Abby is here. We talk of you—she sends you her love as I send
mine. Abby reminds me of the things I know already—that you are
very young and you adore me. Abby does not think I should send
this to you, but tell you when you come. We have just had quite
an argument about it. I tell her she does not know you as well as
I, and I think now she does not know me as well as you in some
ways, and those ways are the emotions. I am not very happy today,
my sweet. I am drinking my ryes and you would tell me they
depress me, I know. But I wasn’t prepared for these days after
those weeks with you. They were happy weeks—you knew it more than
I did. Though all we have known is only a beginning. I meant to
try to tell you in this letter that you don’t even know the rest
and perhaps you never will and are not supposed to—meaning
destined to. We never fought, never came back knowing there was
nothing else we wanted in heaven or hell but to be together. Did
you ever care for me that much, I don’t know. But that is all
part of it and all we have known is only a beginning. And it has
been such a short time. For that reason it will have shorter
roots in you. You say you love me however I am and when I curse.
I say I love you always, the person you are and the person you
will become. I would say it in a court if it would mean anything
to those people or possibly change anything, because those are
not the words I am afraid of. I mean, darling, I shall send you
this letter and I think you will understand why I do, why I told
the lawyers yesterday I would not see you again and why I had to
tell them that, and I would be underestimating you to think you
could not and to think you would prefer delay.
She stopped reading and stood up, and walked slowly to her writing
table. Yes, she understood why Carol had sent the letter. Because Carol
loved her child more than her. And because of that, the lawyers had been
able to break her, to force her to do exactly what they wanted her to
do. Therese could not imagine Carol forced. Yet here it was in Carol’s
writing. It was a surrender. Therese knew no situation in which she was
the stake could have wrested from Carol. For an instant there came the
fantastic realization that Carol had devoted only a fraction of herself
to her, Therese, and suddenly the whole world of the last month, like a
tremendous lie, cracked and almost toppled. In the next instant, Therese
did not believe that. Yet the fact remained, she had chosen her child.
She stared at Richard’s envelope on her table, and felt all the words
she wanted to say to him, that she had never said to him, rising in a
torrent inside her. What right had he to talk about whom she loved or
how? What did he know about her? What had he ever known?
... exaggerated and at the same time minimized [she read on
another page of Carol’s letter]. But between the pleasure of a
kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a
gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its
value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their
pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or
not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a
question of pleasure after all, and what’s the use of debating
the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football game—or a
Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I’ll leave that to the
philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow
demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact
a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men).
Someone brought “aesthetics” into the argument, I mean against me
of course. I said did they really want to debate that—it brought
the only laugh in the whole show. But the most important point I
did not mention and was not thought of by anyone—that the rapport
between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it
can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want
just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing
that happens between men and women. It was said or at least
implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the
depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good
deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on
like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one
person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial
thing—that is degeneration. Or to live against one’s grain, that
is degeneration by definition.
Darling, I pour all this out to you [the next lines were crossed
out]. You will undoubtedly handle your future better than I. Let
me be a bad example to you. If you are hurt now beyond what you
think you can bear and if it makes you—either now or one day—hate
me, and this is what I told Abby, then I shan’t be sorry. I may
have been that one person you were fated to meet, as you say, and
the only one, and you can put it all behind you. Yet if you
don’t, for all this failure and the dismalness now, I know what
you said that afternoon is right—it needn’t be like this. I do
want to talk with you once when you come back, if you’re willing,
unless you think you can’t.
Your plants are still thriving on the back porch. I water them
every day....
Therese could not read any more. Beyond her door she heard footsteps
slowly descending the stairs, walking more confidently across the hall.
When the footsteps were gone, she opened her door and stood there a
moment, struggling against an impulse to walk straight out of the house
and leave everything behind her. Then she went down the hall to Mrs.
Cooper’s door in the rear.
Mrs. Cooper answered her knock, and Therese said the words she had
prepared, about leaving that night. She watched Mrs. Cooper’s face that
didn’t listen to her but only reacted to the sight of her own face, and
Mrs. Cooper seemed suddenly her own reflection, that she could not turn
away from.
“Well, I’m sorry, Miss Belivet. I’m sorry if your plans have gone
wrong,” she said, while her face registered only shock and curiosity.
Then Therese went back to her room and began to pack, laying in the
bottom of her suitcase the cardboard models she had folded flat, and
then her books. After a moment, she heard Mrs. Cooper approaching her
door slowly, as if she carried something, and Therese thought, if she
was bringing her another tray, she would scream. Mrs. Cooper knocked.
“Where shall I forward your mail to, honey, in case there’s any more
letters?” Mrs. Cooper asked.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to write and let you know.” Therese felt
lightheaded and sickish when she straightened up.
“You’re not starting back for New York this late at night, are you?”
Mrs. Cooper called anything after six “night.”
“No,” Therese said. “I’ll just go a little ways.” She was impatient to
be alone. She looked at Mrs. Cooper’s hand bulging the gray checked
apron under the waistband, at the cracked soft house shoes worn paper
thin on these floors, that had walked these floors years before she came
here and would go on in the same foot tracks years after she was gone.
“Well, you be sure and let me hear how you make out,” Mrs. Cooper said.
“Yes.”
She drove to a hotel, a different hotel from the one where she had
always called Carol. Then she went out for a walk, restlessly, avoiding
all the streets she had been in with Carol. She might have driven to
another town, she thought, and stopped, half decided to go back to the
car. Then she walked on, not caring, actually, where she was. She walked
until she was cold, and the library was the closest place to go and get
warm. She passed the diner and glanced in. Dutch saw her, and with the
familiar dip of his head, as if he had to look under something to see
her through the window, he smiled and waved to her. Automatically, her
hand waved back, good-by, and suddenly she thought of her room in New
York, with the dress still on the studio couch, and the corner of the
carpet turned back. If she could only reach out now and pull the carpet
flat, she thought. She stood staring down the narrowish, solid looking
avenue with its round street lights. A single figure walked along the
sidewalk toward her. Therese went up the library steps.
Miss Graham, the librarian, greeted her as usual, but Therese did not go
into the main reading room. There were two or three people there
tonight, the baldheaded man with the black-rimmed glasses who was often
at the middle table, and how often had she sat in that room with a
letter from Carol in her pocket? With Carol beside her. She climbed the
stairs, passed the history and art room on the second floor, up to the
third floor where she had never been before. There was a single large
dusty looking room with glass-front bookcases around the walls, a few
oil paintings and marble busts on pedestals.
Therese sat down at one of the tables, and her body relaxed with an
ache. She put her head down on her arms on the table, suddenly limp and
sleepy, but in the next second, she slid the chair back and stood up.
She felt prickles of terror in the roots of her hair. She had been
somehow pretending until this moment that Carol was not gone, that when
she went back to New York, she would see Carol and everything would be,
would have to be as it had been before. She glanced nervously around the
room, as if looking for some contradiction, some redress. For a moment,
she felt her body might shatter apart of itself, or might hurl itself
through the glass of the long windows across the room. She stared at a
pallid bust of Homer, the inquisitively lifted eyebrows delineated
faintly by dust. She turned to the door, and for the first time noticed
the picture over the lintel.
It was only similar, she thought, not quite the same, not the same, but
the recognition had shaken her at the core, was growing as she looked at
it, and she knew the picture was exactly the same, only much larger, and
she had seen it many times in the hall that led to the music room before
they had taken it down when she was still small—the smiling woman in the
ornate dress of some court, the hand poised just below the throat, the
arrogant head half turned, as if the painter had somehow caught her in
motion so that even the pearls that hung from each ear seemed to move.
She knew the short, firmly modeled cheeks, the full coral lips that
smiled at one corner, the mockingly narrowed lids, the strong, not very
high forehead that even in the picture seemed to project a little over
the living eyes that knew everything beforehand, and sympathized and
laughed at once. It was Carol. Now in the long moment while she could
not look away from it, the mouth smiled and the eyes regarded her with
nothing but mockery, the last veil lifted and revealing nothing but
mockery and gloating, the splendid satisfaction of the betrayal
accomplished.
With a shuddering gasp, Therese ran under the picture and down the
stairs. In the downstairs hall, Miss Graham said something to her, an
anxious question, and Therese heard her own reply like an idiot’s
babble, because she was still gasping, fighting for breath, and she
passed Miss Graham and rushed out of the building.
chapter twenty-two
In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but
they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere,
and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world
was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the
world come back to life? How would its salt come back?
She walked to the hotel. In her room, she wet a face towel with cold
water to put over her eyes. The room was chilly, so she took off her
dress and shoes and got into bed.
From outside, a shrill voice, muted in empty space, cried: “Hey,
_Chicago Sun-Times_!”
Then silence, and she debated trying to fall asleep, while fatigue
already began to rock her unpleasantly, like drunkenness. Now there were
voices in the hall, talking of a misplaced piece of luggage, and a sense
of futility overwhelmed her as she lay there with the wet, medicinally
smelling face towel over her swollen eyes. The voices wrangled, and she
felt her courage running out, and then her will, and in panic she tried
to think of the world outside, of Dannie and Mrs. Robichek, of Frances
Cotter at the Pelican Press, of Mrs. Osborne, and of her own apartment
still in New York, but her mind refused to survey or to renounce, and
her mind was the same as her heart now and refused to renounce Carol.
The faces swam together like the voices outside. There was also the face
of Sister Alicia, and of her mother. There was the last room she had
slept in at school. There was the morning she had sneaked out of the
dormitory very early and run across the lawn like a young animal crazy
with spring, and had seen Sister Alicia running crazily through a field
herself, white shoes flashing like ducks through the high grass, and it
had been minutes before she realized that Sister Alicia was chasing an
escaped chicken. There was the moment, in the house of some friend of
her mother’s, when she had reached for a piece of cake and had upset the
plate on the floor, and her mother had slapped her in the face. She saw
the picture in the hall at school, it breathed and moved now like Carol,
mocking and cruel and finished with her, as if some evil and
long-destined purpose had been accomplished. Therese’s body tensed in
terror, and the conversation went on and on in the hall obliviously,
falling on her ear with the sharp, alarming sound of ice cracking
somewhere out on a pond.
“What do you mean you did?”
“No....”
“If you did, the suitcase would be downstairs in the checkroom....”
“Oh, I told you....”
“But you want me to lose a suitcase so you won’t lose your job!”
Her mind attached meaning to the phrases one by one, like some slow
translator that lagged behind, and at last got lost.
She sat up in bed with the end of a bad dream in her head. The room was
nearly dark, its shadows deep and solid in the corners. She reached for
the lamp switch and half closed her eyes against the light. She dropped
a quarter into the radio on the wall, and turned the volume quite loud
at the first sound she got. It was a man’s voice, and then music began,
a lilting, Oriental-sounding piece that had been among the selections in
music appreciation class at school. “In a Persian Market,” she
remembered automatically, and now its undulant rhythm that had always
made her think of a camel walking took her back to the rather small room
at the Home, with the illustrations from Verdi operas around the walls
above the high wainscoting. She had heard the piece occasionally in New
York, but she had never heard it with Carol, had not heard it or thought
of it since she had known Carol, and now the music was like a bridge
soaring across time without touching anything. She picked up Carol’s
letter opener from the bed table, the wooden knife that had somehow
gotten into her suitcase when they packed, and she squeezed the handle
and rubbed her thumb along its edge, but its reality seemed to deny
Carol instead of affirm her, did not evoke her so much as the music they
had never heard together. She thought of Carol with a twist of
resentment, Carol like a distant spot of silence and stillness.
Therese went to the basin to wash her face in cold water. She should get
a job, tomorrow if she could. That had been her idea in stopping here,
to work for two weeks or so, not to weep in hotel rooms. She should send
Mrs. Cooper the hotel name as an address, simply for courtesy’s sake. It
was another of the things she must do, although she did not want to. And
was it worth while to write to Harkevy again, she wondered, after his
polite but explicit note in Sioux Falls. “... I should be glad to see
you again when you come to New York, but it is impossible for me to
promise anything this spring. It would be a good idea for you to see Mr.
Ned Bernstein, the co-producer, when you get back. He can tell you more
of what is happening in designing studios than I can....” No, she
wouldn’t write again about that.
Downstairs, she bought a picture post card of Lake Michigan, and
deliberately wrote a cheerful message on it to Mrs. Robichek. It seemed
false as she wrote it, but walking away from the box where she had
dropped it, she was conscious suddenly of the energy in her body, the
spring in her toes, the youth in her blood that warmed her cheeks as she
walked faster, and she knew she was free and blessed compared to Mrs.
Robichek, and what she had written was not false, because she could so
well afford it. She was not crumpled or half blind, not in pain. She
stood by a store window and quickly put on some more lipstick. A gust of
wind made her step to catch her balance. But she could feel in the
wind’s coldness its core of spring, like a heart warm and young inside
it. Tomorrow morning, she would start to look for a job. She should be
able to live on the money she had left, and save whatever she earned to
get back to New York on. She could wire her bank for the rest of her
money, of course, but that was not what she wanted. She wanted two weeks
of working among people she didn’t know, doing the kind of work a
million other people did. She wanted to step into someone else’s shoes.
She answered an advertisement for a receptionist-filing clerk that said
little typing required and call in person. They seemed to think she
would do, and she spent all morning learning the files. Then one of the
bosses came in after lunch and said he wanted a girl who knew some
shorthand. Therese didn’t. The school had taught her typing, but not
shorthand, so she was out.
She looked through the help-wanted columns again that afternoon. Then
she remembered the sign on the fence of the lumberyard not far from the
hotel. “Girl wanted for general office work and stock. $40 weekly.” If
they didn’t demand shorthand, she might qualify. It was around three
when she turned into the windy street where the lumberyard lay. She
lifted her head and let the wind blow her hair back from her face. And
she remembered Carol saying, I like to see you walking. When I see you
from a distance, I feel you’re walking on the palm of my hand and you’re
about five inches high. She could hear Carol’s soft voice under the
babble of the wind, and she grew tense, with bitterness and fear. She
walked faster, ran a few steps, as if she could run out of that morass
of love and hate and resentment in which her mind suddenly floundered.
There was a wooden shack of an office at the side of the lumberyard. She
went in and spoke with a Mr. Zambrowski, a slow moving baldheaded man
with a gold watch chain that barely stretched across his front. Before
Therese asked him about shorthand, he volunteered that he didn’t need
it. He said he would try her out the rest of the afternoon and tomorrow.
Two other girls came in for the job the next morning, and Mr. Zambrowski
took their names, but before noon, he said the job was hers.
“If you don’t mind getting here at eight in the morning,” Mr. Zambrowski
said.
“I don’t mind.” She had come in at nine that morning. But she would have
gotten there at four in the morning if he had asked her to.
Her hours were from eight to four thirty, and her duties consisted
simply in checking the mill shipments to the yard against the orders
received, and in writing letters of confirmation. She did not see much
lumber from her desk in the office, but the smell of it was in the air,
fresh as if the saws had just exposed the surface of the white pine
boards, and she could hear it bouncing and rattling as the trucks pulled
into the center of the yard. She liked the work, liked Mr. Zambrowski,
and liked the lumberjacks and truck drivers who came into the office to
warm their hands at the fire. One of the lumberjacks named Steve, an
attractive young man with a golden stubble of beard, invited her a
couple of times to have lunch with him in the cafeteria down the street.
He asked her for a date on Saturday night, but Therese did not want to
spend a whole evening with him or with anyone yet.
One night, Abby telephoned her.
“Do you know I had to call South Dakota twice to find you?” Abby said
irritably. “What’re you doing out there? When’re you coming back?”
Abby’s voice brought Carol as close as if it were Carol she heard. It
brought the hollow tightness in her throat again, and for a moment she
couldn’t answer anything.
“Therese?”
“Is Carol there with you?”
“She’s in Vermont. She’s been sick,” Abby’s hoarse voice said, and there
was no smile in it now. “She’s taking a rest.”
“She’s too sick to call me? Why don’t you tell me, Abby? Is she getting
better or worse?”
“Better. Why didn’t you try to call to find out?”
Therese squeezed the telephone. Yes, why hadn’t she? Because she had
been thinking of a picture instead of Carol. “What’s the matter with
her? Is she—”
“That’s a fine question. Carol wrote you what happened, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Well, do you expect her to bounce up like a rubber ball? Or chase you
all over America? What do you think this is, a game of hide and seek?”
All the conversation of that lunch with Abby crashed down on Therese. As
Abby saw it, the whole thing was her fault. The letter Florence had
found was only the final blunder.
“When’re you coming back?” Abby asked.
“In about ten days. Unless Carol wants the car sooner.”
“She doesn’t. She won’t be home in ten days.”
Therese forced herself to say, “About that letter—the one I wrote—do you
know if they found it before or after?”
“Before or after what?”
“After the detectives started following us.”
“They found it afterward,” Abby said, sighing.
Therese set her teeth. But it didn’t matter what Abby thought of her,
only what Carol thought. “Where is she in Vermont?”
“I wouldn’t call her if I were you.”
“But you’re not me and I want to call her.”
“Don’t. That much I can tell you. I can give her any message—that’s
important.” And there was a cold silence. “Carol wants to know if you
need any money and what about the car.”
“I don’t need any money. The car’s all right.” She had to ask one more
question. “What does Rindy know about this?”
“She knows what the word divorce means. And she wanted to stay with
Carol. That doesn’t make it easier for Carol, either.”
Very well, very well, Therese wanted to say. She wouldn’t trouble Carol
by telephoning, by writing, by any messages, unless it was a message
about the car. She was shaking when she put the telephone down. And she
immediately picked it up again. “This is room six eleven,” she said. “I
don’t want to take any more long distance calls—none at all.”
She looked at Carol’s letter opener on the bed table, and now it meant
Carol, the person of flesh and blood, the Carol with freckles and the
corner nicked off one tooth. Did she owe Carol anything, Carol the
person? Hadn’t Carol been playing with her, as Richard had said? She
remembered Carol’s words, “When you have a husband and child it’s a
little different.” She frowned at the letter opener, not understanding
why it had become only a letter opener suddenly, why it was a matter of
indifference to her whether she kept it or threw it away.
Two days later, a letter arrived from Abby enclosing a personal check
for a hundred and fifty dollars that Abby told her to “forget about.”
Abby said she had spoken with Carol, and that Carol would like to hear
from her, and she gave Carol’s address. It was a rather cold letter, but
the gesture of the check was not cold. It hadn’t been prompted by Carol,
Therese knew.
“Thank you for the check,” Therese wrote back to her. “It’s terribly
nice of you, but I won’t use it and I don’t need it. You ask me to write
to Carol. I don’t think I can or that I should.”
Dannie was sitting in the hotel lobby one afternoon when she came home
from work. She could not quite believe it was he, the dark-eyed young
man who got up from the chair smiling and came slowly toward her. Then
the sight of his loose black hair, mussed a little more by the upturned
coat collar, the symmetrical broad smile, was as familiar as if she had
seen him only the day before.
“Hello, Therese,” he said. “Surprised?”
“Well, terrifically. I’d given you up. No word from you in—two weeks.”
She remembered the twenty-eighth was the day he said he would leave New
York, and it was the day she had come to Chicago.
“I’d just about given you up,” Dannie said, laughing. “I got delayed in
New York. I guess it’s lucky I did, because I tried to telephone you and
your landlady gave me your address.” Dannie’s fingers kept a firm grip
on her elbow. They were walking slowly toward the elevators. “You look
wonderful, Therese.”
“Do I? I’m awfully glad to see you.” There was an open elevator in front
of them. “Do you want to come up?”
“Let’s go have something to eat. Or is it too early? I didn’t have any
lunch today.”
“It’s certainly not too early, then.”
They went to a place Therese knew about, that specialized in steaks.
Dannie even ordered cocktails, though he usually never drank.
“You’re here by yourself?” he said. “Your landlady in Sioux Falls told
me you left by yourself.”
“Carol couldn’t come out finally.”
“Oh. And you decided to stay out longer?”
“Yes.”
“Until when?”
“Until just about now. I’m going back next week.”
Dannie listened with his warm dark eyes fixed on her face, without any
surprise. “Why don’t you just go west instead of east and spend a little
time in California. I’ve got a job in Oakland. I have to be there day
after tomorrow.”
“What kind of a job?”
“Researching—just what I asked for. I came out better than I thought I
would on my exams.”
“Were you first in the class?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. They weren’t graded like that. You didn’t
answer my question.”
“I want to get back to New York, Dannie.”
“Oh.” He smiled, looking at her hair, her lips, and it occurred to her
Dannie had never seen her with this much make-up on. “You look grown up
all of a sudden,” he said. “You changed your hair, didn’t you?”
“A little.”
“You don’t look frightened any more. Or even so serious.”
“That pleases me.” She felt shy with him, yet somehow close, a closeness
charged with something she had never felt with Richard. Something
suspenseful, that she enjoyed. A little salt, she thought. She looked at
Dannie’s hand on the table, at the strong muscle that bulged below the
thumb. She remembered his hands on her shoulders that day in his room.
The memory was a pleasant one.
“You did miss me a little, didn’t you, Terry?”
“Of course.”
“Did you ever think you might care something about me? As much as you
did for Richard, for instance?” he asked with a note of surprise in his
own voice, as if it were a fantastic question.
“I don’t know,” she said quickly.
“But you’re not still thinking about Richard, are you?”
“You must know I’m not.”
“Who is it then? Carol?”
She felt suddenly naked, sitting there opposite him. “Yes. It was.”
“But not now?”
Therese was amazed that he could say the words without any surprise, any
attitude at all. “No. It’s—I can’t talk to anyone about it, Dannie,” she
finished, and her voice sounded deep and quiet in her ears, like the
voice of another person.
“Don’t you want to forget it, if it’s past?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know just how you mean that.”
“I mean, are you sorry?”
“No. Would I do the same thing again? Yes.”
“Do you mean with somebody else, or with her?”
“With her,” Therese said. The corner of her mouth went up in a smile.
“But the end was a fiasco.”
“Yes. I mean I’d go through the end, too.”
“And you’re still going through it.”
Therese didn’t say anything.
“Are you going to see her again? Do you mind if I ask you all these
questions?”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “No, I’m not going to see her again. I don’t
want to.”
“But somebody else?”
“Another woman?” Therese shook her head. “No.”
Dannie looked at her and smiled, slowly. “That’s what matters. Or
rather, that’s what makes it not matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re so young, Therese. You’ll change. You’ll forget.”
She did not feel young. “Did Richard talk to you?” she asked.
“No. I think he wanted to one night, but I cut it off before he got
started.”
She felt the bitter smile on her mouth, and she took a last pull on her
short cigarette and put it out. “I hope he finds somebody to listen to
him. He needs an audience.”
“He feels jilted. His ego’s suffering. Don’t ever think I’m like
Richard. I think people’s lives are their own.”
Something Carol had said once came suddenly to her mind: every adult has
secrets. Said as casually as Carol said everything, stamped as indelibly
in her brain as the address she had written on the sales slip in
Frankenberg’s. She had an impulse to tell Dannie the rest, about the
picture in the library, the picture in the school. And about the Carol
who was not a picture, but a woman with a child and a husband, with
freckles on her hands and a habit of cursing, of growing melancholy at
unexpected moments, with a bad habit of indulging her will. A woman who
had endured much more in New York than she had in South Dakota. She
looked at Dannie’s eyes, at his chin with the faint cleft. She knew that
up to now she had been under a spell that prevented her from seeing
anyone in the world but Carol.
“Now what are you thinking?” he asked.
“Of what you said once in New York, about using things and throwing them
away.”
“Did she do that to you?”
Therese smiled. “I shall do it.”
“Then find someone you’ll never want to throw away.”
“Who won’t wear out,” Therese said.
“Will you write to me?”
“Of course.”
“Write me in three months.”
“Three months?” But suddenly she knew what he meant. “And not before?”
“No.” He was looking at her steadily. “That’s a fair time, isn’t it?”
“Yes. All right. It’s a promise.”
“Promise me something else—take tomorrow off so you can be with me. I’ve
got till nine tomorrow night.”
“I can’t, Dannie. There’s work to do—and I’ve got to tell him anyway
that I’m leaving in another week.” Those weren’t quite the reasons, she
knew. And perhaps Dannie knew, looking at her. She didn’t want to spend
tomorrow with him, it would be too intense, he would remind her too much
of herself, and she still was not ready.
Dannie came round to the lumberyard the next day at noon. They had
intended to have lunch together, but they walked and talked on Lake
Shore Drive for the whole hour instead. That evening at nine, Dannie
took a plane westward.
Eight days later, she started for New York. She meant to move away from
Mrs. Osborne’s as soon as possible. She wanted to look up some of the
people she had run away from last fall. And there would be other people,
new people. She would go to night school this spring. And she wanted to
change her wardrobe completely. Everything she had now, the clothes she
remembered in her closet in New York, seemed juvenile, like clothes that
had belonged to her years ago. In Chicago she had looked around in the
stores and hungered for the clothes she couldn’t buy yet. All she could
afford now was a new haircut.
chapter twenty-three
Therese went into her old room, and the first thing she noticed was that
the carpet corner lay flat. And how small and tragic the room looked.
And yet hers, the tiny radio on the bookshelf, and the pillows on the
studio couch, as personal as a signature she had written long ago and
forgotten. Like the two or three set models hanging on the walls that
she deliberately avoided looking at.
She went to the bank and took out a hundred of her last two hundred
dollars, and bought a black dress and a pair of shoes.
Tomorrow, she thought, she would call Abby and arrange something about
Carol’s car, but not today.
That same afternoon, she made an appointment with Ned Bernstein, the
co-producer of the English show for which Harkevy was to do the sets.
She took three of the models she had made in the West and also the
_Small Rain_ photographs to show him. An apprentice job with Harkevy, if
she got it, wouldn’t pay enough to live on, but there were other
sources, other than department stores, anyway. There was television, for
instance.
Mr. Bernstein looked at her work indifferently. Therese said she hadn’t
spoken to Mr. Harkevy yet, and asked Mr. Bernstein if he knew anything
about his taking on helpers. Mr. Bernstein said that was up to Harkevy,
but as far as he knew, he didn’t need any more assistants. Neither did
Mr. Bernstein know of any other set studio that needed anyone at the
moment. And Therese thought of the sixty-dollar dress. And of the
hundred dollars left in the bank. And she had told Mrs. Osborne she
might show the apartment any time she wished, because she was moving.
Therese hadn’t yet any idea where. She got up to leave, and thanked Mr.
Bernstein anyway for looking at her work. She did it with a smile.
“How about television?” Mr. Bernstein asked. “Have you tried to start
that way? It’s easier to break into.”
“I’m going over to see someone at Dumont later this afternoon.” Mr.
Donohue had given her a couple of names last January. Mr. Bernstein gave
her some more names.
Then she telephoned Harkevy’s studio. Harkevy said he was just going
out, but she could drop her models by his studio today and he could look
at them tomorrow morning.
“By the way, there’ll be a cocktail party at the St. Regis for Genevieve
Cranell tomorrow at about five o’clock. If you care to drop in,” Harkevy
said, with his staccato accent that made his soft voice as precise as
mathematics, “at least we’ll be sure to see each other tomorrow. Can you
come?”
“Yes. I’d love to come. Where in the St. Regis?”
He read from the invitation. Suite D. Five to seven o’clock. “I shall be
there by six.”
She left the telephone booth feeling as happy as if Harkevy had just
taken her into partnership. She walked the twelve blocks to his studio,
and left the models with a young man there, a different young man from
the one she had seen in January. Harkevy changed his assistants often.
She looked around his workroom reverently before she closed the door.
Perhaps he would let her come soon. Perhaps she would know tomorrow.
She went into a drugstore on Broadway and called Abby in New Jersey.
Abby’s voice was entirely different from the way it had sounded in
Chicago. Carol must be much better, Therese thought. But she did not ask
about Carol. She was calling to arrange about the car.
“I can come and get it if you want me to,” Abby said. “But why don’t you
call Carol about it? I know she’d like to hear from you.” Abby was
actually bending over backward.
“Well—” Therese didn’t want to call her. But what was she afraid of?
Carol’s voice? Carol herself? “All right. I’ll take the car to her,
unless she doesn’t want me to. In that case, I’ll call you back.”
“When? This afternoon?”
“Yes. In a few minutes.”
Therese went to the door of the drugstore and stood there for a few
moments, looking out at the Camel advertisement with the giant face
puffing smoke rings like gigantic doughnuts, at the low-slung,
sullen-looking taxis maneuvering like sharks in the after-matinee rush,
at the familiar hodgepodge of restaurant and bar signs, awnings, front
steps and windows, that reddish-brown confusion of the side street that
was like hundreds of streets in New York. She remembered walking in a
certain street in the West Eighties once, the brownstone fronts,
overlaid and overlaid with humanity, human lives, some beginning and
some ending there, and she remembered the sense of oppression it had
given her, and how she had hurried through it to get to the avenue. Only
two or three months ago. Now the same kind of street filled her with a
tense excitement, made her want to plunge headlong into it, down the
sidewalk with all the signs and theater marquees and rushing, bumping
people. She turned and walked back to the telephone booths.
A moment later, she heard Carol’s voice.
“When did you get in, Therese?”
There was a brief, fluttering shock at the first sound of her voice, and
then nothing. “Yesterday.”
“How are you? Do you still look the same?” Carol sounded repressed, as
if someone might be with her, but Therese was sure there was no one
else.
“Not exactly. Do you?”
Carol waited. “You sound different.”
“I am.”
“Am I going to see you? Or don’t you want to. Once.” It was Carol’s
voice, but the words were not hers. The words were cautious and
uncertain. “What about this afternoon? Have you got the car?”
“I’ve got to see a couple of people this afternoon. There won’t be
time.” When had she ever refused Carol when Carol wanted to see her?
“Would you like me to drive the car out tomorrow?”
“No, I can come in for it. I’m not an invalid. Did the car behave
itself?”
“It’s in good shape,” Therese said. “No scratches anywhere.”
“And you?” Carol asked, but Therese didn’t answer anything. “Shall I see
you tomorrow? Do you have any time in the afternoon?”
They arranged to meet in the bar of the Ritz Tower on Fifty-seventh
Street at four thirty, and then they hung up.
Carol was a quarter of an hour late. Therese sat waiting for her at a
table where she could see the glass doors that led into the bar, and
finally she saw Carol push open one of the doors, and the tension broke
in her with a small dull ache. Carol wore the same fur coat, the same
black suède pumps she had worn the day Therese first saw her, but now a
red scarf set off the blond lifted head. She saw Carol’s face, thinner
now, alter with surprise, with a little smile, as Carol caught sight of
her.
“Hello,” Therese said.
“I didn’t even know you at first.” And Carol stood by the table a
moment, looking at her, before she sat down. “It’s nice of you to see
me.”
“Don’t say that.”
The waiter came, and Carol ordered tea. So did Therese, mechanically.
“Do you hate me, Therese?” Carol asked her.
“No.” Therese could smell Carol’s perfume faintly, that familiar
sweetness that was strangely unfamiliar now, because it did not evoke
what it had once evoked. She put down the match cover she had been
crushing in her hand. “How can I hate you, Carol?”
“I suppose you could. You did for a while, didn’t you?” Carol said, as
if she told her a fact.
“Hate you? No.” Not quite, she might have said. But she knew that
Carol’s eyes were reading it in her face.
“And now—you’re all grown up—with grown-up hair and grown-up clothes.”
Therese looked into her gray eyes that were more serious now, somehow
wistful, too, despite the assurance of the proud head, and she looked
down again, unable to fathom them. She was still beautiful, Therese
thought with a sudden pang of loss. “I’ve learned a few things,” Therese
said.
“What?”
“That I—” Therese stopped, her thoughts obstructed suddenly by the
memory of the portrait in Sioux Falls.
“You know, you look very fine,” Carol said. “You’ve come out all of a
sudden. Is that what comes of getting away from me?”
“No,” Therese said quickly. She frowned down at the tea she didn’t want.
Carol’s phrase “come out” had made her think of being born, and it
embarrassed her. Yes, she had been born since she left Carol. She had
been born the instant she saw the picture in the library, and her
stifled cry then was like the first yell of an infant, being dragged
into the world against its will. She looked at Carol. “There was a
picture in the library at Sioux Falls,” she said. Then she told Carol
about it, simply and without emotion, like a story that had happened to
somebody else.
And Carol listened, never taking her eyes from her. Carol watched her as
she might have watched from a distance someone she could not help.
“Strange,” Carol said quietly. “And horrifying.”
“It was.” Therese knew Carol understood. She saw the sympathy in Carol’s
eyes, too, and she smiled, but Carol did not smile back. Carol was still
staring at her. “What are you thinking?” Therese asked.
Carol took a cigarette. “What do you think? Of that day in the store.”
Therese smiled again. “It was so wonderful when you came over to me. Why
did you come to me?”
Carol waited. “For such a dull reason. Because you were the only girl
not busy as hell. You didn’t have a smock either, I remember.”
Therese burst out laughing. Carol only smiled, but she looked suddenly
like herself, as she had been in Colorado Springs, before anything had
happened. All at once, Therese remembered the candlestick in her
handbag. “I brought you this,” she said, handing it to her. “I found it
in Sioux Falls.”
Therese had only twisted some white tissue around it. Carol opened it on
the table.
“I think it’s charming,” Carol said. “It looks just like you.”
“Thank you. I thought it looked like you.” Therese looked at Carol’s
hand, the thumb and the tip of the middle finger resting on the thin rim
of the candlestick, as she had seen Carol’s fingers on the saucers of
coffee cups in Colorado, in Chicago, and places forgotten. Therese
closed her eyes.
“I love you,” Carol said.
Therese opened her eyes, but she did not look up.
“I know you don’t feel the same about me. Do you?”
Therese had an impulse to deny it, but could she? She didn’t feel the
same. “I don’t know, Carol.”
“That’s the same thing.” Carol’s voice was soft, expectant, expecting
affirmation or denial.
Therese stared at the triangles of toast on the plate between them. She
thought of Rindy. She had put off asking about her. “Have you seen
Rindy?”
Carol sighed. Therese saw her hand draw back from the candlestick. “Yes,
last Sunday for an hour or so. I suppose she can come and visit me a
couple of afternoons a year. Once in a blue moon. I’ve lost completely.”
“I thought you said a few weeks of the year.”
“Well, a little more happened—privately between Harge and me. I refused
to make a lot of promises he asked me to make. And the family came into
it, too. I refused to live by a list of silly promises they’d made up
like a list of misdemeanors—even if it did mean that they’d lock Rindy
away from me as if I were an ogre. And it did mean that. Harge told the
lawyers everything—whatever they didn’t know already.”
“God,” Therese whispered. She could imagine what it meant, Rindy
visiting one afternoon, accompanied by a staring governess who had been
forewarned against Carol, told not to let the child out of her sight,
probably, and Rindy would soon understand all that. What would be the
pleasure in a visit at all? Harge—Therese did not want to say his name.
“Even the court was kinder,” she said.
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t promise very much in court. I refused
there, too.”
Therese smiled a little in spite of herself, because she was glad Carol
had refused, that Carol had still been that proud.
“But it wasn’t a court, you know, just a round-table discussion. Do you
know how they made that recording in Waterloo? They drove a spike into
the wall, probably just about as soon as we got there.”
“A _spike_?”
“I remember hearing somebody hammering something. I think it was when
we’d just finished in the shower. Do you remember?”
“No.”
Carol smiled. “A spike that picks up sound like a dictaphone. He had the
room next to us.”
Therese didn’t remember the hammering, but the violence of all of it
came back, shattering, destroying—
“It’s all over,” Carol said. “You know, I’d almost prefer not to see
Rindy at all any more. I’m never going to demand to see her, if she
stops wanting to see me. I’ll just leave that up to her.”
“I can’t imagine her ever not wanting to see you.”
Carol’s eyebrows lifted. “Is there any way of predicting what Harge can
do to her?”
Therese was silent. She looked away from Carol, and saw a clock. It was
five thirty-five. She should be at the cocktail party before six, she
thought, if she went at all. She had dressed for it, in the new black
dress with a white scarf, in her new shoes, with her new black gloves.
And how unimportant the clothes seemed now. She thought suddenly of the
green woolen gloves that Sister Alicia had given her. Were they still in
the ancient tissue at the bottom of her trunk? She wanted to throw them
away.
“One gets over things,” Carol said.
“Yes.”
“Harge and I are selling the house, and I’ve taken an apartment up on
Madison Avenue. And a job, believe it or not. I’m going to work for a
furniture house on Fourth Avenue as a buyer. Some of my ancestors must
have been carpenters.” She looked at Therese. “Anyway, it’s a living and
I’ll like it. The apartment’s a nice big one—big enough for two. I was
hoping you might like to come and live with me, but I guess you won’t.”
Therese’s heart took a jump, exactly as it had when Carol had telephoned
her that day in the store. Something responded in her against her will,
made her feel happy all at once, and proud. She was proud that Carol had
the courage to do such things, to say such things, that Carol always
would have the courage. She remembered Carol’s courage, facing the
detective on the country road. Therese swallowed, trying to swallow the
beating of her heart. Carol had not even looked at her. Carol was
rubbing her cigarette end back and forth in the ash tray. To live with
Carol? Once that had been impossible, and had been what she wanted most
in the world. To live with her and share everything with her, summer and
winter, to walk and read together, to travel together. And she
remembered the days of resenting Carol, when she had imagined Carol
asking her this, and herself answering no.
“Would you?” Carol looked at her.
Therese felt she balanced on a thin edge. The resentment was gone now.
Nothing but the decision remained now, a thin line suspended in the air,
with nothing on either side to push her or pull her. But on the one
side, Carol, and on the other an empty question mark. On the one side,
Carol, and it would be different now, because they were both different.
It would be a world as unknown as the world just past had been when she
first entered it. Only now, there were no obstacles. Therese thought of
Carol’s perfume that today meant nothing. A blank to be filled in, Carol
would say.
“Well,” Carol said smiling, impatient.
“No,” Therese said. “No, I don’t think so.” Because you would betray me
again. That was what she had thought in Sioux Falls, what she had
intended to write or say. But Carol had not betrayed her. Carol loved
her more than she loved her child. That was part of the reason why she
had not promised. She was gambling now as she had gambled on getting
everything from the detective that day on the road, and she lost then,
too. And now she saw Carol’s face changing, saw the little signs of
astonishment and shock so subtle that perhaps only she in the world
could have noticed them, and Therese could not think for a moment.
“That’s your decision,” Carol said.
“Yes.”
Carol stared at her cigarette lighter on the table. “That’s that.”
Therese looked at her, wanting still to put out her hands, to touch
Carol’s hair and to hold it tight in all her fingers. Hadn’t Carol heard
the indecision in her voice? Therese wanted suddenly to run away, to
rush quickly out the door and down the sidewalk. It was a quarter to
six. “I’ve got to go to a cocktail party this afternoon. It’s important
because of a possible job. Harkevy’s going to be there.” Harkevy would
give her some kind of a job, she was sure. She had called him at noon
today about the models she had left at his studio. Harkevy had liked
them all. “I got a television assignment yesterday, too.”
Carol lifted her head, smiling. “My little big shot. Now you look like
you might do something good. Do you know, even your voice is different?”
“Is it?” Therese hesitated, finding it harder and harder to sit there.
“Carol, you could come to the party if you want to. It’s a big party in
a couple of rooms at a hotel—welcoming the woman who’s going to do the
lead in Harkevy’s play. I know they wouldn’t mind if I brought someone.”
And she didn’t know quite why she was asking her, why Carol would
possibly want to go to a cocktail party now any more than she did.
Carol shook her head. “No, thanks, darling. You’d better run along by
yourself. I’ve got a date at the Elysée in a minute as a matter of
fact.”
Therese gathered her gloves and her handbag in her lap. She looked at
Carol’s hands, the pale freckles sprinkled on their backs—the wedding
ring was gone now—and at Carol’s eyes. She felt she would never see
Carol again. In two minutes, less, they would part on the sidewalk. “The
car’s outside. Out in front to the left. And here’s the keys.”
“I know, I saw it.”
“Are you going to stay on?” Therese asked her. “I’ll take care of the
check.”
“I’ll take care of the check,” Carol said. “Go on, if you have to.”
Therese stood up. She couldn’t leave Carol sitting here at the table
where their two teacups were, with the ashes of their cigarettes in
front of her. “Don’t stay. Come out with me.”
Carol glanced up with a kind of questioning surprise in her face. “All
right,” she said. “There are a couple of things of yours out at the
house. Shall I—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Therese interrupted her.
“And your flowers. Your plants.” Carol was paying the check the waiter
had brought over. “What happened to the flowers I gave you?”
“The flowers you gave me—they died.”
Carol’s eyes met hers for a second, and Therese looked away.
They parted on the sidewalk, at the corner of Park Avenue and
Fifty-seventh Street. Therese ran across the avenue, just making it
ahead of the green lights that released a pack of cars behind her, that
blurred her view of Carol when she turned on the other sidewalk. Carol
was walking slowly away, past the Ritz Tower doorway, and on. And that
was the way it should be, Therese thought, not with a lingering
handclasp, not with backward glances. Then as she saw Carol touch the
handle of the car door, she remembered the beer can still under the
front seat, remembered its clink as she had driven up the ramp from the
Lincoln Tunnel coming into New York. She had thought then, she must get
it out before she gave the car back to Carol, but she had forgotten.
Therese hurried on to the hotel.
People were already spilling out of the two doorways into the hall, and
a waiter was having difficulty pushing his rolling table of ice buckets
into the room. The rooms were noisy, and Therese did not see Bernstein
or Harkevy anywhere. She didn’t know anyone, not a soul. Except one
face, a man she had talked to months ago, somewhere, about a job that
didn’t materialize. Therese turned around. A man poked a tall glass into
her hand.
“Mademoiselle,” he said with a flourish. “Are you looking for one of
these?”
“Thank you.” She didn’t stay with him. She thought she saw Mr. Bernstein
over in the corner. There were several women with big hats in the way.
“Are you an actress?” the same man asked her, thrusting with her through
the crowd.
“No. A stage designer.”
It was Mr. Bernstein, and Therese sidled between a couple of groups of
people and reached him. Mr. Bernstein held out a plump, cordial hand to
her, and got up from his radiator seat.
“Miss Belivet!” he shouted. “Mrs. Crawford, the make-up consultant—”
“Let’s not talk business!” Mrs. Crawford shrieked.
“Mr. Stevens, Mr. Fenelon,” Mr. Bernstein went on, and on and on, until
she was nodding to a dozen people and saying “How do you do?” to about
half of them. “And Ivor—Ivor!” Mr. Bernstein called.
There was Harkevy, a slim figure with a slim face and a small mustache,
smiling at her, reaching a hand over for her to shake. “Hello,” he said,
“I’m glad to see you again. Yes, I liked your work. I see your anxiety.”
He laughed a little.
“Enough to let me squeeze in?” she asked.
“You want to know,” he said, smiling. “Yes, you can squeeze in. Come up
to my studio tomorrow at about eleven. Can you make that?”
“Yes.”
“Come and join me later. I must say good-by to these people who are
leaving.” And he went away.
Therese set her drink down on the edge of a table, and reached for a
cigarette in her handbag. It was done. She glanced at the door. A woman
with upswept blond hair, with bright, intense blue eyes had just come
into the room and was causing a small furor of excitement around her.
She had quick, positive movements as she turned to greet people, to
shake hands, and suddenly Therese realized she was Genevieve Cranell,
the English actress who was to play the lead. She looked different from
the few stills Therese had seen of her. She had the kind of face that
must be seen in action to be attractive.
“Hello, hello!” she called to everyone finally as she glanced around the
room, and Therese saw the glance linger on her for an instant, while in
Therese there took place a shock a little like that she had known when
she had seen Carol for the first time, and there was the same flash of
interest in the woman’s blue eyes that had been in her own, she knew,
when she saw Carol. And now it was Therese who continued to look, and
the other woman who glanced away, and turned around.
Therese looked down at the glass in her hand, and felt a sudden heat in
her face and her finger tips, the rush inside her that was neither quite
her blood nor her thoughts alone. She knew before they were introduced
that this woman was like Carol. And she was beautiful. And she did not
look like the picture in the library. Therese smiled as she sipped her
drink. She took a long pull at the drink to steady herself.
“A flower, madame?” A waiter was extending a tray full of white orchids.
“Thank you very much.” Therese took one. She had trouble with the pin,
and someone—Mr. Fenelon or Mr. Stevens it was—came up and helped.
“Thanks,” she said.
Genevieve Cranell was coming toward her, with Mr. Bernstein behind her.
The actress greeted the man with Therese as if she knew him very well.
“Did you meet Miss Cranell?” Mr. Bernstein asked Therese.
Therese looked at the woman. “My name is Therese Belivet.” She took the
hand the woman extended.
“How do you do? So you’re the set department?”
“No. Only part of it.” She could still feel the handclasp when the woman
released her hand. She felt excited, wildly and stupidly excited.
“Isn’t anybody going to bring me a drink?” Miss Cranell asked anybody.
Mr. Bernstein obliged. Mr. Bernstein finished introducing Miss Cranell
to the people around him who hadn’t met her. Therese heard her tell
someone that she had just gotten off a plane and that her luggage was
piled in the lobby, and while she spoke, Therese saw her glance at her a
couple of times past the men’s shoulders. Therese felt an exciting
attraction in the neat back of her head, in the funny, careless lift of
her nose at the end, the only careless feature of her narrow, classic
face. Her lips were rather thin. She looked extremely alert, and
imperturbably poised. Yet Therese sensed that Genevieve Cranell might
not talk to her again at the party for the simple reason that she
probably wanted to.
Therese made her way to a wall mirror, and glanced to see if her hair
and her lipstick were still all right.
“Therese,” said a voice near her. “Do you like champagne?”
Therese turned and saw Genevieve Cranell. “Of course.”
“Of course. Well, toddle up to six-nineteen in a few minutes. That’s my
suite. We’re having an inner circle party later.”
“I feel very honored,” Therese said.
“So don’t waste your thirst on highballs. Where did you get that lovely
dress?”
“Bonwit’s—it’s a wild extravagance.”
Genevieve Cranell laughed. She wore a blue woolen suit that actually
looked like a wild extravagance. “You look so young, I don’t suppose
you’ll mind if I ask how old you are.”
“I’m twenty-one.”
She rolled her eyes. “Incredible. Can anyone still be only twenty-one?”
People were watching the actress. Therese was flattered, terribly
flattered, and the flattery got in the way of what she felt, or might
feel, about Genevieve Cranell.
Miss Cranell offered her cigarette case. “For a while, I thought you
might be a minor.”
“Is that a crime?”
The actress only looked at her, her blue eyes smiling, over the flame of
her lighter. Then as the woman turned her head to light her own
cigarette, Therese knew suddenly that Genevieve Cranell would never mean
anything to her, nothing apart from this half hour at the cocktail
party, that the excitement she felt now would not continue, and not be
evoked again at any other time or place. What was it that told her?
Therese stared at the taut line of her blond eyebrow as the first smoke
rose from her cigarette, but the answer was not there. And suddenly a
feeling of tragedy, almost of regret, filled Therese.
“Are you a New Yorker?” Miss Cranell asked her.
“_Vivy!_”
The new people who had just come in the door surrounded Genevieve
Cranell and bore her away. Therese smiled again, and finished her drink,
felt the first soothing warmth of the Scotch spreading through her. She
talked with a man she had met briefly in Mr. Bernstein’s office
yesterday, and with another man she didn’t know at all, and she looked
at the doorway across the room, the doorway that was an empty rectangle
at that moment, and she thought of Carol. It would be like Carol to come
after all, to ask her once more. Or rather, like the old Carol, but not
like this one. Carol would be keeping her appointment now at the Elysée
bar. With Abby? With Stanley McVeigh? Therese looked away from the door,
as if she were afraid Carol might appear, and she would have to say
again, “No.” Therese accepted another highball, and felt the emptiness
inside her slowly filling with the realization she might see Genevieve
Cranell very often, if she chose, and though she would never become
entangled, might be loved herself.
One of the men beside her asked, “Who did the sets for _The Lost
Messiah_, Therese? Do you remember?”
“Blanchard?” she answered out of nowhere, because she was still thinking
of Genevieve Cranell, with a feeling of revulsion, of shame, for what
had just occurred to her, and she knew she would never be. She listened
to the conversation about Blanchard and someone else, even joined in,
but her consciousness had stopped in a tangle where a dozen threads
crossed and knotted. One was Dannie. One was Carol. One was Genevieve
Cranell. One went on and on out of it, but her mind was caught at the
intersection. She bent to take a light for her cigarette, and felt
herself fall a little deeper into the network, and she clutched at
Dannie. But the strong black thread did not lead anywhere. She knew as
if some prognostic voice were speaking now that she would not go further
with Dannie. And loneliness swept over her again like a rushing wind,
mysterious as the thin tears that covered her eyes suddenly, too thin to
be noticed, she knew, as she lifted her head and glanced at the doorway
again.
“Don’t forget.” Genevieve Cranell was beside her, patting her arm,
saying quickly, “Six-nineteen. We’re adjourning.” She started to turn
away and came back. “You are coming up? Harkevy’s coming up, too.”
Therese shook her head. “Thanks, I—I thought I could, but I remember
I’ve got to be somewhere else.”
The woman looked at her quizzically. “What’s the matter, Therese? Did
anything go wrong?”
“No.” She smiled, moving toward the door. “Thanks for asking me. No
doubt I’ll see you again.”
“No doubt,” the actress said.
Therese went into the room beside the big one and got her coat from the
pile on the bed. She hurried down the corridor toward the stairs, past
the people who were waiting for the elevator, among them Genevieve
Cranell, and Therese didn’t care if she saw her or not as she plunged
down the wide stairs as if she were running away from something. Therese
smiled to herself. The air was cool and sweet on her forehead, made a
feathery sound like wings past her ears, and she felt she flew across
the streets and up the curbs. Toward Carol. And perhaps Carol knew at
this moment, because Carol had known such things before. She crossed
another street, and there was the Elysée awning.
The headwaiter said something to her in the foyer, and she told him,
“I’m looking for somebody,” and went on to the doorway.
She stood in the doorway, looking over the people at the tables in the
room where a piano played. The lights were not bright, and she did not
see her at first, half hidden in the shadow against the far wall, facing
her. Nor did Carol see her. A man sat opposite her, Therese did not know
who. Carol raised her hand slowly and brushed her hair back, once on
either side, and Therese smiled because the gesture was Carol, and it
was Carol she loved and would always love. Oh, in a different way now,
because she was a different person, and it was like meeting Carol all
over again, but it was still Carol and no one else. It would be Carol,
in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they
would go together, in heaven and in hell. Therese waited. Then as she
was about to go to her, Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her
incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing,
before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting
that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked toward her.
This Bantam Book contains the complete text of the original
edition. Not one word has been changed or omitted. The low-priced
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