“We’ll be a half hour drinking these.”

“Your powers of persuasion are irresistible.” Carol took the suit into

the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub.

It was the suit she had worn the day they had had the first lunch

together.

“Do you realize this is the only drink I’ve had since we left New York?”

Carol said. “Of course you don’t. Do you know why? I’m happy.”

“You’re beautiful,” Therese said.

And Carol gave her the derogatory smile that Therese loved, and walked

to the dressing table. She flung a yellow-silk scarf around her neck and

tied it loosely, and began to comb her hair. The lamp’s light framed her

figure like a picture, and Therese had a feeling all this had happened

before. She remembered suddenly: the woman in the window brushing up her

long hair, remembered the very bricks in the wall, the texture of the

misty rain that morning.

“How about some perfume?” Carol asked, moving toward her with the

bottle. She touched Therese’s forehead with her fingers, at the hairline

where she had kissed her that day.

“You remind me of the woman I once saw,” Therese said, “somewhere off

Lexington. Not you but the light. She was combing her hair up.” Therese

stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she

could never say exactly what she wanted to say. “Early one morning when

I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain,” she

floundered on. “I saw her in a window.” She really could not go on,

about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an

intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she

might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door,

wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican

Press.

“My little orphan,” Carol said.

Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when

Carol said it.

“What does your mother look like?”

“She had black hair,” Therese said quickly. “She didn’t look anything

like me.” Therese always found herself talking about her mother in the

past tense, though she was alive this minute, somewhere in Connecticut.

“You really don’t think she’ll ever want to see you again?” Carol was

standing at the mirror.

“I don’t think so.”

“What about your father’s family. Didn’t you say he had a brother?”

“I never met him. He was a kind of geologist, working for an oil

company. I don’t know where he is.” It was easier talking about the

uncle she had never met.

“What’s your mother’s name now?”

“Esther—Mrs. Nicolas Strully.” The name meant as little to her as one

she might see in a telephone book. She looked at Carol, suddenly sorry

she had said the name. Carol might some day—A shock of loss, of

helplessness came over her. She knew so little about Carol after all.

Carol glanced at her. “I’ll never mention it,” she said, “never mention

it again. If that second drink’s going to make you blue, don’t drink it.

I don’t want you to be blue tonight.”

The restaurant where they dined overlooked the lake, too. They had a

banquet of a dinner with champagne and brandy afterward. It was the

first time in her life that Therese had been a little drunk, in fact

much drunker than she wanted Carol to see. Her impression of Lakeshore

Drive was always to be of a broad avenue studded with mansions all

resembling the White House in Washington. In the memory there would be

Carol’s voice, telling her about a house here and there where she had

been before, and the disquieting awareness that for a while this had

been Carol’s world, as Rapallo, Paris, and other places Therese did not

know had for a while been the frame of everything Carol did.

That night, Carol sat on the edge of her bed, smoking a cigarette before

they turned the light out. Therese lay in her own bed, sleepily watching

her, trying to read the meaning of the restless, puzzled look in Carol’s

eyes that would stare at something in the room for a moment and then

move on. Was it of her she thought, or of Harge, or of Rindy? Carol had

asked to be called at seven tomorrow, in order to telephone Rindy before

she went to school. Therese remembered their telephone conversation in

Defiance. Rindy had had a fight with some other little girl, and Carol

had spent fifteen minutes going over it, and trying to persuade Rindy

she should take the first step and apologize. Therese still felt the

effects of what she had drunk, the tingling of the champagne that drew

her painfully close to Carol. If she simply asked, she thought, Carol

would let her sleep tonight in the same bed with her. She wanted more

than that, to kiss her, to feel their bodies next to each other’s.

Therese thought of the two girls she had seen in the Palermo bar. They

did that, she knew, and more. And would Carol suddenly thrust her away

in disgust, if she merely wanted to hold her in her arms? And would

whatever affection Carol now had for her vanish in that instant? A

vision of Carol’s cold rebuff swept her courage clean away. It crept

back humbly in the question, couldn’t she ask simply to sleep in the

same bed with her?

“Carol, would you mind—”

“Tomorrow we’ll go to the stockyards,” Carol said at the same time, and

Therese burst out laughing. “What’s so damned funny about that?” Carol

asked, putting out her cigarette, but she was smiling, too.

“It just is. It’s terribly funny,” Therese said, still laughing,

laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.

“You’re giggly on champagne,” Carol said as she put the light out.

Late the next afternoon they left Chicago and drove in the direction of

Rockford. Carol said she might have a letter from Abby there, but

probably not, because Abby was a bad correspondent. Therese went to a

shoe repair shop to get a moccasin stitched, and when she came back,

Carol was reading the letter in the car.

“What road do we take out?” Carol’s face looked happier.

“Twenty, going west.”

Carol turned on the radio and worked the dial until she found some

music. “What’s a good town for tonight on the way to Minneapolis?”

“Dubuque,” Therese said, looking at the map. “Or Waterloo looks fairly

big, but it’s about two hundred miles away.”

“We might make it.”

They took Highway 20 toward Freeport and Galena, which was starred on

the map as the home of Ulysses S. Grant.

“What did Abby say?”

“Nothing much. Just a very nice letter.”

Carol said little to her in the car, or even in the café where they

stopped later for coffee. Carol went over and stood in front of a juke

box, dropping nickels slowly.

“You wish Abby’d come along, don’t you?” Therese said.

“No,” Carol said.

“You’re so different since you got the letter from her.”

Carol looked at her across the table. “Darling, it’s just a silly

letter. You can even read it if you want to.” Carol reached for her

handbag, but she did not get the letter out.

Sometime that evening, Therese fell asleep in the car and woke up with

the lights of a city on her face. Carol was resting both arms tiredly on

the top of the wheel. They had stopped for a red light.

“Here’s where we stay the night,” Carol said.

Therese’s sleep still clung to her as she walked across the hotel lobby.

She rode up in an elevator and she was acutely conscious of Carol beside

her, as if she dreamed a dream in which Carol was the subject and the

only figure. In the room, she lifted her suitcase from the floor to a

chair, unlatched it and left it, and stood by the writing table,

watching Carol. As if her emotions had been in abeyance all the past

hours, or days, they flooded her now as she watched Carol opening her

suitcase, taking out, as she always did first, the leather kit that

contained her toilet articles, dropping it onto the bed. She looked at

Carol’s hands, at the lock of hair that fell over the scarf tied around

her head, at the scratch she had gotten days ago across the toe of her

moccasin.

“What’re you standing there for?” Carol asked. “Get to bed, sleepyhead.”

“Carol, I love you.”

Carol straightened up. Therese stared at her with intense, sleepy eyes.

Then Carol finished taking her pajamas from the suitcase and pulled the

lid down. She came to Therese and put her hands on her shoulders. She

squeezed her shoulders hard, as if she were exacting a promise from her,

or perhaps searching her to see if what she had said were real. Then she

kissed Therese on the lips, as if they had kissed a thousand times

before.

“Don’t you know I love you?” Carol said.

Carol took her pajamas into the bedroom, and stood for a moment, looking

down at the basin.

“I’m going out,” Carol said. “But I’ll be back right away.”

Therese waited by the table while Carol was gone, while time passed

indefinitely or maybe not at all, until the door opened and Carol came

in again. She set a paper bag on the table, and Therese knew she had

only gone to get a container of milk, as Carol or she herself did very

often at night.

“Can I sleep with you?” Therese asked.

“Did you see the bed?”

It was a double bed. They sat up in their pajamas, drinking milk and

sharing an orange that Carol was too sleepy to finish. Then Therese set

the container of milk on the floor and looked at Carol who was sleeping

already, on her stomach, with one arm flung up as she always went to

sleep. Therese pulled out the light. Then Carol slipped her arm under

her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if

something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading

through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her

flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in

darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

“Go to sleep,” Carol said.

Therese hoped she would not. But when she felt Carol’s hand move on her

shoulder, she knew she had been asleep. It was dawn now. Carol’s fingers

tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped

in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when

Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night. I love you, Therese

wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and

terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol’s lips over her

neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly, the length of her body. Her

arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing

else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that

brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in

widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought

could follow. While a thousand memories and moments, words, the first

darling, the second time Carol had met her at the store, a thousand

memories of Carol’s face, her voice, moments of anger and laughter

flashed like the tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was

pale-blue distance and space, an expanding space in which she took

flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an

impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and

not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still clung to Carol, that

she trembled violently, and the arrow was herself. She saw Carol’s pale

hair across her eyes, and now Carol’s head was close against hers. And

she did not have to ask if this were right, no one had to tell her,

because this could not have been more right or perfect. She held Carol

tighter against her, and felt Carol’s mouth on her own smiling mouth.

Therese lay still, looking at her, at Carol’s face only inches away from

her, the gray eyes calm as she had never seen them, as if they retained

some of the space she had just emerged from. And it seemed strange that

it was still Carol’s face, with the freckles, the bending blond eyebrow

that she knew, the mouth now as calm as her eyes, as Therese had seen it

many times before.

“My angel,” Carol said. “Flung out of space.”

Therese looked up at the corners of the room that were much brighter

now, at the bureau with the bulging front and the shield-shaped drawer

pulls, at the frameless mirror with the beveled edge, at the green

patterned curtains that hung straight at the windows, and the two gray

tips of buildings that showed just above the sill. She would remember

every detail of this room forever.

“What town is this?” she asked.

Carol laughed. “This? This is Waterloo.” She reached for a cigarette.

“Isn’t that awful.”

Smiling, Therese raised up on her elbow. Carol put a cigarette between

her lips. “There’s a couple of Waterloos in every state,” Therese said.

chapter sixteen

Therese went out to get some newspapers while Carol was dressing. She

stepped into the elevator and turned around in the exact center of it.

She felt a little odd, as if everything had shifted and distances were

not quite the same. She walked across the lobby to the newspaper stand

in the corner.

“The _Courier_ and the _Tribune_,” she said to the man, taking them, and

even to utter words was as strange as the names of the newspapers she

bought.

“Eight cents,” the man said, and Therese looked down at the change he

had given her and saw there was still the same difference between eight

cents and a quarter.

She wandered across the lobby, looked through the glass into the barber

shop where a couple of men were getting shaves. A Negro boy was shining

shoes. A tall man with a cigar and a broad-brimmed hat, with Western

shoes, walked by her. She would remember this lobby, too, forever, the

people, the old-fashioned looking woodwork at the base of the

registration desk, and the man in the dark overcoat who looked at her

over the top of his newspaper, and slumped in his chair and went on

reading beside the black and cream-colored marble column.

When Therese opened the room door, the sight of Carol went through her

like a spear. She stood a moment with her hand on the knob.

Carol looked at her from the bathroom, holding the comb suspended over

her head. Carol looked at her from head to foot. “Don’t do that in

public,” Carol said.

Therese threw the newspapers on the bed and came to her. Carol seized

her suddenly in her arms. They stood holding each other as if they would

never separate. Therese shuddered, and there were tears in her eyes. It

was hard to find words, locked in Carol’s arms, closer than kissing.

“Why did you wait so long?” Therese asked.

“Because—I thought there wouldn’t be a second time, that I wouldn’t want

it. But that’s not true.”

Therese thought of Abby, and it was like a slim shaft of bitterness

dropping between them. Carol released her.

“And there was something else—to have you around reminding me, knowing

you and knowing it would be so easy. I’m sorry. It wasn’t fair to you.”

Therese set her teeth hard. She watched Carol walk slowly away across

the room, watched the space widen, and remembered the first time she had

seen her walk so slowly away in the department store, Therese had

thought forever. Carol had loved Abby, too, and she reproached herself

for it. As Carol would one day for loving her, Therese wondered? Therese

understood now why the December and January weeks had been made up of

anger and indecision, reprimands alternating with indulgences. But she

understood now that whatever Carol said in words, there were no barriers

and no indecisions now. There was no Abby, either, after this morning,

whatever had happened between Carol and Abby before.

“Was it?” Carol asked.

“You’ve made me so happy ever since I’ve known you,” Therese said.

“I don’t think you can judge.”

“I can judge this morning.”

Carol did not answer. Only the rasp of the door lock answered her. Carol

had locked the door and they were alone. Therese came toward her,

straight into her arms.

“I love you,” Therese said, just to hear the words. “I love you, I love

you.”

But Carol seemed deliberately to pay almost no attention to her that

day. There was more arrogance in the tilt of her cigarette, in the way

she backed the car away from a curb, cursing, not quite joking. “Damned

if I’ll put a dime in a parking meter with a prairie right in sight,”

Carol said. But when Therese did catch her looking at her, Carol’s eyes

were laughing. Carol teased her, leaning on her shoulder as they stood

in front of a cigarette machine, touching her foot under tables. It made

Therese limp and tense at the same time. She thought of people she had

seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn’t she and Carol? Yet when

she simply took Carol’s arm as they stood choosing a box of candy in a

shop, Carol murmured, “Don’t.”

Therese sent a box of candy to Mrs. Robichek from the candy shop in

Minneapolis, and a box also to the Kellys. She sent an extravagantly big

box to Richard’s mother, a double-deck box with wooden compartments that

she knew Mrs. Semco would use later for sewing articles.

“Did you ever do that with Abby?” Therese asked abruptly that evening in

the car.

Carol’s eyes understood suddenly and she blinked. “What questions you

ask,” she said. “Of course.”

Of course. She had known it. “And now—?”

“Therese—”

She asked stiffly, “Was it very much the same as with me?”

Carol smiled. “No, darling.”

“Don’t you think it’s more pleasant than sleeping with men?”

Her smile was amused. “Not necessarily. That depends. Who have you ever

known except Richard?”

“No one.”

“Well, don’t you think you’d better try some others?”

Therese was speechless for a moment, but she tried to be casual,

drumming her fingers on the book in her lap.

“I mean sometime, darling. You’ve got a lot of years ahead.”

Therese said nothing. She could not imagine ever leaving Carol either.

That was another terrible question that had sprung into her mind at the

start, that hammered at her brain now with a painful insistence to be

answered. Would Carol ever want to leave her?

“I mean, whom you sleep with depends so much on habit,” Carol went on.

“And you’re too young to make enormous decisions. Or habits.”

“Are you just a habit?” she asked, smiling, but she heard the resentment

in her voice. “You mean it’s nothing but that?”

“Therese—of all times to get so melancholic.”

“I’m not melancholic,” she protested, but the thin ice was under her

feet again, the uncertainties. Or was it that she always wanted a little

more than she had, no matter how much she had? She said impulsively,

“Abby loves you, too, doesn’t she?”

Carol started a little, and put her foot down. “Abby has loved me

practically all her life—even as you.”

Therese stared at her.

“I’ll tell you about it one day. Whatever happened is past. Months and

months ago,” she said, so softly Therese could hardly hear.

“Only months?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me now.”

“This isn’t the time or the place.”

“There’s never a time,” Therese said. “Didn’t you say there never was a

right time?”

“Did I say that? About what?”

But neither of them said anything for a moment, because a fresh barrage

of wind hurled the rain like a million bullets against the hood and

windshield, and for a moment they could have heard nothing else. There

was no thunder, as if the thunder, somewhere up above, modestly

refrained from competing with this other god of rain. They waited in the

inadequate shelter of a hill at the side of the road.

“I might tell you the middle,” Carol said, “because it’s funny—and

ironic. It was last winter when we had the furniture shop together. But

I can’t begin without telling you the first part—and that was when we

were children. Our families lived near each other in New Jersey, so we

saw each other during vacations. Abby always had a mild crush on me, I

thought, even when we were about six and eight. Then she wrote me a

couple of letters when she was about fourteen and away at school. And by

that time I’d heard of girls who preferred girls. But the books also

tell you it goes away after that age.” There were pauses between her

sentences, as if she left out sentences in between.

“Were you in school with her?” Therese asked.

“I never was. My father sent me to a different school, out of town. Then

Abby went to Europe when she was sixteen, and I wasn’t at home when she

came back. I saw her once at some party around the time I got married.

Abby looked quite different then, not like a tomboy any more. Then Harge

and I lived in another town, and I didn’t see her again—really for

years, till long after Rindy was born. She came once in a while to the

riding stable where Harge and I used to ride. A few times we all rode

together. Then Abby and I started playing tennis on Saturday afternoons

when Harge usually played golf. Abby and I always had fun together.

Abby’s former crush on me never crossed my mind—we were both so much

older and so much had happened. I had an idea about starting a shop,

because I wanted to see less of Harge. I thought we were getting bored

with each other and it would help. So I asked Abby if she wanted to be

partners in it, and we started the furniture shop. After a few weeks to

my surprise, I felt I was attracted to her,” Carol said in the same

quiet voice. “I couldn’t understand it, and I was a little afraid of

it—remembering Abby from before, and realizing she might feel the same

way, or that both of us could. So I tried not to let Abby see it, and I

think I succeeded. But finally—here’s the funny part finally—there was

the night in Abby’s house one night last winter. The roads were snowed

in that night, and Abby’s mother insisted that we stay together in

Abby’s room, simply because the room I’d stayed in before hadn’t any

sheets on the bed then, and it was very late. Abby said she’d fix the

sheets, we both protested, but Abby’s mother insisted.” Carol smiled a

little, and glanced at her, but Therese felt Carol didn’t even see her.

“So I stayed with Abby. Nothing would have happened, if not for that

night, I’m sure of it. If not for Abby’s mother, that’s the ironic

thing, because she doesn’t know anything about it. But it did happen,

and I felt very much as you, I suppose, as happy as you.” Carol blurted

out the end, though her voice was still level and somehow without

emotion of any kind.

Therese stared at her, not knowing if it was jealousy or shock or anger

that was suddenly jumbling everything. “And after that?” she asked.

“After that, I knew I was in love with Abby. I don’t know why not call

it love, it had all the earmarks. But it lasted only two months, like a

disease that came and went.” Carol said in a different tone, “Darling,

it’s got nothing to do with you, and it’s finished now. I knew you

wanted to know, but I didn’t see any reason for telling you before. It’s

that unimportant.”

“But if you felt the same way about her—”

“For two months?” Carol said. “When you have a husband and child, you

know, it’s a little different.”

Different from her, Carol meant, because she hadn’t any

responsibilities. “Is it? You can just start and stop?”

“When you haven’t got a chance,” Carol answered.

The rain was abating, but only by so much that she could see it as rain

now and not solid silver sheets. “I don’t believe it.”

“You’re hardly in a state to talk.”

“Why are you so cynical?”

“Cynical? Am I?”

Therese was not sure enough to answer. What was it to love someone, what

was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real

questions, and who could answer them.

“It’s letting up,” Carol said. “How about going on and finding a good

brandy somewhere? Or is this a dry state?”

They drove on to the next town and found a deserted bar in the biggest

hotel. The brandy was delicious, and they ordered two more.

“It’s French brandy,” Carol said. “Someday we’ll go to France.”

Therese turned the little bowl of a glass between her fingers. A clock

ticked at the end of the bar. A train whistle blew in the distance. And

Carol cleared her throat. Ordinary sounds, yet the moment was not an

ordinary one. No moment had been an ordinary one since the morning in

Waterloo. Therese stared at the bright brown light in the brandy glass,

and suddenly she had no doubt that she and Carol would one day go to

France. Then out of the shimmering brown sun in the glass, Harge’s face

emerged, mouth and nose and eyes.

“Harge knows about Abby, doesn’t he?” Therese said.

“Yes. He asked me something about her a few months ago—and I told him

the whole thing from start to finish.”

“You did—” She thought of Richard, imagined how Richard would react. “Is

that why you’re getting the divorce?”

“No. It’s got nothing to do with the divorce. That’s another ironic

thing—that I told Harge after it was all over. A mistaken effort at

honesty, when Harge and I had nothing left to salvage. We’d already

talked about a divorce. Please don’t remind me of mistakes!” Carol

frowned.

“You mean—he certainly must have been jealous.”

“Yes. Because however I chose to tell it, I suppose it came out that I’d

cared more about Abby at one period than I’d ever cared for him. At one

point, even with Rindy I’d have left everything behind to go with her. I

don’t know how it was that I didn’t.”

“And taken Rindy with you?”

“I don’t know. I know the fact that Rindy existed stopped me from

leaving Harge then.”

“Do you regret it?”

Carol shook her head slowly. “No. It wouldn’t have lasted. It didn’t

last, and maybe I knew it wouldn’t. With my marriage failing, I was too

afraid and too weak—” She stopped.

“Are you afraid now?”

Carol was silent.

“Carol—”

“I am not afraid,” she said stubbornly, lifting her head, drawing on her

cigarette.

Therese looked at her face in profile in the dim light. What about Rindy

now, she wanted to ask, what will happen? But she knew Carol was on the

brink of growing suddenly impatient, giving her a careless answer, or no

answer at all. Another time, Therese thought, not this moment. It might

destroy everything, even the solidity of Carol’s body beside her, and

the bend of Carol’s body in the black sweater seemed the only solid

thing in the world. Therese ran her thumb down Carol’s side, from under

the arm to the waist.

“I remember Harge was particularly annoyed about a trip I took with Abby

to Connecticut. Abby and I went up to buy some things for the shop. It

was only a two-day trip, but he said, ‘Behind my back. You had to run

away.’” Carol said it bitterly. There was more self-reproach in her

voice than imitation of Harge.

“Does he still talk about it?”

“No. Is it anything to talk about? Is it anything to be proud of?”

“Is it anything to be ashamed of?”

“Yes. You know that, don’t you?” Carol asked in her even, distinct

voice. “In the eyes of the world it’s an abomination.”

The way she said it, Therese could not quite smile. “You don’t believe

that.”

“People like Harge’s family.”

“They’re not the whole world.”

“They are enough. And you have to live in the world. You, I mean—and I

don’t mean anything just now about whom you decide to love.” She looked

at Therese, and at last Therese saw a smile rising slowly in her eyes,

bringing Carol with it. “I mean responsibilities in the world that other

people live in and that might not be yours. Just now it isn’t, and

that’s why in New York I was exactly the wrong person for you to

know—because I indulge you and keep you from growing up.”

“Why don’t you stop?”

“I’ll try. The trouble is, I like to indulge you.”

“You’re exactly the right person for me to know,” Therese said.

“Am I?”

On the street, Therese said, “I don’t suppose Harge would like it if he

knew we were away on a trip, either, would he?”

“He’s not going to know about it.”

“Do you still want to go to Washington?”

“Absolutely, if you’ve got the time. Can you stay away all of February?”

Therese nodded. “Unless I hear something in Salt Lake City. I told Phil

to write there. It’s a pretty slim chance.” Probably Phil wouldn’t even

write, she thought. But if there was the least chance of a job in New

York, she should go back. “Would you go on to Washington without me?”

Carol glanced at her. “As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t,” she said with a

little smile.

Their hotel room was so overheated when they came back that evening,

they had to throw open the windows for a while. Carol leaned on the

window sill, cursing the heat for Therese’s amusement, calling her a

salamander because she could bear it. Then Carol asked abruptly, “What

did Richard have to say yesterday?”

Therese had not even known that Carol knew about the last letter. The

one he had promised, in the Chicago letter, to send to Minneapolis and

to Seattle. “Nothing much,” Therese said. “Just a one-page letter. He

still wants me to write to him. And I don’t intend to.” She had thrown

the letter away, but she remembered it, “I haven’t heard from you, and

it’s beginning to dawn on me what an incredible conglomeration of

contradictions you are. You are sensitive and yet so insensitive,

imaginative and yet so unimaginative.... If you get stranded by your

whimsical friend, let me know and I’ll come after you. This won’t last,

Terry. I know a little about such things. I saw Dannie and he wanted to

know what I’d heard from you, what you were doing. How would you like it

if I had told him? I didn’t say anything, for your sake, because I think

one day you’ll blush. I still love you, I admit it. I’ll come out to

you—and show you what America’s really like—if you care enough about me

to write and say so....”

It was insulting to Carol, and Therese had torn it up. Therese sat on

the bed with her arms around her knees, gripping her wrists inside the

sleeves of her robe. Carol had overdone the ventilation, and the room

was cold. The Minnesota winds had taken possession of the room, were

seizing Carol’s cigarette smoke and tearing it to nothing. Therese

watched Carol calmly brushing her teeth at the basin.

“Do you mean that about not writing to him? That’s your decision?” Carol

asked.

“Yes.”

Therese watched Carol knock the water out of her toothbrush, and turn

from the basin, blotting her face with a towel. Nothing about Richard

mattered so much to her as the way Carol blotted her face with a towel.

“Let’s say no more,” Carol said.

She knew Carol would say no more. She knew Carol had been pushing her

toward him, until this moment. Now it seemed it might all have been for

this moment as Carol turned and walked toward her and her heart took a

giant’s step forward.

They went on westward, through Sleepy Eye, Tracy, and Pipestone,

sometimes taking an indirect highway on a whim. The West unfolded like a

magic carpet, dotted with the neat, tight units of farmhouse, barn, and

silo that they could see for half an hour before they came abreast of

them. They stopped once at a farmhouse to ask if they could buy enough

gas to get to the next station. The house smelled like fresh cold

cheese. Their steps sounded hollow and lonely on the solid brown

planks of the floor, and Therese thought in a fervid burst of

patriotism—_America_. There was a picture of a rooster on the wall, made

of colored patches of cloth sewn on a black ground, beautiful enough to

hang in a museum. The farmer warned them about ice on the road directly

west, so they took another highway going south.

They discovered a one-ring circus that night beside a railroad track in

a town called Sioux Falls. The performers were not very expert. Their

seats were a couple of orange crates in the first row. One of the

acrobats invited them into the performers’ tent after the show, and

insisted on giving Carol a dozen of the circus posters, because she had

admired them. Carol sent some of them to Abby and some to Rindy, and

sent Rindy as well a green chameleon in a pasteboard box. It was an

evening Therese would never forget, and unlike most such evenings, this

one registered as unforgettable while it still lived. It was a matter of

the bag of popcorn they shared, the circus, and the kiss Carol gave her

back of some booth in the performers’ tent. It was a matter of that

particular enchantment that came from Carol—though Carol took their good

times so for granted—seemed to work on all the world around them, a

matter of everything going perfectly, without disappointments or

hitches, going just as they wished it to.

Therese walked from the circus with her head down, lost in thought. “I

wonder if I’ll ever want to create anything again,” she said.

“What brought this on?”

“I mean—what was I ever trying to do but this? I’m happy.”

Carol took her arm and squeezed it, dug her thumb in so hard that

Therese yelled. Carol looked up at a street marker and said, “Fifth and

Nebraska. I think we go this way.”

“What’s going to happen when we get back to New York? It can’t be the

same, can it?”

“Yes,” Carol said. “Till you get tired of me.”

Therese laughed. She heard the soft snap of Carol’s scarf end in the

wind.

“We might not be living together, but it’ll be the same.”

They couldn’t live together with Rindy, Therese knew. It was useless to

dream of it. But it was more than enough that Carol promised in words it

would be the same.

Near the border of Nebraska and Wyoming, they stopped for dinner at a

large restaurant built like a lodge in an evergreen forest. They were

almost the only people in the big dining room, and they chose a table

near the fireplace. They spread out the road map and decided to head

straight for Salt Lake City. They might stay there for a few days, Carol

said, because it was an interesting place, and she was tired of driving.

“Lusk,” Therese said, looking at the map. “What a sexy sounding name.”

Carol put her head back and laughed. “Where is it?”

“On the road.”

Carol picked up her wine glass and said, “Chateau Neuf-du-Pape in

Nebraska. What’ll we drink to?”

“Us.”

It was something like the morning in Waterloo, Therese thought, a time

too absolute and flawless to seem real, though it was real, not merely

props in a play—their brandy glasses on the mantel, the row of deers’

horns above, Carol’s cigarette lighter, the fire itself. But at moments

she felt like an actor, remembered only now and then her identity with a

sense of surprise, as if she had been playing in these last days the

part of someone else, someone fabulously and excessively lucky. She

looked up at the fir branches fixed in the rafters, at the man and woman

talking inaudibly together at a table against the wall, at the man alone

at his table, smoking his cigarette slowly. She thought of the man

sitting with the newspaper in the hotel in Waterloo. Didn’t he have the

same colorless eyes and the long creases on either side of his mouth? Or

was it only that this moment of consciousness was so much the same as

that other moment?

They spent the night in Lusk, ninety miles away.

chapter seventeen

“Mrs. H. F. Aird?” The desk clerk looked at Carol after she had signed

the register. “Are you Mrs. Carol Aird?”

“Yes.”

“Message for you.” He turned around and got it from a pigeonhole. “A

telegram.”

“Thank you.” Carol glanced at Therese with a little lift of her brows

before she opened it. She read it, frowning, then turned to the clerk.

“Where’s the Belvedere Hotel?”

The clerk directed her.

“I’ve got to pick up another telegram,” Carol said to Therese. “Want to

wait here while I get it?”

“Who from?”

“Abby.”

“All right. Is it bad news?”

The frown was still in her eyes. “Don’t know until I see it. Abby just

says there’s a telegram for me at the Belvedere.”

“Shall I have the bags taken up?”

“Well—just wait. The car is parked.”

“Why can’t I come with you?”

“Of course, if you want to. Let’s walk. It’s only a couple of blocks

away.”

Carol walked quickly. The cold was sharp. Therese glanced around her at

the flat, orderly looking town, and remembered Carol’s saying that Salt

Lake City was the cleanest town in the United States. When the Belvedere

was in sight, Carol suddenly looked at her and said, “Abby’s probably

had a brainstorm and decided to fly out and join us.”

In the Belvedere, Therese bought a newspaper while Carol went to the

desk. When Therese turned to her, Carol was just lowering the telegram

after reading it. There was a stunned expression on her face. She came

slowly toward Therese, and it flashed through Therese’s mind that Abby

was dead, that this second message was from Abby’s parents.

“What’s the matter?” Therese asked.

“Nothing. I don’t know yet.” Carol glanced around and slapped the

telegram against her fingers. “I’ve got to make a phone call. It might

take a few minutes.” She looked at her watch.

It was a quarter to two. The hotel clerk said she could probably get New

Jersey in about twenty minutes. Meanwhile, Carol wanted a drink. They

found a bar in the hotel.

“What is it? Is Abby sick?”

Carol smiled. “No. I’ll tell you later.”

“Is it Rindy?”

“No!” Carol finished her brandy.

Therese walked up and down in the lobby while Carol was in the telephone

booth. She saw Carol nod slowly several times, saw her fumble to get a

cigarette lighted, but by the time Therese got there to light it for

her, Carol had it and motioned her away. Carol talked for three or four

minutes, then came out and paid her bill.

“What is it, Carol?”

Carol stood looking out the doorway of the hotel for a moment. “Now we

go to the Temple Square Hotel,” she said.

There they picked up another telegram. Carol opened it and glanced at

it, and tore it up as they walked to the door.

“I don’t think we’ll stay here tonight,” Carol said. “Let’s go back to

the car.”

They went back to the hotel where Carol had gotten the first telegram.

Therese said nothing to her, but she felt something had happened that

meant Carol had to get back East immediately. Carol told the clerk to

cancel their room reservation.

“I’d like to leave a forwarding address in case of any other messages,”

she said. “That’s the Brown Palace, Denver.”

“Right you are.”

“Thank you very much. That’s good for the next week at least.”

In the car, Carol said, “What’s the next town west?”

“West?” Therese looked at the map. “Wendover. This is that stretch. A

hundred and twenty-seven miles.”

“Christ!” Carol said suddenly. She stopped the car completely and took

the map and looked at it.

“What about Denver?” Therese asked.

“I don’t want to go to Denver.” Carol folded the map and started the

car. “Well, we’ll do it anyway. Light me a cigarette, will you, darling?

And watch out for the next place to get something to eat.”

They hadn’t had lunch yet, and it was after three. They had talked about

this stretch last night, the straight road west from Salt Lake City

across the Great Salt Lake Desert. They had plenty of gas, Therese

noticed, and probably the country wasn’t entirely deserted, but Carol

was tired. They had been driving since six that morning. Carol drove

fast. Now and then she pressed the pedal down to the floor and held it

there a long while before letting up. Therese glanced at her

apprehensively. She felt they were running away from something.

“Anything behind us?” Carol asked.

“No.” On the seat between them, Therese could see a piece of the

telegram sticking out of Carol’s handbag. GET THIS. JACOPO. was all she

could read. She remembered Jacopo was the name of the little monkey in

the back of the car.

They came to a gas station café standing all by itself like a wart on

the flat landscape. They might have been the first people who had

stopped there in days. Carol looked at her across the white oilcloth

table, and sank back in the straight chair. Before she could speak, an

old man in an apron came from the kitchen in back, and told them there

was nothing but ham and eggs, so they ordered ham and eggs and coffee.

Then Carol lighted a cigarette and leaned forward, looking down at the

table.

“Do you know what’s up?” she said. “Harge has had a detective following

us since Chicago.”

“A detective? What for?”

“Can’t you guess?” Carol said in almost a whisper.

Therese bit her tongue. Yes, she could guess. Harge had found out they

were traveling together. “Abby told you?”

“Abby found out.” Carol’s fingers slid down her cigarette and the fire

burned her. When she got the cigarette out of her mouth, her lip began

to bleed.

Therese looked around her. The place was empty. “Following us?” she

asked. “_With_ us?”

“He may be in Salt Lake City now. Checking on all the hotels. It’s a

very dirty business, darling. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.” Carol sat back

restlessly in her chair. “Maybe I’d better put you on a train and send

you home.”

“All right—if you think that’s the best idea.”

“You don’t have to be mixed up in this. Let them follow me to Alaska, if

they want to. I don’t know what they’ve got so far. I don’t think much.”

Therese sat rigidly on the edge of her chair. “What’s he doing—making

notes about us?”

The old man was coming back, bringing them glasses of water.

Carol nodded. “Then there’s the dictaphone trick,” she said as the man

went away. “I’m not sure if they’ll go that far. I’m not sure if Harge

would do that.” The corner of her mouth trembled. She stared down at one

spot on the worn white oilcloth. “I wonder if they had time for a

dictaphone in Chicago. It’s the only place we stayed more than ten

hours. I rather hope they did. It’s so ironic. Remember Chicago?”

“Of course.” She tried to keep her voice steady, but it was pretense,

like pretending self-control when something you loved was dead in front

of your eyes. They would have to separate here. “What about Waterloo?”

She thought suddenly of the man in the lobby.

“We got there late. It wouldn’t have been easy.”

“Carol, I saw someone—I’m not sure, but I think I saw him twice.”

“Where?”

“In the lobby in Waterloo the first time. In the morning. Then I thought

I saw the same man in that restaurant with the fireplace.” It was only

last night, the restaurant with the fireplace.

Carol made her tell completely about both times and describe the man

completely. He was hard to describe. But now she racked her brain to

extract the last detail she could, even to the color of his shoes. And

it was odd and rather terrifying, dragging up what was probably a

figment of her imagination and tying it to a situation that was real.

She felt she might even be lying to Carol as she watched Carol’s eyes

grow more and more intense.

“What do you think?” Therese asked.

Carol sighed. “What can anyone think? Just watch out for him the third

time.”

Therese looked down at her plate. It was impossible to eat. “It’s about

Rindy, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She put down her fork without taking the first bite, and reached

for a cigarette. “Harge wants her—in toto. Maybe with this, he thinks he

can do it.”

“Just because we’re traveling together?”

“Yes.”

“I should leave you.”

“Damn him,” Carol said quietly, looking off at a corner of the room.

Therese waited. But what was there to wait for? “I can get a bus

somewhere from here, and then get a train.”

“Do you want to go?” Carol asked.

“Of course, I don’t. I just think it’s best.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Afraid? No.” She felt Carol’s eyes appraise her as severely as at that

moment in Waterloo, when she had told Carol she loved her.

“Then I’m damned if you’ll go. I want you with me.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Yes. Eat your eggs. Stop being silly.” And Carol even smiled a little.

“Shall we go to Reno as we’d planned?”

“Any place.”

“And let’s take our time.”

A few moments later, when they were on the road, Therese said again,

“I’m still not sure it was the same man the second time, you know.”

“I think you’re sure,” Carol said. Then suddenly on the long straight

road, she stopped the car. She sat for a moment in silence, looking down

the road. Then she glanced at Therese. “I can’t go to Reno. That’s a

little too funny. I know a wonderful place just south of Denver.”

“Denver?”

“Denver,” Carol said firmly, and backed the car around.

chapter eighteen

In the morning, they lay in each other’s arms long after the sun had

come into the room. The sun warmed them through the window of the hotel

in the tiny town whose name they hadn’t noticed. There was snow on the

ground outside.

“There’ll be snow in Estes Park,” Carol said to her.

“What’s Estes Park?”

“You’ll like it. Not like Yellowstone. It’s open all year.”

“Carol, you’re not worried, are you?”

Carol pulled her close. “Do I act like I’m worried?”

Therese was not worried. That first panic had vanished. She was

watching, but not as she had watched yesterday afternoon just after Salt

Lake City. Carol wanted her with her, and whatever happened they would

meet it without running. How was it possible to be afraid and in love,

Therese thought. The two things did not go together. How was it possible

to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And

every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they

possessed a miracle.

The road into Estes Park slanted downward. The snowdrifts piled higher

and higher on either side, and then the lights began, strung along the

fir trees, arching over the road. It was a village of brown logged

houses and shops and hotels. There was music, and people walked in the

bright street with their heads lifted up, as if they were enchanted.

“I do like it,” Therese said.

“It doesn’t mean you don’t have to watch out for our little man.”

They brought the portable phonograph up to their room, and played some

records they had just bought and some old ones from New Jersey. Therese

played “Easy Living” a couple of times, and Carol sat across the room

watching her, sitting on the arm of a chair with her arms folded.

“What a rotten time I give you, don’t I?”

“Oh, Carol—” Therese tried to smile. It was only a mood of Carol’s, only

a moment. But it made Therese feel helpless.

Carol looked around at the window. “And why didn’t we go to Europe in

the first place? Switzerland. Or fly out here at least.”

“I wouldn’t have liked that at all.” Therese looked at the yellow suède

shirt that Carol had bought for her, that hung over the back of a chair.

Carol had sent Rindy a green one. She had bought some silver earrings, a

couple of books, and a bottle of Triple Sec. Half an hour ago, they had

been happy, walking through the streets together. “It’s that last rye

you got downstairs,” Therese said. “Rye depresses you.”

“Does it?”

“Worse than brandy.”

“I’m going to take you to the nicest place I know this side of Sun

Valley,” she said.

“What’s the matter with Sun Valley?” She knew Carol liked skiing.

“Sun Valley just isn’t the place,” Carol said mysteriously. “This place

is near Colorado Springs.”

In Denver, Carol stopped and sold her diamond engagement ring at a

jeweler’s. Therese felt a little disturbed by it, but Carol said the

ring meant nothing to her and she loathed diamonds anyway. And it was

quicker than wiring her bank for money. Carol wanted to stop at a hotel

a few miles out from Colorado Springs, where she had been before, but

she changed her mind almost as soon as they got there. It was too much

like a resort, she said, so they went to a hotel that backed on the town

and faced the mountains.

Their room was long from the door to the square floor-length windows

that overlooked a garden, and beyond, the red and white mountains. There

were touches of white in the garden, odd little pyramids of stone, a

white bench or a chair, and the garden looked foolish compared to the

magnificent land that surrounded it, the flat sweep that rose up into

mountains upon mountains, filling the horizon like half a world. The

room had blond furniture about the color of Carol’s hair, and there was

a bookcase as smooth as she could want it, with some good books amid the

bad ones, and Therese knew she would never read any of them while they

were here. A painting of a woman in a large black hat and a red scarf

hung above the bookcase, and on the wall near the door was spread a pelt

of brown leather, not a real pelt but something someone had cut out of a

piece of brown suède. Above it was a tin lantern with a candle. Carol

also rented the room next to them, which had a connecting door, though

they did not use it even to put their suitcases in. They planned to stay

a week, or longer if they liked it.

On the morning of the second day, Therese came back from a tour of

inspection of the hotel grounds and found Carol stooped by the bed

table. Carol only glanced at her, and went to the dressing table and

looked under that, and then to the long built-in closet behind the wall

panel.

“That’s that,” Carol said. “Now let’s forget it.”

Therese knew what she was looking for. “I hadn’t thought of it,” she

said. “I feel like we’ve lost him.”

“Except that he’s probably gotten to Denver by now,” Carol said calmly.

She smiled, but she twisted her mouth a little. “And he’ll probably drop

in down here.”

It was so, of course. There was even the remotest chance that the

detective had seen them when they drove back through Salt Lake City, and

followed them. If he didn’t find them in Salt Lake City, he might

inquire at the hotels. She knew that was why Carol had left the Denver

address, in fact, because they hadn’t intended to go to Denver. Therese

flung herself in the armchair, and looked at Carol. Carol took the

trouble to search for a dictaphone, but her attitude was arrogant. She

had even invited trouble by coming here. And the explanation, the

resolution of those contradictory facts was nowhere but in Carol

herself, unresolved, in her slow, restless step as she walked to the

door now and turned, in the nonchalant lift of her head, and in the

nervous line of her eyebrows that registered irritation in one second

and in the next were serene. Therese looked at the big room, up at the

high ceiling, at the large square, plain bed, the room that for all its

modernness had a curiously old-fashioned, ample air about it that she

associated with the American West, like the oversized Western saddles

she had seen in the riding stable downstairs. A kind of cleanness, as

well. Yet Carol looked for a dictaphone. Therese watched her, walking

back toward her, still in her pajamas and robe. She had an impulse to go

to Carol, crush her in her arms, pull her down on the bed, and the fact

that she didn’t now made her tense and alert, filled her with a

repressed but reckless exhilaration.

Carol blew her smoke up into the air. “I don’t give a damn. I hope the

papers find out about it and rub Harge’s nose in his own mess. I hope he

wastes fifty thousand dollars. Do you want to take that trip that

bankrupts the English language this afternoon? Did you ask Mrs. French

yet?”

They had met Mrs. French last night in the game room of the hotel. She

hadn’t a car, and Carol had asked her if she would like to take a drive

with them today.

“I asked her,” Therese said. “She said she’d be ready right after

lunch.”

“Wear your suède shirt.” Carol took Therese’s face in her hands, pressed

her cheeks, and kissed her. “Put it on now.”

It was a six- or seven-hour trip to the Cripple Creek gold mine, over

Ute Pass and down a mountain. Mrs. French went with them, talking the

whole time. She was a woman of about seventy, with a Maryland accent and

a hearing aid, ready to get out of the car and climb anywhere, though

she had to be helped every foot of the way. Therese felt very anxious

about her, though she actually disliked even touching her. She felt if

Mrs. French fell, she would break in a million pieces. Carol and Mrs.

French talked about the State of Washington, which Mrs. French knew

well, since she had lived there for the past few years with one of her

sons. Carol asked a few questions, and Mrs. French told her all about

her ten years of traveling since her husband’s death, and about her two

sons; the one in Washington and the one in Hawaii who worked for a

pineapple company. And obviously Mrs. French adored Carol, and they were

going to see a lot more of Mrs. French. It was nearly eleven when they

got back to the hotel. Carol asked Mrs. French to have supper in the bar

with them, but Mrs. French said she was too tired for anything but her

shredded wheat and hot milk, which she would have in her room.

“I’m glad,” Therese said when she had gone. “I’d rather be alone with

you.”

“Really, Miss Belivet? Whatever do you mean?” Carol asked as she opened

the door into the bar. “You’d better sit down and tell me all about

that.”

But they were not alone in the bar more than five minutes. Two men, one

named Dave and the other whose name Therese at least did not know and

did not care to, came over and asked to join them. They were the two who

had come over last night in the game room and asked Carol and her to

play gin rummy. Carol had declined last night. Now she said, “Of course,

sit down.” Carol and Dave began a conversation that sounded very

interesting, but Therese was seated so that she couldn’t participate

very well. And the man next to Therese wanted to talk about something

else, a horseback trip he had just made around Steamboat Springs. After

supper, Therese waited for a sign from Carol to leave, but Carol was

still deep in conversation. Therese had read about that special pleasure

people got from the fact that someone they loved was attractive in the

eyes of other people, too. She simply didn’t have it. Carol looked at

her every now and then and gave her a wink. So Therese sat there for an

hour and a half, and managed to be polite, because she knew Carol wanted

her to be.

The people who joined them in the bar and sometimes in the dining room

did not annoy her so much as Mrs. French, who went with them somewhere

almost every day in the car. Then an angry resentment that Therese was

actually ashamed of would rise in her because someone was preventing her

from being alone with Carol.

“Darling, did you ever think you’ll be seventy-one, too, some day?”

“No,” Therese said.

But there were other days when they drove out into the mountains alone,

taking any road they saw. Once they came upon a little town they liked

and spent the night there, without pajamas or toothbrushes, without past

or future, and the night became another of those islands in time,

suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute.

Or perhaps it was nothing but happiness, Therese thought, a complete

happiness that must be rare enough, so rare that very few people ever

knew it. But if it was merely happiness, then it had gone beyond the

ordinary bounds and become something else, become a kind of excessive

pressure, so that the weight of a coffee cup in her hand, the speed of a

cat crossing the garden below, the silent crash of two clouds seemed

almost more than she could bear. And just as she had not understood a

month ago the phenomenon of sudden happiness, she did not understand her

state now, which seemed an aftermath. It was more often painful than

pleasant, and consequently she was afraid she had some grave and unique

flaw. She was as afraid sometimes as if she were walking about with a

broken spine. If she ever had an impulse to tell Carol, the words

dissolved before she began, in fear and in her usual mistrust of her own

reactions, the anxiety that her reactions were like no one else’s, and

that therefore not even Carol could understand them.

In the mornings, they generally drove out somewhere in the mountains and

left the car so they could climb up a hill. They drove aimlessly over

the zigzagging roads that were like white chalk lines connecting

mountain point to mountain point. From a distance, one could see clouds

lying about the projecting peaks, so it seemed they flew along in space,

a little closer to heaven than to earth. Therese’s favorite spot was on

the highway above Cripple Creek, where the road clung suddenly to the

rim of a gigantic depression. Hundreds of feet below, lay the tiny

disorder of the abandoned mining town. There the eye and the brain

played tricks with each other, for it was impossible to keep a steady

concept of the proportion below, impossible to compare it on any human

scale. Her own hand held up in front of her could look Lilliputian or

curiously huge. And the town occupied only a fraction of the great scoop

in the earth, like a single experience, a single commonplace event, set

in a certain immeasurable territory of the mind. The eye, swimming in

space, returned to rest on the spot that looked like a box of matches

run over by a car, the man-made confusion of the little town.

Always Therese looked for the man with the creases on either side of his

mouth, but Carol never did. Carol had not even mentioned him since their

second day at Colorado Springs, and now ten days had passed. Because the

restaurant of the hotel was famous, new people came every evening to the

big dining room, and Therese always glanced about, not actually

expecting to see him, but as a kind of precaution that had become a

habit. But Carol paid no attention to anyone except Walter, their

waiter, who always came up to ask what kind of cocktail they wanted that

evening. Many people looked at Carol, however, because she was generally

the most attractive woman in the room. And Therese was so delighted to

be with her, so proud of her, she looked at no one else but Carol. Then

as she read the menu, Carol would slowly press Therese’s foot under the

table to make her smile.

“What do you think about Iceland in the summer?” Carol might ask,

because they made a point of talking about travel, if there was a

silence when they first sat down.

“Must you pick such cold places? When’ll I ever work?”

“Don’t be dismal. Shall we invite Mrs. French? Think she’d mind our

holding hands?”

One morning, there were three letters—from Rindy, Abby, and Dannie. It

was Carol’s second letter from Abby, who had had no further news before,

and Therese noticed Carol opened Rindy’s letter first. Dannie wrote that

he was still waiting to hear the outcome of two interviews about jobs

and reported that Phil said Harkevy was going to do the sets for the

English play called _The Faint Heart_ in March.

“Listen to this,” Carol said. “‘Have you seen any armadillos in

Colorado? Can you send me one, because the chameleon got lost. Daddy and

I looked everywhere in the house for him. But if you send me the

armadillo it will be big enough not to get lost.’ New paragraph. ‘I got

90 in spelling but only 70 in arithmetic. I hate it. I hate the teacher.

Well I must be closing. Love to you and to Abby. Rindy. XX. P.S. Thank

you very much for the leather shirt. Daddy bought me a two-wheel bike

regular size that he said I was too small for Christmas. I am not too

small. It is a beautiful bike.’ Period. What’s the use? Harge can always

top me.” Carol put the letter down and picked up Abby’s.

“Why did Rindy say ‘Love to you and to Abby’?” Therese asked. “Does she

think you’re with Abby?”

“No.” Carol’s wooden letter opener had stopped halfway through Abby’s

envelope. “I suppose she thinks I write to her,” she said, and finished

slitting the envelope.

“I mean, Harge wouldn’t have told her that, would he?”

“No, darling,” Carol said preoccupiedly, reading Abby’s letter.

Therese got up and crossed the room, and stood by the window looking out

at the mountains. She should write to Harkevy this afternoon, she

thought, and ask him if there was a chance of an assistant’s job with

his group in March. She began composing the letter in her head. The

mountains looked back at her like majestic red lions, staring down their

noses. Twice she heard Carol laugh, but she did not read any of the

letter aloud to her.

“No news?” Therese asked when she was finished.

“No news.”

Carol taught her to drive on the roads around the foot of the mountains,

where a car almost never passed. Therese learned faster than she had

ever learned anything before, and after a couple of days, Carol let her

drive in Colorado Springs. In Denver, she took a test and got a license.

Carol said she could do half the driving back to New York, if she wanted

to.

He was sitting one evening at the dinner hour at a table by himself to

the left of Carol and behind her. Therese choked on nothing, and put her

fork down. Her heart began to beat as if it would hammer its way out of

her chest. How had she gotten halfway through the meal without seeing

him? She lifted her eyes to Carol’s face and saw Carol watching her,

reading her with the gray eyes that were not quite so calm as a moment

ago. Carol had stopped in the middle of saying something.

“Have a cigarette,” Carol said, offering her one, lighting it for her.

“He doesn’t know that you can recognize him, does he?”

“No.”

“Well, don’t let him find out.” Carol smiled at her, lighted her own

cigarette, and looked away in the opposite direction from the detective.

“Just take it easy,” Carol added in the same tone.

It was easy to say, easy to have thought she could look at him when she

saw him next, but what was the use of trying when it was like being

struck in the face with a cannon ball?

“No baked Alaska tonight?” Carol said, looking at the menu. “That breaks

my heart. You know what we’re going to have?” She called to the waiter.

“Walter!”

Walter came smiling, ardent to serve them, just as he did every evening.

“Yes, madame.”

“Two Remy Martins, please, Walter,” Carol told him.

The brandy helped very little, if at all. The detective did not once

look at them. He was reading a book that he had propped up on the metal

napkin holder, and even now Therese felt a doubt as strong as in the

café outside Salt Lake City, an uncertainty that was somehow more

horrible than the positive knowledge would be that he was the detective.

“Do we have to go past him, Carol?” Therese asked. There was a door in

back of her, into the bar.

“Yes. That’s the way we go out.” Carol’s eyebrows lifted with her smile,

exactly as on any other night. “He can’t do anything to us. Do you

expect him to pull a gun?”

Therese followed her, passed within twelve inches of the man whose head

was lowered toward his book. Ahead of her she saw Carol’s figure bend

gracefully as she greeted Mrs. French, who was sitting alone at a table.

“Why didn’t you come and join us?” Carol said, and Therese remembered

that the two women Mrs. French usually sat with had left today.

Carol even stood there a few moments talking with Mrs. French, and

Therese marveled at her but she couldn’t stand there herself, and went

on, to wait for Carol by the elevators.

Upstairs, Carol found the little instrument fastened up in a corner

under the bed table. Carol got the scissors and using both hands cut

through the wire that disappeared under the carpet.

“Did the hotel people let him in here, do you think?” Therese asked,

horrified.

“He probably had a key to fit.” Carol yanked the thing loose from the

table and dropped it on the carpet, a little black box with a trail of

wire. “Look at it, like a rat,” she said. “A portrait of Harge.” Her

face had flushed suddenly.

“Where does it go to?”

“To some room where it’s recorded. Probably across the hall. _Bless_

these fancy wall to wall carpets!”

Carol kicked the dictaphone toward the center of the room.

Therese looked at the little rectangular box, and thought of it drinking

up their words last night. “I wonder how long it’s been there?”

“How long do you think he could have been here without your seeing him?”

“Yesterday at the worst.” But even as she said it, she knew she could be

wrong. She couldn’t have seen every face in the hotel.

And Carol was shaking her head. “Would it take him nearly two weeks to

trace us from Salt Lake City to here? No, he just decided to have dinner

with us tonight.” Carol turned from the bookshelf with a glass of brandy

in her hand. The flush had left her face. Now she even smiled a little

at Therese. “Clumsy fellow, isn’t he?” She sat down on the bed, swung a

pillow behind her and leaned back. “Well, we’ve been here just about

long enough, haven’t we?”

“When do you want to go?”

“Maybe tomorrow. We’ll get ourselves packed in the morning and take off

after lunch. What do you think?”

Later, they went down to the car and took a drive, westward into the

darkness. We shall not go farther west, Therese thought. She could not

stamp out the panic that danced in the very core of her, that she felt

due to something gone before, something that had happened long ago, not

now, not this. She was uneasy, but Carol was not. Carol was not merely

pretending coolness, she really was not afraid. Carol said, what could

he do, after all, but she simply didn’t want to be spied upon.

“One other thing,” Carol said. “Try and find out what kind of car he’s

in.”

That night, talking over the road map about their route tomorrow,

talking as matter of factly as a couple of strangers, Therese thought

surely tonight would not be like last night. But when they kissed good

night in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response

in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials which put

together inevitably created desire.

chapter nineteen

Therese could not find out what kind of car he had, because the cars

were locked in separate garages, and though she had a view of the

garages from the sunroom, she did not see him come out that morning.

Neither did they see him at lunchtime.

Mrs. French insisted that they come into her room for a cordial, when

she heard they were leaving. “You must have a stirrup cup,” Mrs. French

said to Carol. “Why I haven’t even got your address yet!”

Therese remembered that they had promised to exchange flower bulbs. She

remembered a long conversation in the car one day about bulbs that had

cemented their friendship. Carol was incredibly patient to the last. One

would never have guessed, seeing Carol sitting on Mrs. French’s sofa

with the little glass Mrs. French kept filling, that she was in a hurry

to get away. Mrs. French kissed them both on the cheek when they said

good-by.

From Denver, they took a highway northward toward Wyoming. They stopped

for coffee at the kind of place they always liked, an ordinary

restaurant with a counter and a juke box. They put nickels into the juke

box, but it was not the same as before. Therese knew it would not be the

same for the rest of the trip, though Carol talked of going to

Washington even yet, and perhaps up into Canada. Therese could feel that

Carol’s goal was New York.

They spent the first night in a tourist camp that was built like a

circle of tepees. While they were undressing, Carol looked up at the

ceiling where the tepee poles came to a point, and said boredly, “The

trouble some idiots go to,” and for some reason it struck Therese as

hysterically funny. She laughed until Carol got tired of it and

threatened to make her drink a tumbler of brandy, if she didn’t stop.

And Therese was still smiling, standing by the window with a brandy in

her hand, waiting for Carol to come out of the shower, when she saw a

car drive up beside the large office tepee and stop. After a moment, the

man who had gone into the office came out and looked around in the dark

area within the circle of tepees, and it was his prowling step that

arrested her attention. She was suddenly sure without seeing his face or

even his figure very clearly that he was the detective.

“Carol!” she called.

Carol pushed the shower curtain aside and glanced at her and stopped

drying herself. “Is it—”

“I don’t know, but I think so,” she said, and saw the anger spread

slowly over Carol’s face and stiffen it, and it shocked Therese to

sobriety, as if she had just realized an insult, to herself or to Carol.

“Chr-rist!” Carol said, and flung the towel at the floor. She drew on

her robe and tied the belt of it. “Well—what’s he doing?”

“I think he’s stopping here.” Therese stood back at the edge of the

window. “His car’s still in front of the office, anyway. If we turn out

the light, I’ll be able to see a lot better.”

Carol groaned. “Oh, don’t. I couldn’t. It bores me,” she said with the

utmost boredom and disgust.

And Therese smiled, twistedly, and checked another insane impulse to

laugh, because Carol would have been furious if she had laughed. Then

she saw the car roll under the garage door of a tepee across the circle.

“Yes, he’s stopping here. It’s a black two-door sedan.”

Carol sat down on the bed with a sigh. She smiled at Therese, a quick

smile of fatigue and boredom, of resignation and helplessness and anger.

“Take your shower. And then get dressed again.”

“But I don’t know if it’s him at all.”

“That’s just the hell of it, darling.”

Therese took a shower and lay down in her clothes beside Carol. Carol

had turned out the light. She was smoking cigarettes in the dark, and

said nothing to her until finally she touched her arm and said, “Let’s

go.” It was three thirty when they drove out of the tourist camp. They

had paid their bill in advance. There was no light anywhere, and unless

the detective was watching them with his light out, no one had observed

them.

“What do you want to do, sleep again somewhere?” Carol asked her.

“No. Do you?”

“No. Let’s see how much distance we can make.” She pressed the pedal to

the floor. The road was clear and smooth as far as the headlights swept.

As dawn was breaking, a highway patrolman stopped them for speeding, and

Carol had to pay a twenty-two dollar fine in a town called Central City,

Nebraska. They lost thirty miles by having to follow the patrolman back

to the little town, but Carol went through with it without a word,

unlike herself, unlike the time she had argued and cajoled the patrolman

out of an arrest for speeding, and a New Jersey speed cop at that.

“Irritating,” Carol said when they got back into the car, and that was

all she said, for hours.

Therese offered to drive, but Carol said she wanted to. And the flat

Nebraska prairie spread out before them, yellow with wheat stubble,

brown-splotched with bare earth and stone, deceptively warm looking in

the white winter sun. Because they went a little slower now, Therese had

a panicky sensation of not moving at all, as if the earth drifted under

them and they stood still. She watched the road behind them for another

patrol car, for the detective’s car, and for the nameless, shapeless

thing she felt pursuing them from Colorado Springs. She watched the land

and the sky for the meaningless events that her mind insisted on

attaching significance to, the buzzard that banked slowly in the sky,

the direction of a tangle of weeds that bounced over a rutted field

before the wind, and whether a chimney had smoke or not. Around eight

o’clock, an irresistible sleepiness weighted her eyelids and clouded her

head, so she felt scarcely any surprise when she saw a car behind them

like the car she watched for, a two-door sedan of dark color.

“There’s a car like that behind us,” she said. “It’s got a yellow

license plate.”

Carol said nothing for a minute, but she glanced in the mirror and blew

her breath out through pursed lips. “I doubt it. If it is, he’s a better

man than I thought.” She was slowing down. “If I let him pass, do you

think you can recognize him?”

“Yes.” Couldn’t she recognize the blurriest glimpse of him by now?

Carol slowed almost to a stop and took the road map and laid it across

the wheel and looked at it. The other car approached, and it was him

inside, and went by.

“Yes,” Therese said. The man hadn’t glanced at her.

Carol pressed the gas pedal down. “You’re sure, are you?”

“Positive.” Therese watched the speedometer go up to sixty-five and

over. “What are you going to do?”

“Speak to him.”

Carol slacked her speed as they closed the distance. They drew alongside

of the detective’s car, and he turned to look at them, the wide straight

mouth unchanging, the eyes like round gray dots, expressionless as the

mouth. Carol waved her hand downward. The man’s car slowed.

“Roll your window down,” Carol said to Therese.

The detective’s car pulled over into the sandy shoulder of the road and

stopped.

Carol stopped her car with its rear wheels on the highway, and spoke

across Therese. “Do you like our company or what?” she asked.

The man got out of his car and closed his door. Some three yards of

ground separated the cars, and the detective crossed half of it and

stood. His dead little eyes had darkish rims around their gray irises,

like a doll’s blank and steady eyes. He was not young. His face looked

worn by the weathers he had driven it through, and the shadow of his

beard deepened the bent creases on either side of his mouth.

“I’m doing my job, Mrs. Aird,” he said.

“That’s pretty obvious. It’s nasty work, isn’t it?”

The detective tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail and lighted it in the

gusty wind with a slowness that suggested a stage performance. “At least

it’s nearly over.”

“Then why don’t you leave us alone,” Carol said, her voice as tense as

the arm that supported her on the steering wheel.

“Because I have orders to follow you on this trip. But if you’re going

back to New York, I won’t have to any more. I advise you to go back,

Mrs. Aird. Are you going back now?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Because I’ve got some information—information that I’d say was in your

interest to go back and take care of.”

“Thanks,” Carol said cynically. “Thanks so much for telling me. It’s not

in my plans to go back just yet. But I can give you my itinerary, so you

can leave us alone and catch up on your sleep.”

The detective looked at her with a false and meaningless smile, not like

a person at all, but like a machine wound up and set on a course. “I

think you’ll go back to New York. I’m giving you sound advice. Your

child is at stake. I suppose you know that, don’t you?”

“My child is my property!”

A crease twitched in his cheek. “A human being is not property, Mrs.

Aird.”

Carol raised her voice. “Are you going to tag along the rest of the

way?”

“Are you going back to New York?”

“No.”

“I think you will,” the detective said, and he turned away slowly toward

his car.

Carol stepped on the starter. She reached for Therese’s hand and

squeezed it for a moment in reassurance, and then the car shot forward.

Therese sat up with her elbows on her knees and her hands pressed to her

forehead, yielding to a shame and shock she had never known before, that

she had repressed before the detective.

“Carol!”

Carol was crying, silently. Therese looked at the downward curve of her

lips that was not like Carol at all, but rather like a small girl’s

twisted grimace of crying. She stared incredulously at the tear that

rolled over Carol’s cheekbone.

“Get me a cigarette,” Carol said.

When Therese handed it to her, lighted, she had wiped the tear away, and

it was over. Carol drove for a minute, slowly, smoking the cigarette.

“Crawl in the back and get the gun,” Carol said.

Therese did not move for a moment.

Carol glanced at her. “Will you?”

Therese slid agilely in her slacks over the back seat, and dragged the

navy-blue suitcase onto the seat. She opened the clasps and got out the

sweater with the gun.

“Just hand it to me,” Carol said calmly. “I want it in the side pocket.”

She reached her hand over her shoulder, and Therese put the white handle

of the gun into it, and crawled back into the front seat.

The detective was still following them, half a mile behind them, back of

the horse and farm wagon that had turned into the highway from a dirt

road. Carol held Therese’s hand and drove with her left hand. Therese

looked down at the faintly freckled fingers that dug their strong cool

tips into her palm.

“I’m going to talk to him again,” Carol said, and pressed the gas pedal

down steadily. “If you want to get out, I’ll put you off at the next gas

station or something and come back for you.”

“I don’t want to leave you,” Therese said. Carol was going to demand the

detective’s records, and Therese had a vision of Carol hurt, of his

pulling a gun with an expert’s oily speed and firing it before Carol

could even pull the trigger. But those things didn’t happen, wouldn’t

happen, she thought, and she set her teeth. She kneaded Carol’s hand in

her fingers.

“All right. And don’t worry. I just want to talk to him.” She swung the

car suddenly into a smaller road off the highway to the left. The road

went up between sloping fields, and turned and went through woods. Carol

drove fast, though the road was bad. “He’s coming on, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

There was one farmhouse set in the rolling hills, and then nothing but

scrubby, rocky land and the road that kept disappearing around the

curves before them. Where the road clung to a sloping hill, Carol went

round a curve and stopped the car carelessly, half in the road.

She reached for the side pocket and pulled the gun out. She opened

something on it, and Therese saw the bullets inside. Then Carol looked

through the windshield, and let her hands with the gun fall in her lap.

“I’d better not, better not,” she said quickly, and dropped the gun back

in the side pocket. Then she pulled the car up, and straightened it by

the side of the hill. “Stay in the car,” she said to Therese, and got

out.

Therese heard the detective’s car. Carol walked slowly toward the sound,

and then the detective’s car came around the curve, not fast, but his

brakes shrieked, and Carol stepped to the side of the road. Therese

opened the door slightly, and leaned on the window sill.

The man got out of his car. “Now what?” he said, raising his voice in

the wind.

“What do you think?” Carol came a little closer to him. “I’d like

everything you’ve got about me—dictaphone tapes and whatever.”

The detective’s brows hardly rose over the pale dots of his eyes. He

leaned against the front fender of his car, smirking with his wide thin

mouth. He glanced at Therese and back at Carol. “Everything’s sent away.

I haven’t a thing but a few notes. About times and places.”

“All right, I’d like to have them.”

“You mean, you want to buy them?”

“I didn’t say that, I said I’d like to have them. Do you prefer to sell

them?”

“I’m not one you can buy off,” he said.

“What’re you doing this for anyway, if not money?” Carol asked

impatiently. “Why not make a little more? What’ll you take for what

you’ve got?”

He folded his arms. “I told you everything’s sent away. You’d be wasting

your money.”

“I don’t think you mailed the dictaphone records yet from Colorado

Springs,” Carol said.

“No?” he asked sarcastically.

“No. I’ll give you whatever you ask for them.”

He looked Carol up and down, glanced at Therese, and again his mouth

widened.

“Get them—tapes, records or whatever they are,” Carol said, and the man

moved.

He walked around his car to the luggage compartment, and Therese heard

his keys jingle as he opened it. Therese got out of the car, unable to

sit there any longer. She walked to within a few feet of Carol and

stopped. The detective was reaching for something in a big suitcase.

When he straightened up, the raised lid of the compartment knocked his

hat off. He stepped on the brim to hold it from the wind. He had

something in one hand now, too small to see.

“There’s two,” he said. “I guess they’re worth five hundred. They’d be

worth more if there weren’t more of them in New York.”

“You’re a fine salesman. I don’t believe you,” Carol said.

“Why? They’re in a hurry for them in New York.” He picked up his hat,

and closed the luggage compartment. “But they’ve got enough now. I told

you you’d better go back to New York, Mrs. Aird.” He ground his

cigarette out in the dirt, twisting his toe in front of him. “Are you

going back to New York now?”

“I don’t change my mind,” Carol said.

The detective shrugged. “I’m not on any side. The sooner you go back to

New York, the sooner we can call it quits.”

“We can call it quits right now. After you give me those, you can take

off and keep going in the same direction.”

The detective had slowly extended his hand in a fist, like the fist in a

guessing game in which there might be nothing. “Are you willing to give

me five hundred for these?” he asked.

Carol looked at his hand, then opened her shoulder strap bag. She took

out her billfold, and then her checkbook.

“I prefer cash,” he said.

“I haven’t got it.”

He shrugged again. “All right, I’ll take a check.”

Carol wrote it, resting it on the fender of his car.

Now as he bent over, watching Carol, Therese could see the little black

object in his hand. Therese came closer. The man was spelling his name.

When Carol gave him the check, he dropped the two little boxes in her

hand.

“How long have you been collecting them?” Carol asked.

“Play them and see.”

“I didn’t come out here to joke!” Carol said, and her voice broke.

He smiled, folding the check. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. What you’ve

gotten from me isn’t all of it. There’s plenty in New York.”

Carol fastened her bag, and turned toward her car, not even looking at

Therese. Then she stopped and faced the detective again. “If they’ve got

all they want, you can knock off now, can’t you? Have I got your promise

to do that?”

He was standing with his hand on his car door, watching her. “I’m still

on the job, Mrs. Aird—still working for my office. Unless you want to

catch a plane for home now. Or for some other place. Give me the slip.

I’ll have to tell my office something—not having the last few days at

Colorado Springs—something more exciting than this.”

“Oh, let them invent something exciting!”

The detective’s smile showed a little of his teeth. He got back into his

car. He shoved his gear, put his head out to see behind him, and backed

the car in a quick turn. He drove off toward the highway.

The sound of his motor faded fast. Carol walked slowly toward the car,

got in and sat staring through the windshield at the dry rise of earth a

few yards ahead. Her face was as blank as if she had fainted.

Therese was beside her. She put her arm around Carol’s shoulder. She

squeezed the cloth shoulder of the coat, and felt as useless as any

stranger.

“Oh, I think it’s mostly bluff,” Carol said suddenly.

But it had made Carol’s face gray, had taken the energy out of her

voice.

Carol opened her hand and looked at the two little round boxes. “Here’s

as good a place as any.” She got out of the car, and Therese followed

her. Carol opened a box and took out the coil of tape that looked like

celluloid. “Tiny, isn’t it. I suppose it burns. Let’s burn it.”

Therese struck the match in the shelter of the car. The tape burned

fast, and Therese dropped it on the ground, and then the wind blew it

out. Carol said not to bother, they could throw both of them in a river.

Carol was sitting in the car, smoking a cigarette.

“What time is it?” Carol asked.

“Twenty to twelve.” She got back in the car, and Carol started

immediately, back down the road toward the highway.

“I’m going to call Abby in Omaha, and then my lawyer.”

Therese looked at the road map. Omaha was the next big town, if they

made a slight turn south. Carol looked tired, and Therese felt her

anger, still unappeased, in the silence she kept. The car jolted over a

rut, and Therese heard the bump and clink of the can of beer that rolled

somewhere under the front seat, the beer they had not been able to open

that first day. She was hungry, had been sickly hungry for hours.

“How about my driving?”

“All right,” Carol said tiredly, relaxing as if she surrendered. She

slowed the car quickly.

Therese slid across her, under the wheel. “And how about stopping for a

breakfast?”

“I couldn’t eat.”

“Or a drink.”

“Let’s get it in Omaha.”

Therese sent the speedometer up to sixty-five, and held it just under

seventy. It was Highway 30. Then two seventy-five into Omaha, and the

road was not first class. “You don’t believe him about dictaphone

records in New York, do you?”

“Don’t talk about it!—I’m sick of it!”

Therese squeezed the wheel, then deliberately relaxed. She sensed a

tremendous sorrow hanging over them, ahead of them, that was just

beginning to reveal the edge of itself, that they were driving into. She

remembered the detective’s face and the barely legible expression that

she realized now was malice. It was malice she had seen in his smile,

even as he said he was on no side, and she could feel in him a desire

that was actually personal to separate them, because he knew they were

together. She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that

the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and

Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster

between them, with each of them caught in a fist.

“I’m thinking of that check,” Carol said.

It fell like another stone inside her. “Do you think they’re going over

the house?” Therese asked.

“Possibly. Just possibly.”

“I don’t think they’d find it. It’s way under the runner.” But there was

the letter in the book. A curious pride lifted her spirit for an

instant, and vanished. It was a beautiful letter, and she would rather

they found it than the check, though as to incrimination they would

probably have the same weight, and they would make the one as dirty as

the other. The letter she had never given, and the check she had never

cashed. It was more likely they would find the letter, certainly.

Therese could not bring herself to tell Carol of the letter, whether

from plain cowardice or a desire to spare Carol any more now, she didn’t

know. She saw a bridge ahead. “There’s a river,” she said. “How about

here?”

“Good enough.” Carol handed her the little boxes. She had put the

half-burned tape back in its box.

Therese got out and flung them over the metal rail, and did not watch.

She looked at the young man in overalls walking onto the bridge from the

other side, hating the senseless antagonism in herself against him.

Carol telephoned from a hotel in Omaha. Abby was not at home, and Carol

left a message that she would call at six o’clock that evening, when

Abby was expected. Carol said it was of no use to call her lawyer now,

because he would be out to lunch until after two by their time. Carol

wanted to wash up, and then have a drink.

They had Old Fashioneds in the bar of the hotel, in complete silence.

Therese asked for a second when Carol did, but Carol said she should eat

something instead. The waiter told Carol that food was not served in the

bar.

“She wants something to eat,” Carol said firmly.

“The dining room is across the lobby, madame, and there’s a coffee

shop—”

“Carol, I can wait,” Therese said.

“Will you please bring me the menu? She prefers to eat here,” Carol said

with a glance at the waiter.

The waiter hesitated, then said, “Yes, madame,” and went to get the

menu.

While Therese ate scrambled eggs and sausage, Carol had her third drink.

Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, “Darling, can I ask you

to forgive me?”

The tone hurt Therese more than the question. “I love you, Carol.”

“But do you see what it means?”

“Yes.” But that moment of defeat in the car, she thought, that had been

only a moment, as this time now was only a situation. “I don’t see why

it should mean this forever. I don’t see how this can destroy anything,”

she said earnestly.

Carol took her hand down from her face and sat back, and now in spite of

the tiredness she looked as Therese always thought of her—the eyes that

could be tender and hard at once as they tested her, the intelligent red

lips strong and soft, though the upper lip trembled the least bit now.

“Do you?” Therese asked, and she realized suddenly it was a question as

big as the one Carol had asked her without words in the room in

Waterloo. In fact, the same question.

“No. I think you’re right,” Carol said. “You make me realize it.”

Carol went to telephone. It was three o’clock. Therese got the check,

then sat there waiting, wondering when it was going to be over, whether

the reassuring word would come from Carol’s lawyer or from Abby, or

whether it was going to get worse before it got better. Carol was gone

about half an hour.

“My lawyer hasn’t heard anything,” she said. “And I didn’t tell him

anything. I can’t. I’ll have to write it.”

“I thought you would.”

“Oh, you did,” Carol said with her first smile that day. “What do you

say we get a room here? I don’t feel like traveling any more.”

Carol had her lunch sent up to their room. They both lay down to take a

nap, but when Therese awakened at a quarter to five, Carol was gone.

Therese glanced around the room, noticing Carol’s black gloves on the

dressing table, and her moccasins side by side near the armchair.

Therese sighed, tremulously, unrefreshed by her sleep. She opened the

window and looked down. It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn’t

remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and

people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either

side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump. She looked off at the

drab little skyline of gray buildings and closed her eyes on it. Then

she turned around and Carol was in the room, standing by the door,

watching her.

“Where have you been?” Therese asked.

“Writing that damned letter.”

Carol crossed the room and caught Therese in her arms. Therese felt

Carol’s nails through the back of her jacket.

When Carol went to the telephone, Therese left the room and wandered

down the hall toward the elevators. She went down to the lobby and sat

there reading an article on weevils in the _Corngrower’s Gazette_, and

wondered if Abby knew all that about corn weevils. She watched the

clock, and after twenty-five minutes went upstairs again.

Carol was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette. Therese waited for her

to speak.

“Darling, I’ve got to go to New York,” Carol said.

Therese had been sure of that. She came to the foot of the bed. “What

else did Abby say?”

“She saw the fellow named Bob Haversham again.” Carol raised herself on

her elbow. “But he certainly doesn’t know as much as I do at this point.

Nobody seems to know anything, except that trouble’s brewing. Nothing

much can happen until I get there. But I’ve got to be there.”

“Of course.” Bob Haversham was the friend of Abby’s who worked in

Harge’s firm in Newark, not a close friend either of Abby’s or Harge’s,

just a link, a slim link between the two of them, the one person who

might know something of what Harge was doing, if he could recognize a

detective, or overhear part of a telephone call, in Harge’s office. It

was worth almost nothing, Therese felt.

“Abby’s going to get the check,” Carol said, sitting up on the bed,

reaching for her moccasins.

“Has she got a key?”

“I wish she had. She’s got to get it from Florence. But that’ll be all

right. I told her to tell Florence I wanted a couple of things sent to

me.”

“Can you tell her to get a letter, too? I left a letter to you in a book

in my room. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t know you were

going to have Abby go there.”

Carol gave her a frowning glance. “Anything else?”

“No. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

Carol sighed, and stood up. “Oh, let’s not worry any more. I doubt if

they’ll bother about the house, but I’ll tell Abby about the letter

anyway. Where is it?”

“In the _Oxford Book of English Verse_. I think I left it on top of the

bureau.” She watched Carol glance around the room, looking anywhere but

at her.

“I don’t want to stay here tonight after all,” Carol said.

Half an hour later, they were in the car going eastward. Carol wanted to

reach Des Moines that night. After a silence of more than an hour, Carol

suddenly stopped the car at the edge of the road, bent her head, and

said, “Damn!”

She could see the darkish sinks under Carol’s eyes in the glare of

passing cars. Carol hadn’t slept at all last night. “Let’s go back to

that last town,” Therese said. “It’s still about seventy-five miles to

Des Moines.”

“Do you want to go to Arizona?” Carol asked her, as if all they had to

do was turn around.

“Oh, Carol—why talk about it?” A feeling of despair came over her

suddenly. Her hands were shaking as she lighted a cigarette. She gave

the cigarette to Carol, and lighted one for herself.

“Because I want to talk about it. Can you take another three weeks off?”

“Of course.” Of course, of course. What else mattered except being with

Carol, anywhere, anyhow? There was the Harkevy show in March, Harkevy

might recommend her for a job somewhere else, but the jobs were

uncertain and Carol was not.

“I shouldn’t have to stay in New York more than a week at most, because

the divorce is all set, Fred, my lawyer, said so today. So why don’t we

have a few more weeks in Arizona? Or New Mexico? I don’t want to hang

around New York the rest of the winter.” Carol drove slowly. Her eyes

were different now. They had come alive, like her voice.

“Of course I’d like to. Anywhere.”

“All right. Come on. Let’s get to Des Moines. How about you driving a

while?”

They changed places. It was a little before midnight when they got to

Des Moines and found a hotel room.

“Why should you go back to New York at all?” Carol asked her. “You could

keep the car and wait for me somewhere like Tucson or Santa Fe, and I

could fly back.”

“And leave you?” Therese turned from the mirror where she was brushing

her hair.

Carol smiled. “What do you mean, leave me?”

It had taken Therese by surprise, and now she saw an expression on

Carol’s face, even though Carol looked at her intently, that made her

feel shut off, as if Carol had thrust her away in a back corner of her

mind to make room for something more important. “Just leave you now, I

meant,” Therese said, turning back to the mirror. “No, it might be a

good idea. It’s quicker for you.”

“I thought you might prefer staying somewhere in the West. Unless you

want to do something in New York those few days,” Carol’s voice was

casual.

“I don’t.” She dreaded the cold days in Manhattan, when Carol would be

too busy to see her. And she thought of the detective. If Carol flew,

she wouldn’t be haunted by his trailing her. She tried to imagine it

already, Carol arriving in the East alone, to face something she didn’t

yet know, something impossible to prepare for. She imagined herself in

Santa Fe, waiting for a telephone call, waiting for a letter from Carol.

But to be two thousand miles away from Carol, she could not imagine that

so easily. “Only a week, Carol?” she asked, drawing the comb along her

part again, flicking the long, fine hair to one side. She had gained

weight, but her face was thinner, she noticed suddenly, and it pleased

her. She looked older.

In the mirror, she saw Carol come up behind her, and there was no answer

but the pleasure of Carol’s arms sliding around her, that made it

impossible to think, and Therese twisted away more suddenly than she

meant to, and stood by the corner of the dressing table looking at

Carol, bewildered for a moment by the elusiveness of what they talked

about, time and space, and the four feet that separated them now and the

two thousand miles. She gave her hair another stroke. “Only about a

week?”

“That’s what I said,” Carol replied with a smile in her eyes, but

Therese heard the same hardness in it as in her own question, as if they

exchanged challenges. “If you mind keeping the car, I can have it driven

East.”

“I don’t mind keeping it.”

“And don’t worry about the detective. I’ll wire Harge that I’m on my

way.”

“I won’t worry about that.” How could Carol be so cold about it, Therese

wondered, thinking of everything else but their leaving each other? She

put the hairbrush down on the dressing table.

“Therese, do you think I’m going to enjoy it?”

And Therese thought of the detectives, the divorce, the hostility, all

Carol had to face. Carol touched her cheek, pressed both palms hard

against her cheeks so her mouth opened like a fish’s, and Therese had to

smile. Therese stood by the dressing table and watched her, watching

every move of her hands, of her feet as she peeled off her stockings and

stepped into her moccasins again. There were no words, she thought,

after this point. What else did they need to explain, or ask, or promise

in words? They did not even need to see each other’s eyes. Therese

watched her pick up the telephone, and then she lay face down on the

bed, while Carol made her plane reservation for tomorrow, one ticket,

one way, tomorrow at eleven A.M.

“Where do you think you’ll go?” Carol asked her.

“I don’t know. I might go back to Sioux Falls.”

“South Dakota?” Carol smiled at her. “You wouldn’t prefer Santa Fe? It’s

warmer.”

“I’ll wait and see it with you.”

“Not Colorado Springs?”

“No!” Therese laughed, and got up. She took her toothbrush into the

bathroom. “I might even take a job somewhere for a week.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Any kind. Just to keep me from thinking of you, you know.”

“I want you to think of me. Not a job in a department store.”

“No.” Therese stood by the bathroom door, watching Carol take off her

slip and put her robe on.

“You’re not worrying about money again, are you?”

Therese slid her hands into her robe pockets and crossed her feet. “If

I’m broke, I don’t care. I’ll start worrying when it’s used up.”

“I’m going to give you a couple of hundred tomorrow for the car.” Carol

pulled Therese’s nose as she passed by. “And you’re not to use that car

to pick up any strangers.” Carol went into the bathroom and turned on

the shower.

Therese came in after her. “I thought I was using this john.”

“I’m using it, but I’ll let you come in.”

“Oh, thanks.” Therese took off her robe as Carol did.

“Well?” Carol said.

“Well?” Therese stepped under the shower.

“Of all the nerve.” Carol got under it, too, and twisted Therese’s arm

behind her, but Therese only giggled.

Therese wanted to embrace her, kiss her, but her free arm reached out

convulsively and dragged Carol’s head against her, under the stream of

water, and there was the horrible sound of a foot slipping.

“Stop it, we’ll fall!” Carol shouted. “For Christ’s sake, can’t two

people take a shower in peace?”

chapter twenty

In Sioux Falls, Therese stopped the car in front of the hotel they had

stayed in before, the Warrior Hotel. It was nine thirty in the evening.

Carol had got home about an hour ago, Therese thought. She was to call

Carol at midnight.

She took a room, had her bags carried up, then went out for a walk

through the main street. There was a movie house, and it occurred to her

she had never seen a movie with Carol. She went in. But she was in no

mood to follow the picture, even though there was a woman in it whose

voice was a little like Carol’s, not at all like the flat nasal voices

she heard all around her. She thought of Carol, over a thousand miles

away now, thought of sleeping alone tonight, and she got up and wandered

out on the street again. There was the drugstore where Carol had bought

cleansing tissues and toothpaste one morning. And the corner where Carol

had looked up and read the street names—Fifth and Nebraska streets. She

bought a pack of cigarettes at the same drugstore, walked back to the

hotel and sat in the lobby, smoking, savoring the first cigarette since

she had left Carol, savoring the forgotten state of being alone. It was

only a physical state. She really did not feel at all alone. She read

some newspapers for a while, then took the letters from Dannie and Phil,

that had come in the last days at Colorado Springs, out of her handbag

and glanced over them.

I saw Richard two nights ago in the Palermo all by himself

[Phil’s letter said]. I asked about you and he said he wasn’t

writing to you. I gather there has been a small rupture, but I

didn’t press for information. He was in no mood for talking. And

we are not too chummy lately, as you know.... Have been talking

you up to an angel named Francis Puckett who will put up fifty

thousand if a certain play from France comes over in April. Shall

keep you posted, as there is not even a producer yet.... Dannie

sends his love, I am sure. He is leaving soon for somewhere

probably, he has that look, and I’ll have to scout for new winter

quarters or find a roommate.... Did you get the clippings I sent

you on _Small Rain_?