“Anything new today?”
“No. With you?”
“No. I’m going to see about boat reservations tomorrow. I’ll call you
tomorrow night.”
Therese did not telephone Stella at all.
The next day was Friday, the last Friday before Christmas, and the
busiest day Therese had known since she had been working at
Frankenberg’s, though everyone said tomorrow would be worse. People were
pressed alarmingly hard against the glass counters. Customers she
started to wait on got swept away and lost in the gluey current that
filled the aisle. It was impossible to imagine any more people crowding
onto the floor, but the elevators kept emptying people out.
“I don’t see why they don’t close the doors downstairs!” Therese
remarked to Miss Martucci, when they were both stooping by a stock
shelf.
“What?” Miss Martucci answered, unable to hear.
“Miss Belivet!” somebody yelled, and a whistle blew.
It was Mrs. Hendrickson. She had been using a whistle to get attention
today. Therese made her way toward her past salesgirls and through empty
boxes on the floor.
“You’re wanted on the telephone,” Mrs. Hendrickson told her, pointing to
the telephone by the wrapping table.
Therese made a helpless gesture that Mrs. Hendrickson had no time to
see. It was impossible to hear anything on a telephone now. And she knew
it was probably Richard being funny. He had called her once before.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello, is this coworker six forty-five A, Therese Belivet?” the
operator’s voice said over clickings and buzzings. “Go ahead.”
“Hello?” she repeated, and barely heard an answer. She dragged the
telephone off the table and into the stockroom a few feet away. The wire
did not quite reach, and she had to stoop on the floor. “Hello?”
“Hello,” the voice said. “Well—I wanted to thank you for the Christmas
card.”
“Oh. Oh, you’re—”
“This is Mrs. Aird,” she said. “Are you the one who sent it? Or not.”
“Yes,” Therese said, rigid with guilt suddenly, as if she had been
caught in a crime. She closed her eyes and wrung the telephone, seeing
the intelligent, smiling eyes again as she had seen them yesterday. “I’m
very sorry if it annoyed you,” Therese said mechanically, in the voice
with which she spoke to customers.
The woman laughed. “This is very funny,” she said casually, and Therese
caught the same easy slur in her voice that she had heard yesterday,
loved yesterday, and she smiled herself.
“Is it? Why?”
“You must be the girl in the toy department.”
“Yes.”
“It was extremely nice of you to send me the card,” the woman said
politely.
Then Therese understood. She had thought it was from a man, some other
clerk who had waited on her. “It was very nice waiting on you,” Therese
said.
“Was it? Why?” She might have been mocking Therese. “Well—since it’s
Christmas, why don’t we meet for a cup of coffee, at least? Or a drink.”
Therese flinched as the door burst open and a girl came into the room,
stood right in front of her. “Yes—I’d like that.”
“When?” the woman asked. “I’m coming in to New York tomorrow in the
morning. Why don’t we make it for lunch? Do you have any time tomorrow?”
“Of course. I have an hour, from twelve to one,” Therese said, staring
at the girl’s feet in front of her in splayed flat moccasins, the back
of her heavy ankles and calves in lisle stockings, shifting like an
elephant’s legs.
“Shall I meet you downstairs at the Thirty-fourth Street entrance at
about twelve?”
“All right. I—” Therese remembered now she went to work at one sharp
tomorrow. She had the morning off. She put her arm up to ward off the
avalanche of boxes the girl in front of her had pulled down from the
shelf. The girl herself teetered back onto her. “Hello?” she shouted
over the noise of tumbling boxes.
“I’m sow—ry,” Mrs. Zabriskie said irritatedly, plowing out the door
again.
“Hello?” Therese repeated.
The line was dead.
chapter four
“Hello,” the woman said, smiling.
“Hello.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” At least, the woman had recognized her, Therese thought.
“Do you have any preference as to restaurants?” the woman asked on the
sidewalk.
“No. It’d be nice to find a quiet one, but there aren’t any in this
neighborhood.”
“You haven’t time for the East Side? No, you haven’t, if you’ve only got
an hour. I think I know a place a couple of blocks west on this street.
Do you think you have time?”
“Yes, certainly.” It was twelve fifteen already. Therese knew she would
be terribly late, and it didn’t matter at all.
They did not bother to talk on the way. Now and then the crowds made
them separate, and once the woman glanced at Therese, across a pushcart
full of dresses, smiling. They went into a restaurant with wooden
rafters and white tablecloths, that miraculously was quiet, and not half
filled. They sat down in a large wooden booth, and the woman ordered an
old-fashioned without sugar, and invited Therese to have one, or a
sherry, and when Therese hesitated, sent the waiter away with the order.
She took off her hat and ran her fingers through her blond hair, once on
either side, and looked at Therese. “And where did you get the nice idea
of sending me a Christmas card?”
“I remembered you,” Therese said. She looked at the small pearl
earrings, that were somehow no lighter than her hair itself, or her
eyes. Therese thought her beautiful, though her face was a blur now
because she could not bear to look at it directly. She got something out
of her handbag, a lipstick and compact, and Therese looked at her
lipstick case—golden like a jewel, and shaped like a sea chest. She
wanted to look at the woman’s mouth, but the gray eyes so close drove
her away, flickering over her like fire.
“You haven’t been working there very long, have you?”
“No. Only about two weeks.”
“And you won’t be much longer—probably.” She offered Therese a
cigarette.
Therese took one. “No. I’ll have another job.” She leaned toward the
lighter the woman was holding for her, toward the slim hand with the
oval red nails and a sprinkling of freckles on its back.
“And do you often get inspired to send post cards?”
“Post cards?”
“Christmas cards?” She smiled at herself.
“Of course not,” Therese said.
“Well, here’s to Christmas.” She touched Therese’s glass and drank.
“Where do you live? In Manhattan?”
Therese told her. On Sixty-third Street. Her parents were dead, she
said. She had lived in New York the past two years, and before that at a
school in New Jersey. Therese did not tell her that the school was
semireligious, Episcopalian. She did not mention Sister Alicia whom she
adored and thought of so often, with her pale-blue eyes and her ugly
nose and her loving sternness. Because since yesterday morning, Sister
Alicia had been thrust far away, far below the woman who sat opposite
her.
“And what do you do in your spare time?” The lamp on the table made her
eyes silvery, full of liquid light. Even the pearl at her earlobe looked
alive, like a drop of water that a touch might destroy.
“I—” Should she tell her she usually worked on her stage models?
Sketched and painted sometimes, carved things like cats’ heads and tiny
figures to go in her ballet sets, but that she liked best to take long
walks practically anywhere, liked best simply to dream? Therese felt she
did not have to tell her. She felt the woman’s eyes could not look at
anything without understanding completely. Therese took some more of her
drink, liking it, though it was like the woman to swallow, she thought,
terrifying, and strong.
The woman nodded to the waiter, and two more drinks arrived.
“I like this.”
“What?” Therese asked.
“I like it that someone sent me a card, someone I didn’t know. It’s the
way things should be at Christmas. And this year I like it especially.”
“I’m glad.” Therese smiled, wondering if she were serious.
“You’re a very pretty girl,” she said. “And very sensitive, too, aren’t
you?”
She might have been speaking of a doll, Therese thought, so casually had
she told her she was pretty. “I think you are magnificent,” Therese said
with the courage of the second drink, not caring how it might sound,
because she knew the woman knew anyway.
She laughed, putting her head back. It was a sound more beautiful than
music. It made a little wrinkle at the corner of her eyes, and it made
her purse her red lips as she drew on her cigarette. She gazed past
Therese for a moment, her elbows on the table and her chin propped up on
the hand that held her cigarette. There was a long line from the waist
of her fitted black suit up to the widening shoulder, and then the blond
head with the fine, unruly hair held high. She was about thirty or
thirty-two, Therese thought, and her daughter, for whom she had bought
the valise and the doll, would be perhaps six or eight. Therese could
imagine the child, blond haired, the face golden and happy, the body
slim and well proportioned, and always playing. But the child’s face,
unlike the woman’s with its short cheeks and rather Nordic compactness,
was vague and nondescript. And the husband? Therese could not see him at
all.
Therese said, “I’m sure you thought it was a man who sent you the
Christmas card, didn’t you?”
“I did,” she said through a smile. “I thought it just might be a man in
the ski department who’d sent it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I’m delighted.” She leaned back in the booth. “I doubt very much if
I’d have gone to lunch with him. No, I’m delighted.”
The dusky and faintly sweet smell of her perfume came to Therese again,
a smell suggestive of dark-green silk, that was hers alone, like the
smell of a special flower. Therese leaned closer toward it, looking down
at her glass. She wanted to thrust the table aside and spring into her
arms, to bury her nose in the green and gold scarf that was tied close
about her neck. Once the backs of their hands brushed on the table, and
Therese’s skin there felt separately alive now, and rather burning.
Therese could not understand it, but it was so. Therese glanced at her
face that was somewhat turned away, and again she knew that instant of
half-recognition. And knew, too, that it was not to be believed. She had
never seen the woman before. If she had, could she have forgotten? In
the silence, Therese felt they both waited for the other to speak, yet
the silence was not an awkward one. Their plates had arrived. It was
creamed spinach with an egg on top, steamy and buttery smelling.
“How is it you live alone?” the woman asked, and before Therese knew it,
she had told the woman her life story.
But not in tedious detail. In six sentences, as if it all mattered less
to her than a story she had read somewhere. And what did the facts
matter after all, whether her mother was French or English or Hungarian,
or if her father had been an Irish painter, or a Czechoslovakian lawyer,
whether he had been successful or not, or whether her mother had
presented her to the Order of St. Margaret as a troublesome, bawling
infant, or as a troublesome, melancholy eight-year-old? Or whether she
had been happy there? Because she was happy now, starting today. She had
no need of parents or background.
“What could be duller than past history!” Therese said, smiling.
“Maybe futures that won’t have any history.”
Therese did not ponder it. It was right. She was still smiling, as if
she had just learned how to smile and did not know how to stop. The
woman smiled with her, amusedly, and perhaps she was laughing at her,
Therese thought.
“What kind of a name is Belivet?” she asked.
“It’s Czech. It’s changed,” Therese explained awkwardly. “Originally—”
“It’s very original.”
“What’s your name?” Therese asked. “Your first name?”
“My name? Carol. Please don’t ever call me Carole.”
“Please don’t ever call me Thereese,” Therese said, pronouncing the
“th.”
“How do you like it pronounced? Therese?”
“Yes. The way you do,” she answered. Carol pronounced her name the
French way, Terez. She was used to a dozen variations, and sometimes she
herself pronounced it differently. She liked the way Carol pronounced
it, and she liked her lips saying it. An indefinite longing, that she
had been only vaguely conscious of at times before, became now a
recognizable wish. It was so absurd, so embarrassing a desire, that
Therese thrust it from her mind.
“What do you do on Sundays?” Carol asked.
“I don’t always know. Nothing in particular. What do you do?”
“Nothing—lately. If you’d like to visit me sometime, you’re welcome to.
At least there’s some country around where I live. Would you like to
come out this Sunday?” The gray eyes regarded her directly now, and for
the first time, Therese faced them. There was a measure of humor in
them, Therese saw. And what else? Curiosity and a challenge, too.
“Yes,” Therese said.
“What a strange girl you are.”
“Why?”
“Flung out of space,” Carol said.
chapter five
Richard was standing on the street corner, waiting for her, shifting
from foot to foot in the cold. She wasn’t cold at all tonight, she
realized suddenly, even though other people on the streets were hunched
in their overcoats. She took Richard’s arm and squeezed it
affectionately tight.
“Have you been inside?” she asked. She was ten minutes late.
“Of course not. I was waiting.” He pressed his cold lips and nose into
her cheek. “Did you have a rough day?”
“No.”
The night was very black, in spite of the Christmas lights on some of
the lampposts. She looked at Richard’s face in the flare of his match.
The smooth slab of his forehead overhung his narrowed eyes, strong
looking as a whale’s front, she thought, strong enough to batter
something in. His face was like a face sculpted in wood, planed smooth
and unadorned. She saw his eyes open like unexpected spots of blue sky
in the darkness.
He smiled at her. “You’re in a good mood tonight. Want to walk down the
block? You can’t smoke in there. Like a cigarette?”
“No, thanks.”
They began to walk. The gallery was just beside them, a row of lighted
windows, each with a Christmas wreath, on the second floor of the big
building. Tomorrow she would see Carol, Therese thought, tomorrow
morning at eleven. She would see her only ten blocks from here, in a
little more than twelve hours. She started to take Richard’s arm again,
and suddenly felt self-conscious about it. Eastward, down Forty-third
Street, she saw Orion exactly spread in the center of the sky between
the buildings. She had used to look at him from windows in school, from
the window of her first New York apartment.
“I got our reservations today,” Richard said. “The _President Taylor_
sailing March seventh. I talked with the ticket fellow, and I think he
can get us outside rooms, if I keep after him.”
“March seventh?” She heard the start of excitement in her voice, though
she did not want to go to Europe now at all.
“About ten weeks off,” Richard said, taking her hand.
“Can you cancel the reservation in case I can’t go?” She could as well
tell him now that she didn’t want to go, she thought, but he would only
argue, as he had before when she hesitated.
“Oh, of course, Terry!” And he laughed.
Richard swung her hand as they walked. As if they were lovers, Therese
thought. It would be almost like love, what she felt for Carol, except
that Carol was a woman. It was not quite insanity, but it was certainly
blissful. A silly word, but how could she possibly be happier than she
was now, and had been since Thursday?
“I wish we could share one together,” Richard said.
“Share what?”
“Share a room!” Richard boomed out, laughing, and Therese noticed the
two people on the sidewalk who turned to look at them. “Should we have a
drink somewhere just to celebrate? We can go in the Mansfield around the
corner.”
“I don’t feel like sitting still. Let’s have it later.”
They got into the show at half price on Richard’s art school passes. The
gallery was a series of high-ceilinged, plush carpeted rooms, a
background of financial opulence for the commercial advertisements, the
drawings, lithographs, illustrations, or whatever that hung in a crowded
row on the walls. Richard pored over some of them for minutes at a time,
but Therese found them a little depressing.
“Did you see this?” Richard asked, pointing to a complicated drawing of
a lineman repairing a telephone wire that Therese had seen somewhere
before, that tonight actually pained her to look at.
“Yes,” she said. She was thinking of something else. If she stopped
scrimping to save money for Europe—which had been silly anyway because
she wasn’t going—she could buy a new coat. There would be sales right
after Christmas. The coat she had now was a kind of black polo coat, and
she always felt drab in it.
Richard took her arm. “You haven’t enough respect for technique, little
girl.”
She gave him a mocking frown, and took his arm again. She felt very
close to him suddenly, as warm and happy with him as she had been the
first night she met him, at the party down on Christopher Street where
Frances Cotter had taken her. Richard had been a little drunk, as he had
never been since with her, talking about books and politics and people
more positively than she had ever heard him talk since, too. He had
talked with her all evening, and she had liked him so very much that
night for his enthusiasms, his ambitions, his likes and dislikes, and
because it was her first real party and he had made it a success for
her.
“You’re not looking,” Richard said.
“It’s exhausting. I’ve had enough when you have.”
Near the door, they met some people Richard knew from the League, a
young man, a girl, and a young colored man. Richard introduced Therese
to them. She could tell they were not close friends of Richard’s, but he
announced to all of them, “We’re going to Europe in March.”
And they all looked envious.
Outside, Fifth Avenue seemed empty and waiting, like a stage set for
some dramatic action. Therese walked along quickly beside Richard, her
hands in her pockets. Somewhere today she had lost her gloves. She was
thinking of tomorrow, at eleven o’clock. She wondered if she would
possibly still be with Carol this time tomorrow night.
“What about tomorrow?” Richard asked.
“Tomorrow?”
“You know. The family asked if you could come out this Sunday and have
dinner with us.”
Therese hesitated, remembering. She had visited the Semcos four or five
Sunday afternoons. They had a big dinner around two o’clock, and then
Mr. Semco, a short man with a bald head, would want to dance with her to
polkas and Russian folk music on the phonograph.
“Say, you know Mamma wants to make you a dress?” Richard went on. “She’s
already got the material. She wants to measure you for it.”
“A dress—but that’s so much work.” Therese had a vision of Mrs. Semco’s
embroidered blouses, white blouses with rows upon rows of stitches. Mrs.
Semco was proud of her needlework. Therese did not feel she should
accept such a colossal labor.
“She loves it,” Richard said. “Well, what about tomorrow? Want to come
out around noon?”
“I don’t think I want to this Sunday. They haven’t made any great plans,
have they?”
“No,” Richard said, disappointed. “You just want to work or something
tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’d rather.” She didn’t want Richard to know about Carol, or even
ever meet her.
“Not even take a drive somewhere?”
“I don’t think so, thanks.” Therese didn’t like his holding her hand
now. His hand was moist, which made it icy cold.
“You don’t think you’ll change your mind?”
Therese shook her head. “No.” There were some mitigating things she
might have said, excuses, but she did not want to lie about tomorrow
either, any more than she had already lied. She heard Richard sigh, and
they walked along in silence for a while.
“Mamma wants to make you a white dress with lace edging. She’s going
crazy with frustration with no girls in the family but Esther.”
That was his cousin by marriage, whom Therese had only seen once or
twice. “How is Esther?”
“Just the same.”
Therese extricated her fingers from Richard’s. She was hungry suddenly.
She had spent her dinner hour writing something, a kind of letter to
Carol that she hadn’t mailed and didn’t intend to. They caught the
uptown bus at Third Avenue, then walked east to Therese’s house. Therese
did not want to invite Richard upstairs, but she did anyway.
“No, thanks, I’ll shove on,” Richard said. He put a foot on the first
step. “You’re in a funny mood tonight. You’re miles away.”
“No, I’m not,” she said, feeling inarticulate and resenting it.
“You are now. I can tell. After all, don’t you—”
“What,” she prompted.
“We aren’t getting very far, are we?” he said, suddenly earnest. “If you
don’t even want to spend Sundays with me, how’re we going to spend
months together in Europe?”
“Well—if you want to call it all off, Richard.”
“Terry, I love you.” He brushed his palm over his hair, exasperatedly.
“Of course, I don’t want to call it all off, but—” He broke off again.
She knew what he was about to say, that she gave him practically nothing
in the way of affection, but he wouldn’t say it, because he knew very
well that she wasn’t in love with him, so why did he really expect her
affection? Yet the simple fact that she wasn’t in love with him made
Therese feel guilty, guilty about accepting anything from him, a
birthday present, or an invitation to dinner at his family’s, or even
his time. Therese pressed her finger tips hard on the stone banister.
“All right—I know. I’m not in love with you,” she said.
“That’s not what I mean, Terry.”
“If you ever want to call the whole thing off—I mean, stop seeing me at
all, then do it.” It was not the first time she had said that, either.
“Terry, you know I’d rather be with you than anyone else in the world.
That’s the hell of it.”
“Well, if it’s hell—”
“Do you love me at all, Terry? How do you love me?”
Let me count the ways, she thought. “I don’t love you, but I like you. I
felt tonight, a few minutes ago,” she said, hammering the words out
however they sounded, because they were true, “that I felt closer to you
than I ever have, in fact.”
Richard looked at her, a little incredulously. “Do you?” He started
slowly up the steps, smiling, and stopped just below her. “Then—why not
let me stay with you tonight, Terry? Just let’s try, will you?”
She had known from his first step toward her that he was going to ask
her that. Now she felt miserable and ashamed, sorry for herself and for
him, because it was so impossible, and so embarrassing because she
didn’t want it. There was always that tremendous block of not even
wanting to try it, which reduced it all to a kind of wretched
embarrassment and nothing more, each time he asked her. She remembered
the first night she had let him stay, and she writhed again inwardly. It
had been anything but pleasant, and she had asked right in the middle of
it, “Is this right?” How could it be right and so unpleasant, she had
thought. And Richard had laughed, long and loud and with a heartiness
that had made her angry. And the second time had been even worse,
probably because Richard had thought all the difficulties had been
gotten over. It was painful enough to make her weep, and Richard had
been very apologetic and had said she made him feel like a brute. And
then she had protested that he wasn’t. She knew very well that he
wasn’t, that he was angelic compared to what Angelo Rossi would have
been, for instance, if she had slept with him the night he stood here on
the same steps, asking the same question.
“Terry, darling—”
“No,” Therese said, finding her voice at last. “I just can’t tonight,
and I can’t go to Europe with you either,” she finished with an abject
and hopeless frankness.
Richard’s lips parted in a stunned way. Therese could not bear to look
at the frown above them. “Why not?”
“Because. Because I can’t,” she said, every word agony. “Because I don’t
want to sleep with you.”
“Oh, Terry!” Richard laughed. “I’m sorry I asked you. Forget about it,
honey, will you? And in Europe, too?”
Therese looked away, noticed Orion again, tipped at a slightly different
angle, and looked back at Richard. But I can’t, she thought. I’ve got to
think about it sometime, because you think about it. It seemed to her
that she spoke the words and that they were solid as blocks of wood in
the air between them, even though she heard nothing. She had said the
words before to him, in her room upstairs, once in Prospect Park when
she was winding a kite string. But he wouldn’t consider them, and what
could she do now, repeat them? “Do you want to come up for a while
anyway?” she asked, tortured by herself, by a shame she could not really
account for.
“No,” Richard said with a soft laugh that shamed her all the more for
its tolerance and its understanding. “No, I’ll go on. Good night, honey.
I love you, Terry.” And with a last look at her, he went.
chapter six
Therese stepped out into the street and looked, but the streets were
empty with a Sunday morning emptiness. The wind flung itself around the
tall cement corner of Frankenberg’s as if it were furious at finding no
human figure there to oppose. No one but her, Therese thought, and
grinned suddenly at herself. She might have thought of a more pleasant
place to meet than this. The wind was like ice against her teeth. Carol
was a quarter of an hour late. If she didn’t come, she would probably
keep on waiting, all day and into the night. One figure came out of the
subway’s pit, a splintery thin hurrying figure of a woman in a long
black coat under which her feet moved as fast as if four feet were
rotating on a wheel.
Then Therese turned around and saw Carol in a car drawn up by the curb
across the street. Therese walked toward her.
“Hi!” Carol called, and leaned over to open the door for her.
“Hello. I thought you weren’t coming.”
“Awfully sorry I’m late. Are you freezing?”
“No.” Therese got in and pulled the door shut. The car was warm inside,
a long dark-green car with dark-green leather upholstery. Carol drove
slowly west.
“Shall we go out to the house? Where would you like to go?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Therese said. She could see freckles along the
bridge of Carol’s nose. Her short fair hair that made Therese think of
perfume held to a light was tied back with the green and gold scarf that
circled her head like a band.
“Let’s go out to the house. It’s pretty out there.”
They drove uptown. It was like riding inside a rolling mountain that
could sweep anything before it, yet was absolutely obedient to Carol.
“Do you like driving?” Carol asked without looking at her. She had a
cigarette in her mouth. She drove with her hands resting lightly on the
wheel, as if it were nothing to her, as if she sat relaxed in a chair
somewhere, smoking. “Why’re you so quiet?”
They roared into the Lincoln Tunnel. A wild, inexplicable excitement
mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the
tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be
dragged out together. She felt Carol glancing at her from time to time.
“Have you had breakfast?”
“No, I haven’t,” Therese answered. She supposed she was pale. She had
started to have breakfast, but she had dropped the milk bottle in the
sink, and then given it all up.
“Better have some coffee. It’s there in the thermos.”
They were out of the tunnel. Carol stopped by the side of the road.
“There,” Carol said, nodding at the thermos between them on the seat.
Then Carol took the thermos herself and poured some into the cup,
steaming and light brown.
Therese looked at the coffee gratefully. “Where’d it come from?”
Carol smiled. “Do you always want to know where things come from?”
The coffee was very strong and a little sweet. It sent strength through
her. When the cup was half empty, Carol started the car. Therese was
silent. What was there to talk about? The gold four-leaf clover with
Carol’s name and address on it that dangled from the key chain on the
dashboard? The stand of Christmas trees they passed on the road? The
bird that flew by itself across a swampy looking field? No. Only the
things she had written to Carol in the unmailed letter were to be talked
about, and that was impossible.
“Do you like the country?” Carol asked as they turned into a smaller
road.
They had just driven into a little town and out of it. Now on the
driveway that made a great semicircular curve, they approached a white
two-story house that had projecting side wings like the paws of a
resting lion.
There was a metal door mat, a big shining brass mailbox, a dog barking
hollowly from around the side of the house, where a white garage showed
beyond some trees. The house smelled of some spice, Therese thought,
mingled with a separate sweetness that was not Carol’s perfume either.
Behind her, the door closed with a light, firm double report. Therese
turned and found Carol looking at her puzzledly, her lips parted a
little as if in surprise, and Therese felt that in the next second Carol
would ask, “What are you doing here?” as if she had forgotten, or had
not meant to bring her here at all.
“There’s no one here but the maid. And she’s far away,” Carol said, as
if in reply to some question of Therese’s.
“It’s a lovely house,” Therese said, and saw Carol’s little smile that
was tinged with impatience.
“Take off your coat.” Carol took the scarf from around her head and ran
her fingers through her hair. “Wouldn’t you like a little breakfast?
It’s almost noon.”
“No, thanks.”
Carol looked around the living room, and the same puzzled
dissatisfaction came back to her face. “Let’s go upstairs. It’s more
comfortable.”
Therese followed Carol up the white wooden staircase, past an oil
painting of a small girl with yellow hair and a square chin like
Carol’s, past a window where a garden with an S-shaped path, a fountain
with a blue-green statue appeared for an instant and vanished. Upstairs,
there was a short hall with four or five rooms around it. Carol went
into a room with green carpet and walls, and took a cigarette from a box
on a table. She glanced at Therese as she lighted it. Therese didn’t
know what to do or say, and she felt Carol expected her to do or say
something, anything. Therese studied the simple room with its dark-green
carpet and the long green pillowed bench along one wall. There was a
plain table of pale wood in the center. A game room, Therese thought,
though it looked more like a study with its books and music albums and
its lack of pictures.
“My favorite room,” Carol said, walking out of it. “But that’s my room
over there.”
Therese looked into the room opposite. It had flowered cotton upholstery
and plain blond woodwork like the table in the other room. There was a
long plain mirror over the dressing table, and throughout a look of
sunlight, though no sunlight was in the room. The bed was a double bed.
And there were military brushes on the dark bureau across the room.
Therese glanced in vain for a picture of him. There was a picture of
Carol on the dressing table, holding up a small girl with blond hair.
And a picture of a woman with dark curly hair, smiling broadly, in a
silver frame.
“You have a little girl, haven’t you?” Therese asked.
Carol opened a wall panel in the hall. “Yes,” she said. “Would you like
a coke?”
The hum of the refrigerator came louder now. Through all the house,
there was no sound but those they made. Therese did not want the cold
drink, but she took the bottle and carried it downstairs after Carol,
through the kitchen and into the back garden she had seen from the
window. Beyond the fountain were a lot of plants some three feet high
and wrapped in burlap bags that looked like something, standing there in
a group, Therese thought, but she didn’t know what. Carol tightened a
string that the wind had loosened. Stooped in the heavy wool skirt and
the blue cardigan sweater, her figure looked solid and strong, like her
face, but not like her slender ankles. Carol seemed oblivious of her for
several minutes, walking about slowly, planting her moccasined feet
firmly, as if in the cold flowerless garden she was at last comfortable.
It was bitterly cold without a coat, but because Carol seemed oblivious
of that, too, Therese tried to imitate her.
“What would you like to do?” Carol asked. “Take a walk? Play some
records?”
“I’m very content,” Therese told her.
She was preoccupied with something, and regretted after all inviting her
out to the house, Therese felt. They walked back to the door at the end
of the garden path.
“And how do you like your job?” Carol asked in the kitchen, still with
her air of remoteness. She was looking into the big refrigerator. She
lifted out two plates covered with wax paper. “I wouldn’t mind some
lunch, would you?”
Therese had intended to tell her about the job at the Black Cat Theatre.
That would count for something, she thought, that would be the single
important thing she could tell about herself. But this was not the time.
Now she replied slowly, trying to sound as detached as Carol, though she
heard her shyness predominating, “I suppose it’s educational. I learn
how to be a thief, a liar, and a poet all at once.” Therese leaned back
in the straight chair so her head would be in the warm square of
sunlight. She wanted to say, and how to love. She had never loved anyone
before Carol, not even Sister Alicia.
Carol looked at her. “How do you become a poet?”
“By feeling things—too much, I suppose,” Therese answered
conscientiously.
“And how do you become a thief?” Carol licked something off her thumb
and frowned. “You don’t want any caramel pudding, do you?”
“No, thank you. I haven’t stolen yet, but I’m sure it’s easy there.
There are pocketbooks all around, and one just takes something. They
steal the meat you buy for dinner.” Therese laughed. One could laugh at
it with Carol. One could laugh at anything with Carol.
They had sliced cold chicken, cranberry sauce, green olives, and crisp
white celery. But Carol left her lunch and went into the living room.
She came back carrying a glass with some whisky in it, and added some
water to it from the tap. Therese watched her. Then for a long moment,
they looked at each other, Carol standing in the doorway and Therese at
the table, looking over her shoulder, not eating.
Carol asked quietly, “Do you meet a lot of people across the counter
this way? Don’t you have to be careful whom you start talking to?”
“Oh, yes,” Therese smiled.
“Or whom you go out to lunch with?” Carol’s eyes sparkled. “You might
run into a kidnaper.” She rolled the drink around in the iceless glass,
then drank it off, the thin silver bracelets on her wrist rattling
against the glass. “Well—do you meet many people this way?”
“No,” Therese said.
“Not many? Just three or four?”
“Like you?” Therese met her eyes steadily.
And Carol looked fixedly at her, as if she demanded another word,
another phrase from Therese. But then she set the glass down on the
stove top and turned away. “Do you play the piano?”
“Some.”
“Come and play something.” And when Therese started to refuse, she said
imperatively, “Oh, I don’t care how you play. Just play something.”
Therese played some Scarlatti she had learned at the Home. In a chair on
the other side of the room, Carol sat listening relaxed and motionless,
not even sipping the new glass of whisky and water. Therese played the C
major Sonata, which was slowish and rather simple, full of broken
octaves, but it struck her as dull, then pretentious in the trill parts,
and she stopped. It was suddenly too much, her hands on the keyboard
that she knew Carol played, Carol watching her with her eyes half
closed, Carol’s whole house around her, and the music that made her
abandon herself, made her defenseless. With a gasp, she dropped her
hands in her lap.
“Are you tired?” Carol asked calmly.
The question seemed not of now but of always. “Yes.”
Carol came up behind her and set her hands on Therese’s shoulders.
Therese could see her hands in her memory—flexible and strong, the
delicate tendons showing as they pressed her shoulders. It seemed an age
as her hands moved toward her neck and under her chin, an age of tumult
so intense it blotted out the pleasure of Carol’s tipping her head back
and kissing her lightly at the edge of her hair. Therese did not feel
the kiss at all.
“Come with me,” Carol said.
She went with Carol upstairs again. Therese pulled herself up by the
banister and was reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.
“I think a nap wouldn’t hurt you,” Carol said, turning down the flowered
cotton bedspread and the top blanket.
“Thanks, I’m not really—”
“Slip your shoes off,” Carol said softly, but in a tone that commanded
obedience.
Therese looked at the bed. She had hardly slept the night before. “I
don’t think I shall sleep, but if I do—”
“I’ll wake you in half an hour.” Carol pulled the blanket over her when
she lay down. Carol sat down on the edge of the bed. “How old are you,
Therese?”
Therese looked up at her, unable to bear her eyes now but bearing them
nevertheless, not caring if she died that instant, if Carol strangled
her, prostrate and vulnerable in her bed, the intruder. “Nineteen.” How
old it sounded. Older than ninety-one.
Carol’s eyebrows frowned, though she smiled a little. Therese felt that
she thought of something so intensely, one might have touched the
thought in the air between them. Then Carol slipped her hands under her
shoulders, and bent her head down to Therese’s throat, and Therese felt
the tension go out of Carol’s body with the sigh that made her neck
warm, that carried the perfume that was in Carol’s hair.
“You’re a child,” Carol said, like a reproach. She lifted her head.
“What would you like?”
Therese remembered what she had thought of in the restaurant, and she
set her teeth in shame.
“What would you like?” Carol repeated.
“Nothing, thanks.”
Carol got up and went to her dressing table and lighted a cigarette.
Therese watched her through half-closed lids, worried by Carol’s
restlessness, though she loved the cigarette, loved to see her smoke.
“What would you like, a drink?”
Therese knew she meant water. She knew from the tenderness and the
concern in her voice, as if she were a child sick with fever. Then
Therese said it: “I think I’d like some hot milk.”
The corner of Carol’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Some hot milk,” she
mocked. Then she left the room.
And Therese lay in a limbo of anxiety and sleepiness all the long while
until Carol reappeared with the milk in a straight-sided white cup with
a saucer under it, holding the saucer and the cup handle, and closing
the door with her foot.
“I let it boil and it’s got a scum on it,” Carol said annoyedly. “I’m
sorry.”
But Therese loved it, because she knew this was exactly what Carol would
always do, be thinking of something else and let the milk boil.
“Is that the way you like it? Plain like that?”
Therese nodded.
“Ug,” Carol said, and sat down on the arm of a chair and watched her.
Therese was propped on one elbow. The milk was so hot, she could barely
let her lip touch it at first. The tiny sips spread inside her mouth and
released a melange of organic flavors. The milk seemed to taste of bone
and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a
growing embryo. It was hot through and through to the bottom of the cup,
and Therese drank it down, as people in fairy tales drink the potion
that will transform, or the unsuspecting warrior the cup that will kill.
Then Carol came and took the cup, and Therese was drowsily aware that
Carol asked her three questions, one that had to do with happiness, one
about the store, and one about the future. Therese heard herself
answering. She heard her voice rise suddenly in a babble, like a spring
that she had no control over, and she realized she was in tears. She was
telling Carol all that she feared and disliked, of her loneliness, of
Richard, and of gigantic disappointments. And of her parents. Her mother
was not dead. But Therese had not seen her since she was fourteen.
Carol questioned her, and she answered, though she did not want to talk
about her mother. Her mother was not that important, not even one of the
disappointments. Her father was. Her father was quite different. He had
died when she was six—a lawyer of Czechoslovakian descent who all his
life had wanted to be a painter. He had been quite different, gentle,
sympathetic, never raising his voice in anger against the woman who had
nagged at him, because he had been neither a good lawyer nor a good
painter. He had never been strong, he had died of pneumonia, but in
Therese’s mind, her mother had killed him. Carol questioned and
questioned her, and Therese told of her mother’s bringing her to the
school in Montclair when she was eight, of her mother’s infrequent
visits afterward, for her mother had traveled a great deal around the
country. She had been a pianist—no, not a first-rate one, how could she
be, but she had always found work because she was pushing. And when
Therese was about ten, her mother had remarried. Therese had visited at
her mother’s house in Long Island in the Christmas holidays, and they
had asked her to stay with them, but not as if they wanted her to stay.
And Therese had not liked the husband, Nick, because he was exactly like
her mother, big and dark haired, with a loud voice, and violent and
passionate gestures. Therese was sure their marriage would be perfect.
Her mother had been pregnant even then, and now there were two children.
After a week with them, Therese had returned to the Home. There had been
perhaps three or four visits from her mother afterward, always with some
present for her, a blouse, a book, once a cosmetic kit that Therese had
loathed simply because it reminded her of her mother’s brittle,
mascaraed eye-lashes, presents handed her self-consciously by her
mother, like hypocritical peace offerings. Once her mother had brought
the little boy, her half brother, and then Therese had known she was an
outsider. Her mother had not loved her father, had chosen to leave her
at a school when she was eight, and why did she bother now even to visit
her, to claim her at all? Therese would have been happier to have no
parents, like half the girls in the school. Finally, Therese had told
her mother she did not want her to visit again, and her mother hadn’t,
and the ashamed, resentful expression, the nervous sidewise glance of
the brown eyes, the twitch of a smile and the silence—that was the last
she remembered of her mother. Then she had become fifteen. The sisters
at the school had known her mother was not writing. They had asked her
to write, and she had, but Therese had not answered. Then when
graduation came, when she was seventeen, the school had asked her mother
for two hundred dollars. Therese hadn’t wanted any money from her, had
half believed her mother wouldn’t give her any, but she had, and Therese
had taken it.
“I’m sorry I took it. I never told anyone but you. Some day I want to
give it back.”
“Nonsense,” Carol said softly. She was sitting on the arm of the chair,
resting her chin in her hand, her eyes fixed on Therese, smiling. “You
were still a child. When you forget about paying her back, then you’ll
be an adult.”
Therese did not answer.
“Don’t you think you’ll ever want to see her again? Maybe in a few years
from now?”
Therese shook her head. She smiled, but the tears still oozed out of her
eyes. “I don’t want to talk any more about it.”
“Does Richard know all this?”
“No. Just that she’s alive. Does it matter? This isn’t what matters.”
She felt if she wept enough, it would all go out of her, the tiredness
and the loneliness and the disappointment, as though it were in the
tears themselves. And she was glad Carol left her alone to do it now.
Carol was standing by the dressing table, her back to her. Therese lay
rigid in the bed, propped up on her elbow, racked with the
half-suppressed sobs.
“I’ll never cry again,” she said.
“Yes, you will.” And a match scraped.
Therese took another cleansing tissue from the bed table and blew her
nose.
“Who else is in your life besides Richard?” Carol asked.
She had fled them all. There had been Lily, and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in
the house where she had first lived in New York. Frances Cotter and Tim
at the Pelican Press. Lois Vavrica, a girl who had been at the Home in
Montclair, too. Now who was there? The Kellys who lived on the second
floor at Mrs. Osborne’s. And Richard. “When I was fired from that job
last month,” Therese said, “I was ashamed and I moved—” She stopped.
“Moved where?”
“I didn’t tell anyone where, except Richard. I just disappeared. I
suppose it was my idea of starting a new life, but mostly I was ashamed.
I didn’t want anyone to know where I was.”
Carol smiled. “Disappeared! I like that. And how lucky you are to be
able to do it. You’re free. Do you realize that?”
Therese said nothing.
“No,” Carol answered herself.
Beside Carol on the dressing table, a square gray clock ticked faintly,
and as Therese had done a thousand times in the store, she read the time
and attached a meaning to it. It was four fifteen and a little more, and
suddenly she was anxious lest she had lain there too long, lest Carol
might be expecting someone to come to the house.
Then the telephone rang, sudden and long like the shriek of a hysterical
woman in the hall, and they saw each other start.
Carol stood up, and slapped something twice in her palm, as she had
slapped the gloves in her palm in the store. The telephone screamed
again, and Therese was sure Carol was going to throw whatever it was she
held in her hand, throw it across the room against the wall. But Carol
only turned and laid the thing down quietly, and left the room.
Therese could hear Carol’s voice in the hall. She did not want to hear
what she was saying. She got up and put her skirt and her shoes on. Now
she saw what Carol had held in her hand. It was a shoehorn of
tan-colored wood. Anyone else would have thrown it, Therese thought.
Then she knew one word for what she felt about Carol: pride. She heard
Carol’s voice repeating the same tones, and now opening the door to
leave, she heard the words, “I have a guest,” for the third time calmly
presented as a barrier. “I think it’s an excellent reason. What
better?... What’s the matter with tomorrow? If you—”
Then there was no sound until Carol’s first step on the stair, and
Therese knew whoever had been talking to her had hung up on her. Who
dared, Therese wondered.
“Shouldn’t I leave?” Therese asked.
Carol looked at her in the same way she had when they first entered the
house. “Not unless you want to. No. We’ll take a drive later, if you
want to.”
She knew Carol did not want to take another drive. Therese started to
straighten the bed.
“Leave the bed.” Carol was watching her from the hall. “Just close the
door.”
“Who is it that’s coming?”
Carol turned and went into the green room. “My husband,” she said.
“Hargess.”
Then the doorbell chimed downstairs, and the latch clicked at the same
time.
“No end prompt today,” Carol murmured. “Come down, Therese.”
Therese felt sick with dread suddenly, not of the man but of Carol’s
annoyance at his coming.
He was coming up the stairs. When he saw Therese, he slowed, and a faint
surprise crossed his face, and then he looked at Carol.
“Harge, this is Miss Belivet,” Carol said. “Mr. Aird.”
“How do you do?” Therese said.
Harge only glanced at Therese, but his nervous blue eyes inspected her
from head to toe. He was a heavily built man with a rather pink face.
One eyebrow was set higher than the other, rising in an alert peak in
the center, as if it might have been distorted by a scar. “How do you
do?” Then to Carol, “I’m sorry to disturb you. I only wanted to get one
or two things.” He went past her and opened the door to a room Therese
had not seen. “Things for Rindy,” he added.
“Pictures on the wall?” Carol asked.
The man was silent.
Carol and Therese went downstairs. In the living room Carol sat down,
but Therese did not.
“Play some more, if you like,” Carol said.
Therese shook her head.
“Play some,” Carol said firmly.
Therese was frightened by the sudden white anger in her eyes. “I can’t,”
Therese said, stubborn as a mule.
And Carol subsided. Carol even smiled.
They heard Harge’s quick steps cross the hall and stop, then descend the
stairs slowly. Therese saw his dark clad figure and then his pinkish
blond head appear.
“I can’t find that watercolor set. I thought it was in my room,” he said
complainingly.
“I know where it is.” Carol got up and started toward the stairs.
“I suppose you want me to take her something for Christmas,” Harge said.
“Thanks, I’ll give the things to her.” Carol went up the stairs.
They are just divorced, Therese thought, or about to be divorced.
Harge looked at Therese, almost offered her his cigarette case, and
didn’t. He had an intense expression that curiously mingled anxiety and
boredom. The flesh around his mouth was firm and heavy, rounding into
the line of his mouth so that he seemed lipless. He lighted a cigarette
for himself. “Are you from New York?” he asked.
Therese felt the disdain and incivility in the question, like the sting
of a slap in the face. “Yes, from New York,” she answered.
He was on the brink of another question to her, when Carol came down the
stairs. Therese had steeled herself to be alone with him for minutes.
Now she shuddered as she relaxed, and she knew that he saw it.
“Thanks,” Harge said as he took the box from Carol. He walked to his
overcoat that Therese had noticed on the loveseat, sprawled open with
its black arms spread as if it were fighting and would take possession
of the house. “Good-by,” Harge said to her. He put the overcoat on as he
walked to the door. “Friend of Abby’s?” he murmured to Carol.
“A friend of mine,” Carol answered.
“Are you going to take the presents to Rindy? When?”
“What if I gave her nothing, Harge?”
“Carol—” He stopped on the porch, and Therese barely heard him say
something about making things unpleasant. Then, “I’m going to see
Cynthia now. Can I stop by on the way back? It’ll be before eight.”
“Harge, what’s the purpose?” Carol said wearily. “Especially when you’re
so disagreeable.”
“Because it concerns Rindy.” Then his voice faded unintelligibly.
Then an instant later, Carol came in alone and closed the door. Carol
stood against the door with her hands behind her, and they heard the car
outside leaving. Carol must have agreed to see him tonight, Therese
thought.
“I’ll go,” Therese said. Carol said nothing. There was a deadness in the
silence between them now, and Therese grew more uneasy. “I’d better go,
hadn’t I?”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Harge. He’s not always so rude. It was
a mistake to say I had any guest here at all.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Carol’s forehead wrinkled and she said with difficulty, “Do you mind if
I put you on the train tonight, instead of driving you home?”
“No.” She couldn’t have borne Carol’s driving her home and driving back
alone tonight in the darkness.
They were silent also in the car. Therese opened the door as soon as the
car stopped at the station.
“There’s a train in about four minutes,” Carol said.
Therese blurted suddenly, “Will I see you again?”
Carol only smiled at her, a little reproachfully, as the window between
them rose up. “Au revoir,” she said.
Of course, of course, she would see her again, Therese thought. An
idiotic question!
The car backed fast and turned away into the darkness.
Therese longed for the store again, longed for Monday, because Carol
might come in again on Monday. But it wasn’t likely. Tuesday was
Christmas Eve. Certainly she could telephone Carol by Tuesday, if only
to wish her a merry Christmas.
But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and
all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark
flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped
and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed
and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line,
carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright
forest with a million shimmering leaves.
chapter seven
The man looked at it, holding it carelessly between thumb and
forefinger. He was bald except for long strands of black hair that grew
from a former brow line, plastered sweatily down over the naked scalp.
His underlip was thrust out with the contempt and negation that had
fixed itself on his face as soon as Therese had come to the counter and
spoken her first words.
“No,” he said at last.
“Can’t you give me anything for it?” Therese asked.
The lip came out farther. “Maybe fifty cents.” And he tossed it back
across the counter.
Therese’s fingers crept over it possessively. “Well, what about this?”
From her coat pocket she dragged up the silver chain with the St.
Christopher medallion.
Again the thumb and forefinger were eloquent of scorn, turning the coin
like filth. “Two fifty.”
But it cost at least twenty dollars, Therese started to say, but she
didn’t because that was what everybody said. “Thanks.” She picked up the
chain and went out.
Who were all the lucky people, she wondered, who had managed to sell
their old pocketknives, broken wrist watches and carpenters’ planes that
hung in clumps in the front window? She could not resist looking back
through the window, finding the man’s face again under the row of
hanging hunting knives. The man was looking at her, too, smiling at her.
She felt he understood every move she made. Therese hurried down the
sidewalk.
In ten minutes, Therese was back. She pawned the silver medallion for
two dollars and fifty cents.
She hurried westward, ran across Lexington Avenue, then Park, and turned
down Madison. She clutched the little box in her pocket until its sharp
edges cut her fingers. Sister Beatrice had given it to her. It was
inlaid brown wood and mother-of-pearl, in a checked pattern. She didn’t
know what it was worth in money, but she had assumed it was rather
precious. Well, now she knew it wasn’t. She went into a leather goods
shop.
“I’d like to see the black one in the window—the one with the strap and
the gold buckles,” Therese said to the salesgirl.
It was the handbag she had noticed last Saturday morning on the way to
meet Carol for lunch. It had looked like Carol, just at a glance. She
had thought, even if Carol didn’t keep the appointment that day, if she
could never see Carol again, she must buy the bag and send it to her
anyway.
“I’ll take it,” Therese said.
“That’s seventy-one eighteen with the tax,” the salesgirl said. “Do you
want that gift wrapped?”
“Yes, please.” Therese counted six crisp ten-dollar bills across the
counter and the rest in singles. “Can I leave it here till about six
thirty tonight?”
Therese left the shop with the receipt in her billfold. It wouldn’t do
to risk bringing the handbag into the store. It might be stolen, even if
it was Christmas Eve. Therese smiled. It was her last day of work at the
store. And in four more days came the job at the Black Cat. Phil was
going to bring her a copy of the play the day after Christmas.
She passed Brentano’s. Its window was full of satin ribbons,
leather-bound books, and pictures of knights in armor. Therese turned
back and went into the store, not to buy but to look, just for a moment,
to see if there was anything here more beautiful than the handbag.
An illustration in one of the counter displays caught her eye. It was a
young knight on a white horse, riding through a bouquetlike forest,
followed by a line of page boys, the last bearing a cushion with a gold
ring on it. She took the leather-bound book in her hand. The price
inside the cover was twenty-five dollars. If she simply went to the bank
now and got twenty-five dollars more, she could buy it. What was
twenty-five dollars? She hadn’t needed to pawn the silver medallion. She
knew she had pawned it only because it was from Richard, and she didn’t
want it any longer. She closed the book and looked at the edges of the
pages that were like a concave bar of gold. But would Carol really like
it, a book of love poems of the middle ages? She didn’t know. She
couldn’t remember the slightest clue as to Carol’s taste in books. She
put the book down hurriedly and left.
Upstairs in the doll department, Miss Santini was strolling along behind
the counter, offering everybody candy from a big box.
“Take two,” she said to Therese. “Candy department sent ’em up.”
“I don’t mind if I do.” Imagine, she thought, biting into a nougat, the
Christmas spirit had struck the candy department. There was a strange
atmosphere in the store today. It was unusually quiet, first of all.
There were plenty of customers, but they didn’t seem in a hurry, even
though it was Christmas Eve. Therese glanced at the elevators, looking
for Carol. If Carol didn’t come in, and she probably wouldn’t, Therese
was going to telephone her at six thirty, just to wish her a happy
Christmas. Therese knew her telephone number. She had seen it on the
telephone at the house.
“Miss Belivet!” Mrs. Hendrickson’s voice called, and Therese jumped to
attention. But Mrs. Hendrickson only waved her hand for the benefit of
the Western Union messenger who laid a telegram in front of Therese.
Therese signed for it in a scribble, and tore it open. It said: