.”

“Murdered! You must be having delusions. What can you possibly mean?”

“You know very well what I mean.”

“I assure you that I haven’t the slightest notion.”

“Don’t bother to deny it. It won’t do you any good. You gave me too much sleeping medicine and left me to go to sleep and die, but I discovered it before it was too late. I walked and walked for hours and hours, and I’m still alive, as you see, and now I’ve come back to get my things and go away again. Don’t worry about it, however. I don’t wish you any harm, in spite of what you did. I promise that I won’t cause you any trouble.”

Lila was now looking at her with such an expression of incredulous shock on her face that Ivy, for the first time, began uneasily to question her position, and to wonder if, after all, the sedative bottle had been as full as she had remembered. Thinking back, she realized, moreover, that she had never, that night, become very drowsy after leaving the apartment, except naturally, in due time, as a result of her exhaustion from so much walking.

“I shouldn’t have left you alone,” Lila said. “I understand that now. I had no idea you were in such a critical state of mind.”

She walked over to Ivy and took her hand and began to stroke it, and Ivy was somehow powerless to take the hand away or to halt the disintegration of her conviction and resolution that had begun with the first doubt of Lila’s guilt. She felt a compulsion to turn and leave immediately without any of the possessions she had come to get, to run away while there was still time. But the truth was that the time had already passed, and all she could do was to stand and be stroked and seduced.

“Oh, you are much more clever and talented than I,” she said, “but I know what you did, or tried to do, and there is nothing you can say or do now that will change it or make any difference. I’m going away, whether you want it or not. Please let me get my things and leave.”

Lila kept stroking her hand. Her eyes were soft, and her voice was softer.

“Of course you shall go, if that’s what you want. You are perfectly free to do as you please, but surely it will do no harm to talk with me for a while and try to understand that I never attempted to do such a terrible thing to you. Come into the bedroom and sit down, and we’ll have a quiet talk together, and you will surely see how wrong you are. Do you seriously believe that I could wish to harm you? Do you remember, when you were at ho ne, how we used to sit under the tree in the yard, and walk together in the country, and lie on the beach, and all the things we said to each other, and were to each other, and meant to each other? Do you think, after all this, that I could do you the least harm or wish, you anything but good? Come now. We’ll have a quiet talk, and everything will be as it used to be, and afterward, if you still wish it, you can go wherever you please.”

She began to pull gently, leading Ivy away from the door and across the room, and Ivy followed as she had followed in other places and at other times, knowing that she should not and desperately wishing that she would not, but following, nevertheless, because Lila was Lila, the way and the life. She tried to think of Henry, of his kindness and the hope for which he stood, but Henry was at the moment no more than a rather fantastic creature in an impossible world that she had surely dreamed about in a bad dream in a bad night. Now, after the bad dream, there was no one left in the bright and shattering world as it truly was except her and Lila, ineffable Lila, and the world was all green and blue and glittering crystal, above and beyond an expanse of hot, white sand, and they were lying on the beach in a secluded cove at home, not on this bed where she had almost died to music. That was the way it had been in the beginning and still was and would always be.

Lila was stroking her now, speaking in her ear the softest words. Ivy’s strength — what was left of it — was drawn from her body like fluid by the insidious caress of Lila’s fingers. Then Lila’s soft, moist lips were upon hers, hungry and demanding, and the old, familiar sensations rolled through Ivy in a tempestuous tide.

Lila’s full-breasted body was locked closely to her own aching flesh. Lila’s lips moved from Ivy’s mouth, to her cheek, her throat, the soft valley between her breasts. Lila’s hands and body were vitally, excitingly alive against her and Ivy began to lose all sense of time. For this little while nothing mattered but Lila — the savage pressure of her writhing flesh against her own slender body, the touch of Lila’s sure hands on her breasts and flanks, the sweet and tormenting caress of her feverish mouth.

Then, suddenly, through the seething sea of sensation that enveloped Ivy came a random thrust of fear and with it a fleeting thought of Henry and what Henry could mean to her — if she so willed it. Deep inside her a warning voice — faint but insistent — whispered that if she were to lie any longer in submission to Lila’s calculated seduction she would be forever lost.

With a strangled cry that tore at her throat like a claw, Ivy jerked herself free of Lila’s warm, intoxicating embrace. She rose, staggering, to her feet, her vision blurred, all her senses hammering, and stumbled to the closet. She jerked open the door, swung it back so that it banged against the wall, then began pulling clothing from the rack in a kind of frenzied abandon.

From the back of the closet she took a large bag. Opening the bag on the floor, she began to throw the clothing into it without the least care. Lila, sitting up on the edge of the bed, her features flushed watched her with eyes that were slowly, after a moment of wonder, filled with the venom of hatred and icy rage.

“What are you doing?” she said.

Her voice was like the edge of a razor. She might have been, from the sound of it, speaking to a guest who had been intolerably vulgar.

“You can see what I’m doing,” Ivy said. “I’m taking my things, and I’m going away, as I said I was.”

“Go, then. I thought I could stop you from making an incredible fool of yourself, possibly from destroying yourself, but I see now that I can’t, and I’m not certain, since you have become such a bore, that I even want to, or would if I could. It will be a satisfaction to me to be rid of you.”

Ivy continued her abandoned packing, and Lila continued to sit on the bed and watch. After a while, Lila got up and went over to the dressing table and got an emery board and returned to the bed. She began shaping her fingernails carefully with the emery board, now paying absolutely no attention to Ivy, who had closed the large bag and was filling a smaller one with toilet articles and other small possessions. Lila did not look up from her meticulous work until Ivy had finished at last and was standing erect beside the large bag, the smaller one in her hand, strangely irresolute in the end, as if, now that the time had come to go, she could not quite believe in her ability to take such definitive action.

“Do you have everything?” Lila said.

“I’m not sure. I think so.”

“Please be absolutely sure to take everything. I want nothing left to remind me that you were ever here, or that I ever knew you.”

“Do you hate me so much?”

“I don’t hate you at all. I despise you, which is something quite different. I despise your whining and your eternal, sickly depression. You may call your moods and attitudes by whatever euphemisms you may choose, but the fact is that you are simply a coward, and that’s your whole trouble. I can’t understand how I’ve tolerated you so long. It’s much better that you are leaving, since you insist, for sooner or later I might have felt compelled to send you away anyhow.”

“I’m not such a coward as you think. You’ll see.”

“Oh, you’ll come crawling back when you reach the miserable end of whatever stupid arrangement you’ve got yourself involved in. I suppose, since I have some responsibility for you, that I’ll take you in again.”

“I won’t come back.”

Lila stood up slowly. She made no threatening gesture, no overt sign at all of violence, and her voice, when she spoke, was rigidly restrained. But the quality of her fury was all the more deadly for its restraint.

“For God’s sake, then, will you kindly quit talking about it and go? Go at once. I want you to get out of my apartment and out of my sight and out of my mind. Before you go, however, I want you to understand one thing clearly. If you do anything or say anything to harm me, I’ll find a way to make you regret it.”

“I have no wish to harm you,” Ivy said. “I’ve told you so before, and it’s true.”

The room was menacing, a place of danger in which all objects were in a conspiracy against her. Bending at the knees, holding her body rigid in precarious balance, she picked up the large bag and walked carefully out of the bedroom and through the living room to the door. She set the large bag down, opened the door, picked the bag up again, went through into the hall, once more set the bag down while she closed the door firmly behind her. She did all this with an air of conscious calculation, as if it were terribly complex and difficult, and afterward, standing safely in the hall at last, she had a sense of exhilaration that she had actually done under the most difficult circumstances, after being subjected to the most seductive influence, what she had come to do.

Carrying the bags, she walked downstairs, preferring not to use the elevator. There was no taxi in sight on the street outside, and so she began to walk and had walked several blocks before a taxi came along and stopped at her signal. This also seemed to her a major and significant accomplishment, stopping the taxi so easily, and she got into it and gave the address on Market Street with a feeling of authority that was quite satisfying. She had one bad moment when she saw that the meter registered an amount larger than the balance of what Henry had left for her, but then she remembered her own money in the small bag, and she got safely to where she was going and paid the fare fully and everything was all right, or nearly so.

Chapter 5

In the following days of their chaste cohabitation, Henry became accustomed to having Ivy around the place and would have missed her if she had gone away. Most surprisingly of all, he discovered that he worked better when she was there, somehow supported and sustained in his efforts by the slight sounds of her movement, her breathing, the occasional remarks she made aloud to herself without any expectation of a response from him. When he came back in the evenings from his small job with a minor publisher of three obscure trade journals, he came with a sense of expectancy that was never quite sure of fulfillment, and he always discovered her presence with mixed feelings of relief and astonishment that she had not, while he was gone, packed her things and departed without a sign or word.

Now, on a night in December, he looked up and around from his work at the table and saw her lying on her belly on the sofa with a thick book propped against the sofa’s arm in front of her eyes. It was a childish and appealing position, her knees bent and her heels waving back and forth above her narrow stern. He got up suddenly and walked across the room to one of the windows overlooking the street. Christmas was coming on, and the street lamps spaced along the curb were decorated with large red-and-white striped candy canes. The windows of the shops across the street had been dressed for the season with monotonous similarity in bright tinsel and piper above cotton and glitter in the semblance of snow. It had snowed in reality for a day and a night, but the snow was now slush on the sidewalk and street. On the nearest corner, seen at a sharp angle from the window where Henry stood, a large black pot of the Salvation Army hung from a tripod to receive alms for the poor. A soldier of the Army stood beside the pot and rang his bell in largo tempo, calculated to survive the long hours of supplication. The sound of the bell did not reach Henry, but he imagined, each time the soldier’s arm rose and fell, that he could hear the clapper strike.

“We ought to have a tree,” Henry said.

“A Christmas tree?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“They’re very expensive. Do you think you can afford it?”

“Certainly I can afford it. I’m not so poor that I can’t buy a tree if I please.”

“Well, it would be nice to have a tree, but I don’t think you ought to buy one.”

“Nonsense. Go out and buy one tomorrow. You’ll have to get some lights and ornaments for it too.”

She closed her book, which was the third one of several that she had decided to read in a program of self-improvement in several areas. Rolling over and sitting up on the sofa, she glared at his back with a kind of sulky resentment.

“I was going to buy one Saturday as a surprise,” she said, “but I see that you’re bound to spoil it.”

“Why wait until Saturday?”

“Because I’m being paid Saturday, that’s why. I was going to buy the tree as a surprise with my own money.”

“What the devil do you mean? Are you actually working somewhere?”

“That follows, doesn’t it? If I’m being paid, I must be working. Sometimes I think you like to be purposely obtuse.”

“Never mind abusing me. I’m not in the mood for it. Where are you working, if you don’t mind saying?”

“I’m working downstairs in the bookshop.”

“For old Adolph Brennan?”

“Yes. I went down to talk with him and to explain our arrangement, that I’m staying with you for a while, because I thought he had a right to know, being the landlord and all, and after talking with him and explaining the arrangement, I asked him if he needed any help during the Christmas rush, and he said it happened that he did, though I can’t say I’ve noticed any particular rush. I guess there aren’t many people who give secondhand books as Christmas presents. Anyhow, what I intended, really, was to work for nothing in return for being allowed to stay here, but he insisted on paying me a little besides. He’s a very sweet old man.”

“You say you explained our arrangement?”

“Yes. I wanted it clearly understood, and I thought it was only fair.”

“Exactly how clear do you suppose his understanding is? It seems to me that the reasonable implications of the arrangement would seem to be very different from the truth.”

“Well, it’s not my fault if he jumps to wrong conclusions. The important thing is, he was kind and considerate and felt that it was our business entirely, just as the Greek did.”

“I’ll say one thing for you. You’re certainly building up quite a reputation for me in the neighborhood.”

“You shouldn’t be so egotistical. You imagine that everyone is paying attention to what you do, but it’s very doubtful, in my opinion, that anyone cares in the least. Besides, writers are supposed to be rather immoral. It’s expected of them.”

“Is that so? It’s interesting to know that you’ve suddenly become an authority on writers.”

“Are you beginning to feel quarrelsome? You sound like it. I only wanted to surprise you with a Christmas tree that I paid for with my own money, and now you’re behaving as if I’d done something wrong. I think it’s very small of you, if you want to know the truth. It’s rather depressing, you know, when everything you do turns out to be wrong.”

“I didn’t mean that at all, and you know it. I wouldn’t think of depriving you of the right to buy a Christmas tree with your own money. I suppose it’s only fair that you should contribute something now and then. We’ll decorate the tree together Saturday night.”

“I’d like that. Really I would. It’s been a long time since I’ve helped to decorate a Christmas tree. Perhaps it hasn’t been so long, actually, but it seems like a long time, so much has happened since, and so it comes to the same thing.”

“You’re right there. Something may seem a long time ago when it really hasn’t been so long at all. It’s a kind of perspective. When I was a boy, we had an evergreen tree in the front yard. Every year, a week before Christmas exactly, we strung colored bulbs in the tree and lit them every night until Christmas was past. It wasn’t too many years ago, but it seems forever.”

“Were you actually a boy once?”

“Of course I was a boy. Do you think I was born a man?”

“It’s crazy, I know, but it seems to me that you must surely have been born the instant we met. You must have been born in one instant and have walked instantly afterward into the Greek’s for a cup of coffee...”

He had often had, as a matter of fact, the same queer notion about himself. Not that he had, specifically, been born full-grown outside the Greek’s on the night of reference, but that he had been born suddenly in various places at various times, and that everything he remembered before that time and place, whenever and wherever it was in a particular instance, was somehow something that had happened to someone else. Now, standing at the window and watching the soldier’s bell rise and fall in largo tempo, he began to think of the past, the way from another time to this time, and it seemed to him, as it always did when he tried to review the pattern of his life, that the pattern had color and richness and variety and sense in two places at two times, and these places and times were signified by three people he had loved, of whom one was dead and the other two, so far as he was now concerned, might as well have been.

There was, in the first time and the first place, his Uncle Andy Harper. There was also an Aunt Edna, Uncle Andy’s wife, but she was never in Henry’s mind more than a kind of shadow of Uncle Andy, existing only because he did and having in recollection only the substance she borrowed from him.

Uncle Andy was a tall man, lean and tough as a wolf, with a long nose projecting downward from between a pair of the softest, most dream-obsessed eyes it was possible to imagine, and many folk thought that his eyes were his most remarkable feature, but these were the folk who had never become familiar with the touch of his hands. His hands were very large, with long thick fingers, padded on the palm side with the thick callus of hard work, and you would naturally have thought, looking at them, that their touch would be heavy, inadvertently brutal, but this was not so. The touch of the hands was as light and as gentle as the most delicate touch of the white hands of a fine lady, and it had the effect of a minor miracle, an impossible effect of its observable cause.

Henry first became aware of the light, miraculous touch of the heavy hands at the age of five when he was ill of influenza, and this was less than a year after the deaths of his father and mother in an accident on a highway six hundred miles away, when he had come to live with Uncle Andy and Aunt Edna on their farm about a hundred miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. He had wakened from a feverish sleep with the feeling that his fever was being drawn from his forehead by the soft magic of cool fingers, and he had thought at first that it was his mother who was sitting beside his bed, but it had turned out to be Uncle Andy. From that moment he had understood his uncle’s vast depth of gentleness, and he had always afterward loved his uncle completely and quietly, with unspoken devotion, which was the only kind of love Uncle Andy wanted or would accept.

Uncle Andy was a puzzle to his neighbors and the despair of his wife, and this was because he declared himself to be an agnostic and maintained his position against all persuasion and prophecies of divine retribution. Enlightenment had its limitations in the area in which they lived, in the time they lived there, and it was not understood how a man could be so good, as measured by his faithfulness to his wife and his attention to his proper affairs, and at once so contaminated by the devil, as measured by his adherence to the devil’s gospel. The truth of the matter was, Uncle Andy’s formal education had ended at the eighth grade, but he had continued to read widely in a random sort of way, taking what he could find anywhere he could find it, and after an early experience with Colonel Bob Ingersoll, he had come, in the twenties, under the influence of Clarence Darrow and H. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, and the greatest of these, because of a communication of gentle pessimism, was Darrow. One of the rare times Uncle Andy had become very angry, which was long before Henry’s time, was when a Baptist minister from Fort Scott had tried to argue that William Jennings Bryan, who had just died of gluttony, had been specifically spared by God just long enough to confound the greatest agnostic of his day at the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee. Uncle Andy had pointed out that God had used damned poor judgment in his choice of counsel, since Darrow had made a bigger monkey of Bryan than Scopes had tried to make of man’s ancestor.

The years on the farm were good years for Henry, although they later became, in the recollection of them after he had gone away, obscured and unreal with incredible rapidity by events that came between him and them. One of the things Henry learned, which was knowledge that filled him with adolescent sadness, was that Uncle Andy, in spite of being a successful farmer with no problems at the bank, considered himself a failure. He was not a failure, of course, but he considered himself one because he had been unable to do what he wanted most to do, which was to set down on paper some of the things he had seen and thought and felt and done, and he would not even allow himself the consolation of thinking that he might have been able to do so if only he had a better chance.

“The test of a Milton is that he act like a Milton,” he said to Henry one summer night on the screened-in back porch off the kitchen. “I read that somewhere. I think it was Mencken wrote it. Anyhow, it’s true. If I had it in me to do what I want to do, I’d do it, but I haven’t got it. It’s a great sadness, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

So it was from Uncle Andy that Henry acquired his curiosity and his reading habits and, later, his need and hunger to express himself. He read voraciously, as Uncle Andy had, and for years without discrimination. Dickens and Charles Alden Seltzer were equally acceptable to him, and if he recognized the superiority of the one, it did not prevent him from enjoying the other, and when he eventually encountered the massive, indiscriminate hunger and thirst and bellowing of Thomas Wolfe, it was like a revelation of divine despair. By that time, he was wanting to write stories himself, and he began to try. It was much more difficult than he had imagined, and it seemed to him unbelievable that it could require so much time and effort to fill a single page of lined paper with words that had never before been set down in the sense and order he gave to them.

In spite of his wide reading and his hunger, which was more emotional than mental, he was no better than a mediocre student at the high school in town. This was not because of inability, but rather because of a stubborn resistance to any kind of direction that was contrary to his natural interests. He read, but he read mostly the things he wanted to read, conceding only enough attention to assignments to get him by without disgrace and without distinction. Literature he loved, and history he accepted, but mathematics and science were barely tolerated. Finally, in due time, he graduated and received his diploma, and in the summer following his graduation Uncle Andy died, and was gone from the earth, and the earth was changed.

The morning of the day of that summer, Henry was up early, and the hours ahead of him seemed bright and clear and filled with the certainty of quiet and rich experience. After breakfast, he was standing behind the bam, looking off beyond the fields and pasture to the stand of timber along the creek, when Uncle Andy drove around the barn on the tractor.

“Where you going, Uncle Andy?” Henry said.

“Down to the far field at the southwest corner of the property,” Uncle Andy said. “It’s been lying there fallow since plowing, and I intend to disc it.”

“Where’s the disc?”

“It’s already down there. I’ve only got to drive the tractor down and hook on. You like to come along?”

“Well, not unless you really need me.”

“I don’t need you, but you’re welcome to come along for the ride. You got a loafing day planned out?”

“I didn’t plan to do much. I thought I’d go down to the creek.”

“You want to take the car and go into town?”

“No. Just down to the creek.”

“You go ahead and do what you like. I’ll be back around noon for dinner.”

“Okay, Uncle Andy. See you later.”

This was almost exactly what was said, and the reason Henry remembered it so clearly, the small talk that didn’t amount to anything, was because it was the last conversation he and Uncle Andy ever had, and it came back to him word for word afterward with all the importance and enormous significance of being the last of something there would ever be. For quite a while he felt guilty, as if he had somehow deserted Uncle Andy just when he was needed most, but he knew, really, that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if he had gone, because he almost certainly wouldn’t have been in any position to prevent what happened, it surely happened so fast. Anyhow, that was later, and this summer Saturday morning he went on down across the fields and pasture to the creek, and he spent the morning down there, lying under the trees and watching the dark water and thinking about what he would do with the rest of his life and wondering if he could ever become a writer, as he wished, or if he would finally have to do something else instead.

He got back to the house a little before noon, and Uncle Andy wasn’t there, and he still wasn’t there by one o’clock. He and Aunt Edna had planned to go into town for the afternoon, and Aunt Edna was frantic with worry, because Uncle Andy wasn’t the kind of man to forget a plan or to go deliberately back on one. Finally, to satisfy Aunt Edna, Henry went all the way across the farm to the southwest corner, the fallow field, and he found the tractor stalled against a post at one end of the field, and Uncle Andy lying back in the field on the plowed earth. The disc had gone over him, and the only thing that later helped a little in the memory of it was the assurance of the doctor that Uncle Andy had clearly suffered a heart attack, which had caused him to fall off the seat of the tractor, and that it was probable he hadn’t ever felt what happened to him.

After Uncle Andy was buried and gone for good, except the little of him that could be remembered, Aunt Edna asked Henry if he was interested in working the farm for a livelihood, and he said he wasn’t, so Aunt Edna let it on shares to a good man with a wife and two sons. She moved into a cottage in town, and Henry went up to the state university on a shoestring in September, and it was there and then that he met the other two of the three people he had loved most. One was a boy, and the other was a girl, and he met the girl through the boy, whom he met first.

Going to the university on a shoestring the way he was, there wasn’t any question of social fraternities, anything that cost extra money, and he found a room in a widow’s house that was down the hill a few blocks from the campus. There were four rooms for men students on the second floor of the house, a community bath at the end of the hall, and Henry’s room was the smallest of the four, overlooking the shingled roof of the front porch. One night of the first week of his residence, he was lying on the bed in the room with his text on World Civilization spread open under his eyes, but he wasn’t having much luck in reading his assignment because he was feeing pretty low and wondering if, after all, he shouldn’t have chosen to work the farm. The door to the hall was open, and after a while someone stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb. Looking up, Henry saw a thin young man with a dark, ugly face under a thatch of unruly, brown hair.

“You Harper?” the young man said.

He asked the question as if there were no more than the slightest chance for an affirmative answer. At the same time he gave the impression of caring very little if the answer was affirmative or not.

“That’s right,” Henry said.

“Mine’s Brewster. Howie Brewster. I live down the hall.”

Howie Brewster came on into the room, and Henry got off the bed and shook hands. The hand that gripped his was surprisingly strong in spite of a suggestion of limpness in the way it was offered. Immediately afterward, without an invitation, Howie Brewster sat down on the bed and took a half-pint of whiskey out of the inside pocket of his coat.

“Have a drink,” he said.

Henry shook his head. “No, thanks.”

“What’s the matter? You one of old Bunsen’s goddamn heroes?”

“I don’t even know who old Bunsen is, and I’m no hero.”

“Honest to God? You don’t know who Bunsen is?”

“I said I don’t. Who is he?”

“Football coach. I thought you might be one of his hired hands. You look like it, if you don’t mind my saying so. You’re big enough. You got good shoulders. I should have known you weren’t, though. If you were, you wouldn’t be living in Mrs. Murphy’s goddamn Poor House. They take better care of the heroes. How come you are living here, by the way? Can’t you afford anything better?”

“No. Can’t you?”

“I can, as a matter of fact. My old man would stand the tariff of one of the frats if I’d live there, but I wouldn’t live in one of those fancy flophouses with all those bastards for a thousand a month.”

“Why don’t you rent a better room or an apartment or something?”

“I know. You think I’m a goddamn liar. That’s all right, though. I don’t mind. You can think whatever you please and kiss my ass besides.”

“Look. What the hell’s the idea of coming in here and talking to me like that? I won’t kiss your ass, but I may kick it if you don’t look out.”

“Sure. You’re just the big corn-fed stupe who could do it, too, aren’t you? Well, go ahead. I had an idea you had some brains, just from the look of you, but I guess you’ve got them all in your hands and feet, if you’ve got any at all, just like all the other stupes around here. Go on. Kick my ass. Kick the shit out of me.”

“Oh, go to hell. I think I’ll have a drink out of that bottle after all.”

He took a swallow from the bottle and gagged. Howie Brewster watched him with open curiosity and an immediately resumed amiability.

“You ever had a drink of whiskey before?”

“No.”

“Honest to God?”

“What do you want me to do, apologize for never having a drink before? I’ve had beer, out with friends now and then, but I never drank any whiskey.”

“Never mind. You’ll learn. How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“You’ve got plenty of time. I’m twenty myself. If I was a year older, I’d be contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“Balls. You’re a big talker, aren’t you? Your old man’s rich, and you’re a regular rounder.”

“It’s a defense mechanism. The truth is, I’m neurotic as hell. It’s a fact, though, that my old man’s well heeled. You can believe it or not.”

“How come you can’t afford anything better than Mrs. Murphy’s, then?”

“Because my old man’s a bastard. He’s a bastard, and so am I. We deserve each other. When I refused to join his goddamn frat, he put me on a subsistence allowance. He thinks it’s good for my soul.”

He tipped his bottle and took a long pull and did not gag. Standing, he walked to the door.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got to read my goddamn economics assignment. Not that it’ll do any good. I won’t remember the crap. This’ll probably be my last year here. Second and last. I’ll flunk out sure as hell.”

He left, swinging his little bottle openly by the neck with an air of bravado in defiance of Mrs. Murphy’s posted prohibition of liquor on the premises, but he was back a couple of nights later, and in the weeks that followed, accumulating to a couple of months, he and Henry became comfortable cronies with a developing taste for beer. By tacit understanding, after the first night, whiskey was dropped as an issue, and the beer was in the beginning a kind of compromise that became quickly a social lubricant, and at the same time the substance of a bond. They discovered a small place downtown near the river where the question of age was not raised against them, and it was here that they habitually spent the nights that they could afford to give to it. The compatibility was supported by a mutual interest in writing and a shared conviction that the novelists of the twenties and thirties, the giants of the middle age between two wars, had never been properly read or appreciated until the two of them came along to do it.

Beneath Howie’s pretentious rebellion, his excessive profanity and assumption of decadence, there was in truth, Henry learned, a genuine loneliness and uncertainty. And below these, now and then discernible, a depth of black despair. At first, as their sensitivity to each other increased, the real Howie was no more than a collection of suggestions, a personality merely inferred by some of the things he said and did, but then, one night in Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House, there occurred an incident that made him, in one rather terrible minute, perfectly clear.

Henry had been to the bathroom at the end of the hall. On his way back to his room, passing Howie’s closed door, he heard from behind the door a dry, rasping sound. Without pausing to think or trying to identify the sound, he stopped and turned the knob and stepped into the room. Just beyond the threshold he stopped abruptly, feeling within himself a rising tide of horror that was excessive in relation to its cause. Howie was lying face down across his bed, and he was crying. The sound of his crying was the arid sound of grief without tears.

“What’s wrong?” Henry said.

He knew immediately that he had made a mistake. He should not have opened the door to begin with, but having opened it, he should have backed silently out of the room and left without a word. Howie rolled over and sat up on the bed, and his voice, although quiet, had the brittle intensity of a scream.

“Get out of here, you son of a bitch! Who the hell do you think you are to come walking in here any goddamn time you please without knocking?”

Henry’s first reaction was one of simple shock at the violence of the attack. He backed out and closed the door, but when he was in his room again, he began to feel angry and was tempted to go back and give Howie a damn good beating. But this reaction was also short-lived, and shock and anger gave way together to genuine concern and an uneasy sense of shame for Howie’s brief emotional nakedness. He wondered what on earth could have happened to disturb Howie so deeply, but he was really aware, even then, that it was nothing specific, no one thing in particular, and that Howie had merely reached, as he had before and would again, a time of intolerable despair.

Thirty minutes later Howie was standing in the doorway.

“May I come in?” he said.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well, you know. I thought I might not be welcome.”

“Oh, to hell with it. Come on in.”

Howie came in and sat down, and that was the only reference ever made to the incident by either of them. “I’ve written a long poem,” Howie said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. Two hundred twenty lines.”

“That’s pretty long, all right. What’s it about?”

“Well, it’s pretty hard just to say in so many words what a poem is about. Would you like me to read it to you?”

“Go ahead.”

“I call it The Dance of the Gonococci.”

“What?”

“The Dance of the Gonococci. You know. Gap bugs”

“Oh, come off. You’re joking.”

“Certainly not. Why should you simply say that I’m joking?”

“You’ll have to admit that gonococci are pretty unusual subjects for a poem.”

“Nothing of the sort. If Burns could write a lousy poem to a louse, why can’t I write one about gonococci? In my opinion, gonococci are much more poetic than louse. At least, one can have a lot more fun acquiring them.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Look, sonny. Just because you’re a green and sappy virgin, don’t think everyone else is too. You’re just retarded, that’s all.”

“Talk, talk, talk. Talk big, talk loud.”

“Oh, God, you’re impossible. You don’t know anything about anything. A dose of clap would do you good.”

“It might do you good too. Then you might not think gonococci are so damn poetic.”

“I had a dose once. Didn’t I tell you about it?”

“No.”

“I was seventeen at the time. I caught it from a girl from one of the best families. Nothing but the best for Howie, you know.”

“One of the best families in shantytown?”

“Don’t be facetious, sonny. Catching the clap is not a minor matter. Not that it amounted to much, really. It’s no worse than a bad cold.”

“I’ve heard that before, too.”

“It’s the truth. You ought to try it.”

“Oh, balls. Go on and read the damn poem.”

“No. I’ve changed my mind.”

“Why? Don’t think I’m going to beg you.”

“Please don’t. It’s just that I don’t think you’d appreciate it. You’re obviously not sufficiently cultivated. Besides, I’ve got another idea.”

“Do you think I’m sufficiently cultivated to hear it?”

“Maybe. Time will tell.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Let’s go see Mandy.”

“Who’s Mandy?”

“Jesus Christ! You mean I’ve never told you about Mandy either?”

“If you did, I don’t remember it.”

“Mandy Moran. Junior. She lives over in the dorm. Honest to God, Henry, I’ve actually never mentioned her?”

“I don’t remember it.”

“An egregious oversight, I assure you. You’ve got a treat in store, sonny. Last year Mandy and I did a lot of knocking around together, but this year we haven’t seen much of each other. I guess that’s why I haven’t thought to mention her. I don’t think she likes me much any more, to tell the truth, but I’m still madly in love with her, of course, in spite of being neglected. As a matter of fact, I have a standing project to go to bed with her. Come on. We’ll go over to the dorm and see if she’s in.”

“I don’t think so, Howie.”

“Why not?”

“Well, damn it, I don’t even know the girl, and besides that, you can’t go busting in on someone without an invitation or a date or anything at all.”

“Are you, for God’s sake, telling me what you can or can’t do with Mandy Moran? You don’t even know her yet, and already you’re telling me what you can and can’t do with her.”

“Oh, all right! I’ll go with you, just to get you off my back, but It’ll damn well serve us right if she has us thrown out on our asses.”

“That’s the spirit. Who knows? Maybe this will be the first step in despoiling you of your disgusting virginity. I’d consider it a rare privilege to be instrumental in your first tumble, sonny.”

“Oh, go to hell, Howie, will you, please?”

They walked up the hill to the girls’ dorm and were told by a superior female senior, the receptionist in the entrance hall, that Miss Moran was not in. Miss Moran was, the superior senior volunteered, working that night on the stage of the little auditorium in Fain Hall.

“We’ll go over there,” Howie said. “Come on, Henry.”

“Do you think we’d better?”

“Certainly I think we’d better. Why not?”

“If she’s working, she may not want to be bothered.”

“Oh, come on, Henry. You’re constantly making excuses. Are you afraid to meet a girl, for God’s sake?”

“Don’t be a damn fool. Some of us country boys might give a few lessons to a lot of guys with exaggerated opinions of themselves. Not to mention names, of course. What’s this Mandy doing in the little auditorium?”

“I’m not sure. Probably painting flats. She’s got an idea she wants to be a set designer.”

“For plays?”

“Hell, yes, for plays. What else do you design sets for? She’s a member of the Little Theater Group.”

“That sounds like a pretty good thing. Interesting, I mean. I might like to try something like that myself.”

“Well here’s your chance. You get on Mandy’s good side, she might be able to get you in.”

The little auditorium in Fain Hall was dark, but there was a line of light across the stage at the bottom of the drawn curtains. Howie led the way up a flight of shallow stairs to stage level and out of a small off-stage room onto the stage itself. It was a very small stage, really, but it gave the effect of echoing vastness, and there was no one on it, excluding Howie and Henry, but a slim girl in a sweat shirt and slacks. She was holding her chin with the fingers of her right hand and staring disconsolately at a flat on which she had, obviously, been daubing paint. There was paint on her clothes, paint on her hands, paint on her face, and even a little paint in her pale, short hair. Henry thought that she must surely be the loveliest girl in all the world, although she wasn’t that, and was a long way from it.

“Hello, Mandy,” Howie said. “Long time no see.”

She shifted the direction of her gaze from the flat to Howie. She did not change her disconsolate expression in the least. She had, apparently, merely shifted her attention from one unsatisfactory object to another.

“Has it been a long time?” she said. “I haven’t missed you.”

“Well, to hell with you.”

“To hell with you too, you crazy bastard.”

“I wanted you to meet my crony, but I can see I picked the wrong time for it.”

Her attention shifted again, from Howie to Henry. “Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” Henry said.

“Don’t you even want to know his name, for God’s sake?” Howie said.

“What’s his name?” she said.

“It’s Henry Harper.”

“I’m glad to know you, Henry.”

“Henry, this is Mandy Moran.”

“I’m glad to know you, Mandy.”

“How about going somewhere for a beer?” Howie said.

“You drink beer, Henry?” she said.

“All the time,” Henry said.

“I’ve written a long poem,” Howie said. “I’ll recite it for you.”

“I can hardly wait,” she said.

“It’s better than anything Eliot ever did,” Howie said. “It’s called The Dance of the Gonococci.”

“A shocker,” Mandy said to Henry. “Howie’s a real shocker. He works at it. You don’t look old enough to drink beer.”

“Cut it out, Henry said. “You have to be a certain age to drink beer?”

“Legally, I mean. What class you in?”

“Freshman.”

“God, I envy you. I really do. I’m a junior myself.”

“That’s what Howie said.”

“I feel like your mother.”

“Ask her to nurse you, for God’s sake,” Howie said.

“Don’t be crude, Howie,” she said.

“A couple of virgins talking to each other like that,” Howie said. “It’s disgusting.”

“Just because you couldn’t get any, Howie,” she said, “It doesn’t signify.”

“For God’s sake,” Howie said, “are we going for a beer, or aren’t we?”

“Wait’ll I wash,” she said.

She walked off-stage to a lavatory. Waiting, they could hear water running and splashing and considerable blowing.

“She washes like a goddamn porpoise,” Howie said.

“She’s lovely,” Henry said.

“Mandy? Well, so she is, when you stop to think about it. She’s so damn irritating, it’s hard to realize it most of the time. Crazy too, of course. A real nut if I ever saw one. So am I, however, so it doesn’t make much difference to me. Something happened to her as a child.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

“How the hell do you know?”

“It must have, that’s all. Nothing’s happened to her since that I know of.”

“Damn it, Howie, you shouldn’t say things like that about her. It’s not right.”

“Well, kiss my ass! Listen to the virgin freshman leap to the defense of his junior mother.”

“All right, all right. Get off my back, Howie.”

At that moment Mandy returned, and she had got some of the paint and had missed some. Her short, pale hair looked as if she might have run a comb through it two or three times.

“Where we going?” she said.

“We know a place,” Howie said.

“I know the kind of places you know,” she said.

“Relax,” Howie said. “You must remember that we have your freshman child with us.”

She took Henry’s arm and pulled it up under hers and held it tight against her slim body. He could feel her small breast against his wrist. She kept his arm clamped under hers, and he kept feeling the breast.

“Never mind what Howie says,” she said.

“I don’t,” he said.

“Where is this place you know?”

“I guess he means the one down on the river. We go there sometimes.”

“It’s a long walk down to the river.”

“Quite a way, all right.”

“I have to be in by eleven.”

“We could have a couple of beers and come right back.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

“Well, by God, I’m glad you got it settled,” Howie said. “Am I included, by the way?”

“Suit yourself,” Mandy said. “You can come along if you want to.”

It took them almost half an hour to walk downhill from the campus and across town to the river, and it was about nine-thirty when they got there. They ordered three beers and drank them and ordered three more.

“Do you want me to recite my poem now?” Howie said.

“Not particularly,” Mandy said.

“Oh, let’s hear him recite it,” Henry said. “It’s better than anything Eliot ever wrote.”

“All right, Howie,” Mandy said. “Go ahead and recite it.”

“I’ll be damned if I will,” Howie said. “I know when I’m not appreciated.”

“Are you going to sulk about it?” Mandy said.

“To hell with it,” Howie said. “Nurse your child and leave me alone.”

They drank the second round of beers, and it got close to ten. Somehow or other Henry and Mandy got to holding hands under the table. When she drank from her schooner, she lifted it in both hands, and this made it necessary for her to release the one under the table temporarily, and during these times she would lay Henry’s hand on her knee and leave it there until she was ready to pick it up again.

“Maybe we’d better have another round of beers,” Henry said.

“I’m afraid it’s time to go,” Mandy said, “If I’m to be back by eleven.”

“It only took about half an hour coming,” Henry said.

“On the way back, we’ll be going uphill,” she said.

“That’s true,” Henry said. “We’d better go.”

They walked back across town and uphill. At a corner near Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House, Howie turned off by himself.

“Where you going, Howie?” Henry said.

“Home,” Howie said.

“Don’t you want to go with us?”

“To hell with it,” Howie said, and walked away.

“Do you suppose we hurt his feelings?” Mandy said.

“I hope not,” Henry said.

“So do I,” she said. “You never know what hell do when his feelings have been hurt.”

When they got to the dorm, they stopped in the deep shadow of a high hedge in front.

“Would you like to kiss me?” she said.

“I was just thinking how much I’d like to.”

“Go ahead and kiss me, then.”

He put his arms around her and kissed her, and she put her arms around him and kissed him, and after the first kiss they kissed twice more for a longer time each time. “I’d better go in now,” she said.

“I guess you’d better.”

“I liked you right away,” she said.

“Same here,” he said. “I liked you as soon as I saw you.”

“It doesn’t matter because you’re only a freshman.”

“I’m glad of it,” he said.

He went back to Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House and went to bed and thought about her. He didn’t see Howie again that night, or all the next day, but the next night Howie came into his room and talked for nearly an hour, and it looked like everything was going to be all right.

It wasn’t true, as Howie had said, that he was a virgin, but he had never felt for any girl the strange and disturbing mixture of lust and tenderness that he felt for Mandy. He had felt the former in numerous instances, satisfying it in two, and he had felt the latter for a particular girl in high school for six whole weeks on end, but he had not understood then that they could be compatible components of a single shattering emotional reaction. Mandy possessed, he learned in the weeks that followed, a fine capacity for passion, and it was only now and then that he wondered, for a moment at a time, if she had expressed before, or was even expressing now, the passion as freely with others as she did with him. He never asked, of course, because he was in no position to assume the right and did not, in any case, want to know. His major source of chagrin was that circumstances always prevented her free expression of passion from being quite so free as it might have been if circumstances had been more favorable.

In November, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday was to begin, he went over to the dorm in the afternoon to tell Mandy good-by. Most of the girls had already left, or were packing to leave, and the sitting room in which he waited was deserted except for himself. He felt very sad, as if he wanted to grieve for something unknown and to cry for no good reason. The holiday would be, after all, a very short one, only a few days, but it seemed to him to stretch ahead interminably. He waited and wallowed in his sadness for ten full minutes before Mandy came down from her room.

“Hello, Henry,” she said. “Have you come to say good-by?”

“Yes, I have.”

“I hoped you’d come, but I was afraid you’d gone without it.”

“I wouldn’t do that. You ought to know I wouldn’t.”

“Are you going to your aunt’s?”

“I guess so. There’s no place else.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I thought I’d go this evening. There’s a bus at six o’clock. When are you?”

“I? I’m not going anywhere. Did you think I was?”

“You mean you’re not going home?”

“No. It’s too far away for so short a time. I’ll wait until Christmas.”

“I’m not going either, then. I’ll stay here with you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want you to spoil your holiday.”

“I want to stay. Will you see me every day if I stay?”

“Isn’t your aunt expecting you?”

“I’ll write and tell her I couldn’t come. Wouldn’t you like me to stay?”

“Yes, I would, and if you do I promise to see you every day and every night.”

“It’s settled, then. I’ll stay.”

“We’ll have a marvelous time, won’t we?”

“Yes, we will. We’ll have the best time ever. I will, anyhow. I know that.”

“Is Howie going home?”

“He’s already gone. He cut his classes and went this morning. Everyone else at Mrs. Murphy’s has gone to 3.”

“Including Mrs. Murphy?”

“Well, no, not Mrs. Murphy, of course. She’s there.”

“Will you call for me tonight?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Come early. About seven-thirty. I’ve got to go back upstairs now. I’m helping my roommate pack.” They were still alone in the sitting room, and so she kissed him hard and held herself tightly against him.

“I’m so glad you’re staying,” she said.

“So am I,” he said.

When he returned at seven thirty, she was already downstairs waiting for him.

“What shall we do?” she said.

“I don’t know. What would you like to do?”

“Do you have much money?”

“About twenty dollars.”

“I thought we might go downtown and have dinner. Do you think that would be fun?”

“Yes. Let’s do that. While we’re having dinner we can decide what we want to do later.”

“I already know what I want to do.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

“Why can’t you tell me now?”

“Never mind why. You keep thinking about what it could be and then let me know if you guessed.”

They walked downtown to a good restaurant and sat knees to knees at a small table for two. It was the last time they’d had dinner together in a restaurant, and it made Henry feel special and very rich, as if he had a thousand dollars in his pocket instead of only twenty. It took quite a while to get served, and quite a while longer to finish eating, and by the time they’d finished and had coffee and a cigarette apiece, it was nine-thirty, or nearly.

“Have you been thinking about what I’d like to do?” she said.

“I’ve been trying,” he said, “but I can’t think of anything special.”

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to buy a bottle of wine and go to your room.”

“At Mrs. Murphy’s?”

“Yes. It seems to me we ought to have a celebration to begin the holiday, and I’d like to go there and have it.”

“We’d have to be careful Mrs. Murphy didn’t see us. She’s deaf, though. We could probably slip in.”

“It would be fun. Don’t you think so? Will you take me?”

They went to a package store for the bottle of wine. Henry was afraid the clerk might embarrass him by asking him his age, and he was prepared to lie if necessary, of course, but the clerk apparently thought that he was old enough, or did not care if he was old enough or not. He was not familiar with wines, moreover, and hadn’t the least idea of what would be the best kind to buy.

“What kind would you like?” he said to Mandy.

“Dark port would be nice,” she said. “It’s not so dry as some of the others, and besides, it’s stronger than most of them.”

“You mean it has more alcohol in it?”

“Yes. Port has around twenty percent and most of the dry wines have only twelve or fourteen.”

“That’s a good thing to know. I’ll remember that.”

“Oh yes. Port is six or eight percent stronger.”

“A bottle of dark port, please,” Henry said to the clerk.

“I’d like to suggest a New York wine, if you don’t mind,” Mandy said. “It may be only imagination on my part, but it always seems to me that New York wines are better.”

“A bottle of dark port from New York,” Henry said to the clerk.

The clerk put a bottle of Taylor’s dark port in a brown paper sack, and Henry paid for it. He was surprised to discover that it was so cheap. He had somehow expected a bottle of wine from New York to be quite expensive. With the bottle under one arm and Mandy holding onto the other, he started uphill for Mrs. Murphy’s Poor House.

“Do you think Mrs. Murphy will be asleep?” Mandy said.

“Probably. She goes to bed early usually, but sometimes she sits up and watches television. It’s all right, though. Her sitting room is at the back of the house. If we’re careful we can get in without her seeing us.”

“What would she do if she saw?”

“Raise hell. Report me to the dean.”

“That would be too bad. I don’t want to get you into trouble.”

“In my opinion, it would be worth it.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I surely do.”

“Well, that was a very nice thing to say, and I promise that I’ll do something nice for you in return.”

“What will you do?”

“Wait and see. We must remember, after we get upstairs, not to get careless and make too much noise. Isn’t this the house?”

“Yes. You wait out here, and I’ll see if the hall’s clear.” He went up across the porch alone and into the hall. The hall was clear, with only a small light burning on one wall, and he signaled Mandy from the door to come on. She came up and into the hall without the slightest sound, except a soft giggle of excitement that was hardly more than a whisper, and they went upstairs together to his room. Henry drew the blinds and turned on a light.

“It’s very small, isn’t it?” Mandy said.

“Yes, but it’s handy. I can lie on the bed and reach damn near everything in the room.”

“It’s cozy, all right. I think it’s very cozy. Do you have some glasses?”—

“Dixie cups.”

“Dixie cups will do nicely. Will you please pour the wine?”

He opened the bottle and poured dark port into two Dixie cups. The wine was sweet and strong, and he could feel it almost immediately in his blood. By the time his cup was empty, his head was feeling strangely and pleasantly light, and he sat down on the edge of the bed. Mandy came over and stood in front of him between his knees, and he put his arms around her hips and leaned his head comfortably against her flat belly. After holding her so for a minute or two, he drew his hands slowly down over her hips and flanks and up again under her skirt.

“You’re sweet,” she said.

“You,” he said. “You’re the sweet one.”

“I promised I’d do something nice for you. Do you want me to?”

“Yes. Please.”

“It would be nicer if the lights were off. If you were to turn off the light and raise the blinds, we could still see each other, but no one could see in.”

He got up and turned off the light and raised the blinds. Turning, he stood with his back to the window until his eyes had adjusted to the shadows. She was standing in the precise place and position he had left her, and he could sense her excitement and expectancy as surely and as strongly as he could feel his own.

“Shall we have a little more wine first?” she said.

“If you wish.”

“I think a little more wine would be nice.”

He filled their cups again, and when they had drunk the sweet and heady wine, she turned around and said, “Please unbutton me,” and he did so with great difficulty, and then, when he had at last accomplished the unbuttoning, she turned back to face him and unfastened his jacket and the shirt under the jacket, throwing both to the floor. Then she came hard against him, clutching him close so that the hard nipples of her breasts rubbed teasingly across the flesh of his chest. Instinctively their mouths met and fused in a kiss that was filled with hunger and yearning. They remained locked together like that as if they could not get enough of each other.

Finally, Mandy drew away slightly and in the faint, uncertain light of the room he saw the svelte, exciting lines of her nude body. Her skin held a rich, pale glow, her breasts were high and firm, her waist narrow and flat, the hips having a wide flare, then narrowing into smooth, slender legs.

“Darling!” she whispered and drew his head to her bosom. He kissed the mounds of her breasts, his mouth lingering on the pink buds of her nipples, then coursing along her ribs, while desire mounted in a powerful tide in both of them.

Her own hands began a feverish stroking of Henry’s body while they kissed and kissed again. Finally, in blind impatience they stumbled toward the bed and fell upon it, their arms and legs intertwining, their hot, moist lips still joined. And afterward the lingering and deliberate revelation of each to the other was mounting and tempestuous excitement that grew to intolerable intensity and shattered at last to the crying of a voice that might have been his or hers or both.

“Was it nice?” she said afterward. “Did I please you?”

“Darling,” he said. “Darling Mandy.”

“Do you love me a little?”

“No. Not a little. I love you so much that it hurts and hurts and I can hardly bear it.”

“I’m so glad you love me, even if it’s only a little, and it makes me happy to know that I’ve been able to please you.”

She was then so quiet for so long that he thought she had gone to sleep, and time had passed from one day to another, to the day of Thanksgiving, when she spoke again and asked what time it was.

“After twelve,” he said. “About ten minutes.”

“Oh, God, I’ll have to go. I have to be in by one.”

“Even on a holiday?”

“Yes. Isn’t it depressing? School nights we have to be in by eleven, but weekends and holidays it’s one.”

“I wish you didn’t have to go.”

“So do I. I wish I could stay all night and wake up and please you in the morning.”

“Will you come back again?”

“Tomorrow night, if you like. We’ll have a wonderful holiday, won’t we?”

They barely beat the one o’clock deadline at the dorm, and the next night was wonderful and pleasing, as was the holiday altogether, but in the time that followed from Thanksgiving to Christmas they were sometimes almost in despair, partly because circumstances again made certain things difficult, if not impossible, and partly because it was a time leading inevitably to another period of time when they would be unable to see each other at all in any circumstances whatever. Henry’s despair increased as the dreaded Christmas holiday drew near, and then, a few days before it was to begin, something happened to Howie that reduced his own affairs to insignificance and made him feel that he had committed a hideous wrong in having been so excessively concerned with them.

The evening of the day it happened, Henry was in his room, trying to study but not being very successful at it, when Howie came in and sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor between his feet.

“I expect this will be my last semester here,” he said suddenly.

“Last semester?” Henry looked up from his book. “Why?”

“Well, I’m not doing so well. I’ve got behind in all my subjects. I’m sure to flunk at least three of my semester exams.”

“Exams aren’t until the middle of January. If you worked hard between now and then, you could catch up.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Anyhow, I won’t do it. I know that. For some reason or other, I can’t seem to get interested in anything. The old man will raise hell, but I guess it doesn’t make much difference. I’ve been thinking about not coming back after the holiday.”

“I hope you will.”

“Why? I’d only be dropped after exams.”

“Maybe not. Maybe you’re being too pessimistic about your chances.”

“No. There’s no chance at all of getting by unless I work like a dog between now and then, and there’s no use kidding myself that I’m going to do it. I just haven’t got it in me.”

“I don’t want you to leave school, Howie. I’d miss you if you did.”

“Oh, balls. You wouldn’t miss me as long as Mandy’s around.”

“Yes, I would. Mandy would miss you too.”

“Cut it out. She hardly ever sees me as it is, and she isn’t very happy about it when she does. You’ve heard the way she talks to me.”

“Well, you invite it, Howie. You know you do.”

“I suppose so. I’m an unpleasant son of a bitch. I don’t really want to be, though. It’s because I’m afraid of being disliked or something, and so I deliberately try to make everyone dislike me. It gives me a kind of excuse. You’ve probably figured out for yourself by this time that I’m a goddamn phony.”

“You’re nothing of the sort, and I’ve never thought so.”

“Well, thanks. I guess maybe you haven’t. You’ve been a good friend.”

Suddenly Howie made a fist with one hand and began to beat it with a slow and desperate cadence into the palm of the other. Standing, he walked out of the room without another word, and it was not more than fifteen minutes later when Henry heard him scream. The scream was repeated and repeated in almost the same cadence with which the fist had pounded the palm, and the screams were accompanied by the sounds of objects crashing and breaking and overturning in what seemed a systematic plan of demolition. After recovering from the first paralysis of shock, Henry hurried into the hall and down to Howie’s closed door. The student who lived in the room across the hall was already there, staring at the door with an expression of incredulous horror.

“What in God’s name’s the matter with him?” he said. “Why the hell don’t you open the door and find out?”

“I tried to, but it’s locked.”

“Help me break it down.”

They threw themselves against the door together, and the flimsy lock snapped at once. The room beyond was in shambles. Curtains and blinds had been ripped from the windows, mattress and covers torn from the bed, chairs and tables overturned, lamps smashed, books and papers scattered everywhere. In the middle of the shambles, facing the door, was Howie. His shirt was ripped, and his face was bleeding in several places where he had clawed himself. He looked at Henry and saw no one and continued his terrible, cadenced screaming.

“Jesus, Jesus,” the student said. “He’s gone completely crazy.”

“Go call the infirmary,” Henry said. “Tell them to send an ambulance.”

The student left, and Henry waited by the door. He spoke to Howie once, but he got no response, no slight sign of recognition, and with a kind of instinctive feeling for what was right, he made no effort to force himself upon his berserk friend. He only waited and watched to see that Howie inflicted no more damage on himself, and after a while the student returned, and a longer while after that the ambulance came with a doctor and two attendants from the infirmary. As soon as he was touched, Howie, who had become quiet, was immediately violent again, screaming and cursing and fighting with incredible strength. It required both attendants and the doctor to subdue him and administer an injection of some kind of sedative. When they had taken Howie away at last, Henry went into the bathroom and was sick.

He did not see Mandy again until the night before the day the Christmas holiday was to begin. They met in the sitting room of the dorm and walked from there across the campus to the Museum of Natural History and along a path behind the museum to a campanile on a high point of ground above a hollow with a small lake in it. A wind was blowing, and it was cold there, but they sat for a while in the cold wind on a stone bench, and the cold was like a punishment inflicted, a penance borne. He could feel her shivering and heard for a moment the chattering of her teeth, but when he lifted his arm to put it around her for warmth, she drew away from him a little on the bench.

“No,” she said. “Don’t touch me tonight.”

“All right. I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

“Please don’t be offended.”

“I’m not. I think I understand.”

“I should have been kinder to him. It wouldn’t have hurt me to be a little kinder, and it might have helped.”

“You musn’t blame yourself for anything. It was something more than you or I or anyone else ever said or did or failed to say or do.”

“You’re right, I suppose. It must have been something in himself that couldn’t be helped.”

“Maybe now it can be helped.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I only wish that I had been a little kinder. He was in love with me, you know. Last year, before you came, he wanted me to run away and marry him.”

“I didn’t know. He never said anything.”

“I couldn’t do it, of course. I never even liked him very well, to tell the truth, but it wouldn’t have hurt me to be a little kinder.”

“Don’t say that again. Please don’t say it. You couldn’t be expected to know how he was or what would eventually happen to him.”

“Do you think he will be all right?”

“After a while. Someone will help him now.”

“I hope he’s all right. I hope he will be helped by someone who is kinder than I.”

She stood up, shivering and drawing her coat around her. They walked back along the path to the museum and on to the dorm, stopping in the shadow of the leafless hedge.

“Good-by, Henry,” she said.

“Good-by,” he said. “Will I see you after Christmas?”

“Yes,” she said. “After Christmas...”

Chapter 6

...Christmas.

And now, he thought, it was almost another one, and between then and now, that Christmas and this, a great deal had happened and he had been many places, but all that had happened and all the places he had been seemed in retrospect to be more remote in his life than the things and people and places of longer ago. Something had somehow ended with the end of Mandy, a quality of intensity, an impressionability, something that was his that she took away. She had left the university at the end of the next year, and afterward he received several letters from her at longer and longer intervals, and finally the one, which was the last, in which she explained that she was getting married to someone she had known for a long time, long before their time, and in the last paragraph of the letter she said, with a kind of gaiety and bravado that must have been intended as a tear and a kiss and a flip of the hand, that she was so happy she had been able to please him, and good luck, and to think of her, please, sometimes.

Well, he did that. He thought of her sometimes. But after the last letter, which came in the spring of his third year at the university, it no longer seemed quite worth his while to stay where he was and do what he was doing, and so he left in June after taking his examinations and did not return. He pulled his hitch in the army instead, and one day in the hills of Korea, when he was thinking about what he would do next, if he lived to do anything, he decided definitely, like Saroyan, that he must be a writer or be nothing, and although he had worked at it very hard ever since on the side of a variety of jobs in various places, he sometimes thought, unlike Saroyan, that it was nothing that he would turn out to be.

And now it was almost another Christmas. And now he stood at the window and looked down into the street below, and the bell of the soldier of salvation rose and fell, rose and fell, and he felt the striking of the clapper that he couldn’t hear. Three people were crossing toward Adolph Brennan’s bookstore from the other side of the street. One man and two women. Their arms were linked, the man in the middle, and they picked their way carefully through the slush. One of the women was carrying a paper bag in the arm that was not linked with the man’s. “Someone’s coming,” Henry said.

“Coming?” There was a high note of alarm in Ivy’s voice. “Coming here?”

“I think so. Yes, I’m certain of it.”

“What makes you think so? How do you know?”

“Well, they’re crossing the street in this direction, and they happen to be three people I know, and so I assume that they’re coming here.”

“Who are they?”

“A man named Ben Johnson. He writes Western stories for slick magazines and makes quite a lot of money. And two women named Clara Carver and Annie Nile.”

“How do you happen to know them?”

“Well, damn it, I do know a few people, you know. Do you imagine that you are the only person I’ve ever met in my life? As a matter of fact, though, if you must know, Ben and I were in the army together. When I came here later, I looked him up. He lives in an apartment not far away. Besides writing Westerns for money, he writes poetry for the good of his soul. Clara lives with him, but they aren’t married. She’s very pretty and friendly but rather stupid. I like her.”

“What about the other one. What did you say her name is?”

“Annie Nile. Her father owns a shoe factory. She lives by herself and paints pictures, but fortunately it isn’t necessary for her to sell any in order to live, for she isn’t very good at it. Sooner or later she’ll give it up and go home and marry someone richer than she is, but in the meanwhile it amuses her, and so do Ben and Clara.”

“Do you amuse her too?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“God only knows. I’ve learned already that it’s impossible to know what you really mean by anything you say.”

“Why are you so sensitive about it? It was only a perfectly natural question. Do you think I give a damn if you amuse her, or what method you use in doing it?”

She was sitting erect on the edge of the sofa, and he was puzzled and a little concerned by the ferocity of her expression as she looked at him.

“Look,” he said. “Will you please behave yourself? There’s no need to be offensive, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t be.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t say anything to hurt the feelings of your precious friends. It may be interesting to watch their expressions when they discover me here. What do you suppose they will think?”

“They’ll probably think the same thing that Adolph and George think, thanks to your admirable compulsion to explain matters.”

“Do you think so? It’s very funny, isn’t it?”

They could hear the trio tramping up the stairs from the street. The sound of their voices in words and laughter rose clearly ahead of them.

“They seem to be gay enough,” Henry said.

“Or drunk,” she said.

“Both, probably,” he said.

He went over and opened the door in response to banging and his name called out. The two women came into the room ahead of the man. Both were wearing fur coats and fur hats to match. One of them was also carrying a fur muff, but the other one wasn’t. The one without the muff was carrying the brown sack, and it was obvious from the sounds that came from it that it contained bottles. The one with the muff was prettier than the one with the sack, but you felt almost at once, after the first concession to superior prettiness, that the one with the sack would be more attractive to most men in the long run. The prettier one was a redhead, the deep red known as titian, and the more attractive one in the long run was a brunette whose hair below the fur hat had the color and luster of polished walnut. There was about her, the more attractive brunette, an air of being present by accident in circumstances and company that she accepted in good humor. She leaned over the sack of bottles and kissed Henry on the mouth.

“Darling,” she said, “where have you been forever? It’s shameful, the way you’ve been avoiding me, and I ought to be angry, but I’m not. As you see, I’ve come with Clara and Ben to wish you a merry Christmas.”

“He’s a genius, Annie,” Ben said. “It’s impossible to be angry with a genius.”

He was a stocky young man with a broad, homely face dusted across a pug nose with freckles. A thin, sandy mustache on his lips was just faintly discernible when the light was favorable. He removed his hat and coat and relieved Annie Nile of the sack.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if he could sell something and make a lot of money?” Clara Carver said. “Don’t you wish Henry had a lot of money, Annie?”

“Yes, I do,” Annie said. “It would make things much more pleasant and simple all around.”

“It isn’t expected of a genius to sell anything,” Ben Johnson said. “A genius is never appreciated until he’s dead. Everyone knows that.”

“If it’s true that a genius never sells anything, then I must be a genius too,” Annie said, “for I’ve painted pictures and pictures and never sold a one.”

“Darling,” Clara said, “you already have nearly all the goddamn money in the world. You must leave a little for the rest of us.”

“Nevertheless,” Annie said, “it would be encouraging to sell a picture as a matter of principle.”

“The only principal you need be concerned with,” Ben said, “is the one you draw your interest on.”

While they were talking, they were also disposing of hats and coats and dispersing a little in the room. Ben set the sack of bottles on Henry’s work table and sat down in Henry’s chair. Annie and Clara sat beside each other on the frieze sofa. Clara stretched her long nylon legs in front of her and stared at them with an air of appreciation. It was clear that she admired them and considered them her most valuable asset, which was a judgment just as clearly shared by Ben. Ben also stared at the legs with an air of appreciation.

Ivy stood quietly in a corner and was ignored. Everyone had seen her there, but no one had spoken or recognized her presence by any sign or word, and there seemed to be a conspiracy instantly in existence among then to establish the pretension that she wasn’t there at all.

“Ben,” Clara said, “why do you simply sit there staring at my legs? Why don’t you open one of the bottles and give us all a drink?”

“I prefer to look at your legs,” Ben said. “Let Henry open it.”

“It’s sparkling burgundy,” Annie said to Henry. “I prefer champagne myself, but Clara and Ben insisted on sparkling burgundy. It’s a peculiarity of theirs. Do you like sparkling burgundy?”

“I like it all right, but I hardly ever drink it.”

“Why don’t you drink it if you like it?”

“Because it’s too expensive.”

“Don’t forget he’s a poor genius,” Ben said.

“I don’t object to his being a genius,” Annie said, “but his being poor is a great bore. Henry, why must you be so depressingly poor? If you had a lot of money we could go to Florida or someplace for the winter and have fun.”

“Why don’t you pay the expenses?” Ben said. “Have people quit wearing shoes all of a sudden?”

“I’d gladly pay the expenses if Henry would go,” Annie said. “Henry, will you go to Florida with me if I pay the expenses?”

“No,” Henry said.

“You see?” Annie said. “He won’t go.”

“He’s crazy,” Ben said, “that’s what he is.”

“No,” Clara said, “he’s merely proud. Henry, I don’t blame you for not going. If Annie wants to sleep with you she can do it right here.”

“I’ll think about it,” Annie said. “In the meantime, Henry, please open a bottle. There are four of them, as you will see. It was our intention to have a bottle for each of us.”

This was the first oblique reference to Ivy, who still stood in the corner, and everyone turned his head to look at her in unified abandonment of the conspiracy of neglect. Ivy came out of the corner reluctantly and returned their looks with an expression of somewhat surly defiance. She had been prepared to be compatible if possible, for the sake of Henry, but it was now apparent from her expression that she considered compatibility, if not impossible, extremely unlikely.

“This is Ivy Galvin,” Henry said. “Annie Nile. Clara Carver. Ben Johnson.”

Each of the three, watching Ivy, nodded in turn. Clara looked curious and rather friendly, Ben looked faintly salacious, as though he were mentally dispossessing Ivy of her clothes, and Annie looked carefully and blandly remote.

“Ivy Galvin?” Annie said in a careful voice that matched her careful expression. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Henry mention you. Are you old friends? Are you old friends, Henry?”

“No,” Henry said.

“On the contrary,” Ivy said, “he picked me up on the street only two weeks ago.”

“How interesting,” Annie said.

“It hasn’t been so interesting, as a matter of fact,” Ivy said, “but it has been convenient.”

“I should think so,” Annie said.

“It isn’t what you think,” Henry said. “She had no money and no place to go.”

“Disregarding your assumption that you know what I think, Henry, darling,” Annie said, “it’s absolutely unnecessary for you to explain anything. It makes you sound as if you were feeling rather nasty about something.”

“Balls,” Henry said.

“I think she’s pretty,” Clara said. “Don’t you think she’s pretty, Ben?”

“In a famished kind of way,” Ben said, “she’s lovely.”

“Well, you needn’t be an extremist about it.”

“Damn it, I am not being an extremist. I only said that she’s lovely in a famished kind of way. I distinctly qualified my judgment.”

“The trouble with you, Ben, darling, is that you are constantly in heat, as I know better than anybody. It’s disgusting.”

“Heat? Do males get in heat? I thought it was only females who get in heat.”

“In your case, an exception has been made. Henry, will you please pour the sparkling burgundy? Ivy, you must sit down here beside me on the sofa where Ben can get a good view of your legs. It will keep him entertained. Henry went into the other room for glasses. Ivy sat down beside Clara and smoothed her skirt down over her knees. After a minute or two had passed, Henry came back with the glasses. He had been forced to rinse out the one that held the toothbrushes in the bathroom in order to get enough to go around.

“I only have water tumblers,” he said.

“I don’t believe I care to drink sparkling burgundy from a water tumbler,” Clara said.

“Who you trying to kid?” Ben said. “You’ll drink anything from anything.”

“Are you implying that I’m addicted to alcohol or something?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “it’s better than dope.”

Henry opened a bottle and poured sparkling burgundy into five glasses. He distributed the glasses and sat down on the arm of the sofa beside Annie.

“What have you been doing lately?” he said.

“Painting,” she said.

“She’s painting a picture of me,” Clara said. “It’s a nude. I’m absolutely naked.”

“It’s ghastly,” Ben said. “She looks like a skinned mink.”

“Are you saying, actually, that I looked like a skinned mink naked?” Clara said.

“Just in the painting,” Ben said.

“Ben has no artistic judgment whatever,” Annie said. “It’s an interpretation. You have to feel her.”

“I prefer to feel her as she really is,” Ben said.

“Besides,” Annie said, “how many skinned minks have you ever seen?”

“Well,” Clara said, “I think that was a sweet thing to say, just the same. The part about preferring to feel me as I really am, I mean. Ben, that was really a sweet thing to say.”

“I only said it because it’s true,” Ben said. “As you come naturally, you’re very feelable.”

“Oh,” said Clara, looking around, “isn’t he the sweetest thing?”

“I think I’d better pour some more sparkling burgundy,” Henry said.

He got up and gathered the glasses and filled them and distributed them again. He got them mixed up in the process, but no one seemed to care.

“This party is rather dull,” Annie said. “What we need is some music to dance to. Henry, why don’t you have a phonograph? If you are so damn poor you can’t afford a phonograph, I’ll give you one as a present for Christmas.”

“I have a phonograph,” Henry said.

“In that case, let’s put on some records and dance.”

“I don’t have any you can dance to. They’re all symphonies and concertos and things like that.”

“Long-hair stuff,” Clara said.

“What would you expect?” Ben said. “It’s characteristic of geniuses to listen to nothing but long-hair stuff.”

“Get off the genius kick,” Henry said.

“Why do you object to being called a genius?”

“Because I’m not one, and you don’t think I’m one. Just because you’re getting fat selling your stuff to the slicks, you don’t have to be so goddamn patronizing.”

“And you don’t have to be so goddamn sensitive either, when you come to that. If you’re going to get red-assed over a little joke, you can go to hell.”

“Merry Christmas,” Clara said. “A merry, merry Christmas.”

“Do you have a radio, Henry?” Annie said. “We could find a D.J. on the radio.”

“There’s a table set in the bedroom.”

“A table set will do. If you would be so kind as to quit quarreling with Ben long enough to get it, maybe we could get this dull party on its feet.”

Henry got up and went into the bedroom, and Ben followed. Clara watched them go with an expression of concern on her pretty and rather stupid face.

“Do you suppose they will have a fight in the bedroom?” She said. “Ben has such a violent temper. He’s perfectly ferocious when he imagines he’s been offended.”

“Oh, hell. How could you have been sleeping with this man for ages without learning that he’s a perfect puppy? All you need to do is pat him on the head, and he starts licking your hand immediately.”

“Really? Honest to God, Annie, I admire you tremendously. You are so truly clever at analyzing people and knowing just how they are. What I would like to know, however, is how you know what is to be learned about Ben from sleeping with him.”

“What we had better do,” Annie said, “is combine our strength and move the furniture back for dancing.”

“You would do well,” Clara said, “to concentrate on sleeping with Henry and quit thinking about what is to be learned from sleeping with Ben.”

“Darling,” Annie said, “if you will get off your tail and take the other end of the sofa, I’m certain we can push it back out of the way easily.”

“It serves you right that Henry has taken up with someone else.” Clara turned to Ivy. “Is it true that you’ve been staying here with Henry?”

“Yes,” Ivy said.

“You see?” Clara turned back to Annie. “While you have been being so clever, Henry has taken up with Ivy.”

“She’s welcome,” Annie said. “Ivy, you are more than welcome.”

“It’s a practical arrangement,” Ivy said. “He has only given me a place to stay for a while.”

“Everyone keeps trying to explain everything,” Annie said. “It’s quite unnecessary.”

At that moment Henry and Ben returned with the radio. Ben had said that he hadn’t meant to sound patronizing, and Henry had said that it was all right, and everything apparently was. Ben got a D.J. program, the top tunes, and Henry began to push the furniture around. When a space had been cleared, Ben began to dance with Clara, and Henry began to dance with Annie. Ivy sat and watched. Clara danced beautifully, even in the congested area. She was not very bright, but she always did beautifully anything that was purely physical. Between one tune and another, Ben approached Ivy and asked her to dance.

“No, thank you,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” he said. “If you don’t, I’ll think you find me offensive or something.”

He had been a little drunk when he arrived, and he was now a little drunker on the sparkling burgundy, and she felt for a moment a powerful compulsion to tell him that she did, indeed, find him offensive, though not for the reason that he had been drinking or any reason that would have occurred to him, but she remembered that she had promised Henry to be good, which seemed little enough to be in return for what he had been to her, and she was determined to keep her promise if she possibly could.

“I don’t know how,” she said. “I’ve never learned.”

“All you have to do is move with the music,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

Rising, she began to dance stiffly, resisting his efforts to draw her close. It was not true that she didn’t know how, and she was really rather good at it, with a true sense of time and rhythm, but the dance was, nevertheless, somewhat more unsatisfactory than a simple failure. When the tune ended, she sat down in the place and position she had held before and was ignored again thereafter, except when her glass was filled and handed to her. Covertly, through her lashes, she watched Henry under the influence of the burgundy and the music and the two girls. Her own head was strangely light, and she had the most peculiar sensation of becoming detached from her familiar emotional moorings. It frightened her a little, but at the same time she was acutely aware of concomitant excitement. She wished with sudden intensity that the intruders, this man and these women whom she did not know or wish to know, would go away and leave her alone with Henry. They were drinking, she noticed, the last of the four bottles. Perhaps, when the bottle was empty, they would go.

Although Ivy did not know it, Henry also wished that his guests would leave. At first he had been pleased to see them, especially Annie Nile, but after a while he began to get bored and to feel unreasonably irritated by things that were said and done in all innocence and good humor. He had been, in the beginning, uneasy in the fear that Ivy would say something to offend the others, or that she might, even worse, deliberately and defiantly expose herself for what she was, but then, when she had stepped forward from her corner to be introduced, he realized suddenly that it was really she for whom he was concerned, for she was the vulnerable one, after all, who would certainly be hurt the most by casual affronts or her own inverted cruelty. He felt for her a painful possessiveness, an exorbitant desire for her to come off well, and he was not alienated even by her brazen admission to being picked up in the street, which was, he understood, no more than abortive defiance of anticipated rejection. Later on, after they began dancing, he kept watching her as she sat primly apart with closed knees and folded hands, and all at once her thin and vibrant intensity under a pose of quietude reminded him so powerfully of someone else that he was for an instant in another place: in another time, and the wine in his glass and blood was sweet port instead of burgundy.

The last of the four bottles was empty at last, and he went, about midnight, into the bathroom. He did not go because it was necessary, but only because he wanted to get away for a few minutes by himself. Closing the door, he sat down on the edge of the tub and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. The radio continued to play in the living room, and he heard a shriek of laughter from Clara in response to something that amused her, which would not need to be, for Clara, anything very amusing. He liked Clara, and she could be very amusing herself in certain circumstances, especially in bed, but he wished she would go home. He wished she would go home and take Ben with her, and that Annie Nile would go alone to wherever, leaving here, she intended to go. He knew that Annie had not, when she came, intended to go anywhere, at least not until tomorrow, and he felt in the knowledge a vague regret for something else lost that could not be recovered. He had met her about a year ago at a party Ben had taken him to, and his relationship with her since had been generally agreeable and sporadically passionate, but it could not be, after tonight, anything at all, and he did not care.

But Annie had behaved quite well in a difficult situation, he had to admit that. It was no more than the way he would have expected her to behave, though, and it was certain, aside from a slight sense of shame and humiliation, that she cared less, if possible, than he. She had liked him for her own reasons, and he had amused her and given her pleasure in his turn among other men who had done the same in the same period of time, but she had always considered him, as he knew, quite impossible for permanence or other purposes. She would not have cared in the least if he had made love to a dozen women besides her, for she was fair enough not to deny him what she allowed herself, but she would never forgive him for letting her intrude in a situation that was humiliating. She had carried it off well, though. You would never have guessed, not knowing, that she was a bit humiliated or had any reason to be. She would merely sustain the pretension, which she had already established tonight, that no intimacy had ever existed between her and Henry Harper, and soon it would seem actually incredible to both of them that any ever had.

Well, Henry thought, he had better get back to the others. Standing, he went out of the bathroom into the bedroom and found Ben Johnson in his hat and overcoat seated on the edge of the bed.

“Are you leaving, Ben?” Henry said.

“Yes,” Ben said, “you can stop stewing now. We’re going.”

“Cut it out, Ben. You know I want you to stay as long as you please.”

“Do you? I’d have sworn you began itching for us to get the hell out of here an hour ago. Not that I blame you, you understand. I must say, however, that you’ve played a damn dirty trick on Annie.”

“I haven’t played any kind of trick at all on Annie. Damn it, this is the first time in weeks that I’ve even seen her.”

“Oh, I know there’s never been anything between you and Annie except a night now and then, but that’s not the point. The point is, you let her walk into an embarrassing situation. You’ll have to admit it’s not pleasant to walk in with your shoes off and find someone else in your half of the bed.”

“I didn’t let her do anything of the sort. Will you kindly tell me how I could have prevented it when I had no idea you were coming?”

“I suppose that’s true. It isn’t fair to blame you when you couldn’t know. I wouldn’t be acting like a friend, though, if I didn’t say that I consider this a very questionable arrangement.”

“Thanks for acting like a friend.”

“Well, go ahead and be sarcastic. I can understand your bringing a girl home, and I can’t deny that I’ve done the same thing more than once myself, but do you think it’s wise to make an affair out of a pick-up?”

Henry understood that Ben meant well and was trying to be helpful, but he was only irritated by the necessity for making concessions to Ben’s good intentions. What he wished was that Ben mind his own goddamn business and not try to give advice in matters where his only qualification was ignorance. He had an urge to employ the shock tactics that Ivy herself sometimes found useful, and he wondered what Ben’s reaction would be if he were to spell out his arrangement with Ivy clearly.

“She isn’t a pick-up,” he said. “You don’t understand.”

“Sure. I know. She doesn’t have any place to go, and you’re only being a lousy Good Samaritan. Okay, pal. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

“Look. I’m trying to tell you. She’s not like Clara. Not like Annie. You danced with her tonight, lover. Did she act as if she enjoyed it?”

“As a matter of fact, she made me feel that I needed a bath.”

“Well, there you are.”

“You mean she’s queer?”

“That’s one word for it. She was living with a girl cousin and ran away. I happened to meet her, and she had no place to go, and I brought her here. That’s all there is to it.”

“Pal, it may be all there is to it, and it may not be. I always knew you were crazy, but not this crazy. You could get yourself involved in a pretty sticky mess.”

“That’s not your problem. If you want to do me a favor, you can keep this to yourself.”

“Sure, pal. At the moment I don’t feel a hell of a lot like doing you any favor, but I doubt that it would make very good conversation to go around telling people I’ve got a friend shacked up with a queer.”

“You can be a pretty bigoted, intolerant son of a bitch when you want to be, can’t you?”

“Thanks, pal, and a merry Christmas to all.”

“Maybe you’d better finish the line.”

“And to all a good night. Good night, pal.”

Ben stood up and walked into the living room, Henry following. Clara and Annie were standing near the door in their fur coats and hats, and Ivy still sat on the sofa in the posture of primness. Clara said good night to Henry, kissing him, and Annie said good night also, not kissing him, and Ben opened the-door and walked out into the hall and stood there waiting with his back turned.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Henry listened to the three of them go down the stairs, and then he walked over to a window and looked down upon them in the street as they crossed to the other side and moved away toward the corner where the black pot hung from its tripod. Behind him, Ivy continued to sit primly, her eyes downcast. No one had said good night to her, and she had said good night to no one.

“They didn’t like me,” she said, and her voice had a tone of arid acceptance.

“You didn’t give them much reason.”

“I admit I wasn’t very congenial, although I wanted to be and tried my best to be, but I don’t think it would have made any difference, however I was. They wouldn’t have liked me anyhow.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s not something I think. It’s something I feel. There’s a difference between us, and everyone feels the difference and knows that nothing can be done about it, even though no one knows what the difference is exactly.”

“You’re exaggerating. Most of what you say is only imagination.”

“Is that what you believe? I wish it were true. It’s kind of you, at any rate, to encourage me. Is that girl who was here in love with you? The dark one, I mean.”

“Annie? God, no. Whatever gave you such a fantastic idea? Annie loves only herself. Not even that. She loves the picture she has of herself.”

“I’m not so sure. I could tell that she was angry because I was here. She treated me very courteously on the whole, however. Rather she ignored me very courteously. I shouldn’t have been nearly so admirable in her place. I’m sure I’d have made an unpleasant scene.”

“Forget it. She isn’t in love with me, whatever you think, and never has been.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been?”

“No. Maybe I thought I was for a little while, but I wasn’t.”

“Have you ever made love to her?”

“Yes.”

“More than once?”

“Several times.”

“Where? Here?”

“Here and there. Her place, I mean.”

“I wish you’d never done it here. I don’t mind so much there.”

“I don’t see why you should mind at all. Besides, you’re far too curious. It’s none of your business, you know.”

“You didn’t have to tell me if you didn’t want to.”

“All right. You asked, and I told you.”

“She wanted to stay tonight, didn’t she? That’s what she intended to do, wasn’t it?”

“Possibly.”

“Would you have let her?”

“Probably.”

“You mean surely, don’t you?”

“Yes. Surely.”

“And now I’ve spoiled it for you. Are you angry?”

“No. You haven’t spoiled anything that wouldn’t have spoiled anyhow, sooner or later. It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m glad you’re not in love with her. Have you ever been in love with anyone else?”

“Yes. Once. A long time ago.”

“Who was she?”

“Her name wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“I’d like to know. Just to hear it. The sound of it.”

“Her name was Mandy.”

“Was she very young?”

“We were both young. In college.”

“What happened to her? Did she die?”

“No. She married someone else.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be. It got to be all right long ago. I only think of her now once in a while.”

“Was she pretty?”

“I guess so. Pretty’s a vapid word. You don’t think pretty about someone you love.”

“Tell me what she looked like.”

“I can’t. Most of the time I can’t see her myself. Only now and then for just a moment.”

“You could tell me the color of her hair and eyes. How tall she was and how she walked and held her head.”

“That wouldn’t be telling you what she looked like. You reminded me of her tonight, when you were sitting by yourself on the sofa with your knees together and your hands folded.”

“Did she sit that way?”

“No. It was something else. I thought it was a kind of intensity.”

“I wish I could love you. If I were able to love you, would you love me in return?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“It would be wonderful to love you and be loved by you.”

“I’m happy that you think so.”

Chapter 7

Toward morning she awoke on the sofa and lay in the precarious peace between sleeping and waking, while the ceiling receded, and the walls withdrew, and the room became spacious and vaulted and filled with sunlight and music and the scent of flowers. She sat erect on the edge of a hard bench of dark and polished oak in the posture of primness that she would never lose, and the sunlight slanted in through high Gothic windows of stained glass and touched with transparent flame the arrangements of lilies and carnations and white, white roses that were massed in woven baskets before a pulpit.

She was in church, and someone must have died and been buried, for it was only after a funeral, unless it was Easter, that so many flowers were displayed before the pulpit. Yes, yes, she was in church, and the music she heard was coming from the great pipes of the organ, which were concealed by the lattice behind the choir loft, and there was a beautiful man in a frock coat standing below among the flowers in the slanting sunlight. The music was something by Bach that she could never remember, and the man was her father, whom she could never forget.

The music stopped, and there was a long silence disturbed by no more than the merest whisper of movement, and then the man, the minister, her father, began to read from an enormous open Bible, and his rich voice, sonorous and penetrating, was like a golden resumption by the organ that had become quiet, and his head in the soft and shining light was massive and leonine, its tawny hair swept back like a flowing mane.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

She sat quietly on the oak bench beside her quiet mother. The beautiful words in the beautiful voice of the beautiful man seemed to reach her from a great distance and a remote time, from the Mount itself and the day they were spoken there. The adoration of the woman beside her, the wife and the mother and the worshiper, was a tangible emanation that could be felt like the air and smelled like the scent of the flowers. Ivy had learned long ago that her mother did not come to church for the same purpose that other people came. Other people came to worship God, but her mother came to worship the minister. This had at first seemed to Ivy a fearful defection, a flagrant incitement of God’s wrath, but she had later lost her fear with the loss of her belief, not in God, but in the power of her father to incite in God any responses whatever. Thereafter, in the presence of her mother’s adoration of her father, she felt only a terrible sense of inadequacy and isolation, as if she had been excluded from their love by the same passion that had created her.

She listened uneasily, with a feeling of shame, to the text her father read. She always felt, when he talked of meekness and humility, that she was a passive part of an enormous hypocrisy, for he was not meek, nor was he humble, and he was in fact the vainest man she had ever known or would ever know. Not only was he vain in petty matters, the effects of his voice and hair and every studied pose, but also in his utter inversion, a narcissistic absorption in himself which made impossible any awareness of the pain that others might suffer, or any genuine compassion if he had been aware.

He was not really a good man, but he gave the impression of goodness, nor was he a brilliant man, but he gave the impression of brilliance, and so he exploited the illusion of being what he was not, and he was extremely successful in the ministry of God and Church. There was in Ivy’s life from her earliest memory a succession of churches in a succession of towns, each of them better than the one before, and so she sat now in the last and best and listened in shame to the golden words of an ancient sermon, but then she was suddenly not sitting in church at all, but was standing before her father’s desk in his paneled study at home, and his voice continued from church to study without interruption, although it was saying in the latter place something entirely different in an entirely different tone.

“Ivy,” he said, “this is your Cousin Lila, whom we have been expecting. She has come to spend the summer with us. We hope she will like us so well that she will want to come every summer for a long time.”

Ivy turned to face her cousin, and her life, which had seemed until that moment to have a certain orderly purpose that could be traced in the past and anticipated for the future, had in an instant no purpose and no past and no future at all. There was only this moment of awakening at the end of an emptiness that had no meaning because it had no Lila. Lila was slim and shimmering, beginning and end, and she held out her hand in an aura of light. The hand was cool and dry and wonderfully soft, and its touch to Ivy was an excitement.

“Hello, Lila,” Ivy said. “I’m so happy you’ve come.”

“Thank you,” Lila said. “I’m sure I shall enjoy my visit very much.”

This was, Ivy thought, only a politeness, and she had a feeling that Lila had no certain expectation of enjoying herself, and that she had, in fact, come unwillingly to spend the summer. Ordinarily Ivy would not have been particularly concerned about the attitude of a guest in the house, especially a relative, but now she felt that it was desperately imperative that Lila, this shining cousin, should truly enjoy herself so much that she would never want to leave, or leaving, should long to return.

“I’m sure you girls will find a great deal to talk about,” the Reverend Dr. Theodore Galvin said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll ask you to excuse me now, as I have some work that must be done. I’ll see you at dinner, if not before.” Ivy and Lila left the study and the house and sat down together in a glider that had been placed under an elm tree on the side lawn. Lila was wearing a white silk dress without sleeves, and her skin above and below the silk was a tawny gold. Her rich, curling hair was black and full of shimmering light. Looking at her, Ivy felt all edges and projections, an awkward assembly of ugly bones. This wasn’t true, for she was almost as attractive in her own way as Lila was in hers, but Lila had already, as she would always have afterward, the unintended effect of making Ivy feel plain by comparison.

“How old are you?” Lila said.

“Sixteen,” Ivy said. “Almost seventeen.”

“Are you? I’m nineteen, almost twenty. I wanted to work this summer until time to return to school, but my father wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t want me at home either, however, which is why he packed me off out here.”

“I’m very glad he did. What kind of work did you plan to do?”

“Modeling. I was promised a place in a shop for the summer. It wasn’t a very good job, to tell the truth, but it would have been experience. I think I’d like modeling.”

“You’d be certain to be successful, you’re so lovely.”

“Do you think so? Thank you very much. You’re pretty too, you know.”

“I’m not really. You’re only being kind.”

“Kindness is not one of my virtues, and you shouldn’t be humble. A pretty girl who knows it, is prettier than a pretty girl who doesn’t know it. The knowledge does something for her. It lights her up inside.”

“Well, anyhow, I’m pleased that you think I’m pretty, whether I am or not. I wonder why we have never met before. Don’t you think it’s odd?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“I mean, your father and my father being brothers and everything. I’ve never seen your father at all. My father hardly ever even mentions him.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t.”

“What do you mean? Why shouldn’t he?”

“They never got along, you know. Uncle Theodore’s a minister, of course, and Father’s a kind of black sheep. He likes good living and whiskey and women and things like that. One of the reasons he sent me out here, I’m sure, was simply to get me out of the way. With me gone, he can bring a woman to the apartment any time he pleases. I’m too old to go to the kind of camps he used to send me to in the summer, and he had this ridiculous notion that I should not be permitted to work and live alone, and so here I am. I think, besides, that he thought it would be good for me to spend two or three months in the house of a minister. The Christian influence, I mean. Every once in a while, he gets to feeling guilty about the kind of atmosphere he’s subjected me to. It’s silly, of course, and it never lasts long, but here I am, anyhow, and we shall have to think of ways to make the most of it and enjoy the summer together.”

“What do you like to do? Do you like to swim?”

“I love to swim, and I love to lie for hours on the warm sand. Is it far from here to the beach?”

“Not far. We can drive the distance easily in half an hour. I don’t drive yet, though. Not without Father in the car. Do you drive?”

“Of course. I had a car of my own, but I smashed it up, and Father is punishing me by making me wait until I’m twenty-one before I get another.”

“We’ll drive to the beach every day, then, if you wish. I’m sure Father will let us have the car unless he needs it, and he doesn’t very often. Not for a whole day at a time, at least.”

“Won’t I be a nuisance to you?”

“Oh, no. Why should you think so?”

“Well, you’re pretty and almost seventeen. I should think in the summer that you’d be wanting to go places with boys. Do you have lots of boy friends?”

“Not many. Father is very strict about such things, boys and dates and such things, but I don’t really mind. I’m not very interested in boys anyhow.”

“Aren’t you? Why not?”

“I don’t know. Just not. You’re older, though, and may go out as often as you please, I’m sure. After you’ve been seen, there will be all kinds of boys wanting to take you out. Almost all the college boys are home for the summer, of course.”

“I can’t say that I’m terribly excited about it. College boys are a bore, mostly.”

“Do you like older men?”

“I can take them or leave them alone.” Lila looked at Ivy from the corners of her eyes and her lips curved slightly in a strange little secretive smile. “I think I’ll prefer to spend the summer with you.”

Sitting on the glider, watching with an air of abstraction the patterns of sun and shade on the green grass of the side lawn, Ivy had the most delicious sensation of pervading warmth, as if she were sinking slowly into a warm bath. It was the best of good fortune to have acquired her lovely Cousin Lila to love for a whole summer, but to be granted already the implications of being loved by Lila in return was the most incredible fulfillment. She stirred and lifted one hand to her breast, feeling there a sudden and pleasurable pain.

“Is there anything in particular you would like to do now?” she said.

“Your father said that your mother would not be home until this evening. Is that true?”

“Yes. She had to attend a meeting of one of the women’s societies. Of the church, you know. Apparently it was quite important, something she couldn’t miss, and she said to tell you she was very sorry she couldn’t be here to meet you when you arrived.”

“I don’t mind. I quite understand. I wonder what it would be like to have a mother. My father divorced my mother when I was a child. Perhaps you’ve been told about it. I haven’t seen her for years, although in the beginning, right after the divorce, she came to visit me once in a while.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t be. I’m not. I suppose she was unfaithful, since Father got the divorce and custody of me. I’m glad it turned out that way. I doubt that Father would be considered a proper parent, but being in his custody has proved interesting for the most part, even though he has often considered me a bother and sent me away, to school or camp or someplace, to be rid of me.”

“Why did you ask about Mother? When she would be home, I mean?”

“I was just thinking that we might go for a walk. It’s pleasant to walk along the strange streets of a strange town. They change, somehow, after the first time, and are never the same again. But I wouldn’t want to be gone when your mother gets home. She might think it was rude.”

“We have plenty of time. We could walk for an hour at least. Would you like to go?”

“Yes. Let’s go. Will it be necessary to tell your father?”

“No. He’ll never miss us. He pays very little attention to anything unless it is brought directly to his attention.”

They had begun to walk, and they continued to walk for an hour under arcs of branches on tree-lined streets, and at some special second in the course of the hour their hands happened to meet and cling, and it was at once a sign of acceptance and a shy beginning of exploration. When they returned to the house, Ivy’s mother had not yet returned, but she did soon after, and after another hour, perhaps longer, they all sat down to dinner and sat with bowed heads while the Reverend Dr. Theodore Galvin said grace with subdued sonority. Ivy looked through her lashes at Lila across the table, and Lila was looking at her at the same moment in the same way, and it seemed to both that they shared an ineffable secret, and they smiled secretly.

If there was any symbol of the summer, it was that secretive smile. It seemed to develop a separate and somnolent existence of its own, so that it permeated the atmosphere and became a quality of the sunlight, the whispering rain, and the silent, moonlit nights. It was always present, the quality of the smile, and it had, Ivy thought, both scent and sound. The scent was the essence of a delicate perfume that was caught only now and then in a favorable instant, and the sound was the softest sound of a distant vibration, like the plucked string of a conceit harp, that could be heard only in the depths of profound stillness. Sometimes in the middle of doing something, of reading or making her bed or playing tennis or coming down the stairs, she would suddenly smell the scent or hear the sound in a brief suspension of all other scents on earth, and she could never remember certainly when she smelled and heard the scent and sound of the secretive smile for the first time, but she thought it must surely have been the first night Lila came to her room, which was a night not long after Lila’s arrival at the house.

She had been asleep, and she ascended slowly from the deep darkness of sleep into the moonlight flooding the room through open windows, and the smile was in the room with the moonlight, the sense and scent and sound of it, and Lila was there too, beside the bed. Spontaneously, with the ease of instinct, Ivy held out a hand, and Lila took it in hers and sat down on the bed’s edge.

“You were sleeping,” Lila said. “I’ve been watching you.”

“Did you speak to me or touch me?”

“No. Neither.”

“I must have sensed you here to have wakened as I did. Do you hear something?”

“No.” Lisa sat listening, her face lifted to the moonlight. “No, nothing. Do you?”

“I think so. Perhaps I’m only imagining it, though, it’s so soft.”

“What kind of sound? Someone in the hall? Someone outside?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. It’s more like music. A string vibrating.”

“It’s the moonlight. Didn’t you know that moonlight makes a sound? Haven’t you ever heard it before?”

“No. It’s lovely, though. I love the sound of moonlight. Why do you suppose I’m hearing it now for the first time?”

“Because I’m here. I make you aware of things. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“I can make you aware of many things you never knew about before. Are you glad I came?”

“Yes, I’m glad, and I’m glad you wanted to. Why did you want to?”

“I was lonely and wanted to be with you. I’d rather be with you than anyone else. I couldn’t sleep. I kept looking at the moon through my window and wanting to be with you, and so I had to come. Do you think your mother and father would be angry if they knew?”

“I don’t think so. Why should they?”

“Perhaps they wouldn’t think it right for us to love each other. We do love each other, don’t we, Ivy? Didn’t you feel it immediately? Haven’t you known it right along? We are the truest of lovers with the best of love.”

“Yes. It’s true. Our own true love.”

The words were spoken with a strange, instinctive ease and they were a prelude to a kind of delirious and sensuous excitement such as Ivy had never experienced. As if in a dream she shifted in the bed to permit Lila to slide in beside her. And in a continuing dream she felt herself enfolded in Lila’s arms, and the warmth and intoxicating softness of Lila’s body, the sweet pressure of her lips on her mouth and throat transported her into a world of dizzying sensation. For the first time her own body seemed to come fully alive. There was a wild singing in her blood, a delightful trembling in all her nerve ends and suddenly her arms and her lips and her whole body were as eager and demanding as Lila’s.

It was not until afterward that Ivy became aware that love had ceased to be one thing in a moment and had become another thing entirely, although what it had been was included in what it became, and neither was he aware until later that there was in her ecstasy the deep and grievous sadness of irreparable loss.

And so for Ivy there was the summer and the symbolic smile, the ecstasy and anguish of what was gained and lost and of learning to know and accept herself as someone quite different from the person she had thought she was, or had thought she could possibly be. There was also in the passing of days and weeks and months an accretion of guilt and unspecific fear that was something quite apart from, and far deadlier than, whatever specific fear of discovery she might have felt in relation to her mother and father. But guilt and fear were still, and would for a long time be, of less effect than love, and at the end of summer, when it was time for Lila to go away to her father and then to her school, everything was of no effect at all in the dreadful desolation and loneliness in which Ivy was left.

“You’ll never come back,” Ivy said the night before Lila departed. “I have the most terrible feeling that I’ll never see you again.”

“You’re wrong. Next summer I’ll come, if your parents will have me. I’m sure that Father will be most happy to dispose of me so conveniently. In the meanwhile, I’ll write to you. Does your father or mother ever open your mail?”

“I don’t get much mail, but I don’t remember that they’ve ever opened any.”

“Nevertheless, I’d better be careful what I write. You’ll understand me, however. I’ll make allusions to places and times, and you’ll know what I mean.”

“I wish I could go away with you.”

“One day you shall. I’ll become a model, and we’ll have an apartment together. Good models are paid quite well, and I’ll have some money from Father besides, when he dies. He’s lived so hard that it’s very likely he won’t live to old age. I think his liver’s gone bad.”

“One day. It seems so indefinite and far away. How long, do you think?”

“Maybe sooner than you imagine. You’ll be eighteen in a little over a year. I think I may leave school for good next spring. Maybe soon after that. Isn’t the moonlight lovely? It’s like the first night I came here to your room.”

“I can hear it. Can you? You must listen very intently. It makes me so drowsy. I feel as if I were floating away on the sound of the moonlight, right out of the window and away forever.”

“I wouldn’t want you to float away forever. Then you wouldn’t be here when I return next summer.”

“Let’s not talk about that. About your going away, I mean. I can’t bear to think of it.”

“Would you like to sleep for a while?”

“I think I would, but I don’t want you to go away. Will you stay here if I sleep?”

“I’ll stay for another hour and watch you. I love to watch you when you’re asleep. You look so incredibly innocent, like a small child.”

“Will you wake me before you go back to your room?”

“Yes. I promise. Go to sleep now. Listen to the sound of the moonlight.”

She lay quietly in the cradle of Lila’s arm and went to sleep to the sound, and all through the fall and winter and spring that followed, lying alone at night, she always listened for the sound and waited in the darkness for it to come, and at first it came quickly and clearly, without delay, but then it began to be more and more elusive and remote, and finally could not be heard at all. With Lila gone, with only an allusive letter now and then to assure her presence on earth, the domination of guilt by love became uncertain, and the unspecific fear, which her father might have simplified as the fear of God, assumed slowly a commanding place and became a constant threat. During the time of the three seasons, Ivy was balanced precariously between one thing and another, standing in the time of decision between two ways to go, either of which was possible. But she made no decision, and the seasons passed, and Lila returned in the fourth season, the summer, and then there was no longer a decision to be made, and no way to go but one. The quality of the secret smile was again in everything, and the sound of the moonlight could again be heard, but there was nevertheless a significant difference between the first summer and the second, and the difference lay in an increased consciousness of an enormous commitment and in the dangerous consequences the commitment might entail.

It is possible to hide from the senses forever something that can only be seen, but it is not possible to hide from the senses forever, or even for very long, something that can be felt. Awareness may come slowly, but it comes certainly, and it carries conviction even if there is no material evidence to support it. And so it happened in the second summer that even so insensitive an egoist as the Reverend Dr. Theodore Galvin became uneasily aware that the emotional climate surrounding his daughter and his niece did not satisfy his conception of the effect of a normal attachment. He reluctantly discussed it with his wife and found support for his suspicions, which were by the support immediately transformed into conviction. They decided between them that something would have to be done to prevent a consummation they did not know had already been accomplished, and their idea of what to do was to institute a kind of police action. They imposed such sudden and severe restrictions and engaged so palpably in surveillance that both Ivy and Lila knew almost at once that they were under unspoken indictment.

“They know,” Lila said.

They were sitting on the glider under the tree on the side lawn. To Ivy the familiar patterns of sun and shade were the shapes and signs of a corporate threat. It did not occur to her, however, that there was any escape from it by retreat, or any choice left to her except the one that had been set. There was Lila, or there was nothing. There was hope, or there was hopelessness.

“Yes,” she said. “What can we do?”

“There’s nothing we can do. Not now. They’ll surely send me away.”

“If they do, I’ll go with you.”

Although Ivy was not clearly conscious of it, the they was not used in simple reference to her father and mother, for already the specific had been absorbed by the general, the smaller overt threat no more than a sign of the greater and deadlier one of which it was a part. They were the enemy in an ancient conflict, the accusing host.

“You can’t,” Lila said. “It’s not time. We’ll have to wait.”

“I can’t stand it if they send you away. I think I’ll die.”

“You won’t die. You’ll wait. In a few month you’ll be eighteen, and then you can come to me if you wish. In the meanwhile, I’ll prepare for it. Father knows a man who runs a model agency, and he’s promised to take me on. When I leave here, I’ll go to work immediately.”

“Suppose they try to stop me from coming. Do you think they could?”

“Your father and mother? They may try, but there’s a limit to what they can do. They won’t make an open issue of it, you know. They couldn’t bear the disgrace if the truth became known, and so, after all, you will be able to control the situation. As a matter of fact, I suspect, whatever they do or say, that they’ll be relieved to have you go. They’ll pretend afterward that you are dead.”

“How will you let me know when and where to come? It wouldn’t be safe to write.”

“Not here, of course, but I can send it to another address. To someone you know who will pass the letter on to you. Write to me when I get home and let me know where.”

Lila was right in assuming that she would surely be sent away, but it was done indirectly with no open reference to the reason for it, and indeed with the pretension that it was not being done at all. The Reverend Dr. Theodore Galvin, a master of indirection, simply wrote to his brother, Lila’s father, that it had become apparent, for reasons he would prefer not to divulge unless they were specifically requested, that it would be better for everyone concerned if Lila were ordered to come home. The black sheep brother knew his daughter rather well, and he had no wish to know any more than he already did. He wrote Lila to come home and did not ask for reasons. Lila went. She said good-by politely, expressing her regret at having to leave, and the Galvins said good-by just as politely, expressing their regret at having her go, and the pretension was sustained to the end. The Reverend Dr. Galvin drove Lila to the station with her luggage, and Ivy went to her room and lay down on the bed and had for the first time in her life a sincere wish that she would often have later, which was the wish to die quietly and quickly without pain.

The period that followed was an extremely difficult one for Ivy, but she lived it somehow in intervals of days, often certain that Lila would never send for her as she had promised, but finally the letter came that fulfilled the promise. The definitive break, the departure from her home and parents, was accomplished so quietly that its finality was implicit in its quietness.

“Going?” her father said. “Where are you going?”

His face was perplexed and wary.

“I’m going to live with Cousin Lila.”

There was a brittle, defiant note in her voice.

“I forbid you to do so.”

“You may forbid me if you please, but it won’t stop me. I’m going.”

“If you leave against my wishes, I shall consider you dead. You will never be allowed in this house again, or in any house of which I am master.”

At this moment his face was like a stranger’s.

“I expected that. I’m willing to accept it.”

“Very well. Go when you are ready, but don’t speak to me again. I won’t want to say good-by.”

Ivy’s mother stood with the man she adored, and Ivy could not remember afterward a single thing she did or a single word she said, either of reproach or regret, in the time of parting. Everything was understood, but nothing was expressed.

And so began the life of Ivy and Lila together, and for a while it had gone wonderfully, and for a longer while it had gone well, but then it had begun to go bad. One cause of the growing badness was Ivy’s recurring and deepening depression, and another cause was Lila’s duality. Unlike Ivy, she was not wholly committed, and she could be one person in one time and another person in another time, depending on the times and their demands. The night of Ivy’s flight and meeting with Henry, the bad time getting worse had become as bad as it could be, but in the relationship with Henry, although the time was still bad, it was a bad time getting better. Lying in darkness on Henry’s sofa, she believed at last that it would be possible to have with him a saving alliance that would absolve her of the past and secure the future, and there was in her belief a compelling urgency to test it. The possibility was directly contingent, she felt, upon present circumstances, and what could be accomplished here and now and with this man could not be accomplished hereafter in another place with anyone else.

Getting up, she walked through the dark into the bedroom and stood beside the bed on which Henry lay. He was lying on his back on the far side with one arm crossing his chest on top of the covers and the other arm, the near one, stretched out at his side. She could see him only dimly in the dark room, but his breath was drawn and released with the rhythm and depth of sleep.

“Henry,” she said.

He didn’t answer, nor even stir, and there was no break in the rhythm of his breathing. She got into bed and lay beside him, very carefully not touching him until she was entirely ready, and then she reached for his hand and laid it deliberately on her breast. He stirred briefly, making a whimpering sound and Ivy held her breath. She squeezed his hand with hers, placed it more firmly on her breast and felt a surge of strange emotion in her.

Henry grunted and suddenly turned.

“Who is it?” he mumbled.

“Henry... Henry, I... I—” Ivy’s voice broke off in a faint whisper.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, then in the dim, uncertain predawn light she saw his eyes widen as he became aware of where his hand was resting.

“Do you mind?” she asked.

He laughed uncertainly. “No. Of course, not.”

“Henry, would you like to kiss me?”

Instead of answering her, he turned fully toward her and placed his lips on hers. It was a groping, tentative kiss and Ivy could feel a terrible trembling in her body. She was suddenly cold and she wanted to push Henry away, but she suffered the kiss to go on. Then she felt his hand pressing more firmly on her breast through the thin cloth of the nightgown. After a moment he removed it and put both arms around her, pulling her closer. She resisted momentarily, her body still strangely cold, then yielded. He brought her soft, quaking flesh against his lean hardness and Ivy felt panic begin to blossom deep inside her.

She was mashed against Henry now and he was kissing her, this time not so gently. His mouth was urgent and a little rough and suddenly his hand crept under the nightgown and was caressing the bare flesh of her breasts. His thumb and index finger toyed with the nipple of her lift breast, massaging it gently. A wild current of feeling rode like quicksilver through Ivy’s veins. She wanted to scream and cry. There was a stirring of desire in her — like the remembered delight of the hours spent in Lila’s arms — but there was a difference she couldn’t fathom and she couldn’t fight down the horrible, crawling fear that suddenly clutched at her vitals.

Suddenly, without conscious volition, she arched against him, pushing against his chest with a terrible frenzy. She withdrew slightly and in that moment she lashed out at his face, raking the nails of her left hand across it. Henry cried out in pain, then cursed.

Ivy scrambled out of the bed, clutching her nightgown to her quaking body. Henry got out the other side of the bed and quickly turned on a lamp. Blood was trickling down his cheek from the gashes left by Ivy’s nails. She had hurt him and she was sorry and there was a deep sadness in her for him. She wanted to ask his forgiveness but the fury she saw in his eyes held her back.

“You rotten bitch,” he said. “You goddamn queer.”

“Henry, please, I thought I could—”

“Shut up, damn you!” he raged.

He put his hand to his face, then lowered it and stared at the smear of blood across fingers and palm, and his eyes were suddenly sick with shame. Turning, he walked into the bathroom and she could hear water running into the lavatory, followed by the sound of the door of the medicine cabinet being opened and closed. She wanted to get up and go after him, to heal his wounds by the miracle of her intense desire, but she thought with despair that miracles did not come to pass, and on one moment of irrational fear it had become too late for the healing of anything. She did not blame him for his cruel words, which had been spoken in reaction to her cruel act. He hadn’t called her a tithe of the evil things she was, and today, instead of buying a Christmas tree, as she had planned, she would gather her things and go away before she could cause him more trouble and shame in return for his kindness.

Chapter 8

When he came out of the bathroom he had washed his face and stopped the seepage of blood with a styptic. Without looking at her, he removed his pajamas and stood before her naked, which was something he had not done before, and she thought that he did it now as an expression of contempt or indifference. Which of the two was worse she didn’t know, but either was bad enough, and she watched him steadily in his nakedness as a kind of submission. He began to dress for the street, dressing slowly, not speaking, not looking at her, and he did not speak or look at her until he was ready to leave. Then he looked at her levelly, with no discernible animosity, and spoke in the same dry, precise voice with which he had cursed her.

“I’m going to work,” he said. “When I get back this evening, I’d be happy to find you gone. I was a fool to bring you here in the first place, and I’ve been a fool ever since to let you stay, and I hope to God I never see you again. I treated you decently, you’ll have to admit that, and I’ve respected you for what you are, but then you crawl into my bed like a whore when I’m asleep, and you scream and claw me like a goddamn violated virgin when you wake up to find yourself where you came of your own will. You’re crazy, that’s what you are. You’re psycho. I don’t believe your cousin tried to kill you at all. Maybe it was just the other way around, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, but more likely it was just something you dreamed up to try to get someone into trouble. Trouble’s all anyone will ever get from you, that’s plain enough but I’ve had enough, thank you, and that’s all I’ve got to say. There’s twenty dollars in the top drawer of the chest. You’re welcome to take it when you go.”

He went out and downstairs and began to walk in the direction of the building in which he worked. It was still dark, and far earlier than he ordinarily left in the morning, and he had plenty of time to walk the entire distance, over three miles, rather than having to take the bus as usual. He was glad of this, for he needed the physical action, and he was grateful for the cold air that stung his face and carried a threat of snow. He could not remember having been angrier in his life than he was now, and his anger was not because of the little pain he had suffered, the scratches on his face, but because of the shame ht had felt and was still feeling, almost a sense of degeneracy. Waking to find her sleeping beside him, her slender body warm and lovely and inciting in its thin gown, he had not touched her until she asked for it, and the violence of her repulsion had made him feel irrationally like a rapist at least, although he was not.

Well, he had told her the truth. She was psycho. Queer. Trouble. He couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to expose himself to her in the way he had, except that he was a little crazy himself, and if she did not leave voluntarily while he was gone, then he would send her away tonight when he returned, and that would be the end of it. His anger had made him physically ill, on the verge of vomiting, but walking and cold air began to clear his head and reduce the angry fever in his flesh, and when he reached the building in which he worked, he was feeling much better.

As the morning passed, Henry’s anger diminished, and he began to wonder if, after all, he had been fair. Reviewing the sordid episode in the clearer climate of his lessened anger, he thought he could understand Ivy’s intent, which had been good, and its failure, which was understandable. Last night, after the impromptu party, they had achieved in their conversation a warmth and compatibility greater than any they had achieved before, and they had even mentioned for a moment the chance of love. Waking early, at it must certainly have happened, she had thought of him and wanted him, or had at least wanted to try him, and so she had come in to find him sleeping and had lain down beside him on the bed. She had acted rashly, that was true, but there was in the action, just the same, a kind of pathetic courage.

Once he had considered it dispassionately, this seemed so obviously the truth that he was tempted, when it was time for lunch, to take a taxi home and talk with Ivy again. But perhaps she was already gone, and perhaps it would be better, regardless of the truth, to leave matters as they were. They had established a precarious relationship, and it would be foolishness, maybe dangerous foolishness, to try to save it under the illusion that it might be the saving of her. People like her did not change. The basic fault they shared must be organic and irreparable. The only sensible thing to do with one of them, he thought, was to turn and walk away.

He lunched alone in a cafeteria in the basement of the building. Afterward, upstairs, he could not dismiss a feeling of uneasiness and guilt that had replaced his anger. If he did not regret his position, he at least regretted the brutality with which he had assumed it. For the first time since knowing Ivy, he felt a need to make some kind of personal contact with her past, to meet and talk with someone who had known her before him. It was then, in the development of this need, that he began to think of Lila Galvin, and sometime during the afternoon he made up his mind definitely that he would see her and talk with her that evening if possible.

He left the offices at five and stopped in a telephone booth in the lobby below. Checking the directory, he found Lila’s name and address listed, and he considered calling to see if she was at home, but he decided against it. If he were to speak with her on the telephone, she might refuse to see him, which would make his calling on her all the more difficult. If he were simply to appear at her door without an invitation, he would at least not have the disadvantage of an expressed denial of one.

On the street outside, he caught a cab and was driven to the address he gave. The apartment house was impressive enough to exert a kind of preliminary intimidation over most trespassers, but Henry was in no humor to be intimidated, and he paid off the cab and entered the lobby. It was then that he remembered that he didn’t know the number of Lila Galvin’s apartment, and there was no doorman, no directory, no one in the lobby to answer questions. He supposed that he could check the floors until he came to the door with the right name on it, provided there was a name on it at all, but this did not seem to be a very sensible solution, and he was trying to think of another when a thin, dehydrated man came in from the street behind a Pomeranian on a leash. The man gave the impression of being dragged by the dog.

“I beg your pardon,” Henry said. “I have an appointment with a Miss Lila Galvin in this building, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the number of her apartment.”

The Pom did not stop, and neither, consequently, did the man. Passing, he spoke over his shoulder.

“Five-o-three. My floor. If you’re going up, come along.”

Henry followed the dog and the man into the self-service elevator and rode up five floors. As soon as the elevator doors were open, the Pom departed, turning right.

“You’re the other way,” the man said, again over his shoulder. “Just look for the number.”

Henry did and found it. Pressing a pearl button beside the door, he listened to a bell. He was about to press the button a second time when the door was opened without any prelude of sound, and he found himself staring at a young woman whom he took to be Lila Galvin, and who was, whoever else she was, one of the loveliest women he had ever seen. Her hair was a shimmering black cloud, gathering and holding the light, parted cleanly and drawn back sleekly into a knot on the back of her neck. The severe perfection of her face was relieved by a sensual mouth, and her body, in a black wool dress of beautiful simplicity, possessed the lean seductiveness of a high fashion model. Which was, he recalled, what she was.

“Yes?” she said. “What is it?”

“I’m looking for Miss Lila Galvin,” he said, certain that he was speaking to her.

She acknowledged her identity and continued to watch him with cool serenity tinged by a faint amusement implicit in slightly arched brows. Her loveliness and serenity and implicit amusement had altogether the effect of making him sound truculent.

“I’m Henry Harper,” he said, and waited.

“Oh?” Her brows arched, if possible, a little higher. “Is that supposed to mean something? Should I know you?”

“Probably not. There is someone else, however, whom we know in common. Ivy Galvin, your cousin.”

“I see.” Her brows descended, and she no longer looked amused, but neither did she look angry or to any degree distressed. “You’re the man she told me about when she returned for her things. She’s been staying with you.”

“That’s right. I’d like to talk with you.”

“No more than I would like to talk with you. Please come in.”

He walked past her into the living room that had a clean, modern look. The furniture, low and heavy but achieving in its simplicity an effect of lightness, was covered with a tweedy material that looked expensive. On the wall that Henry faced there was a good copy of a Van Gogh. Against the wall near a door to another room, there was a bleached console phonograph. It must be the one, he thought, to which Ivy had listened the night she meant to die. If the whole story was not, as he suspected it might be, a lie at the worst or a delusion at best.

“I just got home a few minutes ago,” Lila Galvin said. “I was about to fix myself a cocktail. Will you join me?”

“I didn’t come on a social call. Maybe, after you’ve heard me, you won’t want to give me a cocktail.”

“You sound very grim. Is something wrong?”

“Something’s wrong, all right, but I’m not sure what it is. That’s what I’d like to find out.”

“Do you know what I think? I think you really need a cocktail, and so do I. I like a martini myself. Will that do for you?”

“Whatever you like.”

“I’ll get some ice. Excuse me, please.”

She went into the kitchen, which he could not see, and returned shortly with ice. She mixed gin and vermouth in a tall frosted glass and stirred it briefly with a glass rod. After pouring the martinis and handing him one, she sat down on a sofa and crossed her knees, holding her own glass with the fingertips of both hands so that it brushed her lips below her nostrils, as if it were a snifter of brandy and she were breathing the aroma.

“I wish you would sit down and quit looking so angry,” she said. “You look on the verge of attacking me. I imagine Ivy has been telling you the most terrible things about me, however, and so it’s quite understandable. Isn’t that right? Hasn’t Ivy been telling you things?”

He sat down facing her, feeling in his joints an unusual awkwardness. The glass he held seemed so fragile in his thick fingers that he had the notion that he must handle it with the greatest care to avoid crushing it inadvertently. “What do you think she’s been telling me?” he said.

“I think, for one thing, that she probably told you that I tried to kill her. Did she?”

“Yes. Did you?”

“Do you think, if I did, that I’d be fool enough to admit it?”

“No.”

“Of course not. But, to answer your question, I didn’t. Not that there’s any point in saying so. You’ll believe whatever you wish.”

“What made you assume at once that she told me you tried to kill her?”

“Because she accused me of it when she returned. Truly a fantastic story. I was supposed to have given her an overdose of sedative, and she was able to save herself only by walking and walking in the streets until she was exhausted. It was an exceptionally brilliant bit of fiction, even for Ivy. Is that the same story she told you, or did she develop a variation?”

“That’s the one.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I shan’t blame you if you do. Ivy can be very convincing. I’ve been deceived myself many times.

“Do you mean that it’s only her imagination? That she has delusions?”

“No. I don’t mean anything of the sort.” Lila tipped her glass against her lips and smiled at him across it. She was clearly in perfectly good humor. “I mean that she’s a deliberate liar. She’s one of the most accomplished and conscienceless little liars that it’s possible to imagine.”

“On the other hand, perhaps it’s you who are the deliberate liar.”

“Think as you wish. I’m only trying to warn you. If you are determined to get yourself involved with Ivy, as you seem to be, you had better know her for what she is.”

“Why should she accuse you of trying to murder her if you didn’t, or if she didn’t at least think you did?”

“Because she’s malicious. She wanted to say the most damaging thing about me that she could think to say. I’m trying to tell you that she’s a psychopathic liar. A psychopathic personality. Do you know what a psychopathic personality is? If you do, you know what Ivy is. She has no more sense of moral values than a cat. She is absolutely incapable of love or gratitude or responsibility or remorse. She would do anything or say anything without regard for any person on earth, so long as it suited her purpose. She can also be extremely ingratiating when she pleases, as you have surely learned. Would you like another martini? Why don’t you mix another for each of us?” He looked with surprise into his glass to see that it was empty. He had not been aware of drinking, and he thought he must have spilled the contents without knowing it, but there was no sign of it on himself or the carpet. He had drunk the martini, all right, and he did badly want another, and so he got up and mixed more gin and vermouth and filled his glass and hers.

“It would make it much easier for us to talk if you sat beside me on the sofa,” she said. “Don’t you agree?”

“Not particularly.”

“Oh, please. There’s nothing to be gained by being antagonistic. You obviously didn’t come here to accuse me of anything. You can’t make up your mind about Ivy, and you think I might be able to help you. If we’re going to be confidential, we may as well get into position for it.”

He sat down beside her, and she smiled and reacted over with her free hand and patted him on the knee in a gesture of approval. It seemed to him now entirely incredible that this serene and lovely woman had ever even considered killing anyone, let alone attempting it, and it seemed equally incredible that she had been a partner in a deviant relationship. Quite the contrary, allowing for the influence of his second martini, he thought that he could sense beneath her serenity a readiness to respond to the normal incitements to love.

“Are you willing to tell me the truth?” he said.

“Well, I’m resigned to it. What do you want me to say?”

“I warn you that I’m in no mood for euphemisms.”

“Neither am I. I never am. I prefer to speak plainly, and I know very well what’s on your mind. After all, you’re quite obviously neither an innocent nor a pervert. You could hardly have taken Ivy to stay with you without learning what she is.”

“She told me in the beginning.”

“Really? How clever of Ivy. And knowing this, you allowed her to stay? You must be either an unusual man or a fool.”

“She was in trouble and had no place to go. I felt sorry for her.”

“I see. You’re compassionate. Genuine compassion is rare in this world, I think. However, don’t believe that Ivy will feel any gratitude for what you do for her, or that it will prevent her from hurting you any way she can if you offend her. You’ve let yourself get into a situation that could become pretty ugly. Or perhaps it already has. I haven’t asked you yet what happened to your face.”

“I cut it shaving.”

“All right. It’s your affair. But if you expect me to tell the truth, you should be willing to do the same.”

“The truth is, Ivy clawed me. The circumstances were probably not quite what you’re thinking, but let it go.”

“Whatever they were, she must have been disturbed by them.”

“She thought I was trying to make love to her, and how disturbing that would be is something you should know.” He thought he saw a glitter of fury in her eyes, but it was so quickly gone, if it had existed at all, that he couldn’t be sure.

“Do you think I’m that way? Did Ivy tell you I was?”

“Did she ever actually say? I don’t believe she did. Anyhow, it was implicit in your relationship.”

“Was it? Is it implicit in yours?”

“Although it’s really none of your business. I don’t mind telling you that that was the source of our trouble. It’s the reason she finally came to hate me. She hates me for rejecting her.”

“In that case, why did you let her stay?”

“Why did you take her in? After all, my responsibility is greater than yours. She’s my cousin. I knew her as a girl. She had no one else to turn to who could understand her and try to help her, and she was better off here than she would have been in some sordid place with her own kind.”

He had eaten little that day, only lunch, and the two martinis were having a strong effect. As if she knew this and approved it, or had perhaps planned it, she got up and mixed a third. When she sat down again beside him, her thigh was brushing his, and he waited for her to move out of contact, but she didn’t. She smiled and lifted her glass in a slight salute. He responded, and they drank together.

“Do you know something?” she said. “You’re a very attractive young man, and I suspect that you could be very nice if you chose to be. I’m glad you came to see me. It would be too bad if you were to have the wrong idea about me.”

“I’m not sure,” he said, “what the wrong idea is.”

He drained his glass and set it aside, as she did hers. Then, because he wanted to and because her words and expression seemed to invite it, he put his arms around her and kissed her, and her response was immediate and warm. Her body arched inward, her head fell back, and her lips parted slowly under his. When he released her and looked down into her upturned face, her eyes were open and clouded with desire, and she was breathing rapidly with excitement that could not possibly, he thought, be simulated.

“Was that a test?” she said with the slightest inflection of mockery. “Were you trying to find out?”

“Maybe.”

“If it was, it’s not enough. It proves nothing. Any man can kiss.”

“What would be enough?” he asked.

“I can show you. Would you like me to show you?”

Henry grinned. “Yes. Show me.”

A dark glint of feeling roiled up the depths of her eyes. Her red mouth curled and suddenly she slid close to him, pressing her body urgently against him. She put her moist, open mouth against his, grinding her lips back and forth in a frenzy of passion, while her hands clawed at his back and his flanks.

Somehow the zipper of her dress was down and she drew away from him long enough to clamber out of it. A twist of her hand behind her back freed her bra so that the burgeoning richness of her full, rounded breasts came free. Then she put his hand to her breast, surging against him. When his hand groped for the elastic of her panties she arched her body to help him so that all of the glowing white riches of her flesh were yielded up to him.

There was fire in her, fire in her hard-nippled breasts, her quivering loins as she pulled him down upon her. He was fumbling to get out of his own clothes now and when he was free of them she crushed her body against him, writhing in a hoarse, panting rhythm. She was all eager, yearning, devouring flesh and her hands upon his chest and thighs and belly were bold and daring, seeking to rouse him to a frenzy that matched her own.

“I’ll show you,” she breathed once, as she pulled her moist, avid mouth away from his. “This way... And this... And this...”

Her surrender was so complete and so adept that Henry did not fully understand until later that it was not surrender at all, but aggression, and that the suspiciously easy seduction of a practical stranger was hers, not his, and that its purpose was deception, not pleasure.

Chapter 9

Ivy lay very still in Henry’s bed and stared at the ceiling with bright, dry eyes. There was a large brown stain that began at one upper corner of the room and extended diagonally toward the center. The stain was long and rather narrow, with an irregular perimeter reminiscent of a rough coastline on a map, and it looked, in fact, somewhat like the Italian boot. Tracing the perimeter of the stain with meticulous attention to every salient and recession, and exercise in careful diversion which was helpful in avoiding disintegration, Ivy could hear Henry descending the stairs to the street, the heaviness of his tread being a kind of index to the degree of his anger. In Ivy there was no anger. There was only the deep and acceptant despair that comes with definitive defeat in a moment of hopefulness. She thought that it would be a great relief to cry, but crying was not possible.

She continued to lie in bed for almost another hour, and as she lay there she tried to decide where she should go, but she knew all the while that there was really nothing to decide and nowhere in particular to go, and that all she was doing, or wanted to do, was to delay doing anything decisive whatever. In time, however, the self-deception could no longer be sustained, and so she got up and took a bath and dressed slowly and began to consider what she should take with her when she left. She did not wish to carry both of the bags she had brought, and it required some time and thought to decide which of the two she should take, the larger or the smaller, but finally she chose the smaller with the qualification that she would also pack the larger and leave it here to pick up later.

Having made this decision she felt a sudden urge to hurry, to complete in all haste what must be done. Opening both bags, she gathered her possessions, deciding quickly whether each item was something she would need soon or not, and putting each in the large or small bag according to the decision. Her packing done, she left the smaller bag standing closed in the middle of the room and put the other one out of the way against a wall. Then she made Henry’s bed and folded the covers of her own, the sofa in the living room, after which she went systematically through both rooms, putting everything neatly in its place. This done, she took the twenty dollars from the chest drawer and put on her hat and coat and picked up the small bag and went downstairs to the street and walked away quickly without pausing or looking back.

She did not choose her direction deliberately, but she turned out of habit in the direction of the Greek’s diner. When she had reached it, becoming conscious of her location, she stopped and looked in through the window and saw the Greek standing behind the counter beside the cash register. Because she was hungry, and because she wanted to say good-by to George, for whom she had affection, she went inside and set her bag on the floor beside a stool at the counter, and sat down on the stool. George was pleased to see her. Taking a position opposite her, he placed the heels of his hands on the edge of the counter and leaned forward with an air of easy camaraderie.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m very glad to see you. Will you have something to eat?”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll have some coffee and toast, if you please. I’ve not eaten any breakfast.”

“How is the arrangement with Henry?”

“Very bad. It hasn’t worked out.”

“Is that so? I’m sorry to learn it. I thought it was working out well.”

The Greek’s face wore an expression of grave concern. His concern was, as it were, doubled and divided in equal parts. In the beginning of the arrangement, he had worried only about possible deleterious effects upon Henry and the book, but later, in affection and ignorance, he had begun to worry about the consequences to Ivy. Beneath his overt attitude of sophistication, he considered the arrangement as he understood it to be, if not sinful, surely regrettable, and he did not want Ivy hurt or abandoned.

“It worked for a while,” she said. “But now I’ve been asked to leave. You see that I have my bag, and I’ve stopped now to say good-by.”

“Henry has asked you to leave?”

“Yes, he has. When he left for work this morning, he told me to be gone by the time he returned.”

“Henry’s hot-headed. No doubt he didn’t mean what he said. I advise you to go home and wait until he returns. It will be all right then. You’ll see.”

“No, no. You don’t understand. It was all my fault. It was my fault entirely.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to find a place to stay for a day or two until I can make other arrangements. I have a little money. Could you suggest a suitable hotel? It must be quite cheap.”

“Well, there’s a hotel directly down the street. About a mile. It’s not so much, but it’s cheap and as clean as could be expected. It’s called the Hawkins. I lived there once myself for a year and found it acceptable.”

“All right. On your recommendation, I’ll go there.” Resolving to speak sternly to Henry at the first chance, the Greek served the coffee and toast and refused, after she had finished, to be paid.

“You’re very generous,” she said. “It may be that I’ll see you again.”

“It may be,” he said.

She went out and down the street, carrying the bag. The bag, which was small and light, kept getting bigger and heavier, and at first she alleviated this by changing it from hand to hand, but then it was as heavy in one hand as the other, and the mile to the hotel was surely two at least. She finally arrived, however, stopping to read the vertical sign above the entrance, and she was relieved to see that the building made a somewhat better appearance than she had hoped for, in spite of the Greek’s recommendation. It was a narrow building, constructed of brick and pressed between two other buildings that were not so high and consequently gave to it an effect of greater height than it had. It had a revolving door, which she entered, and two shallow steps upward to the lobby, which she climbed. The lobby was small and shabby, but the shabbiness managed to retain a suggestion of respectability, and there were some deep leather chairs and potted plants distributed over a worn red carpet. Some of the chairs were occupied, and she noticed that the occupants were all elderly men who were so in harmony with the general tone of the place that they might have been installed there by design as part of the furnishings. There was also an elderly man behind the desk, and Ivy approached him and spoke with spurious arrogance that was a defensive effect of her uncertainty.

“I’d like a room, please,” she said.

The elderly clerk responded as if this were a reasonable and routine request, which somehow surprised her and gave her an exorbitant sense of acceptance. He presented a card, which she signed, and then slapped a bell that summoned a Negro bellhop.

“Six-ten,” the clerk said.

He handed the Negro, who was also elderly, a key fastened by a chain to a heavy fiber tag. The Negro took the key and Ivy’s bag and started for the elevator, and Ivy followed. They went up in the elevator together and down the narrow sixth floor hall to room ten, and then, after the Negro was gone and the door closed behind him, Ivy was swept immediately by the terrible desolation of being in a strange and unloved place with absolutely nothing to do.

She did not know how she could ever survive the desolate day, and she wished now that she had remained at Henry’s until late in the afternoon, just before he was due to return. Then, at that time, it would already be getting dark at the end of the short winter’s day, and the gray hours would be past, over and done with, the neons and fluorescents and incandescents burning against the darkness, and if there was a menace in the night that the day did not have, its pulse was quicker, and it passed faster, and it was usually possible, sometime in the course of it, to sleep and lose the consciousness of time entirely. But she had not thought, she had left in the middle of the day, the worst possible of times, and now she was trapped in this deadly room and must either escape it or somehow devise a way to bear it.

She removed her hat and coat and put them in a closet and went over to a window and stood looking down upon the tarred roof of the building next door. The black expanse was bleak and ugly, with sooty patches of snow in the corners at the base of the parapet and against the north sides of the chimney and a metal ventilator. The ugliness of the roof increased her depression, and she turned away from the window and sat down in a chair and began to think about where she could go from where she was and how she could live after the twenty dollars were gone. She could not go home, to the house of her parents, and she would not go back to Lila, and it was very doubtful after what had happened, in spite of the Greek’s assurance, that she could go back to Henry. There were places she could go where she would find understanding and help, the allegiance of kind, but she had never gone to any of these places and did not want to go, because going to them was the voluntary acceptance of a kind of segregation that was crippling and degrading.

Well, she would have to go to work and live alone, but what could she do? She had no particular talents and no special training. She could get a job as a clerk in a store, of course, even though she had no experience, and it should be especially easy now, during the Christmas shopping rush, but such a job would be very dull and would pay very little, and it could be considered at best only something to do until something better could be found. Thinking about the necessity for getting a job, she remembered for the first time that day that she actually already had one, that she was committed to helping old Adolph Brennan in his book shop, and that she had walked away without once thinking about it. It would have been only common courtesy to have stopped to explain why she couldn’t work any longer, and to say good-by, and she regretted that she had not. He owed her a little money, too, and perhaps later she could go there and get it.

The air in the room was stale and very warm. The radiator against the wall made a soft, whispering sound of escaping steam that was pleasant to hear and soothing in effect. Listening to the sound, she felt herself becoming a little drowsy, and this was good. It would be good to sleep and would solve the problem of how to survive the day. She got up and sat down on the edge of the bed and removed her shoes and lay down. The action dispelled the drowsiness, but she lay and listened to the sound of the steam and slowly became drowsy again, and after a while she went to sleep and slept through the rest of the day and wakened in darkness about eight o’clock. She wakened in terror with a scream in her throat, but she remembered in time where she was and why, and terror diminished as the scream became a whimper. Getting up, she turned on a light and washed her face in the bathroom. Leaving the light burning, wearing her hat and coat, she went out of the room and downstairs in the elevator and across the lobby into the street.

She wasn’t hungry, but she thought that she had better eat for the sake of her strength, and besides, eating was something to do that would pass some time. She walked along, looking for a place, and in the next block, or maybe it was in the block after the next, she came to a basement restaurant with a flight of steps leading down from street level to the door, and she descended the flight to the door and went inside. On her right as she entered was a long bar with two men and one woman in front of it on stools and a bartender behind it in a white jacket. The men and the woman and the bartender were all watching a prize fight on an elevated television set at the far end of the bar, and she walked past them down two more steps into the restaurant.

Since she had so little money, she felt compelled to order wisely, to get as much food as possible for what she would have to pay. Considering this, and feeling very sensible and efficient in doing so, she decided that a steak would be best all around, one of the cheaper cuts, and he ordered the steak medium rare and ate it slowly after it was served, cutting small bites and chewing each one thoroughly. From where she sat, she could see at an upward angle, over the top of a low partition, the heads of the two men and the woman at the bar. They were now faced squarely around, no longer looking downbar toward the television, and so she assumed that the fight was over.

The bar seemed all at once a wonderful place, a sanctuary, and she made up her mind suddenly that she would go in and have a drink and sit there for a while in the sanctuary. She couldn’t afford it, of course, not even one drink, but she thought of the cost in terms of warmth and casual companionship and the pleasant passage of time, and the price of a drink for all this was surely little enough. The waiter had left her check, and she picked it up and carried it over to the cashier and paid it. With part of her change, she got a package of cigarettes from a machine, another extravagance which she did not even try to justify. She was beginning to feel, in fact, strangely compatible with immediate circumstances, indifferent to matters which had previously, only a little while ago, seemed enormously important and threatening. At the bar, the bartender stood opposite her and smiled politely. He had a twisted nose and a thick ear on the left side, but these acquired defects had the effect of making him more attractive than he would otherwise have been, giving distinction to a face that would have been nondescript without them, and she wondered if he had been a prize fighter or wrestler before becoming a bartender.

“Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening,” she said. “I think I shall have a double manhattan, if you please.”

Double. She had said double promptly and quite naturally, without thinking about it. From a cheap cut of steak to a double manhattan was a long way in terms of economy, but the inconsistency in this was more apparent than real, and there was definitely an underlying sense and purpose in it, although she couldn’t immediately isolate it. The bartender brought her double manhattan and left her with it, and an incredibly short time later, lifting her glass, she discovered that it was empty. This would not do. It simply would not do. It was all right to allow oneself a drink, especially if it contributed to survival in a period of time, but such careless extravagances as this was another thing entirely. She had intended to nurse the double manhattan, to make it last, but she had gulped it down at once instead, and now she would have to leave or buy another.

The prospect of leaving being intolerable, there was only one thing to do, and she beckoned to the bartender, who returned, and ordered another double manhattan. With this one, however, she would mind what she was doing. She would drink slowly, in sips, with attention to time. Having made this resolution, she no longer regretted having drunk the first one quickly, for the result had been beneficial. It had increased her sense of compatibility, the capacity to cope, and had given her the beginning of a feeling of pleasurable excitement.

“Excuse me,” she said to the bartender. “Would you mind very much if I were to ask you a question?”

“Not at all, lady,” he said. “I gets lots of them.”

“I was wondering if you were once a prize fighter or a wrestler.”

“Both. I was a fighter first and a wrestler later.”

“Did you prefer wrestling to prize fighting?”

“No. I prefer bartending to either.”

“Really? That’s very interesting. Why did you quit prize fighting for wrestling if you didn’t prefer to wrestle?”

“I quit fighting because I wasn’t any good at it. I kept getting my brains beat out. Wrestling wasn’t as tough on a guy. It was all rigged, you see. Just a show. It was always decided in advance who would win.”

“Is that so? Were you allowed to win often?”

“Not often. The way it is, you got a hero and a villain. I was always the villain.”

“You don’t look like a villain to me. In my opinion, you look like a perfect gentleman.”

“As a bartender, I’m expected to look like a gentleman. As a wrestler, I wasn’t. I made a pretty fair villain, if I do say so myself.”

“Then how did you happen to quit wrestling for bartending?”

“I got too old. Too slow and brittle. One night In Dallas a Swede named Igor the Golden accidentally broke my arm. He was the hero and was supposed to win, but he wasn’t supposed to break my arm. It wasn’t his fault, though. It was all arranged, but I was too slow in shifting my weight in the right direction at the right time. In giving with the hold, you know.”

“I see. I’m sorry your arm was broken, but if you prefer tending bar, as you say, it has all worked out Jill right in the end.”

“Yes. It’s all worked out all right.”

He went away, and she sat nursing her double, but soon he was back to serve a customer who had taken the stool next to Ivy, on her left. The new customer was a man. Ivy knew this by the smell of him, even before she had heard his voice or had seen, looking down at a sharp angle from under lowered lids, a worsted knee against the wall of the bar. He ordered a rye on the rocks in a voice that had a trace of an accent, and she tried to identify the accent, whether it was foreign or sectional or one modified by the other, but she couldn’t even be certain that he had an accent at all. Neither could she get a clue from his appearance, which she examined covertly in the mirror over the backbar. He had a narrow face with a scar diagonally across his chin, and although she could not tell in the shadowy mirror, she had an idea that his eyes must be pale blue. The assumption of pale eyes was based, perhaps, on the observable fact of pale hair. He wore a soft hat, but it was pushed so far back on his head that she could see the hair brushed flatly across the front part of his skull. There was, she thought, a peculiar quality in this particular man, something that made him exceptional among other men, but she was no more successful in identifying this quality than she had been in identifying the accent, if any, and she did not learn until later, too late, that it was the quality of danger, the elusive essence of a dangerous man.

“What’s your opinion?” he said suddenly in the voice that might have had an accent.

“Were you speaking to me?” she said.

“You were watching me in the mirror, weren’t you? What’s your opinion?”

“Was I watching you? Excuse me. I really wasn’t paying the slightest attention to what I was doing. I was thinking of something else.”

“I’m disappointed.”

“Are you? I don’t see why you should be.”

“It’s always pleasant to be looked over by a good-looking woman, provided the impression is favorable. My mistake, however. And my apologies. Are you waiting for someone?”

“No.”

“In that case, may I buy you a drink?”

“I already have a drink.”

“It won’t last forever.”

That was true, she thought. Even with the most careful nursing, the double manhattan wouldn’t last forever, and it would be nice, when it was finished, to have another. Surely there was nothing wrong in allowing a man to buy her a drink, or even several drinks, in a bar that was a sanctuary that she did not want to leave. It was, in fact, kind and considerate of him to offer, and would be a rudeness on her part to refuse.

“Perhaps I’ll be ready for another by the time it comes,” she said.

“If you aren’t,” he said, “it won’t spoil.”

No longer under the necessity of nursing, she drank her manhattan quickly, and he kept her company in rye. Ii the meanwhile, he had given the signal for duplicates, which were supplied by the attractive bartender with the twisted nose and thick ear.

“My name is Neal,” he said. “Charles Neal. My friends call me Chick.”

“How do you do, Mr. Neal,” she said formally. “My name is Ivy Galvin.”

“Oh, come on. Be my friend.”

“I don’t know. It was nice of you to buy me a drink, and I’m prepared to be friendly for it, but I don’t believe I could call you Chick.”

“Why not?”

“As a name, I don’t like it. Does that offend you? I don’t want to be offensive.”

He stared at her with his pale, shallow eyes and thought that she was certainly tight, probably a nut, and altogether something nice and easy to be had for the night.

“I’m not offended.”

“I’m willing to call you Charles, however. Is that satisfactory?”

“Sure. Call me Charles. I haven’t been called Charles since my old man ran me away from home.”

“Were you run away from home? I was too, in a way. Not exactly, but in a way. It gives us something in common.”

“Maybe we can find other things in common. Let’s work at it.”

She lost track of the number of manhattans she drank and the length of time she was in the bar, but there were quite a few over a period of quite a while, and in this period, while the manhattans were being drunk, she was aware of the pressure of a knee and the sly and tentative explorations of a hand, the knee and the hand being the property of Charles Neal, whom she could not bring herself to call Chick. She tolerated his trespasses, which were minor, for the sake of the manhattans, which were sustaining, and in fact she was proud of herself for the really competent way in which she was getting along in a strange situation that would once have terrified her, and it just showed again that she could get along quite well in any situation whatever if she only had the confidence.

Someone kept feeding coins to a jukebox, and it seemed to Ivy that the same music was played over and over again, a full-voiced woman singing “Oh, How I Miss You Tonight,” and it was that song in that voice that became the night’s accompaniment, with power to restore it later, not in the fuzzy details of what happened, which were always vague, but in its emotional quality. After the consumption of a good many manhattans, Ivy felt the need to relieve herself, and she slipped carefully off her stool and said, “Excuse me, please,” and started toward the door of the ladies’ room that was clearly marked by a little electric sign above it. But the door was animated by a capricious spirit and insisted upon playing jokes on her. Although she had located it exactly before starting and had walked directly toward it, it kept shifting a little to the right or to the left, so that she had to stop and start again each time in a new direction. Moreover, it kept withdrawing slowly, so that she gained on it only about half as much distance as she should have, and therefore required twice as long to reach it.

There was a clock in the restroom, which she was able to bring into focus after a few moments of intent concentration, and she was surprised and delighted to see that it was eleven o’clock and that she had managed to pass several hours of the night with practically no trouble. It was evident to her now, however, that she had drunk quite enough manhattans for one night and had better return to the hotel to which she’d gone after leaving Henry’s, and The name of the hotel was, she believed, the Hawkins. Yes, that was it. It was named the Hawkins, and it was just down the street a short way, in the next block or the block after.

Leaving the restroom, she returned to the bar to say good night to Charles Neal. She owed him this courtesy, she thought, for being generous and buying her so many manhattans. She did not attempt to get back onto the stool, a difficult and dangerous exercise, but stood beside him and spoke politely in his ear, forming the shape of each word with care before enunciating it.

“Than you very much for the manhattans,” she said, “but I think I had better leave now.”

“Where are we going?” he said.

“I’m staying at the Hawkins Hotel. It’s only down the street a little way, though, and it isn’t necessary for you to come with me. I can get there easily by myself.”

A comedian, he thought. A lush and a nut and a goddamn comedian.

“I wouldn’t think of letting you go alone,” he said.

“Really it isn’t necessary, and you’ve already been quite considerate and generous enough. I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“You’ve got a real sense of humor,” he said. “You kill me.”

These words surprised her, for she had intended no humor, and they were spoken in a hard, fiat tone of voice that did not suggest that he was in the least amused. But her senses had become unreliable, and it was likely that her impressions were distorted. Anyhow, he was definitely determined to see her to the hotel, having already slipped off the stool as a beginning, and it would be ungracious of her to make an issue of it. And so she permitted him to walk out of the bar and down the street beside her.

The sidewalk was unsteady and kept tilting toward the street. This caused her to keep bumping into Charles Neal, who was between her and the curb, and once, at an intersection, the pavement moved so suddenly as she was stepping down from the sidewalk into the street that she stumbled and would have fallen if he had not held her by the arm. After that he continued holding her by the arm, even when it was no longer necessary, and when she assured him that she was perfectly all right and did not need his help, he only laughed and kept hold of the arm, and the laugh had the same hard, flat, disturbing sound that his voice had had at the last moment at the bar.

The lobby of the hotel was empty, except for the night clerk, another elderly man who was asleep in a chair behind the desk, his head fallen back and his Adam’s apple working convulsively as he sucked air through his nostrils and blew it out noisily through his mouth. Since she had carried her room key with her in the pocket of her coat, Ivy did not find it necessary to waken him. She walked across the lobby to the elevator and stopped, turning to face Charles Neal with what she hoped was an attitude of decisiveness.

“Thank you for coming with me,” she said.

“Don’t mention it.”

“Good night, then.”

“Joke again.”

“What?”

“Suppose we have a nightcap in your room.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have anything there to drink.”

“No? Well, I’ll just see you safely upstairs.”

She understood then, going up in the elevator, that she had made a wanton commitment to a dangerous man, and when she opened the door of her room and entered she was afraid to try to close it against him. Slowly, with despair, she removed her hat and coat and faced him.

She was horrified to see that Neal too had tom off his own coat and tie, tossing them toward a chair, and was now loosening his belt. Her eyes fastened on the stiff brush of hair at the parting in his shirt, and before she began to shiver with revulsion, she was conscious of a sharp spurt of unwanted excitement within her.

Chick’s clothes had been deceptive in the bar. She saw now that he was brutally formed, and that with such a man there would be no mercy. Not knowing what else to do, she backed slowly away, her frantic gaze fixed on his pale eyes, with their shallow glitter of blind lust. Slowly Chick walked after her.

His pointed tongue flicked wetly over his half-smiling lips, and it dawned on her for the first that he thought she was playing his game, teasing him on, building his passion, and a moan of realization formed in her throat.

This whipped him into action, and suddenly he lunged at her, the veins in his neck swollen and pulsating as if ready to burst. One grimy hand darted out and grabbed the collar of her dress, while he shoved her savagely with the other. The dress ripped like paper and Ivy sank helplessly to the floor.

Laughter exploded in his throat, as his hard flanks imprisoned her sides, and he reached down to draw her to him. Slowly, with calculated brutality, he brought her up against his rigidity, the hard length of his male body pressing into hers at every point. Her senses reeled, unable to cope with this strange and terrifying excitement, then took refuge in the paralysis of pure terror.

His searching hands were now taking rough liberties with every part of her, caressing her breasts, massaging her flanks, exploring her thighs, his mouth ravenous on her neck, her ears, and finally sinking between her lips.

It was in her mouth that her paralysis was shattered, and without warning she bit down on his lip, and tasted blood. He cursed and slapped her back-handed across the face. Like a cornered animal, she lunged for his hand with her teeth, and again he cursed and struck her harder, so that she fell to the floor.

There, between sitting and lying, she stared down with mute shame at the exposed pink of her breasts. How much longer would this go on? And did it really matter any more? Was this not, perhaps, the violation she had been unconsciously seeking from the beginning? No, no, she thought, it was the ultimate degradation that she should lose in violence to a stranger what she had hoped to gain in tenderness from a friend.

With a flicker of regained hope, she looked up almost beseechingly into Chick’s bleeding face, as if somehow he ought to understand this. But Neal was beyond the reach of such sanities, and this time he made no effort to bring her to her feet, but flung himself down upon her with such force that it drove the breath from her body.

In the desperate moments that followed, she cried out once, not loudly, but in a plaintive hopelessness that she knew no one would ever hear.

Chapter 10

Between nine-thirty and ten, while Ivy was enjoying the illusory warmth and security of too much alcohol, Henry was on the way home. He arrived just before ten, and he was already beginning to feel uncertain of a number of things he had accepted as true in Lila’s apartment. He was also beginning to feel guilty in proportion to his growing uncertainty, and he was nagged by the suspicion that Lila, in addition to being beautiful, was extremely clever as well. He had been altogether too ready to accept her diagnosis of Ivy, which was a measure of his own cowardice in trying to justify his own injustice, and now that he was away from her beauty and her assured voice and her willing flesh, he thought that he could detect in her remembered words and behavior a pattern of deception that he had not seen before.

He faced the rather humiliating conclusion that he had probably been seduced for a purpose other than pleasure, and this purpose was simply that of making Lila Galvin appear convincingly something that she was not. After all bisexuality was not particularly rare, and certainly had a far greater incidence than was generally known. Lila was, by the nature of her ambition, especially vulnerable to a kind of disgrace that could destroy her life as she wanted it to be, including probably a marriage for money and position, and her fear of Ivy, what she might say and do, was surely commensurate with her vulnerability. He wondered if this fear could actually become murderous. He had never fully believed Ivy’s story about the sedative, but he had considered it an effect of feverish imagination, not calculated deception, and he had not doubted until tonight, in Lila’s apartment, that Ivy had believed it herself. Now, in his own rooms, where the sense of Ivy’s presence was strong and Lila’s wasn’t, he again began to believe in Ivy’s innocence, if not her reliability.

Lila had said that Ivy was a psychopathic personality, a liar and cheat and egoist as well as deviate, but this was not so. It was Lila who lied, and possibly it was Lila who was the psychopathic personality. Henry’s knowledge of abnormalities was no greater and no broader than his experience of observation and reading, but he was certain that psychopathic personalities did not commit suicide or seriously try to. They destroyed others, never themselves. And Ivy’s suicide attempt had been genuine, there was no question about that, and she had been saved only by the thinnest and most ludicrous of chances, that she could in no way have predicted.

It was Lila who lied. She was very beautiful and very clever and maybe very dangerous. She had lied with her voice and with her body, and he had believed, for a while, both lies.

And where was Ivy? Well, she had gone away, because she had been told to go in anger that was now regretted. The rooms above the bookshop seemed desolate and deserted, and it occurred to Henry that emptiness, against all logic, existed in degrees. He noted the tidiness of the living room, and the tidiness somehow emphasized the absence of the person who had accomplished it. Walking into the bedroom, he saw the packed bag against the wall, and then, looking into the drawer of the chest, saw that the twenty dollars had been taken. The packed bag indicated that she intended to return for it, but this might no be for a long time, or might be never. In the meanwhile, she was gone, because he had sent her away, and where could she possibly be?

Was she, like the night he had found her, roaming the streets? The thought of her doing this was deeply disturbing, increasing his conviction of senseless cruelty and concomitant guilt, and he had a vision of her passing like a lost child through the intermittent areas of light and darkness along the cold streets. She had taken the twenty dollars, however. Having the money, it was unlikely that she would go without shelter and a bed the first night.

Perhaps she would go back to Lila. This thought was in his mind suddenly, and it was the most disturbing possibility of all. If she roamed the streets or stayed somewhere for the night in a cheap room, it was at least a sign of stubborn adherence to rebellion, a refusal to capitulate, but if she returned to Lila it would be a final admission of failure, the definitive submission. She had not been there while he was, that was certain, and he had left late enough so that she should easily have arrived, if she was coming at all. But perhaps it had merely taken her a long while to make a decision, or to be driven to it in desertion and desperation, in which case she might be there at this moment, and it was imperative, now that he had thought of it, to know if it were so or not.

Putting on his hat and overcoat, he went downstairs to the street and turned left toward the Greek’s as far as a public telephone booth on the corner. It was very cold in the booth, and the bulb which lighted it was growing dim. He found Lila’s number listed in the directory and dialed it. Her phone rang and rang in short bursts at the other end of the line, and he was about to give up and break the connection when her voice came on abruptly. “Hello,” she said. “This is Lila Galvin speaking.”

“Henry Harper,” Henry said.

There was a long pause before she spoke again, and in the pause a suggestion of wariness. Her voice, when she spoke, was so cool and impersonal that it seemed completely unrelated to the voice in which he had heard, a few hours ago, the soft solicitations and gutturals of passion.

“What do you want?” she said. “Why are you calling me at this hour?”

“Is Ivy there?”

“Ivy? Certainly not. I supposed that she was with you.”

“She’s gone. She was gone when I got home.”

“What made you think she came here?”

“I only thought she might have. It was the only place I could think of that she might go to.”

“Why did she leave? Was it because of something you did to her?”

He had been made sensitive to inference by his feeling of guilty responsibility, however irrational it might be, and he was, sitting cramped in the cold and dimly lighted booth, shaken of a sudden by a diffused and futile fury that was at once directed inwardly upon himself and outwardly upon both Ivy and Lila.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Whatever I have done to her is not one-tenth so bad as what you have done to her, or what she has done to herself. Anyhow, it will do no good to make accusations or call names. She’s gone, and where she may go finally and do to herself in the end is something I don’t like to think about. Neither do you, I’ll bet. You don’t like to think about what she may do to herself and, incidentally, to you.”

“Are you trying to threaten me?”

“If you’re threatened, it’s not by me.”

“I thought earlier tonight that you might have a little intelligence, but I see now that you’re a complete fool.”

“On the contrary, you thought earlier that I was a fool, and I was, but you’re beginning to think now that I may not be. Never mind that, however. There’s no use talking about it. I’ll look for Ivy, and if I can’t find her I may report to the police that she’s missing.”

“No! Wait a minute.”

He waited, listening to the humming wire, and he could feel in the little booth, as though it came through the wire on the sound he heard, the anxiety and calculation of the woman at the other end.

“Are you there?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re quite right about making accusations and calling names. There’s nothing to be gained by it. Where are you now? Are you at home?”

“No. I’m in a sidewalk telephone booth.”

“Where can I meet you?”

“I’m not sure that I want you to meet me. Why should I?”

“Because you want to find Ivy, and so do I. I can be of help. You don’t have a car, do you?”

“No.”

“Do you propose to walk the streets all night? In my car, we may have a chance of finding her. At least we can check the cheap hotels in your area. I don’t suppose she had much money.”

“Twenty dollars, I think. Not much more.”

“That won’t last long, and God knows what she may do after it goes. We must find her, that’s all, and then she must come back to stay with me. I hope you’re convinced by this time that no other arrangement will work. She simply can’t be allowed to go on jeopardizing herself and causing endless trouble for others.”

“What she does is something she will decide for herself.”

“All right. Will you tell me where we can meet?”

“There’s an all-night diner down the street from here. The Greek’s. You’d better meet me there.”

“Give me the address.”

He told her how to find the place, and then he hung up and went there to wait for her. George, behind the counter, watched him with a frown as he crossed from the door and sat down on a stool. The customary warmth of his reception was totally lacking, and in the severity of George’s gaze there was more than a hint of disapproval.

“It’s apparent,” George said, “that you are feeling despondent tonight. Could it be because your conscience is bothering you?”

“Why the hell should my conscience be bothering me?”

“One’s conscience becomes a bother when one has done something he should not have done, or failed to do something he should have. Provided, of course, one has a conscience to begin with.”

It was obvious that George was making some kind of point about something, preferring for his own reasons to be devious instead of direct, but Henry was in no mood for subtleties. It had been, since the bad beginning of the abortive fiasco of the morning, a long and difficult day, coming to a kind of climax in the feverish episode in the apartment of Lila Galvin, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that he had not, on the whole, accounted very well for himself in the day’s events.

“George,” he said, “I have a notion that you’re referring obliquely to something specific in which I seem somehow to be involved. With all due respect for the subtlety of the Greek mind, which is notoriously devious, I’d appreciate it if you’d say directly what you mean.”

“Gladly,” George said. “I was referring to your shameful treatment of Ivy.”

“Oh? Am I to understand from this that you’ve seen her today?”

“She was here this morning to say good-by and to have breakfast.”

“I suppose she gave you a full report on all my qualifications as a son of a bitch. Is that it?”

“On the contrary, she had nothing bad to report. She said, merely, that you had ordered her to leave. Although I had doubts about her in the beginning, especially in relation to you and the book, I confess that I have become very fond of her since, and I don’t mind saying that I consider it more than likely that I was worried about the wrong person.”

“The hell with that! Did she say where she was going?”

“Not knowing, she couldn’t say. But she asked me to recommend a cheap hotel as a place to go for the time being, and I suggested the Hawkins.”

“Did she go there?”

“I don’t know.

“You going down there and see?”

“I don’t know why I should.”

“She’s a nice girl, Henry. She has her trouble.”

“She has a hell of a lot more trouble than you know about.”

“I will tell you one thing, Henry. I would never take a sweet girl with trouble into my house for shelter and then put her into the cold street for no sufficient reason. Sometimes I, too, am inclined to believe that it will be a lousy book that no one will buy.”

“By God, it looks right now as if it will never even be written. How the hell do you know I had no sufficient reason?”

“In spite of certain foolishnesses, she is a nice girl. It would be too bad if she came to a bad end.”

“All right, George. You can get off my back now. I’ll go down to the Hawkins and see if she’s there. Damn it, I intended to go from the start. Why the hell do you think I’m out prowling the streets, if not to try to find her?”

“In that case, I’ll spare you the ignominy of explaining how you got the scratches on your face that look as if they may have been made by fingernails.”

“That’s right, George. Spare me. And, incidentally, go to hell.”

Getting off the stool at the counter, he walked over to the door and stopped, making a pretense of adjusting his collar against the cold outside. He was sick and tired of being unfairly accused by others, and most of all he was sick and tired of being unfairly accused by himself. He wished, however, that it had not come to this between him and the Greek. He liked George and did not wish to lose his friendship, and he waited now inside the door in the hope that George would say a healing word. Having sustained the pretense of adjusting the collar as long as he could, he reached for the door handle and was about to leave when the Greek finally spoke.

“Henry,” George said.

“Yes.”

“It would also be too bad for friends to become strangers.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I spoke hastily about the book. It will be good and sell well.”

“Thank you, George. And I, for my part, don’t really want you to go to hell.”

“I hardly thought so.”

“Good night, George. I’ll see you soon.”

“Let us hope so.”

Henry opened the door and went out. He felt better after the pacific exchange, but at the same time he began to develop a premonition that grew stronger with each step in the street until it was so strong that he could not dispel it by reason or disregard, and the premonition was that Ivy was dead.

He walked rapidly down the street toward the Hawkins, exercising restraint to keep from breaking into a trot, and his compulsion to hurry was as irrational as his conviction of death, for if Ivy was dead hurrying had no point. But he hurried, nevertheless, and he had covered half the distance to the hotel before he remembered that he had agreed to wait for Lila at the Greek’s. Well, she would probably inquire for him there, and George would tell her where he had gone. She could follow if she chose, and if she did not choose, it did not matter. His only concern now was to see as quickly as possible if his premonition was true or not, and he could not doubt that it was.

To give the premonition credence, there was the fact that Ivy had already tried once to kill herself, and had almost succeeded. In addition to this, he attached an ominous significance to the report that she had apparently gone immediately from the diner to the hotel. Hotel rooms were often used by suicides. He had read about; such deaths in the newspapers, and there were probably many more that were kept quiet or passed off as being natural. The odd thing about it was that many such suicides could much more easily have destroyed themselves elsewhere, in their homes or offices, for instance, and it was possible that they were trying in a twisted sort of way to remove the shame and sorrow of their self-destruction from the places and people they knew and loved, simply be removing the act to a strange place among strangers. It could be that Ivy had been so motivated. She had had the day alone above the bookstore in which to kill herself, but she had thought of him in the end, as she had not thought of him in her first attempt, and had gone away to a hotel to save him trouble.

He saw the sign of the hotel hanging high above the sidewalk ahead of him. Increasing his pace until he was in fact moving at a kind of awkward lope, he crossed an intersection and was no more than thirty feet from the hotel’s entrance when he stopped abruptly in his traces with a gasp, as if he had suddenly been struck a powerful blow to the solar plexus, and he had for a moment an absurd fear that he was going to faint. For there ahead of him, coming from the opposite direction, was Ivy herself with a man. The man had a hand on her arm in casual, public intimacy, and she seemed to be allowing this intimacy with complete congeniality, but whether she was congenial or not, she was certainly not dead.

The absurd faintness having passed, Henry was furious. He felt that he had been made a fool of, as though Ivy had maliciously put into his mind by telepathy the premonition of her death, and it was far too much to bear calmly at the end of a day in which he had been a fool too many times before. But the fury left him, passing only a little less quickly than the faintness, and he wondered in dismay, remembering her in his bed that morning, if she was attempting now with this stranger a kind of radical surgery that had failed with him.

Moving again, he went into the hotel lobby and saw the floor indicator above the closed elevator doors moving upon the number two. He started up the stairs three at a time, staying always a floor behind the elevator, until he found the indicator unmoving on the number six. Looking down the hall to his right, he was just in time to see a door closing.

He stood looking at the door in indecision. He assumed, from what he had seen, that Ivy had willingly admitted the man to her room. He guessed at her motive and feared the consequences of her behavior, but he had no desire, by intruding where he was not wanted, to make a fool of himself again. He was still standing and looking at the closed door, wondering if he should intrude or retreat, when Ivy cried out. It was not a loud and piercing cry. It had more of the quality of a plaintive cry of despair, rising barely above the volume of a normal voice, and he was not certain, after it was gone, that he had heard it at all.

But it was enough to make him act decisively. He went down the hall to the door and tried the knob. The door, unlocked, swung inward before pressure. Ivy, on the floor, was struggling with a man who was trying to pinion her flailing arms, and as he stood fixed in the doorway, she lifted her shame-filled eyes over the shoulders of the man and saw him standing there. Her lips formed the shape of his name, but she made no sound.

Henry, for a couple of seconds, went blind with rage. Everything was obscured by a pink mist deepening through red to black, and he stepped forward into the mist as it began to lift, striking with all his strength at the kneeling figure of the man. The man, Charles Neal, had not heard the door open behind him, but he was made aware of Henry’s presence by the direction of Ivy’s gaze and the sudden rigidity of her body. He whirled to one side, and this turning saved him from the force of Henry’s blow. Henry’s fist brushed his jaw, spinning him away and sending him sprawling. He rolled to the wall beyond the bed and came up like a cat onto his feet. In his hand as he rose, apparently by some kind of legerdemain, was a switch knife. The long blade of the knife sprang out of its handle, shining, with a snick of sound. Slowly, with a calculated deadliness of purpose that went oddly with the insane light in his shallow eyes, Charles Neal, feinting and weaving and driving in, brought the knife held low and ready with the blade angled up.

Henry’s movement was hampered by his overcoat, which weighed suddenly a thousand pounds, but it was too late now to remove it, and it was luck for him that it was, for it saved him from the shining blade. Charles Neal feinting and weaving and driving in, brought the blade upward in a short, flashing arc. Henry, falling back and aside, felt a dull blow in the belly, a hot prick of flesh above his navel. The blade caught and held for a second in the thick fabric of his coat, and his motion away from the blow pulled Neal off balance for that second. He stumbled, bent over, and Henry brought a heavy fist down like a club on the back of his neck at the base of the skull. Driven to his knees, he remained for another second in the kneeling position, and then he lay down on his face on the floor with a rattle of breath.

Henry looked down at him and drew his own breath with heavy labor.

No one, he realized, had spoken a word or made an unnecessary sound since he opened the door, and except the sound, of breathing, the room was now utterly sill.

Lifting his eyes and looking around, he saw that he was alone with the stranger at his feet. Ivy was gone.

Chapter 11

She could never remember leaving the room or descending the stairs or crossing the lobby. She could only remember being suddenly in the street, in her torn dress, in the cutting cold. It did not occur to her that she was doing a cowardly thing in running away to leave Henry, who had looked for her and found her and come to her in time to save her, alone and unarmed against a dangerous man with a knife. It did not occur to her, as it had not previously occurred to her that it was a wicked thing to attempt suicide in his bathroom, because she was blinded to the implications and effects of her action by the one imperative need to escape the circumstances that had closed upon her. She was not, in fact, merely running away from the sordid situation in the room she had left, nor was she running from the danger. Her flight was a symbol and a gesture. She was really fleeing the aberrant and threatening part of herself that made sordidness and danger probable, if not certain.

And so she ran, holding her tom dress together and carrying the constant threat with her, from one place to another. She did not actually run, but walked very fast, and she had no idea where she was going, either immediately or eventually, except that she must, in the first place, cross over at once to the other side of the street, for the street would somehow be a barrier between her and the proximate past. When this came into her mind, she was halfway to the corner of the block, but she turned with the thought, without slowing or thinking further or seeing anything whatever, stepping off the curb between two parked cars and walking blindly and imperiously into the traffic lane. At the last moment, just before she was struck, she looked around and through the windshield of the car, as if in the instant of this new and different danger she was mysteriously compelled to see from where and what it came. She was aware of a white and staring face, set behind glass in lines of virulent hatred, and she had in that final instant, before the bolt of pain and thunderous night, the most fantastic notion that it was the face of Lila...

But it was not the face of Lila at all, and it was absolutely absurd that she had ever thought so. The face was much older than the face of Lila, and set not in lines of hatred but of reassuring and disciplined kindness, and above the face was a foolish kind of white cap that Lila would never have worn. At first sight, the face appeared to be disembodied, hanging above her without support, and this was so clearly impossible that the face itself was impossible, and she shut her eyes and waited for it to fade away, but when she opened her eyes again it was still there. Now, however, there was also a body to support the face and give it credence, but the body was incidental and unimportant; the important thing was that the face was smiling and was obviously trying to say something.

“What did you say?” Ivy said to the face.

She intended to speak normally, and tried to, but her voice came out a whisper, and she couldn’t understand why this should be so.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the face said.

“Waiting for me? Why? Where have I been?”

“You’ve been unconscious. For quite a long time. Hew do you feel?”

Now that the question had been asked, Ivy realized that she did not feel right in several ways. In the first place, she did not understand where she was or how she had got there, and this was confusing. In the second place, apart from the confusion, she had a feeling of insecure cohesion, as though at any second she might fall into pieces. In the third place, she hurt. She hurt in her head and body, in flesh and bone, and the hurt was worse with her slightest move.

“I feel strange,” she said. “Why do I hurt so?”

“Don’t you remember? You had an accident. You were struck by a car.”

Then she remembered, and remembering, saw it all again in a split second as it had happened over a period of hours. She shut her eyes against it, trying to recover the deep and solacing peace of total darkness, and she lay for so long with her eyes closed that the nurse thought she had gone naturally to sleep, and was about to go away when the eyes opened.

“That’s why I thought at first you were Lila,” Ivy said.

“Lila? Is she a friend of yours?”

“She’s someone I know.”

“Well, now that you’ve recovered consciousness, you will soon be able to see your friends.”

“Has anyone been here?”

“Two people that I know of. The lady who was driving the car that struck you, and a young man. The lady is terribly distressed about the accident. She insists on assuming all expenses.”

“What does she look like?”

“She’s young and lovely. Like a fashion model. She has black hair.”

“Then it was Lila.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She closed her eyes and saw the white face behind glass and opened the eyes immediately to escape it. “Who was the young man?”

“His name is Henry Harper. He comes every evening.”

“Every evening? How long have I been here? This is a hospital, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s a hospital. You’ve been here three days. This is the third day.”

“I should like to see Henry.”

“You may see him soon.”

“How soon?”

“The doctor will decide. Perhaps for a little while in a day or so.”

“I want very much to see him.”

“I know. I understand. But now you mustn’t talk any more. You must go to sleep if you can.”

The nurse meant well. She was trying to do the right thing. Obediently, Ivy closed her eyes again and listened to the nurse move quietly away, and then she opened her eyes one more time before sleeping and looked out through a window at a black branch covered with ice, and the ice was like cold white fire in the sunlight, the black branch aflame against a patch of pale sky.

Later that day the doctor came. He was an elderly man with gray and white hair brushed smoothly across his skull from a low side part. He also had a ragged gray and white mustache that needed trimming and had grown so far down over his upper lip that he could hold the ends of the hairs between his upper lip and his lower lip, and he did this abstractedly while thinking. His face and voice had the gentleness that comes from the kind of tiredness that is a final estate. He said his name was Dr. Larson. He told her that she had received a severe concussion and a simple fracture of the right arm, which she had guessed from the cast that was on it, and was lucky that she had, besides these, only bruises and lacerations. She was lucky, indeed, to be alive. He came that day, and the next day, and the third day, in the evening, she was allowed to see Henry. He came into the room looking awkward and shy and sit down in a chair beside the bed.

“How are you feeling?” he said.

“Much better,” she said. “I hurt much less than I did. How is the book coming?”

“All right. For some reason I feel confident now that it will be a good book.”

“It’s very generous of you to come to see me.”

“I haven’t come out of generosity. I’ve come because I wanted to.”

“It was cowardly of me to run away and leave you when you were in danger because of me. I’m grateful to you for saving me, however.”

“It’s all right. It came out all right.”

“I didn’t dream that you were so brave.”

“Oh, nonsense. Anyone will fight if it’s necessary, I paid your bill at the hotel and took your things home.”

“Did you? Thank you very much. I’m sorry that I’ve caused you so much trouble.”

“I also talked to the police about the accident. You’ll have to talk to them yourself, when you feel like it, but it will be only a formality.”

“It was Lila who did it, wasn’t it?”

‘Yes.”

“She did it on purpose. First she gave me too much sedative, and then she ran me down.”

“Listen to me. I doubt seriously that she gave you too much sedative, and she certainly didn’t deliberately run you down. There were witnesses to the accident, and they testified that you walked right in front of the car. She couldn’t have stopped or missed you.”

“It seems to me a great coincidence that it should have been Lila.”

“That’s what it was. You must believe it.”

“Why was she there? That’s something I’ve been unable to understand. She couldn’t have known where I had gone.”

“I’d arranged to meet her. We were going to look for you together. I’ll tell you all about it when you are better.”

“Well, I’ll believe that she’s innocent if you tell me to, but I don’t want to see her again. Not ever again.”

“That’s good.”

“If she comes here to see me, I’ll have them send her away.”

“She won’t come. I’ve told her it would be better if she didn’t.”

“Do you really want me to come back to you?”

“If you want to.”

“I want to, but I don’t know if it would be wise. How will it end?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think it will end well. I think so.”

“We’ll see.”

“How is George?”

“George is fine. He sends his regards. He’ll come to see you when you’re stronger.”

“I’ll be glad to see him. I would be glad to see Mr. Brennan too, if he cares to come.”

“Perhaps I can bring him one time.”

“Did you have any trouble over the fight in the hotel room?”

“No. No trouble. It didn’t last long. I knocked the man out, whoever he was, and when he came to, he went away. I took your things, as I said, and paid your bill. I had heard the ambulance in the street, but I didn’t know what it was for. When I got outside, they were just putting you into it.”

“I’ll tell you about the man sometime.”

“You don’t have to. I don’t care about him.”

“I’ve caused you a great deal of trouble, haven’t I?”

“Never mind that.”

“I can’t understand why you bother with me.”

“Maybe it’s because you remind me, for some reason, of someone else I once knew.”

“The girl you told me about that you were in love with?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad I remind you of her. She must have been very nice if you were in love with her. I hope that you get to be in love with me too, and I with you. I’ll try to make it come out so.”

“You tried once. Remember? It didn’t work.”

“I’ll try again.”

“It’s a good thing to keep trying.”

The hand of her unbroken arm was lying near him on the bed, and he took the hand in his and held it. They sat silently for a long time as the room grew dark in the short and sudden winter dusk.

“I’d better be going,” he said at last.

“I don’t want you to go.”

“I’d better. I was told to stay only a little while.”

“I wish you could stay longer.”

“Perhaps I can stay longer tomorrow.”

“Would you be willing to kiss me before you go?”

“Yes.”

He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips and then stood up. She looked very small and frail, he thought, with her head in bandages and her right arm in a plaster cast. The cast gave her a kind of comic touch, an incitement at once to laughter and tears.

“Good-by,” he said.

“Until tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “Until tomorrow.”

He went out and she lay quietly in the dark room. She thought for a while that she would surely cry, but she didn’t because she couldn’t, and pretty soon she went to sleep and wakened only once for a few minutes in the night, and in the morning, when she turned her head on her pillow and looked out the window, she could see the black branch aflame in the sunlight.

Content

Fletcher Flora
Take Me Home

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11