Dannie’s short letter was:
Dear Therese,
There is a possibility I may go out to the Coast at the end of
the month to take a job in California. I must decide between this
(a lab job) and an offer in a commercial chemical place in
Maryland. But if I could see you in Colorado or anywhere else for
a while, I would leave a little early. Shall probably take the
California job, as I think it has better prospects. So would you
let me know where you’ll be? It doesn’t matter. There are a lot
of ways of getting to California. If your friend wouldn’t mind,
it would be nice to spend a few days with you somewhere. I’ll be
in New York until the 28 of February anyway.
Love,
Dannie
She had not yet answered him. She would send him an address tomorrow, as
soon as she found a room somewhere in the town. But as to the next
destination, she would have to talk to Carol about that. And when would
Carol be able to say? She wondered what Carol might already have found
tonight in New Jersey, and Therese’s courage sank dismally. She reached
for a newspaper and looked at the date. February fifteenth. Twenty-nine
days since she had left New York with Carol. Could it be so few days?
Upstairs in her room, she put the call through to Carol, and bathed and
got into pajamas. Then the telephone rang.
“Hel-_lo_,” Carol said, as if she had been waiting a long while. “What’s
the name of that hotel?”
“The Warrior. But I’m not going to stay here.”
“You didn’t pick up any strangers on the road, did you?”
Therese laughed. Carol’s slow voice went through her as if she touched
her. “What’s the news?” Therese asked.
“Tonight? Nothing. The house is freezing and Florence can’t get here
till day after tomorrow. Abby’s here. Do you want to say hello to her?”
“Not right there with you.”
“No-o. Upstairs in the green room with the door shut.”
“I _don’t_ really want to talk to her now.”
Carol wanted to know everything she had done, how the roads were, and
whether she had on the yellow pajamas or the blue ones. “I’ll have a
hard time getting to sleep tonight without you.”
“Yes.” Immediately, out of nowhere, Therese felt tears pressing behind
her eyes.
“Can’t you say anything but yes?”
“I love you.”
Carol whistled. Then silence. “Abby got the check, darling, but no
letter. She missed my wire, but there isn’t any letter anyway.”
“Did you find the book?”
“We found the book, but there’s nothing in it.”
Therese wondered if the letter could be in her own apartment after all.
But she had a picture of the letter in the book, marking a place. “Do
you think anybody’s been through the house?”
“No. I can tell by various things. Don’t worry about that. Will you?”
A moment later, Therese slid down into bed and pulled her light out.
Carol had asked her to call tomorrow night, too. For a while the sound
of Carol’s voice was in her ears. Then a melancholy began to seep into
her. She lay on her back with her arms straight at her sides, with a
sense of empty space all around her, as if she were laid out ready for
the grave, and then she fell asleep.
The next morning, Therese found a room she liked in a house on one of
the streets that ran uphill, a large front room with a bay window full
of plants and white curtains. There was a four-poster bed and an oval
hooked rug on the floor. The woman said it was seven dollars a week, but
Therese said she was not sure if she would be here a week, so she had
better take it by the day.
“That’ll be the same thing,” the woman said. “Where’re you from?”
“New York.”
“Are you going to live here?”
“No. I’m just waiting for a friend to join me.”
“Man or a woman?”
Therese smiled. “A woman,” she said. “Is there any space in those
garages in back? I’ve got a car with me.”
The woman said there were two garages empty, and that she didn’t charge
for the garages, if people lived here. She was not old, but she stooped
a little and her figure was frail. Her name was Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper.
She had been keeping roomers for fifteen years, she said, and two of the
three she had started with were still here.
The same day, she made the acquaintance of Dutch Huber and his wife who
ran the diner near the public library. He was a skinny man of about
fifty with small curious blue eyes. His wife Edna was fat and did the
cooking, and talked a great deal less than he. Dutch had worked in New
York for a while years ago. He asked her questions about sections of the
city she happened not to know at all, while she mentioned places Dutch
had never heard of or had forgotten, and somehow the slow, dragging
conversation made them both laugh. Dutch asked her if she would like to
go with him and his wife to the motorcycle races that were to be held a
few miles out of town on Saturday, and Therese said yes.
She bought cardboard and glue and worked on the first of the models she
meant to show Harkevy when she got back to New York. She had it nearly
done when she went out at eleven thirty to call Carol from the Warrior.
Carol was not in and no one answered. Therese tried until one o’clock,
then went back to Mrs. Cooper’s house.
Therese reached her the next morning around ten thirty. Carol said she
had talked over everything with her lawyer the day before, but there was
nothing she or her lawyer could do until they knew Harge’s next move.
Carol was a little short with her, because she had a luncheon
appointment in New York and a letter to write first. She seemed anxious
for the first time about what Harge was doing. She had tried to call him
twice without being able to reach him. But it was her brusqueness that
disturbed Therese most of all.
“You haven’t changed your mind about anything?” Therese said.
“Of course not, darling. I’m giving a party tomorrow night. I’ll miss
you.”
Therese tripped on the hotel threshold as she went out, and she felt the
first hollow wave of loneliness break over her. What would she be doing
tomorrow night? Reading in the library until it closed at nine? Working
on another set? She went over the names of the people Carol had said
were coming to the party—Max and Clara Tibbett, the couple who had a
greenhouse on some highway near Carol’s house and whom Therese had met
once, Carol’s friend Tessie she had never met, and Stanley McVeigh, the
man Carol had been with the evening they went to Chinatown. Carol hadn’t
mentioned Abby.
And Carol hadn’t said to call tomorrow.
She walked on, and the last moment she had seen Carol came back as if it
were happening in front of her eyes again. Carol waving from the door of
the plane at the Des Moines airport, Carol already small and far away,
because Therese had had to stand back of the wire fence across the
field. The ramp had been moved away, but Therese had thought, there were
still a few seconds of time before they closed the door, and then Carol
had appeared again, just long enough to stand still in the doorway for a
second, to find her again, and make the gesture of blowing her a kiss.
But it meant an absurd lot that she had come back.
Therese drove out to the motorcycle races on Saturday, and took Dutch
and Edna with her, because Carol’s car was bigger. Afterward, they
invited her to supper at their house, but she did not accept. There
hadn’t been a letter from Carol that day, and she had expected a note at
least. Sunday depressed her, and even the drive she took up the Big
Sioux River to Dell Rapids in the afternoon did not change the scene
inside her mind.
Monday morning, she sat in the library reading plays. Then around two,
when the noonday rush was slacking off in Dutch’s diner, she went in and
had some tea, and talked with Dutch while she played the songs on the
juke box that she and Carol had used to play. She had told Dutch that
the car belonged to the friend for whom she was waiting. And gradually,
Dutch’s intermittent questions led her to tell him that Carol lived in
New Jersey, that she would probably fly out, that Carol wanted to go to
New Mexico.
“Carol does?” Dutch said, turning to her as he polished a glass.
Then a strange resentment rose in Therese because he had said her name,
and she made a resolution not to speak of Carol again at all, not to
anyone in the city.
Tuesday the letter came from Carol, nothing but a short note, but it
said Fred was more optimistic about everything, and it looked as if
there would be nothing but the divorce to worry about and she could
probably leave the twenty-fourth of February. Therese began to smile as
she read it. She wanted to go out and celebrate with someone, but there
was no one, so there was nothing to do but take a walk, have a lonely
drink at the bar of the Warrior, and think of Carol five days away.
There was no one she would have wanted to be with, except perhaps
Dannie. Or Stella Overton. Stella was jolly, and though she couldn’t
have told Stella anything about Carol—whom could she tell?—it would have
been good to see her now. She had meant to write Stella a card days ago,
but she hadn’t yet.
She wrote to Carol late that night.
The news is wonderful. I celebrated with a single daiquiri at the
Warrior. Not that I am conservative, but did you know that one
drink has the kick of three when you are alone?... I love this
town because it all reminds me of you. I know you don’t like it
any more than any other town, but that isn’t the point. I mean
you are here as much as I can bear you to be, not being here....
Carol wrote:
I never liked Florence. I say this as a prelude. It seems
Florence found the note you wrote to me and sold it to Harge—at a
price. She is also responsible for Harge’s knowing where we (or
at least I) were going, I’ve no doubt. I don’t know what I left
around the house or what she might have overheard, I thought I
was pretty silent, but if Harge took the trouble to bribe her and
I’m sure he did, there’s no telling. They picked us up in
Chicago, anyway. Darling, I had no idea how far this thing had
gone. To give you the atmosphere—nobody tells me anything, things
are just suddenly discovered. If anyone is in possession of the
facts, it is Harge. I spoke with him on the phone, and he refuses
to tell me anything, which of course is calculated to terrorize
me into giving all my ground before the fight has even begun.
They don’t know me, any of them, if they think I will. The fight
of course is over Rindy, and yes, darling, I’m afraid there will
be one, and I can’t leave the 24th. That much Harge did tell me
when he sprang the letter this morning on the phone. I think the
letter may be his strongest weapon (the dictaphone business only
went on in Colorado S. so far as I can possibly imagine) hence
his letting me know about it. But I can imagine the kind of
letter it is, written even before we took off, and there’ll be a
limit to what even Harge can read into it. Harge is merely
threatening—in the peculiar form of silence—hoping I will back
out completely as far as Rindy is concerned. I won’t, so there
will come some kind of a showdown, I hope not in court. Fred is
prepared for anything however. He is wonderful, the only person
who talks straight to me, but unfortunately he knows least of all
too.
You ask if I miss you. I think of your voice, your hands, and
your eyes when you look straight into mine. I remember your
courage that I hadn’t suspected, and it gives me courage. Will
you call me, darling? I don’t want to call you if your phone is
in the hall. Call me collect around 7 P.M. preferably, which is 6
your time.
And Therese was about to call her that day when a telegram came:
DON’T TELEPHONE FOR A WHILE. EXPLAIN LATER. ALL MY LOVE, DARLING.
CAROL.
Mrs. Cooper watched her reading it in the hall. “That from your friend?”
she asked.
“Yes.”
“Hope nothing’s the matter.” Mrs. Cooper had a way of peering at people,
and Therese lifted her head deliberately.
“No, she’s coming,” Therese said. “She’s been delayed.”
chapter twenty-one
Albert Kennedy, Bert to people he liked, lived in a room at the back of
the house, and was one of Mrs. Cooper’s original lodgers. He was
forty-five, a native of San Francisco, and more like a New Yorker than
anyone Therese had met in the town, and this fact alone inclined her to
avoid him. Often he asked Therese to go to the movies with him, but she
had gone only once. She was restless and she preferred to wander about
by herself, mostly just looking and thinking, because the days were too
cold and windy for any outdoor sketching. And the scenes she had liked
at first had grown too stale to sketch, from too much looking, too much
waiting. Therese went to the library almost every evening, sat at one of
the long tables looking over half a dozen books, and then took a
meandering course homeward.
She came back to the house only to wander out again after a while,
stiffening herself against the erratic wind, or letting it turn her down
streets she would not otherwise have followed. In the lighted windows
she would see a girl seated at a piano, in another a man laughing, in
another a woman sewing. Then she remembered she could not even call
Carol, admitted to herself she did not even know what Carol was doing at
this moment, and she felt emptier than the wind. Carol did not tell her
everything in her letters, she felt, did not tell her the worst.
In the library, she looked at books with photographs of Europe in them,
marble fountains in Sicily, ruins of Greece in sunlight, and she
wondered if she and Carol would really ever go there. There was still so
much they had not done. There was the first voyage across the Atlantic.
There were simply the mornings, mornings anywhere, when she could lift
her head from a pillow and see Carol’s face, and know that the day was
theirs and that nothing would separate them.
And there was the beautiful thing, transfixing the heart and the eyes at
once, in the dark window of an antique shop in a street where she had
never been. Therese stared at it, feeling it quench some forgotten and
nameless thirst inside her. Most of its porcelain surface was painted
with small bright lozenges of colored enamel, royal blue and deep red
and green, outlined with coin gold as shiny as silk embroidery, even
under its film of dust. There was a gold ring at the rim for the finger.
It was a tiny candlestick holder. Who had made it, she wondered, and for
whom?
She came back the next morning and bought it to give to Carol.
A letter from Richard had come that morning, forwarded from Colorado
Springs. Therese sat down on one of the stone benches in the street
where the library was, and opened it. It was on business stationery: The
Semco Bottled Gas Company. Cooks—Heats—Makes Ice. Richard’s name was at
the top as General Manager of the Port Jefferson Branch.
Dear Therese,
I have Dannie to thank for telling me where you are. You may
think this letter unnecessary and perhaps it is to you. Perhaps
you are still in that fog you were, when we talked that evening
in the cafeteria. But I feel it is necessary to make one thing
clear, and that is that I no longer feel the way I did even two
weeks ago, and the letter I wrote you last was nothing but a last
spasmodic effort, and I knew it was hopeless when I wrote it, and
I knew you wouldn’t answer and I didn’t want you to. I know I had
stopped loving you then, and now the uppermost emotion I feel
toward you is one that was present from the first—disgust. It is
your hanging onto this woman to the exclusion of everyone else,
this relationship which I am sure has become sordid and
pathological by now, that disgusts me. I know that it will not
last, as I said from the first. It is only regrettable that you
will be disgusted later yourself, in proportion to how much of
your life you waste now with it. It is rootless and infantile,
like living on lotus blossoms or some sickening candy instead of
the bread and meat of life. I have often thought of those
questions you asked me the day we were flying the kite. I wish I
had acted then before it was too late, because I loved you enough
then to try to rescue you. Now I don’t.
People still ask me about you. What do you expect me to tell
them? I intend to tell them the truth. Only that way can I get it
out of myself—and I can no longer bear to carry it around with
me. I have sent a few things you had at the house back to your
apartment. The slightest memory or contact with you depresses me,
makes me not want to touch you or anything concerned with you.
But I am talking sense and very likely you are not understanding
a word of it. Except maybe this: I want nothing to do with you.