Fletcher Flora

Strange Sisters

Chapter 1

From the start, she knew it was a bad thing she was doing. Of all the things she had ever done that were bad for her, which were far greater in number than she could remember or wanted to remember, this was probably the worst and would bring her after a while to the worst end.

The irony was that it was something she wanted to turn out good, and she had only started it in the first place because of her sudden conviction that there had to be a break, and that once the early and really bad part of it was over with, everything would get better. Not immediately, of course, not all at once, but slowly and surely over a period of time, the way she’d seen daylight come after one of the long nights when she hadn’t slept.

But she had understood, once it was begun, that the bad part of it was all of it, the beginning and the end of it, and that nothing would ever get better. She thought a thousand times that she would stop, would go no farther with it, but she went ahead in spite of knowing very well that it was coming to a bad end, because after she had gone so far, she was obsessed with the belief that any kind of end was better than no end at all.

It was so simple, really, and involved nothing more than a man. An ordinary man. Well, maybe not such an ordinary man, at that, as anyone might have felt after seeing his lean, gray, hawk’s face. Not that she had chosen him because he was either ordinary or extraordinary. She had not really chosen him at all. She was merely using him, and she was doing it because he had presented himself at the right time under the right circumstances when she just happened to be ripe for him. She had gone into a bar. She had gone there, not to pick up a man, but to get a drink. She had just ridden downtown on a crowded bus, caught in a jam at the rear between a fat man sour with yesterday’s sweat and a younger, thinner man who made the most of the congestion, and she needed the drink badly. She went into the bar and ordered a Sidecar, which was what she usually drank, except when she drank straight rye in order to get quickly and mercifully drunk. She drank the Sidecar greedily, feeling a partial interior recovery and a little warmer in the flesh as the chill drained out.

The man on the stool beside her said, “May I buy you another?”

She had hardly noticed the man when she sat down, and now she looked at him swiftly, her eyes dilating and her viscera reacting with the familiar exorbitant violence that was like a physical shock. She averted her eyes, looking back down into her empty glass, and said with a kind of prim abruptness, “No, thanks.”

The man lifted a hand in a gesture to the bartender. “The lady will have another of the same,” he said.

She didn’t look at him again directly, but she lifted her eyes to probe the smoky depths of the mirror behind the bar and found his face beyond and a little above a row of Pilsener glasses. He was looking at her and smiling, and she noticed this time the strong, hooked nose, the hard, gray planes of the cheeks, the thin, predatory mouth above a narrow, jutting chin. It was not a handsome face, was actually ugly; but it was possessed of a cruel strength, and, rather paradoxically, she found the strength soothing, a kind of depressant to her furious adrenals.

“I said, no thanks,” she said.

His smile spread in glass. “I heard you. Now that you’ve made a gesture for propriety, you can enjoy your Sidecar.”

The bartender placed it in front of her, and after a moment she picked it up and cupped her hands around the small, cold bulb of the glass, letting her eyes slip down from the reflected hawk’s face to the suggestion of her own in amber. She wet her lips with the mixture, permitting a little to slip past and down her throat, and it was then that she got the idea. It just came into her mind. At first it made her slightly sick, and she tried to repel it, but then she accepted it and considered it coldly, looking down into her glass as if the idea had materialized and was there in suspension. She couldn’t have said why she was so suddenly capable of doing it. Yesterday she wouldn’t have been, and tomorrow she probably wouldn’t be. And maybe that was the reason. Because it was time, high time, and it had to be done now, at this moment, in this bar, with this man, or it would never be done at all, because all other times for the rest of her life would be too late. She didn’t actually think it all through like that. It was just a feeling. Maybe it was insight.

“My name is Brunn,” he said. “Angus Brunn.” And even his name was a precipitant. She liked the chopped quality of it. Especially the rugged Angus. It was conservative and agrarian, and it would go with a man who adhered to restrained and traditional forms. All of which was, in this case, a monstrous deception that she practiced on herself deliberately in a kind of inverted hatred.

“Mine is Kathryn Gait,” she said. And then, with the first concession to familiarity that was a sign of fatal commitment, she added, “My friends call me Kathy.”

That’s the way it started, the bad thing. She allowed Angus Brunn to buy her two more Sidecars, and the brandy helped her to do what was necessary. Once when her left hand was lying on the bar beside her glass, he reached out and covered it with his own. His hand was square and hard, with black hair growing in thick clusters between the second and third joints of the blunt fingers, and she felt a sudden shock of sickness in her stomach, a shriveling of the flesh on her bones. She thought then that it was no use, that she would never be able to go through with it, but somehow she managed to leave her hand lying limp beneath his, and after a while, with more help from the brandy, she recovered.

It had gone slowly from there. That afternoon she left him in the bar, but she also left her address and telephone number. She had intended going to Jacqueline’s, maybe to spend the night with her, but instead she killed a couple of hours in a movie and returned to her own place uptown to spend the night alone. Ready for bed, she stood for a moment to examine herself in the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door, leaning forward to trace with her eyes the lines of the face that was almost as lovely as Stella’s had been, the longer lines of the body that even Stella’s had not surpassed. Crossing her arms beneath her breasts, she hugged herself in a fierce, protective gesture of love. She always loved herself in a mirror. Then she wanted to be only what she was, never anything else, and she was able to discount her recurring depression, the suicidal despair and inverted hate.

The next day, Angus Brunn called her, and the first moment was a critical one. Hearing his voice and knowing that the idea she had examined in a Sidecar was gaining shape and dimension, she felt a terrible compulsion to cradle the instrument without answering. But in the end she talked, she let him come, and the idea grew materially over a period of time that seemed ages to her but was actually no more than a week. And now, tonight, in the night club, in the taxi, in the ascending elevator, she understood that it had grown to its ultimate monstrous proportion, and that it was, in spite of her desperate good intention, a bad thing, the worst thing for herself that she had ever done.

In the hall, he unlocked the door to his apartment and pushed it inward. “Welcome to my sanctuary, baby,” he said. “I warn you, you won’t find an etching in the place.”

She accepted this as a bald statement of intention, and she felt her flesh crawl, sucking in her breath in brief anguish at the sharp contraction of her stomach. She had no reason to take offense, certainly, and even less to be alarmed. The intention had been implicit in their relationship from the start, was indeed the whole reason for her allowing the relationship to exist, and she had accepted the essential with a cold, sacrificial despair that now threatened to disintegrate in terror.

It wasn’t too late. There was still time. She was still free to turn and walk back down the hall to the elevator, to descend in the whispering car to the half-life, the dim, precarious way beyond a translucent barrier. She stood without moving outside the open door until her inner disintegration had arrested itself, and then she moved past him into the room and waited rigidly for him to come up behind her and take the wrap from her shoulders. His fingers brushed her skin, and she shivered, the response traveling in a kind of peristaltic action over the whole surface of her body.

“What a nice place you have,” she said.

He laughed. “It serves. Relax a minute, baby, I’ll fix you a Sidecar.”

He went into a bedroom with her wrap and reappeared almost immediately to cross the end of the living room and enter a tiny kitchen. She heard in order the small click of the light switch, the slightly larger sound of the refrigerator door opening and closing, the faint, confused tinkling of ice and glass. Standing there in the middle of the room, she turned her head stiffly, taking in the heavy furniture, a bright hunting print on I the wall, a scattering of masculine trivia. Against the wall below the hunting print, flanked by narrow windows, was a desk. On its surface was a variety of items, but all she saw was the desk set, a silver-colored pen extending at an angle from a black base. Terror came washing back, mounting on a tide to the level of hysteria. Turning, walking like an automaton, she went over to the sofa and sat down, bending sectionally at knees and hips.

After all, she thought, it’s such a simple thing. You need only to be passive. That’s it. You let every thing happen in its own time, in its own order, and at first it’s very bad, but then it gets better, it gets better and easier each time after the first time, and after a while’ it’s perfectly right and normal and perhaps even enjoyable, because the way things are now is nothing more, than a twist, something you learned wrong a long time ago, and it’s only the very simple matter of learning it all over again now the right way.

Then Angus Brunn came back in from the kitchen with her Sidecar in one hand and a Scotch-and-soda for himself in the other. He handed her the Sidecar and said, “What’s the matter, baby? You look stiff.”

Reaching up for her drink, she managed a laugh, a sound as thin and brittle as the stem she took between her fingers. “Maybe I’m a little scared,” she said. “It could be the first time I’ve been in a man’s apartment.”

He sat down beside her and grinned, the twist of his tight mouth above the narrow, jutting chin giving to his gray face a Satanic expression that was without humor. “Oh, sure. It could be the first time I’ve ever had a woman here, too.”

“You don’t believe it’s possible? My never having been in a situation like this before?”

“You, baby? A looker like you? Let’s just say it isn’t likely. The ones without experience are the ones who haven’t had opportunities.”

“That could probably be taken as a compliment. I suppose I should thank you.”

“No. Just drink your Sidecar.”

She lifted the glass and tilted some of the tart liquid into her mouth, and at that moment he deposited his own glass on the arm of the sofa at his side and let the emptied hand fall onto her knee. It lay there like a branding iron, burning through a triple intervention of silk and nylon, but the heat did not diffuse itself. It remained localized in the small area of the violated knee, while all the remainder of her was cold and clammy, and her flesh was filthy with crawling things. It occurred to her that the delusions of delirium tremens might be something like this, and that that, too, was an experience she might someday accomplish. Deliberately, functioning under a total exertion of her will, she drained her glass and let it fall and leaned forward into him with her head back and her lids lowered against the awful encroachment of his face.

She gagged. A thin, bitter fluid rose up into her throat and nostrils, and she couldn’t breathe. She was drowning, drowning in a stagnant sea, and she lifted one arm above her head, as a drowning person does, to grasp the receding sky. The hand was held there for a second, hanging downward from the wrist like a claw, and then it descended in an attack of talons. Her long, pointed nails slashed into his cheek below the bone and plowed four parallel furrows to the jaw. With a harsh cry that was mixed pain and fury and surprise, he pushed her away and lashed out violently. The back of his hand caught her across the eyes and knocked her sprawling onto the floor. She lay there, cowering away from him, looking up at him with hate and revulsion. Blood welled slowly from his gashed cheek, making of it a shining, scarlet half-mask, and he began to curse her softly, an inflectionless recital of invective more terrifying than violence. Getting to her feet, she turned and ran through the door behind her into the kitchen.

It was so small. And it kept getting smaller. The walls closed in on her, compressing the air, threatening to crush her. She stood with her back to the cabinet, her hands spread behind her on the working surface. Her breasts rose and fell and rose again in labored gasps. She watched the door through which she had come, and pretty soon she heard him following, in no hurry, his steps light and measured on the carpet. He was still cursing, quietly and fluently, his voice never rising above a conversational level.

She looked around frantically for an exit that wasn’t there, and it was then she saw the final deadly essential of the bad end. An old-fashioned ice-pick with a rough wooden handle, stuck half the length of its spike between the back of the cabinet and the wall. Reaching over, she pulled it loose with a jerk and held it in her right hand behind her back.

Angus Brunn appeared in the doorway and stopped. The entire side of his face was now a scarlet sheen, and his eyes glittered with cold, controlled fury. Looking at her down the negligible length of the tiny room, a distance he could almost have spanned by stepping forward and reaching out with one arm, he said with a queer, incongruous dullness, “So that’s the kind of little slut you are. A just-so-far girl. A non-producing harlot. Maybe you think I’m a snotty kid to be led by my glands until you’re ready to call the turn. That’s your mistake, baby. That’s your big mistake.”

But it wasn’t. It was his. He took two steps and grasped her by the hair, jerking her head back above the strained arch of her throat, and she brought the ice-pick around and up, and the slim spike slipped into him smoothly at an angle just below the apex of the inverted V of his ribs. His breath sucked through his lips with a shrill, ragged sound that was like a reversed whinny, and he wrapped both hands around the protruding handle of the pick and looked down at it in an attitude of stunned, incredulous wonder. Then, without looking at her again, he released his held breath in a long sigh and folded slowly in the middle.

Lifting her skirt, she stepped over the body and went back into the living room. She stood in the middle of the room, almost in the identical position in which she had waited a little while ago for him to return from the kitchen with her Sidecar. Now he was in the kitchen again, and she was waiting again, but this time he would not come out even though she waited forever. The thought struck her as very funny, and she began to laugh silently, her body shaking with a swelling inner storm that.she felt must surely rock the room. After a while, the swelling of laughter began to diminish, and she tried to think, to think clearly, to decide what would now be best for her to do. She had no real faith in any course of action, no hope that anything on earth could save her now, but she still fought with a sort of instinctive tenacity to gather and secure the remnants of whatever might be left.

The glass. She had touched the glass, and it would have her prints on it. If it were discovered that she’d been here, or had even known Angus Brunn, the police would take her fingerprints and compare them with those they would have lifted from the glass, and that would be the end of her. She saw the glass lying on its side on the carpet by the sofa, and she went over and picked it up. After wiping it on the skirt of her dress, she let it drop onto the sofa and left it lying there.

Next, she thought of the ice-pick, but she couldn’t bear the thought of returning to the kitchen, and she decided, anyhow, that the handle was too rough to take fingerprints. She had heard that they could be lifted only from smooth surfaces. She couldn’t recall having touched anything else, except possibly the working surface of the kitchen cabinet, and she was certain that those would be blurred. Yes, she remembered distinctly drawing her fingers off the surface in a way that would have left them blurred.

Nothing remained, then, but to get her wrap and leave. Moving with a jerk, she went into the bedroom and found the wrap lying across the bed. Putting it on, she went back through the living room and out into the hall, using the skirt of her dress again to handle the knob. She felt rather clever, thinking of things like that, taking precautions, but all the time she knew that it was just chopping wood and that nothing would come of them but the same disaster that would have come without them, though maybe at a different time in a little different way.

On the street, she began to walk without conscious direction or purpose. She walked three blocks, and then, still without any conscious purpose, turned ninety degrees and walked until she saw a cab cruising toward the downtown area. This made her think of Jacqueline, and she wondered why she hadn’t thought of Jacqueline before, and now she left a sudden terrible need to get to her as quickly as she could, as if a second lost might be the difference between security and destruction. She waved at the cab, but by that time it had gone too far past her for the driver to see her frantic gesture. She quickened her step until she was almost running, and several blocks farther on she found another available cab stopped for a red light. Getting into the cab before the light changed, she gave the cabbie Jacqueline’s address and leaned back in the seat. Only then, suddenly aware of her burning lungs, did she realize the desperate pace she had maintained for the long blocks.

On both sides of her, beyond glass, the dappled city passed. Dappled. She liked the echoes of the word in her mind. Every once in a while, there would be a word like that, one that she immediately liked, and then she would pause, as she did now, to take a new direction from it, on whatever tangent of thought it suggested. Dappled with light and darkness, the splashes of intermittent light from street lamps and signs and unshaded windows, the deep cast shadows of buildings that seemed to crowd in upon the street in fear of the night and the aberrations of the night. People in the dappled city, moving from darkness to light to darkness. She watched them as she passed, finding and losing them in half a dozen ticks of the meter, and she began to wonder which of them were living, as she was, behind a personal translucent barrier through which light filtered dimly when there was any light at all. She thought of them in stock terms, the brutal little classifications that focused on a particular and left everything else out. Winos, dipsos, nymphos, homos. Felons, vagrants, whores and hoods. Then there were those with no barriers. The normal people. The non-aberrant, the undeviated, the good, clean partisans of orthodox sin. These, she thought, were the ones with the mentionable neuroses, the ones who had tuberculosis as opposed to leprosy, and she was suddenly rocked again by the silent, hysterical laughter. Sinking teeth into her lower hp, she laid her head back and closed her eyes, but she immediately saw Angus Brunn wrap both hands around the handle of the ice-pick and fold over slowly in the middle, so she opened her eyes again and sat staring blankly ahead past the right ear of the cabbie until he stopped at the curb in front of Jacqueline’s apartment house.

She paid the fare and crossed over and through the heavy glass door into the small lobby. The single elevator was up, and she didn’t wait, walking back to the stairs and ascending quickly. The stairs seemed interminable, stretching up forever, as if, now that she was so near Jacqueline, there were a kind of inanimate conspiracy to prevent her ever arriving. She had a heady feeling, a sense of treading air, and unconsciously she took hold of the bannister, moving the hand forward with every step to pull herself upward against the resistance of intangibles.

On the right floor at last, before the right door, she pressed a button and listened to the faint, measured strokes of chimes. There was no response, and she pressed again, leaning forward in a posture of intense concentration to follow the repetition of ordered tones. But it was no use. She rang again and again, but Jacqueline didn’t come. The blond door, the final impediment in the conspiracy that had permitted her to advance against odds to defeat, remained closed.

She wondered where Jacqueline could be, and she could think of a number of possible places. Obviously, she couldn’t tour the city, or even the likely restricted area, searching for her, and besides, now that the conspiracy against her was manifest, she was inclined to accept the futility of struggling against it any longer. She was tired. She was more tired than she could remember ever being before, and there was nothing to be done but to make the long uptown trip to her own small apartment.

On the street again, she found another cab and returned through the dappled city. In her own apartment, she undressed and stood for a moment before the mirror on the back of her closet door, but now she saw herself distorted by her relationship with Angus Brunn, an ugly corruption of what she had been. She turned off the light and got into bed and lay there on her back in the darkness trying to make her mind adhere to the unmenacing present, detached from everything that had approached this moment or would develop from it, and therefore powerless to foretell consequences.

Sometime during the swing shift of the earth’s movement around the sun, she went to sleep, and when she came awake in the morning, lying very still in the painful period of precarious readjustment, the lines of the poem were already running through her mind. Not all of them. She was already up to the third stanza. The poem was like that. It would be in her waking mind at one point or an-other, and she thought it was because the preceding lines had already run through while she was still asleep. This morning, only the third and fourth stanzas were left:

Oh a deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid

To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;

But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare,

And they’re taking him to justice for the colour of his hair.

Now ‘tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet,

And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,

And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare

He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

Chapter 2

She always thought of it as her hair, of course; instead of his hair. Not that the gender really mattered at all, because in the end it came to the same thing.

She’d discovered the poem by accident a long time ago. She’d been in one of her depression periods, and this one had gone on and on with no sign of lifting, and she’d gone into the public library back home because she’d just happened to approach it, and it seemed like a good place to go. It was very quiet there, cool dusk in the stacks, with great stains of sunlight on the floor of the reading section and dust particles suspended in the shafts slanting down from the high windows.

She’d taken the thin volume off the shelf, and it had fallen open in her hand right to the poem, as if it were pointed at her. Anyhow, she was sensitive to ideas of reference, and she always believed that it was pointed. The poem was a kind of revelation, and she never forgot it. She remembered it word for word, and sometimes when she was alone at night she lay in bed and repeated it to herself, and sometimes, on her bad days, which were frequent, she awoke in the morning, as she had now, with the lines in her mind.

Portland was a prison, she knew. She hadn’t ever been in prison, although it now seemed that she might go there; but that didn’t matter, because prison, like hair, could be taken to mean something else entirely. That was the thing about the poem. You could make it mean just about whatever you wanted it to, and so there wasn’t any use getting technical.

As far as she was concerned, because of her idea of reference, it had only one meaning, however. That was why she always remembered it exactly, even without ever referring back to it again, and why she repeated it to herself at night and at the beginning of her bad days. Not that it brought her any comfort or made the bad day any the less bad. On the contrary, it deepened her depression and hardened her despair. It was like pressing on a sore place, repeating the poem or just thinking it, and that’s why she did it.

Thinking back, which she often did in spite of the fact that she knew it was bad for her, she had the feeling that everything had begun with the scent of flowers. Beyond the scent, far back in the mists of beginning, there was the shadow of a man who had been her father, but in her mind he was someone who had had nothing to do with anything. He had died of something, and he had been buried someplace, but this was academic knowledge, devoid of significance. She realized, naturally, that this was irrational, that some part of her was of necessity a development of some part of him, but the realization didn’t give him any more substance in her mind. He was before the beginning, and the beginning was the scent of flowers.

There was, first, the scent of lilies, and it was strange that this scent which signified the beginning for her should have signified the end for someone else. The lilies lay in the living room in a large spray on top of her mother’s casket, and the scent filled the room to the point of suffocation and crept out through all the house and even out into the yard. She had gone out into the yard to get away from it, but it had followed her there.

She always had a sense of guilt about her mother’s death, because she hadn’t felt sufficient grief. But that wasn’t exactly true. At first, she had felt very intense and genuine grief, even if it was in large part loneliness and terror of loneliness, but then Aunt Stella had arrived, and after that it was impossible to feel anything except a consuming sense of anticipation that was almost as terrifying in its own way as the loneliness had been.

Aunt Stella was beautiful. She was certainly the most beautiful creature God had ever made, and it was difficult to believe that she was really the younger sister of the thin, bitter, bone-tired woman who lay, no longer tired nor bitter nor anything at all, under the weight of lilies, in the living room. Aunt Stella was twenty-eight at the time, but she could have passed for less. Her hair was shoulder length and loose, and it shone in the light almost like silver. Her eyes were blue and wide and soft with a kind of secret laughter, and her mouth was wide, too, and soft, too, and it seemed always to tremble slightly with the same laughter that was in the eyes.

There were so many beautiful things about Aunt Stella — or, as she insisted upon being called with a delicious familiarity that was nearly sufficient to burst the heart, just Stella. But more beautiful than everything else, perhaps, were her hands. Long, narrow hands with long, scarlet-tipped fingers, wonderfully certain and talented and incredibly gentle. Cupping your face or stroking your cheek, they achieved in a touch an intimacy that was a wild, singing delight. As a matter of fact, Stella was naturally accomplished in the achievement of intimacy. She was other things, too, of course. She was kind and generous and full of fun, and she was about as bad for a starved and lonely girl as anything that could possibly have happened.

It was the scent that Stella wore, more than the scent of lilies, although they were inextricably mixed, that signified the beginning. Simply because Stella was herself the beginning, and the scent was the first thing known of her. It preceded her into the room where Kathy sat, and it stood waiting, sharp and light and strangely penetrating, like something alive, for Kathy’s attention. The scent was common enough, the essence of a common flower fixed in ambergris, but Kathy could never remember the name of it, would never be able to as long as she lived, because naming it would have destroyed it, would have established it as the ordinary thing it really was.

“You must be Kathryn,” Aunt Stella said, and Kathy looked up with sudden, breathless expectancy at the beautiful woman filled with secret laughter.

“Yes.”

“Did your mother call you that? Kathryn?”

“Mostly.”

“What else did she call you? A pet name?”

“Yes. Kitten.”

The slender arches of brows were extended for a moment above Aunt Stella’s eyes, and her silent laughter grew briefly to the stature of husky sound.

“Oh, I don’t believe I like that. Kitten, I mean. I think a girl should be called something she can grow up with, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“What would you like me to call you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

“How about Kathy? It’s a nice name, and it uses part of your real one. Do you think you would like that?”

The affectionate diminutive acquired on her lips a quality of magic. It swelled and sang in the house of death.

“Yes, I’d like that very much.”

“Good. That’s settled, then. And you must call me Stella. I’m afraid I couldn’t bear being called Aunt. Let me hear you say my name once, just to make us better acquainted.”

Kathy tried to force the name through the hard, hurting constriction in her throat, but the monstrous familiarity with such a shimmering, charming woman was more than she could manage. The sound came out a dry, strangled gasp, and Stella’s voice in response was edged with alarm.

“Oh, now. You’re not going to cry, are you?”

“No.”

“No doubt it’s just that I’m strange. Do you think you could learn to like me?”

“I like you already.”

The laugh again, the husky amplification of the inner secret. “That’s nice. Then you should be able to say my name. Why don’t you try again?”

This time she accomplished it. “Stella,” she said, and the sound was like the closing of a door that would never be opened again, a small sound, definitive, shutting away everything that had gone before and making of the woman under the lilies a kind of static improbability, as if she had been a corpse from the beginning.

Stella turned and dropped into an overstuffed chair, a sad construction of lumps and squeaks and worn plush. Her narrow skirt slipped up over shining, silken knees.

“That’s better. Come here, Kathy.”

Kathy went and stood beside her, and for the first time she felt the enchantment of Stella’s long, slender hands, reacting to the delicate touch of fingers with an intensity that made her tremble. The fingers touched her hair, her temple, traced on her cheek four fines so light that the) seemed no more than a suggestion of contact.

“Would you like to come live with me from now on Kathy?”

“Oh, yes.”

Now there was a rueful quality in Stella’s voice. She lifted her shoulders and let them drop with a sigh. “That’s good, because there doesn’t seem to be any way out of it Oh, well, what the hell! Maybe a little responsibility will be good for me. But I shouldn’t swear in front of you should I? Did your mother ever swear?”

“Once in a while. When she got very angry about something.”

“Oh, sure. Only under sufficient provocation, I’ll bet your mother didn’t like me, Kathy. She didn’t approve of me. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Well, she didn’t. If she had, she could’ve made an easier time of it for herself and for you, too. Then you and I could have been friends long ago. But no matter now. Did you know I was married once?”

“No.”

“I was. The man’s name was Lonnie, and he was very handsome and exciting, but he didn’t do the kind of thing! people approve of. With their help, he died young, so you see it’s not only the good it happens to. But, anyhow, he left me lots of money, and it will be fun to have you help me spend some of it. Would you like lots of money to spend?”

“I think so.”

“Good.” The light, electric hand moved again, hair and temple and cheek. “You’re really quite pretty, you know. Something done with your hair and a few attractive frocks will make a big difference. How old are you, Kathy?”

“Ten.”

“So old? Then it’s high time something was done.” She leaned back in her chair and laughed again, and at last the sound was full-bodied, though still light — an airy, antic sound tumbling over itself to get past her lips. “Now suppose you run out into the yard and let me start finding out what’s left to be done here.”

Obediently, Kathy went out into the yard and sat under a tree and watched the slowly shifting pattern of the leaves on the grass, and the next day they buried her mother in the cemetery at the edge of town. She sat on a hard, folding chair as the casket descended into the earth, and for a moment she felt again the intense grief and at the same time the guilt that came because the grief was not enough. Then she was aware of Stella’s hand on her own, and she looked up at the silver hair shining in the sun, and grief and guilt were emotions that had no place in the new world.

Then, after a few days of final preparation, she went with Stella to the new town where Stella lived. It was not a larger town than the old one, but it seemed larger because Stella lived there. Neither was it a more beautiful or a more exciting or a more anything town, but it seemed more of everything for the same reason. What Stella touched or influenced in any way always took to itself something of the essence of Stella.

Stella’s house, however, was really larger than the old one. It was built of brick behind a wide lawn with a box hedge around it and elm and maple trees growing between the hedge and the house. There were eight rooms in the house, four upstairs and four down, and there was a colored woman who came in every day to keep the rooms clean. She also cooked and laundered and told Kathy stories about Stella, how wonderful Stella was and how all men, or at least a lot of men, were crazy about her.

This was true. There were a lot of men. Almost every night, after Kathy was upstairs in bed, one of them called for Stella. It became the colored woman’s duty, after Kathy came to stay, to remain in the house until Stella’s return at whatever hour. Kathy didn’t like the men. She regarded them as trespassers, thieves of the time she might have had with Stella herself, and her attitude toward them went through a slow metamorphosis from a general resentment to a childish, particularized hatred as she learned to identify them as individuals.

With the door of her room open so she could hear, she would lie in bed and follow in detail the audible stages of each arrival and departure. Allowing for a little variation in the time element, they all followed a routine that acquired for Kathy in its constant repetition the quality of torture, like the ancient practice of letting water drip on someone’s forehead — the car stopping at the curb in front of the house, footsteps on the approach from the street, the doorbell, Stella’s voice in greeting and the masculine response. Sometimes, if Stella wasn’t taken away at once, there would be other sounds — of ice and glass, of music, of the many small supports with which a man and a woman may shore a frail relationship.

She fought sleep. She fought it with all her strength in the hope that she could be awake when Stella returned, and sometimes she was successful. There was a reason for this. She and Stella shared the same room, and this was because Kathy, in the time following the death of her mother, was subject to nightmares. She awoke screaming in the night, terrified by the pressing darkness. So Stella, a warm and responsive person with a genuine and growing love for her niece, had taken Kathy into her room. They had twin beds, and it was a wonderful arrangement, because Kathy, if she could only stay awake, could have with Stella the last delicious intimacy of the day.

Lying very still, looking through the narrowest of slits that left vision a little blurred by her lashes, she watched Stella come into the room and turn on the soft light through which she moved while getting ready for bed.

Stella’s hair was usually a little disheveled and her lips sometimes a little smudged, and she moved about her business with a kind of floating dreaminess to the accompaniment of a trivial tune which she hummed to herself. As in everything she did, there was a charming disorder in Stella’s undressing. Moving to the tune, in and out of the adjoining bathroom, she left her dress here and her slip there, one stocking one place and the other another, and so through a Utter of shimmer and froth until she stood at last by the bed in a transparent cloud of nightgown.

She learned soon enough that Kathy watched her. The knowledge gave her a sincere, unanalyzed pleasure, and she fell into the habit of stopping beside Kathy’s bed when she returned in darkness from turning off the light

“Kathy?”

“Yes, Stella?”

“You’re awake again, you little devil. Do you know what time it is? You’ll grow up with bags under your eyes.”

“You stay awake late. You don’t have bags.”

“That’s entirely different. I’m older and don’t need so much sleep. Besides, I can sleep in the morning. I don’t have to get up and go to school.”

“I’m sorry, Stella. I just couldn’t sleep.”

“Would you like me to tell you where I went and what I did tonight?”

“Oh, yes.”

This was a lie. Or, rather, it was partly a lie. She didn’t really want to hear about Stella’s activity, because that involved one of the many men as a participant, and the men were already, so soon, the dark violators of the shining center of her life which was Stella. Hearing Stella’s dreamy, unconsciously cruel accounts of them was an experience that filled her with a sickening resentment that frightened her because it was, though she didn’t yet recognize it, evidence of her own violent potential. Still, on the other hand, she would rather suffer the anguish of Stella’s accounts than to have her go on to her own bed and lie down in silence, so it was also partly true that she wanted to listen.

“Very well, then,” Stella would say. “For just a few minutes. Move over, please.”

And this was the climax that Kathy waited for. To move over in the narrow bed. To breathe and feel the warmth and scent of Stella as she slipped into the bed to lie beside her. To make herself deaf to the intelligence of Stella’s words while absorbing all the while the soft, laughter-threaded sound of Stella’s voice. To be acutely aware in a kind of hard, hurting ecstasy of the proximate, pulsing reality of Stella in sheerest silk.

The difficult nights were the ones when Stella did not come upstairs at once after returning from wherever she’d been. Kathy would hear her come into the hall downstairs with whatever man it might be, and pretty soon the front door would open again and close behind someone departing, but it would be the colored woman and not the man. Following roughly the pattern of events below by the broken threads of sound that reached her, Kathy could feel herself drawing tighter and tighter as tension increased. But worse than that, worse by far than the mounting effect of sound, were the intervals of silence. These, offering no clues and suggesting no pattern, leaving everything to the irrational antics of the mind, were hardly to be endured.

Eventually, after nearly a year, there was one which could not be endured. Moving under a compulsion she could in no way deny, Kathy got out of bed and went out into the hall and downstairs into the hall below and across to the entrance to the living room. Though her bare feet made no appreciable noise on the treads of the stairs or the uncovered floor of the hall, she did not try to be secretive, and she stood squarely in the entrance to look into the room. One lamp was burning at the far end of the sofa. She could see nothing clearly at first except that small area which was within the perimeter of light cast by the lamp, but then the rest of the room and its contents took shape, and she saw Stella and the man in the outer area of shadow just beyond the sofa and the lamp.

They were kissing. And that was the horror of it. That it was mutual. Not that Stella was being kissed, for which she could have been exonerated as a victim, but that Stella was kissing in return. That it was obviously something she wanted to happen, had helped to make happen. That it was something she liked. Her fingers were tangled in the man’s hair, drawing his head down to a hot, adherent contact of mouths, and her body was overtly aggressive.

Turning with a whimper, Kathy ran back upstairs to her bed. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, shaking with a chill that crept through her from a central core of ice, and she thought that she was certainly going to be sick to her stomach. She didn’t open her eyes when Stella finally came up and undressed for bed, and she kept them closed when Stella spoke her name.

It was all of a week before she opened her eyes and answered when Stella spoke.

Chapter 3

This was not the first morning she had awakened in the sour aftermath of the night before to the wish that she might never have to get up, to the regret that she had not died in her sleep. But always before, her depression had been a corollary of her personality, an element in a way of life that, if it never improved, might at least survive. Therefore, there was hope, and after a while the depression lifted and regret was abandoned.

Now there was no hope. She was damned, not for what she was, but for what she had done. She had killed. Murdered. In the tiny kitchen of a certain apartment, a man named Angus Brunn lay on the linoleum with an ice-pick penetrating his abdomen at an upward angle and perhaps puncturing his heart. He was dead, and she had killed him, and there was no way on earth to undo the act or its results, or to make anyone but herself responsible for it.

Soon someone would discover the body, probably before the day was out. It was possible, even, that the body had already been discovered — by a cleaning woman, by a friend, by anyone who might have had a reason for entering the apartment. If so, the intricate social machinery designed for the hunting of transgressors was already in operation. Men to whom murder was a job were converging on the house which had become a focal point because death had given it a sudden significance. And though it was almost incredible, this massive action which would, before it ground to its end, consume thousands of dollars and man-hours, was solely directed toward the detection and apprehension of a damned and frightened fragment of society just twenty-two years of age. Of her, Kathy Gait.

Lying in bed, reluctant to resume physical participation in a menacing world, she thought that it was a long way from ten to murder. A long, long way from a child with no hope to a woman who realized it. How long, actually? Twelve years? No more than a mere dozen years? How many days would that be? She tried to multiply it in her head, but she’d never had much of a head for arithmetic, and she lost her way between digits. It didn’t matter, anyhow. What mattered was that you could learn a lot in twelve years, a lot that should never have been learned. Even more important, you could fail to learn a lot that you should have learned. She wondered if, after all, it could really be reduced to such a splendid simplicity — the development of an adequate balance between a proper ignorance and approved learning.

Reluctantly, working back in reverse order of events, she began to examine again the disastrous night. She remembered the steps she had taken to remove all evidence of her presence in the apartment, but there might, of course, be evidence of a kind that she could not affect. Suppose, for example, that Angus Brunn had confided in a third person that he was cultivating a certain Kathy Gait. This wouldn’t actually tie her to the murder, but it would at least establish a relationship with Brunn. It would make her subject to an investigation which would entail consequences, quite apart from murder, that were unpleasant to contemplate. More than that, however, suppose someone had seen her entering the apartment with Brunn, or had seen her leaving later alone.

So she came by association to the cab driver. The one who had delivered Brunn and her to the apartment house from the night club. Whether the driver could identify her, or would come forward to do it even if he could, was something she couldn’t know. But he became an additional factor in the sum of terror, one more menace in a world that bristled with them.

She lifted her hands and, looking at them, retched suddenly. Sickness churned in her stomach, rose bitterly in her throat. The tips of the fingers of her right hand, she saw, were pink-tinged, and she remembered coming in last night, undressing and going to bed without washing or making any toilet whatever. The pink on her fingers was the stain of Angus Brunn’s blood. Bringing the hand closer to her eyes, she saw under the nail of the middle finger a dried shred of flesh. Two of the nails were torn badly near the quick.

Now she was really sick. Getting out of bed, she went into the bathroom and stood over the commode, leaning forward and bracing herself against the water closet. Her stomach heaved, forcing up the watery fluid that was all it contained. When the spasm had exhausted itself, she turned to the sink and ran it full of water as hot as she could bear. She lathered her hands and rinsed them several times and then stood for a moment longer with clear water from the tap running over them.

Standing there, her eyes caught the reflection of her face in the small mirror on the medicine cabinet, and she lowered them quickly to her hands under the running water. She hardly knew what terrible metamorphosis she had expected in her appearance, perhaps a gross distortion of features to symbolize depravity, but the unchanged slender face with rather sad eyes below a tangle of short brown hair, a childish face, really, was a genuine shock. Untouched by her inner corruption, it seemed to her the ultimate horror.

Her hands scoured, she returned to the bedroom and dressed. Her empty stomach ached dully, and she began to think longingly of the comfort of hot coffee. There was coffee in the kitchen, but she couldn’t bear the prospect of making and drinking it alone. It was necessary, now that she was in motion, to get out of the apartment at once. On the corner below the apartment house was a drug store where she could get both the hot coffee and the cold company of people. People could offer nothing to save her, or even to help her, neither compassion nor pardon, but they could at least hold back the silence and divert somewhat the destructive line of her thoughts. So, acting with decision, she left the apartment and walked down the street to the drug store.

There was a stack of newspapers on one end of the tobacco counter. She stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes and pick up one of the papers, and then she continued to the fountain. On a stool she lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, and spread the paper on the imitation marble counter.

The young man behind the counter was wearing a starched white mess jacket and a starched white hat that was cut like a military overseas cap. The hat was cocked at such a precarious angle over one ear that it seemed about to fall off at any moment. His hair was heavy and blond and rather long, brushed around the sides of his head so that it met to form a little ridge, like two waves of water coming together, precisely in the center in the back. The only way a man could brush his hair to achieve such an effect, Kathy thought, would be to stand with his back to one mirror while he looked into another. It would take a lot of time and work to achieve such a precise effect. A lot of vanity.

“A cup of black coffee,” she said.

The young man looked at her and smiled. “Anything else? How about a breakfast roll? Fresh this morning.”

“No, thanks. Just coffee.”

“Doughnut? Hot cake?”

“Please. Just the coffee.”

“Okay, lady. Coffee coming up.” He put a heavy cup on the counter at the edge of her paper and poured the coffee from a Silex. “Ten cents, lady.”

“Oh... yes.”

She dug for the dime and slid it across the counter. Drawing the steaming cup over onto the newspaper under her face, she sat with her head bent and let the warm, moist fragrance rise up into her nostrils. It was a good smell, a reviving smell, a smell that prepared her a little better for the ordeal of the paper that waited her attention under the coffee. She drank a little, relishing the scalding descent into her interior, and then pushed the cup aside again, leaving no barrier between her and the symbolic ink, no last excuse for further procrastination.

She examined the paper carefully, her eyes moving column by column across the front page. And there was nothing there. There was a murder, all right, but it was not Angus Brunn’s. Perhaps, she thought, because Angus Brunn, even dead by violence, didn’t merit the prestige of page one. She turned the page, feeling a strange and desperate affinity for the unknown person who might, at this moment, be reading in loneliness and terror and with God knew what futile regret the page one account of his cardinal transgression. She had never before been compelled to feel compassion for a murderer, though she had felt in her life many things good people are not supposed to feel, and she thought, looking for the report of her own crime, that her corruption was now surely complete.

Nothing on page two. Nor three. Turning the pages methodically, examining each page with the same column by column thoroughness, even through finances^ sports, and entertainment, she gave up only at the classified section. Then, folding the paper as compactly as possible, she dropped it to the floor and returned to her coffee.

What did it mean? That the body of Angus Brunn hadn’t yet been discovered? That it had been discovered and was being kept under wraps by the police for reasons of their own? She doubted that it was the latter. She knew nothing about police procedure, but she doubted that a thing like that would be done in the case of a relatively unknown and unimportant man like Angus Brunn. No, the reasonable assumption was that the body had not been found. Then she began to think, what if it isn’t found for a long time, not until someone is led to it by the nose? She visualized the body, over an extended period, bloating and decomposing and beginning to stink, and she shuddered violently, lifting her cup quickly to take more heat into her stomach.

She sat drinking and smoking, alternating swallows and inhalations. She had a feeling of waiting, of being incapable of doing anything else, as if nothing remained but to let the disastrous effects of grim causes catch up with her. When her cup was empty, she ground out the butt of her cigarette in the saucer and found another dime, which she placed on the counter. The young man with swept-around hair came down to her on the other side.

“More coffee, lady?”

“Yes, please.”

He supplied it and lingered, and she realized with exaggerated resentment that he was about to exercise his charm. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to talk with him. There was something about him that disturbed her even beyond the degree of her usual abnormal reaction which she had long ago come to accept as normal.

“Big night?” he said.

She looked at him coldly, quickly. “I beg your pardon.”

He grinned. “All the coffee. No food. I figured you must be trying to work one off.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“No? Okay, if that’s the way you want it. You take my word for it, though, there’s nothing like a good old Seltzer. You like to try one?”

“No, thank you.”

“Don’t be like that, sweetheart. I’ll make it on the house. Don’t be like that.”

“Let me alone. For God’s sake, let me alone.”

His vanity bled in his face, changing it to a dull, ugly red, and his mouth sagged in an expression of angry sullenness. “Sure, lady. Pardon me for living. Pardon me all to hell.”

He moved off behind the counter, but his words had shattered her defenses against the past. Don’t be like that, he’d said. That silly expression. Someone else had said it to her a long time ago, and its repetition now cued the recollection of an experience she did not want to remember.

Christ! she thought. Kenny Renowski!

And now that she had remembered, it seemed to her that there was even a subtle physical similarity between Kenny and the counterman. Kenny was younger, of course, at the time she remembered him, and his hair was darker, and he wasn’t so tall, and maybe he was a little better looking, though she was a poor judge of that, but there was something common to both of them, and she decided it was the silly arrogance, the nasty little bloated ego that could be heard in the voice and seen in the eyes and in the way the head was carried.

Where was Kenny now, she wondered. In what dull town, working at what dull job, married to what dull, impossible girl? Probably the same old town. Probably doing one of the petty, dreary jobs that seemed to be, for some obscure reason, essential to the existence of people in a town like that. Probably married to one of the girls she used to know when she was there.

Jesus, how she had despised him. Him and all the other strutting, revolting little cocks so proud of their fuzzy masculinity, just beginning to be conscious of the weight of their genitals between their legs. And the girls had been no better, for that matter. They were just as bad with their secret little yens, their secret little knowledge, their frightened, frantic attempts to give a nauseating spirituality to what was no more than an ache in the groin. Oh, Jesus, what a relief it was to get away from them after each horrible day of school and get back to the beautiful, exciting company of Stella. To return each day from their gray fringe existence to the clean and shining center that was Stella.

But it hadn’t been that bad at first. At first it was actually almost all right, because then, in the early years, it was right and normal for like to prefer like. But then, later, one somehow crossed an intangible demarcation line, and once you were across it, it was no longer normal for like to prefer like, but it became necessary and normal for like to prefer unlike, and what had been normal back on the other side of the line now became abnormal, and if you didn’t make the change at the time it was supposed to be made, you were in a hell of a fix. You were left, as she had been, with a growing sense of detachment and loneliness in a kind of emotional isolation resulting from the blurred perception of your own oddness. And, it would have been worse than it was, worse than it was later to become, if it hadn’t been for the great compensating constant of Stella. Stella was the poetess-priestess of an island sanctuary, and if there were imperfections in her role of Sappho, there were also subtle mechanisms of the mind to reject recognition of them.

The men, for instance. God, the constant flow of panting men! Even they had been reduced by the devious mind to fantasy figures without body or place in the real scheme of things. One could even ignore, thanks to the adroit mind, Stella’s imperception, her insensitivity to the true character of the relationship of which she was part — her pretty, inept confusion when she tried, on rare occasions, to understand Kathy’s failure to display the orthodox signs of transformation beyond the intangible demarcation line.

“Kathy,” she’d said, “why is it you never go places like the other girls? You’re much prettier than any of them.”

“But I do, Stella. I go lots of places.”

“Please don’t be obtuse, darling. You know what I mean. Why don’t you go out with a nice boy once in a while? You’re old enough now. It would be good for you.”

“I’m not interested in boys, Stella.”

“Well, that’s the point. You ought to be interested in boys. And I happen to know that there are a great many boys who are interested in you. It isn’t that you don’t have opportunities. Look, darling. It isn’t natural for a pretty girl to be alone all the time. Will you please tell me why you have no interest in boys?”

And Kathy’s heart cried out in silence, Oh, Stella, can’t you see that I’m not alone at all? Can’t you see that I can’t be alone while I’m with you, and that I’m with you every minute of my life, because even when we’re physically apart I’m still with you in my mind, and that I can never be alone so long as you are here to touch or to think about? Oh, Stella, Stella, sweet shining Stella, can’t you see anything or understand anything or share with me just a little this feeling that I have?

But all she’d said was, “I don’t know, Stella. I’m just not interested.”

Then Stella had shrugged and laughed and looked prettily frustrated, because naturally she had this intimation that everything was not quite as it should have been, but she never knew, never actually knew, and it was fantastic, looking back, that she could sense this thing but never actually recognize it until it was much too late.

Kenny. Kenny Renowski. What right did he have to come filtering back after all this time from the dark and distant March day when he had been fixed for her as the symbol of a constant threat and, even more disturbing, of self-revelation? The March day of the wet, gray early spring when she had disposed of him once and for all, and had consigned him, she had hoped, to the oblivion of total repression. Damn him to hell, what right did he have to return from the dead by tenuous association with a cheap little drug store clerk to molest her now, at this precarious time, when she was poised on the verge of destruction and needed all her faculties for present trouble?

He had been one of the facile boys. One of the complacent and arrogant little aristocrats of adolescence that rise like cream — or scum, as she thought of them — to the surface of the human volume of every high school. She had been pretty, and he had been, of course, irresistible. Or so he had considered himself, and in the beginning it had been fun. It had been great fun to watch his obvious advances against her indifference, to follow with a mild sadistic pleasure the progressive stages of his incredulity and disintegration as he found the indifference to be impregnable. Oh, Christ, it was really funny! A lonely, withdrawn girl of no position, however pretty, totally unimpressed by his attention! It was really quite impossible. It wasn’t supposed to be that way at all. She was supposed to melt, to submit, to acknowledge his charm with appropriate concessions. She was supposed to wet herself with joy. And it was fine fun for a while, before the fun was killed, to watch the formula of conquest reverse itself. To see him debased by a green and sappy passion. To see him watching her in revolting humility, groveling inwardly, pleading with dog’s eyes.

She wondered how far she should permit the ridiculous business to go, and she decided that the limit should be imposed by her own stomach. So long, that is, as her perverse pleasure in his silly suffering was a larger factor than her revulsion. So she let it develop to its natural climax, and in the end it was she who suffered more. It was she who finally confronted for the first time, thanks to the catalyst of his fumbling aggression, a reality far more disturbing than a temporary glandular frustration.

He had fallen into the practice of standing on a certain corner to watch her pass on her way home from school. She never looked at him directly, but she was acutely aware of him, and she relished the sharp turmoil of emotions his presence aroused — the confusion of contempt and curiosity and genuine animus. He worked so hard to achieve a studied casualness, as if it were the purest coincidence that he just happened to be at that spot evening after evening at the very time she would be passing it. And finally, as she had known he would, he made a move.

It was this wet gray day in March with water dripping from the branches of trees and standing in little puddles on the sidewalk and in the street. In the air there was the lift, the raw promise, the damned lie of spring, and as she passed with a load of books under her arm, he fell in beside her and said, “Hello, Kathy.”

She increased the cadence of her steps a bit. “Hello,” she said.

“Let me carry your books, Kathy.”

She felt his hands on them, and she clamped them more I tightly against her side. “No, thanks. I can carry them.”

“Oh, come on, Kathy. Don’t be like that.”

He tugged at the books, and rather than make a foolish issue of it, she released them suddenly.

“Oh, well. Go ahead and carry them if you want to.”

She could sense at once the subtle change in his personality. Already, with such a nominal concession, his bruised ego began to recover, to reorganize itself along a line of dominance. She caught in the corner of her eye the change in his expression, the quick little lift of his chin, and her contempt for him swelled within her, assuming the proportions of exorbitant mockery. She speculated on the extent of his consternation if there were all of a sudden a contact of mental telepathy between them, and the thought prompted in her a wild urge to hilarious laughter.

“You’re a funny girl, Kathy,” he said. “Am I?”

“What I mean is, you don’t seem to mix much. Sometimes it seems as if you just don’t like anyone.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

“Not even me?”

“Why should I make an exception of you?”

“I don’t know. Anyhow, I like you. I think you’re the prettiest girl in school.”

“Do you?”

“I just said so, didn’t I? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Not particularly.”

“You see what I mean? Why can’t you be nice to a guy?”

“If you don’t like the way I am, you can give me my books and leave. Nobody’s holding you here.”

Again from the corner of her eye, she saw the impact of her words on his ego, the swift collapse of the slight bloat that had developed as a result of his obtaining her books.

He said quickly, “Let’s go over to Tinker’s for a coke. Would you like a coke, Kathy?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on. Give a guy a break, can’t you?”

“Why should I?”

“Well, damn it, just to see what it’s like. You could just try it once.”

She hesitated. She was tempted to concede again, and she didn’t quite know why. Not, God knew, because she anticipated any pleasure from it. Except, perhaps, the pleasure of extending her manipulation of his emotions a little longer, of seeing him humbled and debased in the silly pursuit of something he’d never get. Of something that didn’t even exist, although there was no possible way for him to understand that. She herself hardly understood it yet.

“All right,” she said. “If you want to buy me a coke, I guess I can drink it.”

So they turned at the next corner and went down to Tinker’s. It was a small clapboard building with a flat roof. Inside, there were plywood booths around three walls, the fourth wall being reserved for the counter. There were stationary stools before the counter and a few tables with chairs scattered in the central area. There was also a garish juke-box of many colors with golden bubbles rising soundlessly through visible tubes. There was always a spinning platter, an amplified voice or the overwhelming collaboration of strings and reeds and brass and percussion, the fiat five-cent can of what passed for music. Tinker’s was one of those places which, for no apparent earthly reason, catches on and hangs on and will not die. Its short orders were bad, its accommodations were inferior, its attitude was indifferent; but in spite of these things it was popular, a congregating place, and trade was brisk in dimes and quarters primarily.

Kathy sat in a booth and sipped her coke and tried to avoid looking at the face of Kenny Renowski across from her. The juke-box blared, there was a heavy smell of greasy hamburger and onions in the stagnant afar, and all around her were students she didn’t like engaged in an awkward mass flirtation with a function she abhorred. She choked on her coke and set the glass unemptied on the table of the booth.

Standing, she said, “I’m leaving.”

He also stood. “Already? Be a sport, Kathy, and stick around. We have lots of fun in this joint. Stick around, you’ll see.”

“I don’t want to stick around. I want to leave. Thanks for the coke.”

“Wait a minute. I’ll go with you, then.”

“You don’t have to come. You can stay and have some of the fun you were talking about.”

“Damn it, Kathy, I said I’d come, didn’t I? Why do you have to be so antagonistic about everything?”

“I’m not antagonistic. I just don’t care whether you come or stay. You can suit yourself.”

He took hold of her arm and said desperately, “Don’t be like that, Kathy.”

They were outside again by that time, and she wheeled to face him, jerking her arm furiously from the grip of his fingers.

“That’s the second time you’ve said that. Please don’t say it again.”

“What?”

“That silly stuff about my not being like that. I am like that, whatever that means, and if you don’t like it, you can get away from me. Just get the hell away.”

She turned again and began walking, and he fell into step beside her. “I didn’t mean to make you sore, Kathy. It’s just an expression. Would you like to take a walk?”

“A walk? Where?”

“Oh, out in the country a little way. It’s a swell day for walking, don’t you think? You can actually smell the earth, wet as it is, and there’s a kind of feeling in the air. It would be nice outside of town today. We could walk out to West Creek and back. It isn’t very far. How about it, Kathy?”

Again she hesitated, and again, for what obscure reason she would never be able to say, she made the concession. And though it seemed afterward to have been a great mistake, the cause of intense suffering, perhaps it was not a mistake after all, but rather a necessary traumatic experience that had to come sooner or later and was better to have come sooner.

“All right,” she said, and they walked in silence along the wet street under trees on which there was an early hint of foliage, an almost invisible tinge of emerging chlorophyll. They crossed the western limit of the small town and walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile along the shoulder of a farm-to-market road. The shoulder was spongy from the rain that had fallen, but it was not muddy, being covered with a mat of heavy brown dead grass left over from the last warm days of the year before. Eventually they left the shoulder and cut at an angle across a pasture toward the long wavering stand of scrub timber that marked the course of West Creek. As they walked, the sun, already far down toward the horizon in its descent of the sky, broke through a cluster of clouds and touched with cold white fire the gray remnants of rain and the drab wet growth of earth. It was all at once an expanded world, still and shimmering and incredibly delicate, and Kathy felt within the close confinement of her ribs a vast swelling of pain and pleasure that she thought must surely burst the slender bones.

She closed her eyes, wanting to cry out in hurting ecstasy, and she wished with all her heart that Stella were here to share the shining world. If only it were Stella beside her instead of this ridiculous, bumbling, offensive boy. By keeping her eyes closed, stepping carefully to avoid stumbling in her self-imposed blindness, she almost managed to convince herself that it was true, that it was indeed Stella beside her and that there was no such person as Kenny Renowski to defile the purity of the new world that the sun had casually created in the last hour before it disappeared.

They crossed the pasture and descended a gentle slope through trees to the bank of the narrow, sluggish creek. And there in the shadows of the trees beside the muddy water, her brief, bright, spun-glass world shattered and fell in silence and lay around her in countless jagged and menacing shards. At first, for a few seconds, she was so frozen, so paralyzed by the violence of her reaction, that she made no protest whatever, and her passivity was mistaken for submission. Then, in an instant, she was a sobbing, clawing fury in fierce and disproportionate retaliation to his mild and harmless aggression. Her vision was impaired by a thick, swirling mist, and the first thing she saw clearly after vision was restored was his clawed, bleeding, terrified face.

Turning, she ran. Wildly, still sobbing, she fled up the slope through the trees and back across the pasture to the road, and though she stopped there on the shoulder to recover her breath and quiet the rampant beating of her heart, she had in a way never stopped at all, had run on and on for a long time over a long way from one bleeding face to another. A long time and a long way from Kenny Renowski to Angus Brunn.

Chapter 4

Abruptly, she stood up and left the counter. Making her way to the rear of the store, she stood waiting outside the door of an occupied telephone booth, caught fast for a moment between the opposing forces of a suddenly recurring need to contact Jacqueline and an oppressive uncertainty of the wisdom of it. She looked at her wrist watch and saw that it was after nine o’clock. Jacqueline would have left her apartment long ago, would have completed by this time the trip from the apartment to the downtown department store in which she was employed as a personnel manager. She was at this moment, no doubt, sitting behind the huge blond desk with the ivory-colored telephone on it over which Kathy had first seen her and over which the intangible line of communication and understanding had established itself between them from the first moment as surely as it could have been established by spoken words over the telephone itself.

Jacqueline liked ivory. The color, that is. Pale, cold ivory. She surrounded herself with it in the restricted places of her private life, and added a touch here and there, wherever it was possible, in the public areas. For instance, except for the slightest relief of more vivid colors, which only served to emphasize the preponderance, the bedroom of her apartment was entirely in the pale tone — woodwork and walls and rug and drapes and furniture. Entering it was like walking into a kind of sanctuary, a strange temple in which the decor was possessed of esoteric significance for the instinctively initiate.

Kathy stirred and lit another cigarette, waiting for the occupant of the booth to complete his conversation. She watched him through a narrow glass panel in the door. He sat bending forward from the little swinging seat beneath the instrument, his soft felt hat pushed back on his head, smoke from a cigarette that was pasted with dry saliva to his lower lip swirling around his face and clogging the booth with a thin, blue haze. When he talked, the cigarette bobbled so sharply that it seemed about to shake loose. His voice undulated, rising now and then to the level of intelligibility, a word here and there standing out nakedly. He was apparently trying to persuade someone to meet him at a certain place at a certain time, and it seemed to be very important.

Kathy moved away a few steps to eliminate the sound of his voice. She was all at once unreasonably angry with him for delaying her own call, for being a stupid man with a dull problem that was probably no problem at all.

Trying to eject him from her mind, she began again to think of Jacqueline, following her in imagination through the routine of the day thus far. In the beginning she arose from ivory sheets and stood beside the bed on ivory broadloom, and she was herself ivory, black-and-ivory, tall and superbly proportioned by the standards of classic beauty, as if she had been carved by an ancient Greek artist from a giant tusk. Propelled by Kathy’s mind, she moved in a remembered order. First to the kitchen, where coffee was started in the automatic silver percolator. Next to the bathroom for a shower and then back into the bedroom for the swift and simple rites before the mirror of the dressing table. These rites, however simply and quickly done, seemed almost superfluous, because there was about her an appearance of fastidiousness that survived even the usual ravages of a night in bed. Her hair, black and sleek and pulled back to a knot from a center part, looked undisturbed. Her eyes were as bright as if they had been chemically flushed, and the muscles of her face did not sag in tired need of an astringent. Whatever there was in her of deterioration and slow decay existed in secrecy beneath unaffected flesh. This physical impression was supported, was perhaps in some degree established, by a more subtle quality, a kind of emotional purity impervious to violation, and even in passion and the act of passion she seemed to burn with a pure white cauterizing flame.

At the closet, she selected one of the severely tailored suits she invariably wore to work. Which one this morning? The navy pin-stripe? The gray chalk-stripe? The hard brown gabardine? It really didn’t matter, because whichever one it was, it was precisely the right one. It was the very one for this particular day, and no other one could possibly have been quite so appropriate for what the day would bring or for the places the day would take her. Fully dressed, a black string tie at the collar of a tailored blouse, she returned to the kitchen where the coffee was brewed and hot in the silver percolator.

She drank the coffee black and unsweetened, and then she left the apartment, locking the door behind her and going down in the elevator to the lobby and through the lobby to the street, and now she was behind the blond desk with the ivory telephone that would be ringing in desperate supplication just as soon as this man, this Goddamn vindictive, deliberately perverse man, got through with his stupid conversation in the drug store booth.

And he was through. He had finished and gone while Kathy wasn’t looking. The jointed door was folded back, and the thin smoke of his cigarette drifted out. Acting quickly, before she had time to reconsider in fear of Jacqueline’s reaction, she slipped into the booth and closed the door and dialed the remembered number. She got a central switch board, of course, and had to wait for a connection. After a bit, she got it, and Jacqueline’s voice, a cool, measured modulation, was saying, “Miss Wieland speaking.”

Kathy answered with a rush. “Jacqueline? This is Kathy, Jacqueline.”

There was a pause in which something grew, and Jacqueline’s voice, when it came back on, had subtle undertones, like the voice of a woman speaking casually to her lover when her husband was present. “Oh, hello, Kathy. How are you this morning?”

“I want to see you. I went to your place last night, but you weren’t home.”

“I had an engagement, I’m afraid. Sorry you made the trip for nothing.”

“I must see you, Jacqueline.”

“Well, I have a rather full schedule today. I’m not even having lunch out.”

“Please, Jacqueline.”

The pause again, a slight alteration in the undertone. A kind of soft wariness. “You sound urgent, Kathy. Is something wrong?”

“Yes. I can’t tell you about it now. Not over the telephone.”

“Very well. I’ll leave here about five o’clock. Meet me in the Bronze Lounge, and you can tell me over a cocktail. I’m sure it can’t be too serious.”

The line went dead, and Kathy sagged against the side of the booth, fighting again the dark compulsion to hysterical laughter. Not serious, Jacqueline had said. Not too serious. Just the bad end of a good idea.

Outside the booth, she looked again at her watch and was astonished to see how few degrees the minute hand had progressed. Five o’clock seemed remote in time, an improbable prospect in her own life. It was not yet ten. Over seven hours before five. She wondered how she could ever get through them to the Bronze Lounge and Jacqueline, and the appointment, now that it had been made, had assumed in her mind the character of a goal to be reached at any cost, a kind of terminal point of danger, beyond which she would be once more quite secure. She understood, actually, that there was no good reason for this, no reason at all to think that anything would be better after she had seen Jacqueline, but that there was, on the other hand, a good possibility that everything would be worse, depending upon Jacqueline’s response. But though she understood this very well, it would have been ruinous to acknowledge it, and so she continued to think of the hour of five as an established haven toward which the hands of her watch crept with unnatural slowness. It was only necessary to survive, somehow, the intervening time.

If only she could sleep. If she could sleep away the time, waking just soon enough to keep the appointment, all her trouble would be resolved. But she would never be able to sleep. If she tried, she would lie staring with hot, dry eyes into a past that offered no consolation and a future that offered no hope, and this was something to be avoided beyond all else. But there were inducements to sleep. What about a sedative? A barbiturate of some kind. Perhaps it would be possible to take just enough of something to let her sleep five or six hours, but not enough to prevent her keeping the appointment with Jacqueline. It would be a risky business, and she would have to be very cautious in the amount she took, rather too little than too much, for it would be the culminating disaster if she failed to be in the Bronze Lounge at the stipulated time. She held desperately to the blind, irrational conviction that Jacqueline would somehow have the solution to her problem that her ills could be cured over a cocktail.

Turning with a jerk, she walked over to the prescription counter and stood drumming with her fingers until a bale man in a tan linen jacket came up from the rear and asked her what she wanted.

“I’d like some sleeping medicine,” she said, and added redundantly because her nerves were taut: “Something to make me sleep.”

The pharmacist looked at her, lifting his eyes from her drumming fingers to her face. “Have you a prescription?”

“No. I... I didn’t realize that it was necessary to have a prescription. Can’t you sell me something without one? Surely there’s some kind that doesn’t require a prescription.”

He shook his head. “Sorry, lady. Law’s pretty strict about it. You go see a doctor, get a prescription and come back. I’ll be glad to serve you if you get a prescription.”

“Yes. I guess I’ll have to. Thanks very much.”

She turned and walked rapidly up the aisle between counters and out onto the sidewalk. She had the feeling all the way that the bald pharmacist was watching her suspiciously from behind his counter, that she had in some way given him a clue to her guilt simply by asking for sleeping medicine. It required a tremendous exertion of will to keep from running, and she felt icy sweat gather in her arm pits and trickle in thin lines down across her ribs. Turning left on the sidewalk, she walked for several blocks with the same accelerated pace with which she’d left the drug store. After a while, she saw a small park on the opposite side of the street, just one square block with trees and shrubs and scattered benches and the cast-iron figure of a man with an axe in his hands. Crossing the street, she went into the park and sat down on a bench, staring straight ahead past the cast-iron man and breathing deeply with a slow, measured rhythm.

Most doctors are men, she thought. This in itself was insignificant, but she was disturbed by the probability that no doctor would give her a prescription for what she wanted just because she asked him for it. He would want to know why. He would ask her questions. He would want to assure himself by his own diagnosis that the medicine was proper and necessary. He would want to examine her, and though she might suffer all the other elements of a consultation, this she certainly couldn’t. She might find a woman doctor, of course. But they were fewer than men and would be more difficult to locate. She would probably have to travel quite a distance to reach the office of one, and even after she had gone to so much trouble, she couldn’t be sure that she would get what she wanted. Trouble and the chance of failure combined to weigh heavily against the effort.

Still, it would be sweet to sleep. To sleep and to waken and to go at once to Jacqueline. Sleep was the balm of hurt minds. Who had said that? Surely someone had said it. It was not something that had just come into her mind. It had the nice, round sound of something that someone had said before. The balm, the balm, the balm of hurt minds. Oh, yes! Oh, God, yes! Who else but old Macbeth? Who but the bloody old Thane of Cawdor himself? The Thane had committed a murder, too, though it was a long time ago and for a different reason, so murder gave them a sort of common denominator, and it was right that she should now remember something he had said. But if you wanted to be technical, it wasn’t really Macbeth who had said it at all, but Shakespeare. Shakespeare had written a play about Macbeth, and he had made Macbeth say that bit about sleep being the balm of hurt minds, so it was really Shakespeare himself who had said it. Not that one needed to quibble. It was a fine line, a true line, a line big enough to divide its credit among all the people in the world who had ever said it — among Macbeth and Shakespeare and Dr. Vera Telsa. There was probably no line Shakespeare had ever written that Dr. Vera Telsa hadn’t repeated sometime or other, and most of them many times. Dr. Vera Telsa loved Shakespeare. She had once settled an old argument by telling Kathy in confidence that

Shakespeare was neither Shakespeare nor Sir Francis Bacon. Shakespeare, she’d said, was a woman.

Dr. Vera Telsa was a teacher of literature in a college Kathy had once attended for a very short while. Her class in Shakespeare had an excellent reputation on the campus, but Kathy had never been in the Shakespeare class, because Shakespeare was not open to freshmen, and Kathy had never got to be anything else. She had been in Dr. Telsa’s freshman survey class, however, because the college, Burlington College for girls, was small and select, and that was one of the advantages of a small, select school. Even when you were a freshman, you got good teachers, really top-drawer teachers with Ph.D.‘s who had written books and maybe some articles for scholarly and literary magazines, and not someone who was working his way to a degree by teaching a class or two. And even in a survey course, if it happened to be a survey of English literature, you got some Shakespeare. Just one play. Just a taste. Just enough to make the receptive students want more. Dr. Telsa was interested only in the receptive students. It was her mission to make them want more.

Dr. Telsa was tall and fairly young to have a Ph.D., and she had ash-blond hair and a deep, husky voice that was wonderful for Shakespeare and made you forget entirely that she was much too thin and that her hip bones were sharp protrusions under her clothes. Kathy had taken a rear seat in the classroom on the first day, but later she moved up front, and her feeling for Dr. Telsa became more and more intense after Beowulf, and by the time Shakespeare came around, she was thinking of Dr. Telsa as Vera and was even forgetting for short periods of time that Stella was dead, that Stella was nowhere on earth and would never be again.

Vera had intimate little extra-curricular sessions in her own home for those who responded adequately. One sat on a cushion and had refreshment and talked about whatever poet or essayist or critic happened to be most on one’s mind. There was a delicious freedom in it, a brave baring of soul, and you could smoke even if you were a freshman. Vera herself smoked. She smoked cork-tipped cigarettes in a long holder that seemed, when you thought about it, to make the cork tips rather superfluous. She waved the holder when she talked or recited, and she blew smoke at the ceiling when someone else was talking or reciting. Kathy was invited to attend because she had moved up front, because her intense concentration on Vera was mistaken for absorption in what Vera was saying, and because, for reasons of her own, Vera would have eventually invited her anyhow.

She had been attending the sessions for about a month when she arrived one night to find that no one was there. No one but Vera, who stood framed in the doorway against a wash of soft light and said, “Have you come for our little session, my dear? I’m afraid it’s been canceled for tonight.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It’s quite all right. It is I who should apologize. I must have forgotten to tell you.”

“This was a lie. She hadn’t forgotten at ah”. And Kathy knew intuitively that it was a lie, though she didn’t specifically categorize it then or later, and she knew also that she was supposed to recognize it as such and was expected to make a decision on the basis of it. She stood quietly outside the door, making no move to leave.

“Aren’t you going to the dance?” Vera asked.

“Is there a dance?”

Vera laughed softly. “Well, I can see that you aren’t going. The boys from the University are down tonight, you know. It’s a standard fall affair.”

“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten all about it I never go to dances.”

“Is that so? In that case, why don’t you come in for a while? We can have a nice, cozy chat all by ourselves.”

She stepped back out of the doorway, and Kathy walked past her into the room. She removed her coat and stood for a moment holding it, and Vera said casually, “Just drop it anyplace, my dear.”

She laid the coat over the back of a chair and moved farther into the room to drop, from habit formed in the sessions, onto a thick brocaded pillow on the floor by the sofa. Vera sat on the sofa itself and fitted a cigarette into her long holder and lit it with a silver table lighter. She leaned back and stretched her long, thin legs in front of her. She blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling in a blue plume and laughed gently.

“Yes,” she sighed, “when there’s a dance with boys available, I’m afraid stuffy old Dr. Telsa and her stuffy old literature must take a back seat. I’m deeply touched that you remembered me under the circumstances. Tell me, why don’t you like to dance?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t care for it.”

“Such a simple reason for such a pretty girl? Oh, no, my dear, I’m sure it must be much more complex than that. Are you sure it’s the dancing you don’t like?”

Kathy looked up from her position on the floor, and Vera looked down through a gossamer drift of smoke, and though Kathy was young, she was no fool, and she thought that there comes a time when it is necessary to recognize and accept whatever is inside you and whatever is apparent inside someone else.

She said clearly, “I guess not. I guess it’s really the boys.”

Vera’s pink lips, wide and flexible and rather too thin, curved very slightly in the merest trace of a smile. “Shall I tell you something? We can make it a little secret just between the two of us. I don’t like boys, either. Or, in my case, perhaps I should say men. Isn’t it odd of us?”

She stood up then and walked across the room to a radio-phonograph combination. Looking back over her shoulder, she said, “Shall we have music tonight with our talk? What would you like?”

“Whatever you’d like.”

“Chopin? Some of the waltzes?”

Kathy had no feeling at all for Chopin, because appreciation of fine music was one of the things she had never learned from Stella, but she nodded in agreement, and Vera placed a stack of records on the spindle of the phonograph and continued to stand by the machine until the captive sound of a piano under talented fingers was released to lilting freedom in the room. Then she returned to the sofa and sat down again in her previous position. Her voice, against the background of Chopin’s music, was as light and lilting as the music itself.

“You have sad eyes, Kathy. That’s the first thing I noticed about you when you came into my class. Why are your eyes so sad, Kathy?”

“I didn’t know they were.”

“They are, Kathy. They’re very, very sad. Come and sit beside me and tell me about yourself, and then perhaps I’ll understand. You must call me Vera and talk with me as if I were the very best friend you have in the world, because I have a feeling that that’s just what I’m going to be.”

And so Kathy sat on the sofa beside Vera and told her all about the significant events from the smell of lilies on, how she lived with Stella and loved Stella and how Stella was now dead, but she didn’t tell, not quite yet, how Vera was someone who might fill the terrible emptiness that Stella had left or how she loved the touch of Vera’s fingers on her hair and face as she talked. Always after that, the music of Chopin meant one thing, and so long as that thing was fresh and beautiful in the way she looked at it, she would listen breathlessly to the music of Chopin, but after the thing withered and grew ugly, she wouldn’t listen to the music of Chopin at all, but would go away as quickly as she could, out of hearing, whenever it was played.

Chapter 5

If it was a long way from Kenny Renowski to Angus Brunn, it was also a long way from a sofa to a park bench. The narrow slats of the bench pressed into her flesh, and she stirred, shifting her weight. She hadn’t thought of Vera Telsa in such detail for quite some time, and had wished, as a matter of fact, never to think of her in such detail again. It was not always possible, however, to control the direction or the material of one’s thoughts. Thinking, after all, was no more than the making of certain connections in the intricate and mysterious system of nerves with which one was equipped, and connections were made without deliberate or conscious effort. Especially, at this moment, the one that sent into her mind the thought that she would one day also wish never to think of Jacqueline again, and that when she did so, it would be with sickness and regret and self-recrimination.

But that was not true. She would not permit it to be true. For Jacqueline was far more than Vera had ever been. She was, indeed, far more than herself. She was hope. She was salvation. She was absolution in a cocktail lounge. If only, that is, one could ever arrive at the time and the place. If only one could sleep quietly through the threatening interim.

Then she became aware that the terminus of her line of vision past the cast-iron man was a narrow store on the street beyond. Her eyes adjusted to the distance and focused, picking out details. Behind dirty glass was an upright cardboard figure of a girl in a very brief swimming suit, two scraps of white cloth barely breaking the continuity of golden skin. Above the girl’s head was a glaring sun with long spears of flame flaring from its circumference to show how hot it was. The girl’s skin remained so beautifully golden under the blistering sun because she used a certain kind of lotion which was spelled out below in cool color. Across the top of the window in flaked letters was the claim that prescriptions were carefully compounded.

A drug store. A shabby, struggling drug store that looked as if it wouldn’t let a small point of ethics interfere with a sale. After all, plenty of places must sell barbiturates without prescriptions. She was almost certain of that There was so much of it around in one form or another.

Without thinking any more about it, because she had already sat and thought too long, she got up and crossed the park and the street beyond and went into the drug store. Inside, the store was shadowy and cool and cluttered, scented with the mixed emissions of fountain flavors. The only light was that which filtered in from the street through the dirty display window and two smaller side windows near the ceiling. At first she thought that there was no one present but herself, but then she heard a staccato voice behind the partition at the rear that divided the store into front and back portions. The voice had a cultivated professional vigor, and after listening for a moment, she realized that it belonged to a radio news reporter. She listened a moment longer in frozen attention that possessed an element of terror, thinking that the reporter might be relating local events, that she might hear the name of Angus Brunn, but then she became aware that his remarks were international, and she walked on toward the source of the voice, her heels rapping sharply on the floor, the constriction in her chest slowly relaxing.

A man appeared in a doorway in the partition and moved forward to meet her. “Can I help you, miss?”

“Yes. I’d like some sleeping tablets, please.”

He was a tall man, and he leaned forward and down a little to look at her. His face was long, the skin hanging loosely on its bone structure, and his eyes were small and dull and tired. Looking at her, he lifted one hand and took the tip of his nose between thumb and index finger, pinching it gently.

“Sleeping tablets require a prescription, you know.”

“I know. I had a prescription, but I seem to have lost it. I’m sure it was nothing uncommon. Any kind of good tablet would do.”

“Who was the doctor? I’ll call him and get the prescription for you.”

“He’s not here. Not in the city, I mean. I got the prescription out of town.”

“That’s too bad. Law says you have to have a doctor’s prescription. Couldn’t you get another one?”

“I don’t like to pay the fee. It seems so unnecessary, and I don’t have money to waste.”

“Sure. Don’t blame you for feeling that way. Fees are pretty rough. For something simple like this, it’d probably be three minutes and three bucks.” He released his nose and sighed. “Okay, miss. Maybe I can fix you up.”

He walked back through the doorway in the partition. She could near him moving around behind the thin barrier, and even though she understood that he knew she was lying, she experienced a renewal of the feeling of cleverness that she had known in Angus Brunn’s apartment last night. A sense of triumph disproportionate and briefly exhilarating.

The druggist returned shortly from the rear and handed her a small cardboard box. She noticed that the box had no label to identify either its contents or its source.

“I’m taking a chance doing this, miss,” he said. “I could get into a Jot of trouble.”

She accepted this as an oblique request for a bonus in compensation for the risk, though it was almost certainly a risk he took frequently and considered negligible. Nevertheless, establishing the lie of her desire to avoid a doctor’s fee, she gave him a ten dollar bill and turned without waiting for any gesture on his part to make change.

“Thank you very much,” she said, and she walked up past the fountain and out across the park with the cast-iron man to the street on the other side. She retraced her way along the street past the drug store she had entered earlier, walking much more slowly now, and so back to her apartment. In the apartment, she sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the box. The tablets inside were green, the coating hard and bright Green dragons, they were called. She had never taken barbiturates herself, even though sleepless nights had become common in her life, but she had encountered addicts and had picked up some of their slang terminology. She counted the tablets and discovered that there was an even dozen.

She wondered how many she should take. Two, perhaps? Being in possession of the coveted soporifics, she had now a morbid fear of taking too much, of sleeping beyond her appointment. Possibly one would be sufficient. Yes, she would take no chances. She would take only one, and if that were not enough, she would just have to stay awake and deal as best she could with corrosive time. Getting up, she went into the bathroom and washed a tablet down her throat with tepid tap water, leaving the remaining eleven on a shelf in the medicine cabinet. Back in the bedroom, she got her alarm clock and set the alarm for four o’clock, checking the setting twice to be certain that she’d made no error. Then she placed the clock on a bedside table not more than two feet from where her head would lie and stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes.

In the darkness behind her lids, the floating fear that she had kept diffused by physical activity halted and gathered and stared at her with yellow eyes. She lay quietly, forcing herself to keep her lids lowered, and after a long time the gathered fear loosened again and moved, washing through her sluggishly. How long would the tablet take? How long before the green dragon took her into its arms? Or would it, perhaps, not be effective at all?

His hair, his hair, the color of his hair, they’re taking him to prison for the color of his hair. But no! Not his. Hers. They would come, and they would get her, and they would take her away. They would take her to prison for the color of her hair. It was very essential to keep the gender straight, though keeping the gender straight was sometimes quite a problem. One had to try, however, one had always to try, and if the attempt came out bad, came out murder, that was unfortunate but really quite incidental, for it was only the color of the hair that mattered, and everything else, even murder, was only a ramification, a damned, damned consequence of the color of the hair.

But she had, for a moment, forgotten something, and she almost laughed aloud in the darkness behind her lids when she remembered again what she had, for a moment, forgotten. She had very foolishly forgotten Jacqueline, and that was the reason she almost laughed aloud in hysterical relief, because Jacqueline didn’t object to the color of her hair at air and would never permit them to come and get her because of it. Jacqueline was very wise, and she would know precisely how to restore everything immediately to sanity and to reduce a dead body to a few cents’ worth of chemicals that should disturb no one very much or for very long. She was sitting right now with a kind of cool omnipotence behind her blond desk, and probably she was saying something crisp and definitive into the ivory telephone, just as she had been the day Kathy had gone into the office to see her.

She had been called into the office, as a matter of fact. She had just come on a week before from Burlington College for girls, and she had applied at the personnel section of the department store for a clerking job, more just to have something to do than because she was in immediate need of money. Stella had left her enough to preclude worry over money for a long time, but she had discovered that it was a little better somehow if one were occupied, and so she had applied for the job of clerking because it was the only kind of work she could think of that didn’t require any particular training. The department store being progressive in its approach to personnel problems, she had been given some tests that were supposed to indicate whether it would be worthwhile hiring her. As it turned out, the tests indicated that she was not only worthwhile hiring but that she might profitably be hired to do something better than selling perfume or costume jewelry or ladies’ lingerie. So she had been called into Jacqueline’s office, and Jacqueline in the gray chalkstripe was talking into the ivory telephone, and after a minute she cradled the instrument and smiled at Kathy, and the understanding that was later verified was a thing immediately felt.

“Miss Gait?” she said. “Sit down, please.”

Kathy sat down primly with her knees together and her hands folded on her knees. She pushed the recurrent and disturbing thought of Vera Telsa from her mind and returned Jacqueline’s smile. Jacqueline picked up some papers from the surface of her desk and tapped them with the pointed nails of one hand. Kathy could see that the papers had long columns of little squares on them. Some of the squares had neat little checks in them, and she recognized the answer sheets to the tests she had taken.

Jacqueline said, “You are trying for a position with us, I believe, Miss Gait.”

“Yes.”

“What, exactly, do you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Nothing in particular, I guess. I thought maybe a clerking job.”

Jacqueline’s smile grew in an instant into a soft laugh, and she dropped the papers onto the desk. “My dear, I’m afraid you’re underselling yourself. I believe we can do a little better for you and for ourselves by using you in a different capacity. Can you take shorthand?”

“No.”

“Do you type?”

“A little. I’m not very good.”

“Well, no matter. There are other ways of utilizing you. Before we make an assignment, however, it will be necessary to administer a few more tests. Just to be certain that we do the right thing, you understand. Would you object to that?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Very well, then. Please report back to the gentleman who sent you here. He will know how to go ahead.”

She had reported back to the gentleman, and the gentleman had administered the additional tests, and one of the tests was something called a personality inventory. Kathy had taken a personality inventory once before, when she had entered Burlington College, and she understood that there was a mysterious sort of lie detector in the construction of it and that it was just as well in the end to tell the truth strictly, and so she had. It was this inventory that later verified for Jacqueline what was originally only felt. She told Kathy about it after quite a long time, after she had taken her to lunch several times, and to dinner, and to a kind of place that Kathy had never heard of, and eventually to the cold ivory room.

Although she was placed in a job with a future and fairly attractive pay, Kathy didn’t stay with the department store long. Just as she hadn’t stayed long at Burlington College. It was an unfortunate element of her personality that she was a drifter, if not from place to place, at least from thing to thing. She simply couldn’t sustain interest in anything for any considerable length of time. So she had given up her job with the idea that she would look for something more to her liking, but somehow she never got down to looking very seriously, and she had continued from then till now, because the inheritance from Stella permitted a certain amount of independence, living from day to day in a kind of inert routine that only Jacqueline kept from degenerating to a level of intolerable despondency.

At first, when she left the department store, she had been afraid that it would alienate Jacqueline, that it would mean the end of the sustaining relationship. But later Jacqueline had met her for cocktails and had laughed and said, “Perhaps it’s just as well, everything considered. Of course it need make no difference at all between us.” And so they continued to meet, for lunch, for dinner, for special engagements that Jacqueline arranged, though less frequently recently than before, and through it all the ivory room, and Jacqueline remained a new center of life in its new direction, as Stella and Stella’s house had been before Stella died. While it was going on, while it was happening, everything was fine, everything was justified by the quality of her mood, but afterward, when she returned alone to the small uptown apartment, she began to fall more and more frequently into deep periods of depression and despair and intense self-hatred that lasted longer and longer before they dispersed. So it was that she came slowly and painfully to the conviction that a break was necessary, and that once the break was made, her life would take still another new direction and become better and better after the first bad time. So it was that she came by delusion necessary to existence to Angus Brunn and death and a dozen soporifics.

The pill worked. Slowly, the imagery of her brain blurring and dissolving and running away, she sank softly into a sleep that was for a while undisturbed. Then, as she rose with time nearer the level of consciousness, the imagery returned distorted, unfocused by the waking mind’s eye, and she began to whimper and toss, now and then crying out, and when the strident four o’clock alarm smashed into her brain, she jerked upright in bed immediately, her heart pounding and her body bathed in sweat.

Reorienting quickly, she went into the bathroom and showered and put on fresh clothing. She had a full hour to reach the Bronze Lounge, but she hurried nevertheless, driven by the unreasonable fear that tardiness might destroy all hope at the last moment. Not until she was in a taxi on the street did she take time to look at her watch, and only then did she realize that she had forty minutes remaining for a trip that would require no more than twenty. She could wait in the lounge, however. It would be pleasant to wait there in security, to take her time with a Sidecar and anticipate the coming of Jacqueline and the miraculous dissipation of a nightmare.

The Bronze Lounge was an unimpeachable spot in a reputable section. It took its name from the type of metal with which it was embellished. There was a lot of burnished bronze grillwork and many large bronze planters in which grew green foliage with broad, shining leaves that looked as if they had been rubbed with oil. All the small items like ash-trays and match-holders and candlesticks were also bronze, or convincing imitations. There was a small dining room separated from the bar by a partition of the bronze grillwork. In the ceiling of both the bar and the dining room were many star-shaped perforations through which light was diffused softly so that one might dine or drink under a semblance of heaven.

Kathy found an empty booth at the rear of the bar which provided a clear view of the entrance. She ordered a Sidecar and waited. It was then a quarter to five, and time passed quickly to the hour. After five, however, as the fear developed that Jacqueline had changed her mind and would not come after all, the pace of time was retarded, and it required an age for the minute hand of the lighted clock above the bar to creep one hundred fifty degrees around the circumference. It was then, when despair had reached its maximum growth, that Jacqueline appeared in the entrance, paused for a moment while her pupils dilated in adjustment to shadows, and made her way to the rear where Kathy waited.

She was wearing the hard brown gabardine, and her body moved inside the severe tailoring with strong, fluid grace. She slipped into the booth across from Kathy and leaned forward to caress Kathy’s hand briefly with the tips of cool fingers. “Hello, darling. Sorry to be late. I was delayed at the last minute by an intolerable old bore in Furniture. Seems he’s having difficulty with his sales force. What are you drinking?”

“A Sidecar.”

“Oh, yes. It’s always a Sidecar, isn’t it? I’ll have one, too, I think. Are you ready for another?”

“Yes, thanks.”

Jacqueline gave the order and leaned back to wait for the cocktails. Her smooth black hair caught the light of ersatz stars, and her long, rather heavy face was softened and beautified by shifting shadows. Looking at her, feeling within herself a rising of hope and restoration, Kathy wondered what it was the face of Jacqueline suggested, and she thought immediately that it was like the face of a Renaissance Borgia, strong and dominating and touched from beneath with the mark of potential cruelty. In the atmosphere of irrational hope, there was a chill breath of more reasoned despair.

The waiter brought the Sidecars and went away. Jacqueline lifted her glass by its thin stem and tilted a swallow of the pale drink into her mouth over the frosting of powdered sugar around its rim.

“Now, darling,” she said, “why all the distress?”

Kathy looked down into her own glass, forcing sound through her constricted throat Her words, formed with difficulty, were aspirate and hoarse. “I’m in trouble, Jacqueline. Bad trouble.”

She continued to stare down into her glass, aware with a morbid sensitivity to externals of the saturated silence that followed her words. After a minute, she looked up into Jacqueline’s eyes and saw that they were suddenly withdrawn, measuring her from an incalculable distance.

“Perhaps you’d better tell me about it,” Jacqueline said.

Now that Kathy had started, it was easier to talk, but she still spoke slowly, her words fashioned with exaggerated care, formed by her lips in advance of sound and spaced too far apart. “It started with a man. His name was Angus Brunn. We met by accident in a bar, and he bought me a drink, and we talked for a little while, and later, the next day, he called me on the telephone, and I let him take me out. We went out together several times.”

For the first time, then, Jacqueline’s ivory veneer cracked. Only for an instant. The cracks healed themselves, the fragments of her expression flowing quickly together and sealing. But her voice betrayed the inner tempest “Why? In Christ’s name, why?”

“I don’t know. It’s very hard to express. Mostly it was because things kept getting worse and worse. Sometimes everything would be all right but then I’d get these terrible periods of depression when I felt dirty and defiled and hated myself and wanted to die, and these periods kept happening more and more frequently, especially when I hadn’t been with you for quite a while or had just come away from being with you, and I began to think that I’d have to do something or it would be the end of me, that I just couldn’t keep going on forever the way I was.”

The carefully modulated voice across the booth throbbed with fury and venom. “You little fool! You damned treacherous little fool! So you thought you could change yourself by letting some man paw you, is that it? So you let him violate you and ruin you, and now you come crying to me! Is that it? Damn you to hell, is that it?”

“No, Jacqueline! It wasn’t that way at all. I couldn’t go through with it, you see. That’s what I thought all right, and I tried to do it, but at the last minute I couldn’t. It was horrible. It made me sick with revulsion.”

“Good! Good, good, good, you stupid, bloody little fool!”

By that time Kathy knew, of course, that she had come to the end of her delusion. No cure, no hope. Absolution denied. But having come so far, there was nothing left to do but to continue as she had started, and so she lifted her eyes and said with a sudden, strange feeling of calm, “I killed him, Jacqueline. I killed him, and he’s lying dead in his apartment right now, unless someone has found him and taken him away.”

The suspension again, all sound and motion in abeyance, terror crouching and ready to spring. A tic, very faint and barely discernible, began to function at one corner of Jacqueline’s mouth. She stirred and whispered, “Oh, Christ, what have you done? Do you realize what this will mean? Do you understand what the police will do with you? The things they will make you say?”

“What can I do?”

Jacqueline lifted her cocktail glass and drained it. “Let me think. For Christ’s sake, let me think! You could never get away with it. Never in the world. The police will find you in no time, once they begin.” She paused, thinking, and very slowly her composure returned. There was about her now a kind of calculating wariness born of awful danger. After a while, she said, “There’s only one solution. Are you listening?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. You must give yourself up. Go to a police station and tell them that you have killed this man. Tell them that he attacked you and that you killed to defend yourself. Tell them you were terrified and ran away but have decided that the only way to save yourself is to tell the truth. They’ll believe you. There will be a mess, of course, a trial, but it will be a mess of your own making, and it will prevent the ruin of people who had nothing to do with it. It will prevent yours, too. If you give the police a case they can accept, they’ll do less investigating, and you’ll come out of it all right. Women always do in such cases.”

Kathy said nothing. She sat looking into her glass, and although she heard Jacqueline’s words, they were sounds without special significance, because now nothing seemed significant or worth saving, even if there were still something that could be saved, and she wished only that Jacqueline, who had sustained her so long, would go away quickly and forever.

Which is what she did. She slipped out of the booth and looked down and said, “Another thing. Don’t mention my name. If you mention my name, you will be sorry. If you mention my name, I’ll see that it’s known why you really killed this man, and you’ll have no chance at all of getting off.”

She walked away through the lounge, and it was strange that someone who had been in her turn the center of life, who had come and lingered to a wild, aberrant singing of blood, should now depart, thanks to no more than so many square yards of carpet, without making any sound whatever.

Chapter 6

In the course of inevitable events, hardly conscious of her movement at the time, she moved from the booth to the bar. From Sidecars to rye. It was entirely logical that she did so, perfectly in keeping with the character of her life. She was always moving, it seemed, from one thing to another, from landmark to landmark, and though she could never look forward to see the way she was going, having no miraculous power to divine the future, she could look back afterward from the place of her arrival to the point of her departure and comprehend in a hazy way their relationship to her ultimate end. From a woman buried in lilies to Stella to Vera to Jacqueline. From Renowski to Brunn. From booth and brandy to bar and rye.

Now where? To what now? Why, to justice, of course. It was really so logical, so beautifully logical, just like mathematics, just like two plus two equals four. They’re taking him to justice for the color of his hair. Gender again. The damned, confusing gender. Her hair. The nameless and abominable color of her hair.

For the most part, now, she remained in the strange slough of emotional exhaustion, of quiet acceptance of what had gone before and resignation to what would follow, but now and then, pricked by a shard of her shattered hope, she would rise to a higher strata of rebellion and terror, and then she would lift her whisky glass and find it empty and rap with it on the bar for the attention of the bartender. The bartender would bring the bottle and look at her unfocused eyes and would think, Oh, God, another lousy lush, another drunken tramp, but he would pour the rye with a resignation equal to her own, though his was compelled by a shallower despair.

It was an antic world. The world moved, and everything in it moved. At first the movement was random and uncoordinated, everything acting independently, but pretty soon there was unison of speed and direction, and the world was a giant, multi-colored spiral in which there was no distinction of parts. She stood at the large end of the spiral and looked down the diminishing hollow interior created by the law of centrifugal action, and far, far off, almost at the small end of the spiral, which was the end of everything, was the small, receding figure of Jacqueline. Jacqueline was leaving her. Jacqueline would never come back. Even as she stood looking down the whirling spiral, the tiny figure was absorbed by emptiness and there was no one there. She tried to cry out, stricken by a terrible loneliness and desolation, but she could make no sound. She felt, of a sudden, a great self-pity. Tears formed on the lower lashes of her eyes and crept without sound down her thin face.

The bartender saw the tears and thought bitterly, Oh, God, she’s going to bawl. All I need to make it a perfect day is a maudlin lush.

His fear was short-lived. She was not going to cry. She thought of Stella, and the tears dried on her cheeks. How could she have forgotten Stella? How could she have forgotten that all things come in the end to their beginning, come by the “curvature of time” and space to the point of origin? Stella was the beginning. It was natural that she should return to Stella now in the end, or the threatened end, and Stella would fix everything. Stella would look at her with a secret laughter in her eyes, and the overflow of the laughter would run through her voice, and life would at once be sweetened and reduced to simplicity. One drink, one drink more, and then back to Stella. Jacqueline had failed her, but Stella would not.

Then she remembered that Stella was dead.

She remembered everything.

She was in her own room in Stella’s house, for she had by that time moved back into a room of her own, and it was very late, almost midnight, and Stella was out with one of her many men. Actually, however, there weren’t so many men now. They had thinned out recently, leaving this one, the one she was out with now, in almost full possession of the field. Not that Stella was any the less attractive. She seemed not to age at all, to lose none of the vibrance and sheen of her loveliness. It was merely that there was something special about this man, and Stella responded to him with a particular intensity that was obvious and discouraging to competitors. The night of his first appearance at the house, after he was gone, she had come upstairs and into Kathy’s room, and she had sat on the edge of Kathy’s bed with the moonlight falling through die open window and across the lower part of her body and her hands folded in her lap in a posture of unusual quietude. Her voice, issuing from upper shadow, embodied wonder and speculation.

“He’s like Lonnie,” she said, “and I never thought to find the like of Lonnie on this earth. His voice, his eyes, the way his lips draw back from his teeth when he smiles. More than all this, though, it’s the way he looks at things. At life, I mean. I’m afraid he’s not very good, not good in the way people expect a man to be good, and neither was Lonnie. Maybe I have an affinity to men who are not very good. If I fall in love with this man, he will make me very happy, and through no fault of his own he will probably make me very unhappy, and that will be like Lonnie, too.”

Lying in darkness, out of the moonlight, Kathy said nothing. She lay there and suffered and said nothing, and after a while Stella got up and went away.

So here was danger, real danger, an invasion of the center of life. In the face of it, Kathy felt impotent, without weapons to defend her position or to repel the invader, and she was sustained only by a virulent, corrosive hatred of the man who was the threat. His name was Felix Brannon, and he was, in fact, a man whom many women might have loved. He was not tall, exceeding Stella’s height by less than an inch when she was in high heels, but there was a lean grace in his body that made him seem taller than he was, an easy coordination of flat muscles. He wore suits that were conservative in cut and pattern, and there was in his personality something restrained and modulated, something held back, an overt subjection to law or lawless elements. His hair was a shade lighter than copper, cut very short, almost cropped. His skin was dark, retaining faintly the mark of shallow pocks, but his eyes were, rather startlingly, pale and brilliant blue. He had money, apparently a great deal of it that came from sources he never mentioned, and he drove down from the city, over a hundred miles north, in a black Cadillac trimmed with much glittering chrome. How he and Stella had met was something Kathy never learned. Nor did she care, now that the meeting had occurred and could not be prevented. Now she was Interested only in how they might part, and she was disturbed, actually made ill, by the pervasive fear that they would not part at all.

In her room, she sat and waited for them to return.

The room was dark, and she sat in a chair by the window and looked out into the soft night. She was seventeen then, and she had just finished high school, and it was a night when a pretty girl of seventeen who had just finished high school should have had in her mind something far different from the aberrant fear and corrosive hatred that were in hers. On the trellis below her window, the Paul’s Scarlet roses, flowers of brief life, still bloomed like bright blood in the darkness. On the air that stirred came the sigh, the restless rustling of young leaves. At a distance, someone laughed.

A car turned the corner and came down the street along the curb. From her position at the window, she followed its progress until her span of vision was cut off by the house. Out front, a powerful engine revved briefly and died. She heard laughter and language and footsteps and a key in the door. The center of life was in peril.

The Negro woman had long ago quit staying nights, Kathy being old enough to stay alone, and now there would be no intervening sound of her departure before the other familiar sounds of a man and woman entertaining themselves. Kathy sat and waited for them to begin, but tonight they didn’t. Instead there was the sound of Stella on the stairs and in the hall, of her voice, light and errant and a little intoxicated, in the doorway to the room.

“Kathy?”

“Yes. I’m here, Stella.”

“Have you been in bed?”

“No.”

“Are you dressed?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’d like you to come down for a minute, darling.”

“I don’t want to come down, Stella.”

Stella came into the room behind the significant scent and stood behind Kathy’s chair. “Why not? Only for a minute. Won’t you do such a small thing for me?”

“I’m sorry, Stella. I don’t feel well. I have a headache.”

This was true enough. She frequently had headaches, and the frequency had increased since the appearance of Felix Brannon. But she would have claimed the headache even if there had been none.

Stella said, “I’m sorry you have a headache, darling, but this time I’m going to insist. Just this once, just for a minute. If it weren’t so important to me, I wouldn’t have asked.”

The peril came closer, breathed its cold breath into her heart. She stood up and said, “All right, Stella. If you insist.”

They went out into the hall and down into the big living room where Felix Brannon stood with his legs apart and his burnished, handsome head cocked a little to one side as he watched them approach. He was holding a highball in one hand. He lifted the glass and drank and set the glass down on a table at the end of the sofa. He smiled a little, watching them.

Kathy kept her eyes averted. She refused to look at him. She thought that if she looked at him she would be deathly sick. She looked instead at the radio-phonograph beyond his shoulder.

“Hello, Kathy,” Felix Brannon said.

“Hello, Mr. Brannon.”

“Oh, come, now. Skip the formality. Just call me Felix.”

“Felix, then.”

“As a matter of fact, there’s another name you can call me after tonight.”

The peril was monstrous now, swollen and terrible and panting. Her heart was a block of ice. She continued to look at the radio-phonograph and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Beside her, Stella laughed her errant, intoxicated laugh and put an arm around her shoulders. “Darling, Felix is asking you to accept him as a father. Or would it be uncle? Anyhow, it’s a kind of secondary proposal, and you’re supposed to feel flattered. You’re supposed to say yes, thank you, and let him kiss your cheek.”

He picked up his cue and stepped toward her, and it was a repetition, only worse, of the evening incident by the muddy creek in the shadows of scrub timber. She was aware of sudden darkness and frenzy and violent confusion of sound and action, and when the proximate items of earth sorted and fixed themselves in the return of sanity, her wrists were captured in his strong fingers and she was staring up into glittering pale eyes in a stony, closed face.

Stella’s voice sliced between them. “Kathy! For God’s sake, Kathy, what’s the matter with you?”

She tugged fiercely against his restraint, and he released her suddenly. She stumbled back, regained her balance, and ran out of the room and upstairs. On her bed, she lay face downward, her body racked by dry, convulsive sobs. The sobs tore her throat, detonated against her ear drums. She didn’t hear Stella come after her into the room, was not conscious of her until she felt the touch of fingers on her head. She remained in the position into which she had thrown herself, but after a while the sobs subsided, and Stella’s voice sounded clearly from the darkness behind her.

“Kathy, Kathy, how can I understand you? It’s so simple, darling. So natural. Just a man and a woman getting married. Do you think you will be excluded? It won’t be that way at all. There will be three of us instead of two, no more than that. I’m still young, still pretty, I’m in love. Felix wants to marry me, and I want to marry him. Is that so disturbing? Is that so difficult to understand? If it is, if you can’t understand, for God’s sake tell me why so that I can at least try to understand you.”

She knew, of course, by that time she could hardly help knowing, but the truth was such a monstrous distortion of nature as nature functioned in herself that she found it incredible as well as monstrous, and so she would not accept it. She stood waiting in the darkness by the bed, dreading the response she might elicit, the normal warmth of her heart dispelled by pervading cold.

Kathy rolled over on the bed and sat on the edge, reaching out for the soft white blur of Stella’s hand. “Please don’t marry him, Stella. Please, please, please don’t marry him.”

“But I want to marry him. Why shouldn’t I marry him?”

“You can’t. You just can’t”

“That’s no reason, darling. Surely you can see that.”

“It would be the end of you and me. Nothing would ever be the same again.”

“Nonsense. Felix is very fond of you. He wouldn’t come between us in any way.”

“You don’t understand! Oh, Stella, you don’t understand!”

“I’m sure I don’t. And I want to. Can’t you make me understand?”

Kathy was silent, and the moon looked through the window, and below the window in the June night the scarlet roses were great drops of blood. Her voice returned with a gasp that was pain, real physical pain ripping her throat. “The things you’ll do! All the things!”

“What in God’s name do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I do. Oh, my darling, it’s nothing wrong. Intimacy is natural and good and necessary for men and women in love. It was meant to be that way.”

“Not with him!”

“I’m the one to decide that.”

“Not with him, Stella! Not with him!”

In the darkness, her hand caught between hot, clutching hands, Stella drew a deep, ragged breath, feeling confused and frustrated and bitterly compassionate, and she thought to herself, I’m making too much of it, I’m giving it too heavy a touch, because she’s little more than a child, and a child needs the light touch and laughter, to be shown with sympathy how foolish she is.

So she said with a smile in her voice, “Who, then? Have you chosen someone for me?”

And it was a mistake. It was a question that shouldn’t have been asked, because, although it was never answered, the answer was naked and understood in both their minds, stripped by the question itself, and it was too late to pretend ever again that the answer didn’t exist.

Stella released her hand and stood very still, looking at the naked thing in her mind. She felt ill and, in a vague, unformulated, undiagnosed way, a disturbing sense of guilt. What have I done? she thought. Or what have I not done that should have been done? How does one see these things in time, and what does one do about them when they are seen?

She spoke very carefully. “Felix and I are being married, darling. Tomorrow. In the city. We are driving to the city tonight, and will be gone a few days. Bertha will be in tomorrow as usual. She’ll prepare your meals and take care of the house. If you want her to stay nights with you, I’m sure she can arrange it. When we get back, we’ll talk this all out. We’ll see together how foolish it all is. You and I, darling. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

There was no spoken answer to this question, either, though it, too, might have been considered implicit if one had had the courage to consider it at all, and Stella turned and walked to the door. She turned there and looked back for a moment, and because she was a warm and generous woman, she was filled with sorrow and compassion and the sense of guilt.

“I’m so sorry, darling,” she said, and she went out.

After a long time, the door opened and closed below. The Cadillac started in the street. Kathy sat in the chair above the roses and prayed.

God, let him die, she prayed. Oh, God in heaven, let him die tonight. Let him die, God. God, God, God, let him die, die, die.

The moon climbed slowly the arc of the sky and quit looking in the window. The roses stirred and shook their scent loose in the night. The street light at the corner inscribed a yellow circle on the dark earth. Time quit being one day and became another. Kathy quit praying and went to sleep.

In her chair above the roses, she slept.

Out on the highway, Felix Brannon died. Stella didn’t.

Stella lived for several hours.

Chapter 7

She was caught in the centrifugal action, whirled around and around the circumference of the conical world. Then she was flung out of the whirling mass in a great, high dizzy arc, and she was standing alone at a great altitude on an arid lip of rock. Below her was the world, and the world was no longer a whirling spiral of many colors but was now a colorless and desolate cup of perfect stillness. Above and beyond her, outside the world, there was a sound like rollicking thunder, and pretty soon she identified it as the laughter of God. God sat on an electron with His feet on a proton and held His sides and laughed and laughed and laughed with the rollicking, thunderous laughter. Leaning forward from the lip of rock, she stuck a finger into the cup of the world and found that it was dry. She pushed the cup away from her and said to God, “Fill it up. Fill up the cup of the world.”

“Lady,” said the bartender, “you’ve had enough. Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

She looked at the bartender, and he was not a man. Neither was he a woman. Neither a he nor a she was he. He was an It. It was an It. How beautiful and considerate was the English language to have the neuter gender, a wonderful and wide and pacific category that was neither one thing nor the other. Other languages weren’t like that. Some other languages. Spanish, for example. She had studied Spanish in high school, and she had hated it because nothing was neuter, everything was he or she. Even pens and pencils were he and she. El and la. She was very clever to remember that from away back in high school. Good morning, Mr. Pencil. Good morning, Miss Pen. No neuter. Never any beautiful It. The neuter was a green and quiet little island in a stormy sea, and you swam and swam in the stormy sea until your arms and legs were like lead, and the soul inside you was exhausted and indifferent, and just when you decided to quit swimming and sink into the dark water, you came to the little neuter island, and you climbed up onto it and rested, and after a while your muscles and your soul were ready to swim again.

She said to the bartender, “The cup of the world is empty, It. Fill up the cup, It.”

“Please, lady,” he said. “You’ve had enough.”

“Enough?” She looked at him slyly and laughed. “You are so right, It. I’ve had enough. I’ve had more than enough, if you only knew it. Do you hear that sound? If you listen very closely, you can hear it. It’s like thunder a long way off. Do you know what it is? It’s God laughing. It’s God laughing because I’ve had enough.”

“You just take it easy, lady. I’ll tell you what. You get back in the booth, and I’ll bring you some nice black coffee.”

She clapped her hands softly. “That’s a good idea. Oh, that’s a fine idea.” She leaned forward across the bar and whispered, “Tell me. It, is God an It?”

“I don’t know anything about God, lady. I don’t like to talk about things like that.”

She laughed gleefully and clapped her hands again. “Things. Things, you said. A thing is an It, isn’t it? Of course a thing is an It. So you answered my question. Of course you know something about God. Everyone knows about God, and everyone talks about God, but no one does anything about God.”

She took time to think about that last bit, and to laugh a little more. It struck her as being a very clever thing to say, even if it wasn’t exactly something she had thought of entirely by herself. It was a kind of twist on something someone had said about the weather, but it required a certain amount of cleverness just to remember things and make twists on them. Things like that just came into her mind. Like Macbeth and Shakespeare and the bit about sleep. Like the color of the hair.

She quit laughing and said, “What color is God’s hair?”

“I wouldn’t know, lady. I’ve never seen God.”

“That’s too bad. It would be very interesting to know the color of His hair. Do you suppose he’s bald, like you? Do you understand that you’re very fortunate to be bald?”

“I never figured I was so lucky. I spent a fortune on tonics.”

“Oh? Did you have hair once?”

“Sure I had hair. Everyone has hair sometime.”

“Tell me something. This is very important, so you must tell me the truth. What color was your hair when you had hair?”

“I’m not sure, lady. It’s been so long I’ve almost forgotten. It was just sort of hair-colored hair, I think.”

She straightened in a kind of triumphant posture, swaying a little on the stool, and looked at him with wide eyes. “You see? You are fortunate. You’re one of God’s fortunate children. God loved you and gave you hair-colored hair and then made you bald. Because when you have hair-colored hair or no hair at all, there is no question. The color’s the thing. If the color isn’t right, it’s very bad for you. You should thank God because He gave you hair-colored hair and made you bald.”

“Okay, lady. Thanks, God.”

She nodded and leaned forward again abruptly, halting the collapse of her body with her elbows on the bar. She liked this bartender. She had great faith in him because he was an It and because he was bald and had once had hair-colored hair.

“Now you must tell me the truth again,” she said. “Please don’t spare me because you have a kind heart. Look at me and tell me truthfully what color my hair is.”

“It’s brown, lady. Dark brown. Very pretty, too.”

She took hold of a lock and pulled it down across her forehead in front of her eyes and examined it closely. She said sadly, “You didn’t tell the truth. You lied to me. I’m sure you meant it kindly, and I thank you for being kind, but to tell me a lie was really the most unkind thing of all. Shall I tell you the color of my hair?”

“It looks brown to me.”

“It’s not. It’s nameless. It’s abominable. The nameless and abominable color of my hair.”

Again she was overwhelmed by self-pity. She let her head fall forward gently onto her forearms, and the silent tears gathered and fell down onto the bar. She was alone on a lip of rock above the empty cup of the world, and God thought it was funny and laughed, and there was really nothing to be done about it by anyone at all, not even a bald-headed It who meant to be kind.

The bartender thought wearily that this one was really the frosting on the cake. He’d seen a lot of wacky dames in his life, you met all kinds tending bar, but this one was worse than wacky. This one was meat for a psycho ward. Talking about God. Talking about the color of hair. Telling a guy he was lucky to have a head like an egg. He cursed softly and came around the bar to her side. He shook her gently.

“Look, lady. How about the coffee? The nice black coffee?”

She lifted her head and peered at him through tumbled hair of nameless color that looked brown. “Oh, yes. Fill up the cup with coffee. Fill up the empty cup of the world with hot black coffee.”

She slipped off the stool and sagged, and he supported her weight tiredly. “Easy, lady. Just take it easy. Just come along this way.”

He guided her back to the booth, and she sat down on the leather-covered seat and lay her head down on the table. He looked down at her and shook his head slowly from side to side and cursed again under his breath, wearily and bitterly and not without a certain compassion. Crazy-talking dame. Headed for a psycho ward, this one. Headed for the big break, God help her. There. She even had him thinking about God. He turned and went for the coffee.

She sat with her head on her arms and heard him move away, but she was not there in a real sense at all. Neither was she any longer on the lip of the world listening to the laughter of God. She was in the chair at the window above the roses, and she was listening to the harsh ringing of the telephone in the hall below.

The telephone rang in long, persistent bursts. She sat rigidly erect in the chair, thinking that she wouldn’t answer, but then, after the deliberate delay, she was up and running in darkness toward the door in a contrary fear that she would be too late to answer before the party at the other end hung up.

She took the call on the upstairs extension, and the party on the other end was a starched impersonal voice that asked if it was Miss Kathryn Gait speaking.

“Yes,” she said.

The starched voice identified itself as the General Hospital, as if it were an animated stack of stone and steel and mortar, and Kathy had a wild, random thought that if a hospital could really have talked, it would have talked with just such a voice. The voice said that Stella was an emergency case in the hospital. She had been brought in from the highway, where she had been involved in an accident. It would be advisable for Kathy to come at once.

She went. She left the phone uncradled and fled as she was down the stairs and outside, leaving open behind her the door through which Stella would not come again with one of her men, or her one man, neither tonight nor in a few days nor any time ever. The hospital was almost a mile across town, and she ran all the way, through light and darkness toward the terrible corollary to the answer to her prayer. In the hospital as she ran, without sound or portent or apparent consequence to earth, Stella died.

It was a long time before Kathy knew it. She sat in a cold white hall on the top floor of the hospital and waited. She sat on the edge of a straight chair with her torso and head held perfectly vertical and rigid from the hips and her knees and ankles together in the posture of a small, terrified girl trying valiantly to contain her terror. People in white went past her on rubber soles. Their feet made no noise, but their clothing whispered like brittle branches stirring in a winter’s wind. They didn’t look at her sitting there on the edge of the chair, didn’t seem to care that she had prayed to God to let a man die and that God had let the man die and would perhaps let Stella die, too. They didn’t care because they were meatless and soulless. You could tell by their soundless tread, their deathly pallor, their indifference to suffering and damnation.

She wondered why she couldn’t weep for release, but the bleak frigidity of the environment had permeated her flesh and frozen her blood, and so she sat mute and motionless. She tried to pray again, this time for life as she had prayed earlier for death, but she found that she couldn’t pray because she was now afraid of the whimsy of God. She could only sit rigidly and wait, and after a long time she was rewarded by the approach and owlish observation of a man in white. He was a man who was neither tall nor short, neither lean nor stout, an elusive mercurial impression of a man quite capable of presenting death without acquiring by association any color or permanence in her mind, so that she could never later remember what he looked like nor any material thing about him.

He introduced himself and said, “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, Miss Gait”

She looked at him and said nothing, and he added, “Your aunt is dead.”

Aunt? she thought. Whoever is he talking about? Whatever is an aunt? An aunt is a mother’s sister. Or a father’s sister. I had a mother once, and my mother had a sister, and her name is Stella. Stella? Can this odd man be talking about Stella? If so, he’s a liar. He’s a cruel, malicious liar. Certainly Stella couldn’t die. And if she could, it would be in a cloud of fire ascending to heaven and not in this ugly sterility scented with ether.

She swayed on the edge of the chair, catching herself in a second and resuming her rigid posture. She said in a remote voice, “I must see her.”

He peered at her closely. “Do you think that would be wise? Perhaps after a sedative and some rest...”

“I must see her now.”

“Very well.” He shrugged and turned. “If you will come this way, please.”

He took her to a closed door and opened it for her to pass through and from the doorway said after her, “Only for a minute, please. I’ll wait for you here.” Then he closed the door between them, and she was in a small white room with a narrow bed in it and on the bed under a sheet was what appeared to be a body, and there was apparently a rumor spreading that the body was Stella’s, which was ridiculous.

She walked over to the bed and pulled the sheet back off the face of the body, and it looked like Stella’s face, all right but it was made of wax. The lids were closed, and the lips were the bloodless lips of a dry wound that had obviously never known the sound and shape of laughter. This was no more than the final deception of a monstrous fraud, this waxen figure in the form of Stella, the final stroke of God’s cruel whimsy. She stood for several minutes looking down at the face, thinking that if this were really Stella she would surely feel more than she felt, should feel more than this even in response to a bitter joke — sadness or anger or anything at all instead of this strange, numb impotence.

Replacing the sheet, she turned and left the room, walking as she had sat on the chair in the hall, her head and torso rigidly perpendicular, as if she feared that excessive motion would topple her off balance. Passing the waiting doctor, she walked down the hall without pausing or speaking, and she didn’t respond when he spoke to her from behind. He asked her if she was all right, if she would like a bed to he down upon, but she made no sense of the words at all. Passing the elevator, she found the stairway and descended, leaving the hospital by the front entrance and walking down the broad concrete approach to the street.

She paused there under the trees, not so much wondering where to go as sensing, without ever giving specific thought to the sense, that there was really no place to go at all. Not home certainly. There was a reason, if she could think of it, why she couldn’t go home. Then she recalled that it was because Stella had gone away. Stella had gone away, and she had said that she wouldn’t be back for several days, and so it was, of course, impossible to go there until Stella returned. Why was that? She asked herself why it was, and she couldn’t quite find an answer. It had something to do with a man and a prayer and the unpredictable caprice of God.

The moon had vanished on its way around the earth. The earth continued on its way around the sun. Across the street, a sign said hamburgers.

She went across and into the all-night lunch counter and said, “Coffee, please.”

The waiter supplied it. He was fat, very fat, with three chins, and he could smell the ether on her. He thought that she looked like she was in a state of shock, and he thought that someone had died on her or was about to die on her, and he felt sorry for her, because he was a man of compassion.

Then she remembered that she had no money and stood up. “I have no money,” she said.

“Forget it,” he said. “Drink your coffee.” She sat down again, wondering if he would be so kind to her if he knew that she had just been punished by God. Looking down into the coffee cup, she faced the truth for the first time. She formulated the truth with her lips and put it into words. “Stella’s dead,” she said. Her breath stirred the surface of the coffee...

Chapter 8

“... coffee,” said the bald It.

The aroma of the black brew drifted into her nostrils. Raising her head, she slanted a look upward through her hair.

“What?” she said. “What did you say?”

“I said, here’s your coffee, lady. Drink it, you’ll feel better.”

“I feel all right. Just a little strange, that’s all. Whimsical, I mean. I feel very whimsical.”

“Sure, lady. Coffee’s good for that, too.”

“Really? Coffee’s good for whimsy? With all respect for coffee, I find that hard to believe. I’ve found in my own experience that nothing is good for whimsy. Have you checked your facts?”

“What say we just try it? Just drink some while it’s hot.”

“Oh, yes. While it’s hot. It is necessary to strike while the coffee is hot. That means you must act at the psychological moment. At the right time. I did something because I thought it was the right time, but it didn’t turn out to be the right time at all, and now I can see that no time would have been the right time.”

She caught herself up and stared at him slyly through her hair. Although she couldn’t remember at the moment precisely what it was she had done, she knew that she must be careful not to tell this agreeable It too much. She had great faith in him, but it didn’t pay to place too much faith in faith. She had had personally some very unfortunate experiences in that respect. If you had too much faith, someone was quite likely to get whimsical with you.

“Tell me, It,” she said. “Did you ever pray for something?”

“Will you please drink your coffee, lady?”

“Of course. Naturally. By all means. If you answer my question, that is. I’m willing to make that bargain with you. You answer the question, I drink the coffee.”

“All right. So I’ve prayed.”

“You’re begging the question. I asked if you’d ever prayed for something. I distinctly remember asking that.”

“So I’ve prayed for something.”

“Recently?”

“No. A long time ago. When I was a kid.”

“Did you get it? What you prayed for, I mean.”

“I don’t remember ever getting anything.”

She shook the hair out of her eyes and looked at him with a return of triumph in her expression. “You see? I told you God loved you. Maybe you thought it wasn’t considerate of God not to give you what you wanted. Is that true? Well, I assure you it was very considerate of God, because not getting anything is better than getting too much. Once I asked for something, and I got it, but I got something else, too, and all together it was too much. Can you understand that?”

“Sure. I understand everything. Now be good and drink the coffee like you promised.”

Yes. A promise is a promise is a promise is a rose, and the roses are blooming in the night, and the night is June. She could smell the roses below the window, and they smelled like coffee. She lifted her cup and swallowed some of the roses, and they were hot. They burned a path to her stomach.

“That’s the way,” said the bartender. “Just drink it slow and pretty soon you’ll be as good as new.”

She began to giggle then, because the thought crossed her mind, prompted by his assurance, that being as good as new might be no improvement. Why was it that people always made the bland assumption that something was necessarily better when it was new than when it was older? That was not true of cheese or beer or blessed rye whisky, and it might not be true of people. If one could start over, be new again, could one be different? Before Stella and Vera and Jacqueline? Before Renowski and Brunn and murder? Could one do differently and think differently and go a different way? Or was the potential not only determined but also directed — nothing to do but what must clearly be done and one way only open? It was a complex problem, rather like metaphysics, and it mixed her all up. It made the world whirl around.

She lifted the cup and scalded her throat. The bartender nodded approvingly. She had great faith in him. Should she tell him the truth right out? I’m a strange one, It. I have the wrong color hair. Because of it, I killed a man with an ice-pick. He had a desk set in his apartment, and my hair was the wrong color. Again she giggled, visualizing the bald It’s expression. But she would be unable to see his expression because of the thick mist that was settling. As a matter of fact, it had already swallowed him up.

Quite suddenly, pricked by a desire to move, she got up herself and pushed her way into the mist It was a soft tangible impediment to progress, and she leaned her body against it, feeling it cleave before her and flow together soundlessly behind her. She had an idea that the mist existed only in the lounge, that it would be clear outside, but she discovered on the street that this was not so. The mist was still around her, thick and swirling. It shifted and drifted and rifted, and there was a yellow blur of electric lights, and through the rifts an occasional person or object. It made walking very difficult. Walking becomes very awkward when the ground — or the sidewalk, to be precise — turns out to be higher than one had judged. One then makes a new estimate of the distance to the sidewalk, and the perverse sidewalk immediately assumes a level lower than the estimate. When walking thus becomes a precarious undertaking, the best thing is to move closely to available buildings for support. The buildings may shift and sway with the mist, but they won’t collapse. They are essentially stable.

Walking along the buildings, she arrived in time at an open newsstand on the corner. Here the yellow light was brighter, thinning the mist and she saw with reasonable clarity die colorful covers of many magazines in racks, a stack of newspapers on the counter. Newspapers! There was something she had expected to read in the newspapers. Something she had looked for earlier and had not found. Something of peculiar importance to herself that she kept forgetting and remembering and forgetting. She stood looking at the newspapers, thinking very hard, and slowly Angus Brunn took shape again in the mist that was solely the emanation of her brain.

Moving down the counter, she removed the top paper from the stack and folded it and slipped it quickly under her arm. Then, turning to the attendant on the other side of the counter, she was aware for the first time since leaving the lounge that she didn’t have her purse. Where had she left it? In the booth? At the bar? Certainly she had had it at the bar, because she had paid for her drinks, and all her money had been in her purse. Perhaps she had carried it back to the booth with her, but it was certainly one place or the other, and clearly she must return for it or give up the newspaper. The lounge seemed suddenly very remote, a far-away, mist-shrouded place to which she was intensely reluctant to return, even if she could find her way. On the other hand, she could not give up the newspaper. It was a terrible dilemma on which she threatened to break, tension mounting at once to the maximum of her capacity to endure it, and she was saved only by the chance contact of her fingers with some odd coins in the pocket of her jacket. Dropping a nickel on the counter, she left with an exorbitant feeling of relief.

At the intersection, the curb tricked her by being in a place it had no business being. The treacherous descent of her foot beyond the expected point of contact caused her to stagger forward into the street. There was a shrill scream of rubber, a confused rise of voices, and she was conscious of a soft blow on her thigh that apparently completed the destruction of her balance because afterwards she was sitting on the curb with her feet in the gutter, and it wasn’t likely that she would have sat there deliberately. A frightened face under a cap with a hard bill was swimming around in front of her eyes, and there was a voice that apparently issued from the face, and the voice was frightened, too.

She comprehended the words with difficulty. “Jesus Christ, lady, you jumped right in front of me. Against the light, it was. You jumped right out in front of me against the light.”

“Did I?” she said. And then because she was sorry to have frightened him, she said so. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Are you hurt, lady?”

“Hurt? Why should I be hurt?”

“Can you stand up all right?”

“Of course I can stand up.”

“Try it once. Here, let me help you.”

She felt the gentle upward pressure of his hand on her elbow, and she rose with it easily.

“There,” she said, as if she were proving decisively and with great satisfaction a disputed fact. “There.”

“That’s fine. Jesus, I’m glad you ain’t hurt,”

“Thank you,” she said primly.

He could smell the rye now, or rather became conscious of what he had smelled all along, and he said, “Look, lady, excuse me for saying it, but you ain’t in no condition to be walking in traffic. You tell me where you’re going, I’ll be glad to take you there. In my cab, I mean. I’m a cabbie.”

“Oh.” She tried to think where she’d been going, and so far as she could remember, she hadn’t been going anyplace. There was always home to go to, however, if there was no place else, and so she said, “I was going home.”

“Good. Just climb in, I’ll take you there. Here you are. This way. This is my bus.”

She got into the back seat and leaned back while he went around the car and got under the wheel in front. At that moment before the cab moved, she thought of the newspaper. Leaning forward, she said with desperate urgency, “The newspaper! I’ve lost the newspaper!”

He turned, looking over his shoulder. “What? Oh, your newspaper. Must’ve dropped it in the street. Just a second, lady.”

He got out of the cab again and walked up in front of the lights. He bent over and came back with the paper. “This it lady?”

She relaxed, clutching the paper. “Yes. Thanks very much.”

“All right, lady. Now, what’s the address?” She told him, and the taxi moved, threading traffic. The mist returned, seeping into the interior of the car and acquiring a density that quickly obscured the back of the driver’s head. Leaning sideways, she rolled down a window, and the night air struck sharply across her face. The mist boiled and thinned. It made her sad to be riding in a taxi, because once, a long time ago, she had ridden to Jacqueline’s in a taxi after killing a man. It was a sad, disturbing time in her life and it was especially disturbing because there was a conspiracy of silence about it, and nothing was ever said about the man who died. That was why she kept buying newspapers, to see if anything was ever printed about the man, and that was why, come to think of it, she had bought the one she now held.

She spread it on her knees and tried to read the big print of the headlines, but there was not enough light in the taxi, and besides the mist kept floating in thin strands across her line of vision. Folding the paper, she sat clutching it in her lap. She sat quietly with her eyes closed, swaying with the motion of the car, the night air fanning her face. After a while, the motion ceased, and the cabbie was out on the sidewalk holding the door open.

“This is it, lady. You want me to help you to your door?”

“No. No, thank you.”

She got out onto the sidewalk, holding firmly to the open door until the concrete under her feet quit rocking, and then she crossed over to the entrance to the building. Inside in the small and rather shabby lobby, really no more than a hallway with a worn carpet and a scattering of decrepit chairs, she stood looking at the stairs. Her apartment was on the third floor, and it was such a long way up through the mist that was everywhere over a perilous route of antic steps that wavered and faded and fell away before her. Moreover, her thigh was now paining her. It was a dull, throbbing pain concentrated near the hip. Each time she lifted the leg to feel for the next elusive step up, the throbbing was sharpened by the tension of muscles.

Three flights up, she felt her way along the wall to her door. There, she stood staring at the knob and the keyhole below the knob, and she felt that the stuff of her body had lost all quality of adhesion and that she was about to fly into innumerable tiny fragments. Because, having come so far, she could go no farther. Because, having lost her purse, she had no key. Oh, it was a grand joke. Oh, she had been the butt recently of an abundance of grand, hilarious jokes. They were so funny, really, that she was compelled to laugh at herself. She leaned against the door and did so, the laughter rising at first from her belly in soft waves that shook her body with only the faintest aspirate sound but acquiring as it grew, as the joke became bigger and better, an ascending shrillness.

Down the corridor, a man separated himself from the wall and approached her. Taking hold of her by an arm and pulling her away from the door gently, he reached down and turned the knob and pushed the door inward.

“You must’ve forgotten to lock it,” he said. “I took the liberty of trying it.”

This made the joke still better, and she kept right on laughing. Forgetting to lock the door, which was something she couldn’t remember ever having done before. A perfectly strange man coming along to try the knob and hanging around to tell her about it. It all fitted into the pattern of hilarity, and the whole world, which had reached a nadir of evil, was now abandoned to the most delicious idiocy. She laughed and laughed, tears pouring down her cheeks, and the man smacked her sharply across the mouth with the hand that had turned the knob. Her head struck the frame of the door, and the rising welter of laughter died in her throat in a series of diminishing gasps.

She stared at him with wide, incredulous eyes. “You hit me,” she said dully.

“Sorry. Best treatment for hysterics, sister. You better go in and sit down.”

This struck her as being a reasonable explanation and a wise suggestion. She accepted the one and acted upon the other. She went inside and sat in a chair with her legs stretched in front of her, and her feet were such a great distance away that she had difficulty seeing them. Vision improved shortly, however, and she could see not only her own feet quite clearly but also another pair of feet beyond them. They must belong to the man who opened the door, she decided. He must have followed her into the room. He must have turned on a light, too. She hadn’t, she was certain, and if he hadn’t done it, the room would be dark. She resented this. She wanted him to go away. She was grateful to him for his service, of course, but he had no right to presume on her gratitude. Had she thanked him? Maybe he was waiting for that. She thought that she had, but it could have been the cabbie she was remembering.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be quite all right now.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to talk with you. Do you feel capable of talking?”

“I could talk with you if I wanted to, but I don’t believe I want to. You’ll have to excuse me.”

“Can you see this?”

He was holding a hand toward her palm up, and the light gathered and glittered on something in the palm, but she couldn’t tell what the thing was. She squinted, peering at it, shaking her head.

“What is it?” she said.

“A badge. My identification. My name’s Sergeant Tromp. I’m a policeman.”

His words were a glacial wind, and the mist condensed and fell inside her skull like icy rain, leaving exposed for a terrible moment the ugly, distorted shape of terror waiting patiently beyond the frail defenses of delusion and fantasy and alcohol. Then the mist rose again from the surface of her feverish brain, blurring the vision and delaying the certain issue.

“A policeman?” she said. “What do you want?”

“Like I said, to talk with you. Not me, to be exact, but Lieutenant Ridley. Down at police headquarters. He sent me to bring you.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know any Lieutenant Ridley. I don’t know any lieutenants at all.”

“That’s all right. He doesn’t know you, either. He’d like to get acquainted.”

“Policemen are to arrest people. Does he want to arrest me?”

“You done anything to be arrested for?”

She shook her head, looking at him craftily from under lowered lids. “You’re trying to trick me, Sergeant. You’re trying to make me incriminate myself. I don’t have to answer that.”

“Sure, sister. That’s right. You don’t have to answer anything.”

“I don’t mind, though. I don’t mind answering. It’s not what I’ve done, you see. It’s what I have.”

“What’s that?”

“Look at me. Can you see anything wrong?”

“You’ve had too much to drink, that’s all I can see.”

“No, no. It’s my hair. Can you see anything wrong with my hair?”

“It needs brushing. Otherwise, it looks okay.”

“I mean the color. The color is wrong. Is this lieutenant going to arrest me because of my hair?”

“Look, sister. Save the jokes for Ridley. He’s a very literate guy with a sense of humor. He likes a good joke.”

“Joke? I guess it is a kind of joke. On me. Someone always keeps playing jokes on me, Sergeant. Like giving me hair of a nameless and abominable color. Don’t you think that’s funny? They’re taking me to prison for the color of my hair. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You’ve come to take me to prison for the color of my hair, haven’t you?”

He said wearily. “Not prison. Not yet. Just down to Headquarters. Listen to me, sister. Putting it bluntly, you’re drunk, and it’s getting late. The lieutenant will be getting tired of waiting. What you need is a cold shower. Suppose you go get one, like a good girl, and I’ll wait for you here.”

“A shower?”

“That’s what I said. Go along, now. You wouldn’t want me to help you, would you?”

She shuddered and stood up. Placing her feet very carefully, she walked past him and into the bedroom. Terror waited in the mist, but the mist was warm and shielding and would not rise. The mist was thrice blessed. The mist was her last friend on earth. She walked through it across the room until her knees struck the edge of the bed. Gently, with a long sigh, she lay down on her face, and the mist closed in upon her and darkened and was perfectly still.

In the other room, Sergeant Tromp waited a reasonable length of time for the sound of the shower, and then he went into the bedroom. Standing beside the bed, he looked down at the recumbent figure. His emotional state was a bitter mixture — tiredness and cynicism and vestigial pity. He was tired because a man just naturally gets tired after so long a time on a road that isn’t going anyplace to speak of, and he was cynical because cynicism is something that can’t be helped after a while, life in general being what it is. Why did he feel pity? Well, she wasn’t much more than a kid, and she was in a hell of a mess, and once he might have felt a hell of a lot more than he was now capable of feeling. Rolling her over onto her back, he lifted an eyelid, felt her pulse, turned away with a whispered curse.

“God damn it,” he said. “God damn it to hell.”

Methodically, with slow professional assurance, he searched the room. Closet, drawers, two pieces of luggage. He was looking for nothing in particular, and he found nothing. In the bathroom, he looked into the medicine cabinet and found the unlabeled box. He opened it and looked at the shiny green tablets and put it back. Moving back through the bedroom into the living room, he found the telephone and dialed Headquarters.

“Lieutenant Ridley in Homicide,” he said.

He waited, looking at the wall with milky blue eyes that had the curious shallow look of blindness. After a few seconds, he said, “Lieutenant? Sergeant Tromp. She’s here. Came in just a few minutes ago. Now she’s gone out again, like a light, I mean. What? Yeah, plastered. I sent her to take a shower, and she passed out on the bed.”

At the other end of the line, Lieutenant Ridley said, “Can you bring her out of it?”

“I doubt it. She’s really been tying one on.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter much. Let her sleep it off. I’ll send a man around to keep an eye on the place. We can bring her down in the morning.”

“That’s what I thought. She’s a crazy dame, Lieutenant. Talks crazy.”

“All drunks talk crazy.”

“I got an idea this was different. Something behind the liquor.”

“What did she say?”

“Crazy stuff. Stuff about the color of her hair. About going to prison for it.”

There was a long silence. The wire hummed. Sergeant Tromp waited with the patience he had learned on the road going no place much, and Ridley came back in his own good time. His voice possessed a sudden hushed quality, as if he were looking at the truth written in cobwebs and was afraid to breathe on it.

“Housman,” he said.

“What?”

“The hair. The stuff she was talking. It’s from a poem by a guy named Housman. You wait for relief, Sergeant. Put him in the hall.”

“Right.”

Sergeant Tromp hung up and cursed again. Imagine the guy pinning it down like that. You say something about hair and right away he says Housman. A real fancy college boy. It didn’t make it any different because he tried to cover up by calling people guys and dames, either, the poetry-reading bastard.

Chapter 9

She awoke in the loneliest hours of time, in the desolate waste between midnight and dawn. She was cold, bitterly cold, and the cold was something that originated in her interior and worked its way outward through flesh and bone. Having exhausted the powers of delusion and alcohol to obscure reality, she was now focused and magnified in her own eyes, lonely and terrified and without resources. Her head throbbed, but she was hardly aware of the pain. She was aware primarily of the cold, the bitter cold. She began to shiver, her teeth rattling in her mouth, and she tensed her muscles and ground her teeth together with a harsh, grating sound.

Remembering the policeman, she sought his elusive name among the confusion of distorted impressions in her mind, but it was no use. She couldn’t remember it. Worse than that, she couldn’t even remember what he had said to her, or what she had in torn said to him. In Christ’s name, what had she said? That could be very important. That could be the difference between escape and destruction. She must try to remember, to be on guard, to go back through the mist from detail to detail until her recollection was complete.

Then it occurred to her that what the policeman had known before he came might be much more important than anything she had said to him. For, after all, he had come, had he not? How could she have been blind, even briefly, to the awful significance of his simple coming? It meant, of course, that Angus Brunn had been found and that there was, in spite of all the clever things she had done, a thin red line from him to her.

The newspaper. What had she done with the newspaper? She sat up on the edge of the bed and tried to recall when she had last had it in her possession. She had bought it at the corner stand. A cab had struck her, and she had dropped it in the street, but the driver, who was very frightened and therefore very considerate, had retrieved it for her. Had she brought it upstairs when she left the cab? Was it now out in the living room? The problem was reduced to that simplicity — was it or was it not in the living room?

She got up and limped through darkness into the living room, the bruised muscles of her thigh protesting the action sharply. In the living room, moving by memory through the sparse scatter of furniture, she found a lamp and produced light. The newspaper, still folded as she had clutched it in her hands, was lying on the floor by the chair in which she had sat while the policeman was here. She went over and picked up the paper and opened it in her hands.

The story was there, on the front page, with a picture of Angus Brunn’s body on the floor, and she had a wild notion, as her eyes flicked to the picture, that she had just missed seeing herself disappear through the kitchen door. But then, after the first tendency toward hysteria, she was quite calm, and she read the story through in careful detail, word for word. The police, she learned, had nothing definite to reveal except that they were checking as a matter of routine a few people whose names and telephone numbers were found in a notebook the victim had kept. Which explained quite logically and simply how they had come so soon to her. Her name and number had been in the notebook. Such things were always logical and simple, after all, if one only took the trouble to find out about them.

The truth was, it was too much so. Much too simple. Like all over-simplifications of catastrophe, like the grim hypothesis of the wrath of God, it possessed a special quality of terror. She stood with the terror mounting within her, and the newspaper dropped from her hands to the floor, and she knew that nothing was now left to her but flight. She would have to flee the gathering wrath, not because she was really convinced that there was the slightest chance of escaping it, but because it always seems better to die in Samarra than in Bagdad. She thought of flight, not in terms of space, but time. There was no secure place on today’s earth, nor would there be on tomorrow’s, but yesterday’s earth, the earth in time before Jacqueline and Stella, each dead in her own way, had been a place of security and could now be a place of sanctuary if only, somehow, she could survive to reach it. If she could only reach it, the hamlet of the real beginning in the scent of lilies, space would become time and time would become space, and she would be by the simple transit of her body the person that she had been then instead of the person that she was now. In regression toward the womb was immunity to life.

Turning away, acting with decision under a strong compulsion that was next to the last one she would ever feel, she returned to the bedroom and packed a few essential articles in a small bag. Carrying the bag and a purse containing all her available money, she turned off the lights in the bedroom and living room and walked quickly out of the apartment and down the stairs and out the front door into the street, and it was, at the moment of her exit, exactly three o’clock.

She intended to leave the city by bus, because there were few trains to her tiny destination, and taking a train might entail a long and perilous wait. It was fully three miles to the bus station, but the streets were nearly empty of traffic in that arid hour of the morning, and so she walked. At first she kept looking for a cruising taxi, but after a while she quit looking, because she found that there was a great satisfaction, almost a healing therapy, in the elemental physical function of walking. It was as if she could measure regression by the rapping of her heels on concrete, the slow accumulation of the poisons of fatigue in her body, and every step through city streets took her closer and closer in the fusion of time and space to the blessed sanctuary in the shadow of the womb.

When she arrived at the station at last, she turned in through the swinging doors and crossed the almost deserted floor to the cage where the ticket agent sat nodding behind bars, her staccato footsteps amplified under the high ceiling of the cathedral-like interior structure. The agent shook his head and looked at her with sleepy eyes, waiting for her to name her destination, and she returned his look without speaking, struggling against a recurrence of hysteria, for though it was very funny, though it was a town she had been born in and had lived in for a decade, she simply couldn’t remember the name. Her lips began to tremble from the first faint force of the rising wave of laughter, and she caught the lower lip between her teeth and looked down at the floor.

“Where to, lady?” the agent asked.

Then, in response to his question, the name came, and she lifted her eyes and told him.

“One way or round trip?”

“One way,” she said, and the two words sounded like an oracle in her ears. One way, reverse way, the way out of a complex and threatening now to a simple and secure then.

The agent stamped her ticket ad handed it to her through the small aperture in the bars. “Bus leaves at five-ten, lady. About an hour’s wait.”

“Thank you.”

She took the ticket and crossed to a hard bench near the doors to the loading dock. She sat on the bench in the prim posture that was part of her personality, knees and ankles together and eyes turned straight ahead. She was, as a matter of fact, challenged by her temporary failure to remember the name of the town of her birth, trying to remember the face of the mother who had borne her, and she couldn’t remember that either, not at all, though she kept trying very hard until the face of Jacqueline intervened, and she began to think instead of what Jacqueline had said in the booth at the Bronze Lounge.

Give yourself up, Jacqueline had said. Go to the police and tell them he attacked you, she’d said. The cold, measured words returned, repeating themselves in the high vault of the station, and beneath the icy syllables was the current of fury and dreadful fear. Evil words, words of death, counseling a cruelly realistic course of action which was terrifying to consider. It was so much easier, once one had discovered the way, merely to return to the simplicity of one’s beginning. Bus leaving at five-ten. Three dollars and fourteen cents to innocence.

Her level line of vision was broken by bodies going one way and by bodies going the opposite way, and once a body paused and remained motionless in the line of vision for some time, but she was not aware of any of this. Someone sat beside her on the bench and looked at a magazine and got up after a while and went away, and she was not aware of that, either. A disembodied, amplified voice announced the departure of busses to points north and points south after having previously announced that the bus going north was loading on dock number six and that the bus going south was loading at dock number nine, and she heard and understood the voice, even though she did not hear anything else or see anything at all, because it was necessary and important to know if it was her bus, the bus to innocence, that the voice was talking about.

At five precisely the voice announced that the bus was loading. She listened carefully to the dock number and then got up and lifted her small bag from the floor at her feet and walked out into the great concrete annex where the bus waited. Several other people who were also waiting for the bus went out ahead of her or behind her, and one of those behind her was the policeman who had followed her from the apartment, and just when she was about to hand her ticket to the driver standing beside the open door of the bus, the policeman took hold of her arm and said gently, “Going someplace, sister?”

She knew immediately what he was and why he was there, but for some reason, now that it was apparent that she was going no place she had ever wanted to go, it made no particular difference. She turned to face him, a very ordinary-looking man to be even a minor agent of destruction, and she said quietly, “I was going on the bus. I was going home.”

He noted the tense, the quiet capitulation, and he felt for her a passing pity. But he only said, “I got a better idea. I got the idea we’d better go down to Headquarters.”

Submitting to the pressure of his fingers, she went with him back into the station and waited by the open door of a telephone booth while he called Headquarters for transportation. From where she stood, she could see outside into the street. As she watched, the pale vestigial tubes and bulbs of the night winked out and were dead. Soiled gray light was a thin smear on concrete and glass.

It was the morning of the last day.

Chapter 10

Later, she sat in a small, bare room at Headquarters. On the whole, everyone was quite kind to her. She was spoken to softly the few times she was spoken to at all, and the only really bad part about it was the waiting and the trying not to think what was going to happen.

After a long time, a man came into the room and spoke to her, and she recognized him as the sergeant of police who had come to her apartment yesterday.

“Good morning, Miss Gait,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

“Yes. Not your name, though. I can’t remember your name.”

“It’s Tromp. Sergeant Tromp.”

“Oh, yes. It’s not a difficult name. I should have remembered.”

His lips moved in a trace of a smile. “It’s all right. You weren’t in the best of condition for remembering, as I recall. If you’ll come with me now, please, there’s something we’d like you to do.”

She followed him out into the hall and down the hall into another room which was much larger and brighter than the first. She was placed in a line with four other women on an elevated platform under a glaring bulb that cast its light downward with such force and intensity that it seemed to rebound with a kind of material resiliency. She thought there were people in the room beyond the reach of the brilliant light, thought she heard the whisper of movement, but the glare blinded her, and she could not be sure. None of the other women said anything, and neither did she. It was very hot under the light, and she was thankful when a voice said, “Step down, please,” and she was permitted to descend from the platform.

Sergeant Tromp met her at the door and said, “Thank you, Miss Gait. Now we can go back.”

“Back where?” she said.

“To the room you came from.”

“What am I waiting for?”

“Like I told you last night, Lieutenant Ridley wants to see you.”

“Will it be long?”

“No. Not long now.”

He left her in the same room, and she sat in the same chair. After a while, she found that she was thinking too much about what might happen to her, and so she tried to concentrate on a calendar that hung on the wall opposite. It was a large calendar with a separate page for each month of the year, and no one had turned the calendar now for three months. The picture above the number was very bright and gay in spite of a film of dust that had gathered on its surface. It was mostly in primary colors, reds and yellows and blues, and it was a picture of a small boy with a rooster in his arms. Beyond the boy there was a lot of sky with some fluffy white clouds floating across it. She wondered what the boy’s name was, and if the rooster had a name, and if there were really a boy and a rooster like that, or if they were only something the artist had just thought up. The boy had bright red hair. It was the brightest red hair she had ever seen on anyone, even in a picture. Sergeant Tromp returned and said, “Now, Miss Gait” She got up and followed him again, and this time they turned the opposite direction in the hall and went down to a closed door which opened after knocking on it briefly. She went past him into a room that was slightly larger and slightly less bare than the one in which she had waited, and he closed the door again between them, leaving her to face alone a man who stood up behind a desk to meet her.

“Miss Gait?”

“Yes.”

“Sit down, please.”

He indicated a chair before the desk, and she went over and sat in it. The chair had arms and an upholstered seat and was considerably more comfortable than the chair in the other room. On the man’s desk, the desk of the man who must be Lieutenant Ridley, was a cardboard container almost full of coffee, and she could see by the scum of cream on top of the coffee that he had allowed it to become stone cold. She thought at first that Lieutenant Ridley himself was an old man, then she thought that he was a young man, and finally she decided that he was a young man with an old face, which is what he was. His eyes looked as if he hadn’t slept much recently, which he hadn’t.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” he said.

“It’s all right.”

“Have you had any breakfast?”

“No.”

“Would you care for some?”

“I’m not hungry, thank you.”

“Some coffee, at least?”

“No. No, thank you.”

He picked up a six-sided pencil and turned it in his fingers. He turned it slowly, so that each side came on top in turn, and he studied each side carefully, especially the side with the printing on it, before turning the pencil again.

“Do you understand why you are here, Miss Gait?”

“No,” she lied.

“You have no idea at all?”

“No.”

“It’s odd that you’re so docile about it. Most people kick up a fuss if they feel we’ve brought them in without justification.”

She said nothing, having no words to explain her emotional exhaustion even if it had been advisable to do so, and he looked up at her from the pencil with heavy eyes.

“Why did you try to leave town this morning, Miss Gait?”

“I wanted to go home. Back to the town where I was born. I bought a ticket on the bus, and I was going. Is that wrong?”

“It depends. You just decided all at once to go? At five o’clock in the morning? There are frequent buses that way, Miss Gait. Why didn’t you decide to go at a more convenient time?”

“I don’t know. I do things like that. I just make up my mind to do something, and I go ahead and do it.”

“Is that so?” His tone inferred a broader significance in her words than she had intended. “Sometimes that isn’t so wise. To act precipitately, I mean. Sometimes it’s better to think about a thing.”

There was no response she dared to make, and so she was silent again, waiting for him to continue.

“Do you remember the man who called on you yesterday, Miss Gait?”

“Yes. It was Sergeant Tromp. I didn’t remember his name, but he told me again this morning.”

“Good. Do you remember what he said to you, or what you said to him?”

This was danger. This was the gap, the hiatus, the threat of the unknown. There was a sudden pain in her chest, a tightening noose around her heart, but she managed to answer quietly.

“No. I’d been drinking, you see.”

“I know. And you remember nothing?”

“Yes. Nothing.”

He released his breath in a long sigh and looked down at the pencil, revolving it slowly in his fingers.

“Then we’ll have to start fresh. There was a man, Miss Gait. His name was Angus Brunn, and he was murdered. Did you know him?”

Her first thought was to lie, but then she remembered in time the notebook with her name in it, and she decided it would be better to tell part of the truth and to lie only about the things they probably didn’t know.

“Angus Brunn?” she said, and she was surprised and a little replenished to discover how lightly the terrible name lay on her tongue. “Yes, I knew an Angus Brunn. I knew him very slightly.”

“Have you seen him recently?”

“I don’t know. I may have. One meets people here and there.”

“I don’t mean that. Not a casual meeting. Have you had a date with him, for instance? Been alone with him?”

Again she started to lie, and again she decided in time that it would be better to tell part of the truth. Because she had stood in a line under bright light for the inspection of whose eyes she did not know, and maybe they were the eyes of the taxi driver who had driven her and Angus Brunn to Brunn’s apartment, and maybe they were the eyes of someone unknown who had seen her going into or coming out of the apartment, but whosoever they were, they might have remembered what they saw, and the simple fact that the identification routine had been used was proof that they had seen something.

She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them and spoke so softly that Ridley had to lean forward across his desk to catch the words.

“All right. I was there. In his apartment, I mean. I went there with him the night he was killed. Night before last, it was.”

He nodded his head slowly without looking at her. “That’s good, Miss Gait. It’s always better to tell the truth. Why did you lie to begin with?”

“I didn’t lie.”

“That’s true. You didn’t. You were merely evasive. Why were you evasive, Miss Gait?”

“I was frightened. I thought I might be suspected.”

“Is that why you tried to leave town?”

“Yes.” -

“Tell me what happened in Angus Brunn’s apartment night before last.”

“While I was there?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Nothing much. He... he gave me a drink. Then he started doing something I didn’t like... getting familiar. So I left.”

“What time was it when you got there?”

“I don’t remember exactly. Around midnight, I think.”

“And when you left?”

“Maybe half an hour later. Maybe not quite so long.”

“I see. Did you meet anyone afterward?”

“No.”

“Where did you go?”

“Home. Back to my apartment.”

“Do you know if Angus Brunn planned to see anyone else after you left him?”

“No. He may have, but I don’t know.”

“Do you know of anyone who had a reason to want him dead?”

“No. I don’t really know much about him at all.”

“I see. As you know from the newspapers, he was stabbed with an ice-pick. All the evidence shows that he was approaching the person who stabbed him. This indicates that the killer might have been defending himself against an attack. Such a theory is supported also by the fact that Brunn’s face had been badly clawed. You said that you left his apartment because he became offensive Miss Gait. How offensive?”

The noose around her heart was now drawn so tight that she thought she would surely scream with the pain just as soon as she could gather enough breath. She had quite forgotten the marks on Angus Brunn’s face, but more threatening by far in the consideration of her own security, she had also forgotten the torn nails on her right hand. She clenched the hand nervously, digging the nails into her palm.

She whispered, “He didn’t get violent, if that’s what you mean.”

“That isn’t quite what I mean.” He smiled thinly. “At least, it isn’t what I’m most interested in at the moment. What I’m most interested in is, did you get violent?”

“No. I just left. I told you I just left.”

“May I see your hands, please?”

She looked across into his face as if she were mentally deficient, or a little deaf, her lips slightly apart in a rather adenoidal expression and her eyes dull.

“What?”

“Your hands, please. I’d like to see them.”

She extended her arms, hands turned palms up, and he smiled patiently and rather sadly.

“Palms down, please.”

She turned them down slowly, and he leaned forward and peered briefly at the torn nails and then leaned back again with a sigh and closed his eyes.

“How did you tear your nails, Miss Gait?”

“I... I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember? I should think it would be quite painful, tearing your nails like that. Surely you can remember if you try.”

“I... I think I did it opening a package. Yes. Yes, that’s it. I remember now. It was a cardboard box, and the flaps that came together on top were glued down tightly. I pulled them loose with my fingers, and I tore the nails.”

He opened his eyes and repeated his thin smile, and she knew that he believed nothing of what she said, but he didn’t pursue the matter because the lie was patent, and it was something he could come back to when he was ready. The lines seemed to deepen in his thin, old-looking face, and the sadness deepened and darkened in his eyes.

“There’s something that bothers me,” he said. “When Sergeant Tromp talked with you last night, you said something about your hair. The color of your hair. What did you mean by that, Miss Gait?”

So that was it. That was what she had said, and the memory of saying it must have lingered beneath the level of her conscious mind, because the fear of having said something was in her when she awoke, and it was something that had disturbed her in all the hours since.

“I don’t remember saying that. I guess I was just talking crazy. As I said, I’d been drinking.”

“I believe you asked the sergeant if he’d come to arrest you for the color of your hair. Don’t you think that’s a strange thing to say even if you’d had too much to drink?”

“I guess so. I don’t know. I don’t remember anything about it.”

He dropped his eyes and began to talk softly to the top of his desk, and she was in the first instant back in the quiet library long ago with the slender book in her hands, and then she was in her bed every night before sleeping and every morning after waking in all the depression periods that had happened to her since, and the words were in her mind before they were on his tongue.

Oh, who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists?

And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?

Oh, they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

After he was quiet, he went on looking at the desk for a while, and then he looked up and said, “Only it’s murder now, Miss Gait.”

She almost told him everything at that moment — how it started and how it happened and how it had been afterward. But then, because evasion had become such a chronic technique in her adjustment to life that she could not immediately overcome it, she said nothing whatever, and after waiting for her, after giving her a long chance, he said tiredly, “You may go home now, Miss Gait, but you are not to leave the city. Please don’t try again.”

Incredible as it seemed, he was offering her freedom of a sort when she had really expected none of any sort, and she retrieved it, however precariously, with a strange feeling of dread at being turned out to loose ends. She stood up and said, “Thank you,” and went out quickly into the hall, the door closing behind her.

He sat at his desk and watched her shadow vanish from the glass, and he thought, You could have held her. There’s evidence enough, and before long there will be more than enough. It’s only a matter of getting it together. Better than that and much easier, you could have broken her down. She’s confused and tense and hanging on by a thread, and only a little pressure would bring the break. Why didn’t you hold her? Why didn’t you apply the pressure, James J. Ridley?

The J was for Jasper, but he hated the name and was ashamed of it and therefore never used it. His mother had wanted him to be a minister, and sometimes he wished he had been one, but the reason he hadn’t was that all the ministers he had ever known had had black and white minds. As for himself, he had never had any faith in the ancient battle of good and evil except as it was fought by the individual within himself, and he had always been conscious of living among his fellows in a glass house. So he had eventually become a policeman instead of a minister. He was always fascinated and depressed by the complex and tragic pattern of neural and glandular processes, or whatever you wanted to call the essential function that made a man what he was, and he had long ago learned to accept with bitter resignation the simple truth that the soul was a strange bed that accommodated strange bedfellows. Sometimes he would remind himself of the scriptural admonition that a man is as he thinketh in his heart, and then he would look into his own and look quickly away. Hunting disturbed and depressed him, and his job was hunting, and it was often a great burden. He was disturbed and depressed because he had no real belief in arbitrary and ruthless categories of transgressions or in pat prescriptions for their treatment, and when, as an agent of retribution, he tried to convince himself that the security of the group required the castigation of the aberrant and the apostate, he would inevitably begin to weigh against each other in his mind the transgressions of the individual against the group and the transgressions of the group against the individual, and this only deepened his depression. He was, in brief, the best kind of policeman, a very good policeman of the highest type, but for his own sake he should have been almost anything else in the world.

When he was a kid at home, his father used to set mousetraps in the pantry at night. In his room just off the kitchen, lying there stiffly in the darkness that seemed to gather and hover, he could hear his father moving around out there, his tread heavy and measured on the hard linoleum, and it was easy to follow him by ear to the kitchen cabinet where the spring traps were kept on a top shelf, across to the icebox for rat-trap cheese, back to the cabinet for the baiting, the final preparation of the little machines of death, and so finally into the pantry where the traps were placed strategically on the dark shelves. And at last, as if it were the terrifying eclipse of all hope and compassion, the sudden erasure of the crack of light under the door to the kitchen.

Then he was alone in total darkness with proximate death. The wall between his bedroom and the pantry was thin, and the sound of the springing traps seemed to be amplified rather than reduced by the passage through, so that the sharp snaps, when they came, were like the terrible crashing of summer thunder.

The waiting was bad, very bad. Sometimes, when he was lucky, he fell asleep before the first trap snapped, and then in the morning it was all right, and it was possible to reduce the experience to the vague status of something that has lost the little meaning it ever had. Other times. Though, the sound of the springing traps preceded sleep, and he was filled with the strange terror and torture of conflicting griefs — for the small animal that acquired in violent death a significance greater than itself, and for the man, his father, who had perpetrated the dark violence.

Then there were the times when the waiting was not to be endured. The times when he got out of bed, the floor cold and hard under his bare feet, the intimate environment corrupted by the evil of darkness, and walked softly through the kitchen to the pantry to release the traps, holding each strong spring carefully with a thumb and letting it move over and down slowly in a release of tension. The black threat removed, sleep came easily, for the time, in an armistice that never developed into final peace.

Next morning, of course, the accounting. His father, anger modified by bewilderment in the face of behavior he could in no way understand, looking at him with the shadow of his bafflement in his eyes. His mother, the gentle interventionist, saying, “Now, dad, now, dad.” His father, shoulders lifting in exasperation and defeat, saying, “Oh, well, then, let the damn things take the place,” and walking away with the relief one always feels in discarding responsibility for the unnatural.

It’s a long way from a mouse to a man. It’s a long, long way from exorbitant sorrow for the death of a tiny rodent to exaltation in the killing of a human. And in the interim between there must be the painful development of mental toughness and resiliency, the capacity to take the world as it is without the burden of personal responsibility or distorted guilt.

Take the time on Leyte in the wet bleak days when the last line of Japanese defense cracked under hammering and fell apart, the enemy scattering and fleeing in small groups over the rough face of the island. He was on patrol. He remembered quite clearly, though he would have liked to forget, the complete sequence of events — the squad resting on the crest of a bill, the shabby Filipino hut in the valley below, lonely in desertion. The sequence running to its end — the waft down the slope into the valley in the high grass, the cautious approach to the hut and the sudden breathless suspense when the rhythmic tapping became audible, at last the view of the Japanese soldier, seen with stark clarity beyond the sight of a rifle, as he sat cross-legged at the front of the hut pounding in his steel helmet rice for the meal he would never eat. Oh, it was great fun, that kill. The Jap never knew James Ridley was there, no danger whatever to Ridley’s security. Just a ragged, dirty, lonely and beaten man, jerking up in a posture of horrible surprise when the bullet struck him, and then slumping over in utter immobility, as if, in the end, he couldn’t die fast enough.

No judgment against Ridley, no indictment. Praise, rather, in those days when a moratorium had been declared on the Sixth Commandment. The warm, effusive approval and commendation of comrades. And worst of all, worst now in dark retrospect, that cruel and singing exaltation in his own heart.

Yes, it’s a long, long way from a mouse to a man, and sometime along the way, somehow, comes the tough resiliency, the ability to cope on even terms. But the old self is never lost. It recedes in one time only to reassert itself in another, and James Ridley stirred uneasily behind his desk and repeated bitterly that he was only an agent, that he was only doing a job.

He was very tired. He had been busy most of the night, and the rest of the night he had sat at his desk and gathered in his mind loose threads of inference and suggestion and odds and ends of fact, and it had all started because a girl who had drunk too much had referred to a poem. He cursed himself for his familiarity with the lines, wished to God that he had never read them, but once he had heard them from Sergeant Tromp and understood their significance in relation to the girl and to the man she had surely killed, there was nothing to do but to go ahead along the line suggested. So he had walked the streets, had visited places he knew, and because a girl cannot live a certain kind of life in one city for several years without leaving here and there circumstantial evidence of the kind of life she lived, he had learned a great deal. Nothing definitive, nothing that actually proved anything, certainly not murder, but sufficient to make him understand the kind of person Kathy Gait was and to make him understand why, under certain circumstances, she might kill a man. What bothered him most was why she had placed herself in those circumstances. He thought he understood that, too, and it bothered him. It made him feel for her a great pity.

Chapter 11

Released in a status of precarious reprieve under a threat that had refined itself to the point of official observation, she walked the streets without objective and came after a while to the bank of a river. She stood at the crest of the brick embankment and looked down at the activity on the gray, sluggish water. A barge drifted past. A group of men were doing something with boxes and bales at the end of a rough plank pier. To her left, heavy and black and parallel to the water’s surface, a railroad bridge spanned the stream. To her right, a more delicate structure, a bridge for automobiles and pedestrians lifted its slender steel spine in a high and graceful arc. Turning in that direction, she walked along the crest of the brick embankment to the rising approach to the bridge. Passing a sign that said no loitering, she ascended the arc of the bridge to its highest point and stood there looking down, and pretty soon there were some words in her mind, and the words were: Even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.

Phrases like that were often very nice and expressive. They had a strong, vivid sound. It was nice and very peaceful to stand there on the bridge and let the words drift slowly through her mind as if they were part of the river itself.

There were some other words that went ahead, if only she could think of them. She tried hard to remember, more because it gave her mind something to do that was free from painful consequences than because she really wanted to know what the words were, but she was unsuccessful. If she could remember the name of the man who had written the words, she thought, perhaps it would help her to remember the words themselves. She thought maybe it was Shelley, though she doubted it very strongly, and she was considering it seriously, whether or not it was Shelley, when some of the words returned with a little rush and were right there in her mind in proper sequence all at once: From too much love of living, from hope and fear set free...

Now, however, it was worse than ever, because there was a gap. Between remembered words there were words unremembered, and she found that very disturbing. Unable to fill the gap, she thought that it might be just as good to put all the remembered words together, thus acquiring by a kind of trickery an effect of completion, and though she found that she could make an appropriate rhyme this way, there was still something obviously missing, something-gone from the middle.

The river flowed toward her and under her and away from her to the sea, and the river was life, and the sea was death. What would it be like to die? Not to be dead, but to die. The actual brief and terrible termination of breathing and thinking and pumping blood. There was a scrap of poetry for that, too, a little rag of words in her mind, as there had been so often for the many bad things.

Be it Paris or Helen dying, Who dies soever, dies in pain...

Was that true? Was it final and climactic pain, worse by far in its flashing brevity than all the pain of all the years before? Or was it really no more than a quiet quitting, a gentle cessation of essential functions? How would it be, for instance, to drop into the gray water below, to pass with the river into the sea? She had read somewhere that drowning was actually not an unpleasant way to die. The thing to remember was not to become terrified, not to fight the work of the water. Passive was the word. You had to be passive. It was that way about many things, not only the final thing of dying. Much that had been bad would have been better, a little less bad, if only you could have been passive.

The river was life, and the sea was death, and the river eventually reached the sea, because even the weariest river reaches the sea, but before it did, it touched many places, and one of the places it touched was the campus of Burlington College. The river valley there was wide and flat, and the river was shallow between low banks, and you could see the sun glinting on the water from a window in the office of the dean. You could sit in an uncomfortable chair with a high, hard back in the musty office that had the smell of old books, and you could see a long way through the window and down a gentle slope between wide-spaced oaks and maples and elms to a pale fringe of willows and the glinting water.

The dean’s voice was a dull, meandering thread in the bright fabric of quiet. It disturbed the peace and molested the ear drums, but it was possible to ignore it almost completely because it was, after all, saying nothing that was any particular help in a matter that was past helping. It was possible to ignore it, that is, until it ceased altogether, and then, by its very absence, it demanded some measure of attention, a concession of a sort.

Reluctantly, Kathy turned her face from the window and said, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I didn’t hear.”

The dean’s heavy face betrayed a trace of irritation that was immediately and professionally expunged. She had a quite obvious mustache of fine hairs. There was a mole on her chin with three similar hairs growing from it, and there > was a second mole in the crevice between her right nostril and cheek. No hairs grew from the second mole. She had a wide mouth that compressed thinly in sudden anger and relaxed as suddenly when she remembered in time that it was not appropriate for deans to display anger.

She said with labored patience, “I was saying that I’m at a loss to understand your miserable showing, Kathryn. With the exception of Dr. Telsa’s class, you failed to make a single passing mark. It’s incredible.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I. Very sorry. But I’m afraid that regret is not sufficient to change the record. Have you anything to say for yourself? Any reasonable explanation at all? Have you been feeling ill? Has anything been troubling you?”

Kathy looked out the window again, and there were no leaves on the trees, but there was on the branches a thin veneer of shining ice, and there was ice floating in the river beyond the willows. It was a January day with the soiled winter clouds cleared for a while from the low sky, a brief, bright interim that would not last, and it was no time to waste on a dull woman who asked interminable questions that never approached the truth. There was no way to explain, no use in the world of trying to explain that the mind obsessed and absorbed cannot be parceled out to lesser tasks and interests like so much hired help.

“No,” she said. “I’ve been all right.”

“Are you sure? Sometimes, my dear, we have these difficulties without being fully aware of their nature.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I don’t know that I mean anything definite. I’m merely suggesting that it might be wise for you to see Dr. Sandstrom.”

“The psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

“No. I don’t want to see her.”

“Is that a reasonable attitude, my dear? Surely you’re not afraid of seeing a psychiatrist. Dr. Sandstrom will be your friend. You will have some friendly chats, and perhaps she will be able to make some suggestions that will help you.”

“I don’t want to see her.”

Again the swift sequence of irritation, expunction, labored patience. “I’d be doing less than my duty if I didn’t urge you very strongly to reconsider. Your initial tests here show you to be a person of superior intelligence. You should be doing superior work. That you are not doing so, that you are, quite the contrary, failing to do even acceptable work, is an indication that you may need professional help. This is no disgrace, my dear, nothing to feel humiliated about. We must simply be realistic enough to take the proper corrective measures. You would find your chats with Dr. Sandstrom to be quite pleasant, very therapeutic. She has worked wonders with many other students here.”

“Thank you, but I don’t need to see Dr. Sandstrom. I don’t want to talk with her.”

“You’re making it very difficult for me, my dear. Indeed, you are leaving me only one alternative. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes. I’ll be dismissed.”

“Temporarily, at least. You will have to miss a semester.”

“All right. I’ll move out of the dormitory tomorrow.”

“We don’t wish to be harsh. If it is inconvenient for you to leave immediately, you are perfectly welcome to stay on a few days.”

We. The comforting plural. The subtle, strategic retreat to dominant numbers and the incidental renunciation of personal responsibility. We do this, my dear, not I. I am merely an agent.

For already in her life, in Kathy’s life, though the issue was not overt and was given substance only by her own recognition of it, there was They and there was I, the antithetic orthodox and aberrant, and in the recognition of it, the ancient and evil conflict of it, there was a way of thinking and a loneliness and a depression that would come and go and come again so long as she lived.

“It’s no inconvenience,” she said. “I’ll leave tomorrow.”

“As you wish.” The dean stood up behind her desk, a dark, blocky woman with heavy breasts bunched and bound so tightly that they gave to her torso the solid, overdeveloped look of a male physical culturist. She extended a hand in a mannish gesture. “Good-bye, my dear, and believe me when I repeat that we’re all most sorry. We hope that you’ll come back to us next fall better prepared to meet our requirements.”

Kathy took the hand and found it strangely damp and limp to belong to such an aggressive woman. She dropped it quickly and said, “Thank you,” and left the office. Outside, the abbreviated day was in its precipitate descent to darkness. Shadows climbed among the branches of trees in pursuit of the icy light. The glitter was gone from the river. The cold was apparently in inverse ratio to the light, and she turned the plain collar of her coat up around her neck. She wasn’t sorry to be leaving Burlington College, but there was in her, nevertheless, an intense sadness. Partly it was because she would be leaving Vera, but mostly it was a sadness she couldn’t explain, couldn’t associate specifically with anything that had happened. And she felt it, of course, because she had come so definitely to a minor end and a minor beginning between the major beginning and the major end, and she felt but did not recognize that neither the end nor the beginning were good things, things that she would have chosen if she had been free to choose.

She was going to Vera’s. She crossed the campus in the gathering darkness, pooled and thickened beneath the trees, her feet making crisp sounds on the dead grass. Past the building that housed the chemistry lab. Past the Fine Arts building with one window illuminated on the second floor to form a screen for the grotesque, antic shadow of someone sawing a bow across the strings of a fiddle. Past the library and the Museum of Natural History and the gymnasium and so off the campus and up the street to Vera’s. She rang the bell, and Vera answered immediately, and there was something wrong between them, a subtle ugliness that was less distortion of reality than the exposure of it.

Kathy went in and sat down. Not on a pillow this time, but on a chair, assuming the primness that was a kind of automatic defense against any felt threat. Not relaxed in warm and delicious atmosphere of intimacy, but tense and wary, like a rejected child, though there had been as yet no expression of rejection. She didn’t understand the atmospheric change, not at first, but after a while she knew that it was fear, Vera’s fear, the bitter, corrosive fear of the especially vulnerable.

“Did you see the dean?” Vera said.

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“I’ll have to leave school.”

“I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do for you.”

It was a little too quick, too fervent, the disavowal of capacity to help. Kathy had come only to report and say good-bye, but the vulnerable see shadows behind every innocence, and she was suspected of having come to force intervention, to practice a kind of blackmail. She was conscious of this at once, and the knowledge stimulated in her a sly and malicious desire to capitalize on it, to fan and feed the ugly fear in this woman, this Dr. Telsa, who had been one thing and was now, almost in an instant, becoming something quite different. She was even changing physically, it seemed, growing thinner and older, all dry skin and projecting bones. The skin was flaky and the pores were large. In her eyes was the reflection of her fear and an incipient hatred for the stupid girl who, by exposing herself to curiosity and inspection, however routine, had become a source of jeopardy. It was perfectly clear that her paramount wish was to have Kathy gone from school as quickly and as quietly as possible.

“The dean wants me to see Dr. Sandstrom,” Kathy said.

“Dr. Sandstrom! My God, you aren’t going to do it, are you?”

“I don’t know. I could probably stay on here if I did.”

She had no intention of seeing the psychiatrist, of course. Nothing on earth, at that time, could have prevailed upon her to do so. But she derived a sadistic pleasure from the flaring fear in Vera Telsa’s eyes, and she derived a concurrent pleasure equally intense from the inversion of hatred, the sickness within herself that came from the cruel exposure of ugliness where she had thought there was beauty. She sat quietly, looking up at Vera with a demure expression, and across the room on a spindle, trapped in a black disk, Chopin was silent.

“You little fool!” Vera said. “Do you want to ruin yourself? Do you have any idea of what that woman may do to you, may make you say?”

Kathy sat quietly for another moment, her head held a little to one side and the faint demure smile on her lips, as if she were listening for a small sound that might come to her from a great distance, and then she stood up and said, “You’re very frightened, aren’t you? It makes you hate me very much. You’re afraid that I may ruin you, not myself. But you needn’t worry. I won’t hurt you. I wish you no harm now. I only wish that you’d died before I met you.”

Then she turned and let herself out of the house and went back up across the campus past the administration building and down the long slope among the trees to the bank of the river. She had been remembering the river as she had seen it through the dean’s window all the time she had been in Vera’s house, and she had thought that she would return to it as soon as she was free. It was very cold. The wind crossed the water and knifed through her thin, plain coat. She could feel over all her body a roughening of skin, and her blood seemed to sing in her veins a strange, sad song. Later she would have regrets, very grievous ones, but she had none now, and the predominant quality of her temper was the great sadness that was somewhat like the emotional equivalent of the sound of the river whispering past her in the night between narrow margins of ice.

And the river had continued to flow through time as well as space, from then to now, and morning became afternoon, and the afternoon passed, and it was evening of the last day.

She was by that time slightly drunk again, having stopped several places in her prowling of the streets, and she was standing on the sidewalk looking into the window of a drug store. It seemed to her that drug stores had recently been playing an unusually important role in her life, and this drug store was no exception. This drug store was, as a matter of fact, undoubtedly the most important single thing that had ever happened to her.

Because it had given her, after so many false starts, the real solution to her problem. And she had almost missed it. By the sheerest luck, in passing, she had caught it in the corner of her eye. And it was so simple, so absurdly simple, that it was just positively incredible that she hadn’t thought-of it before. She felt faint with relief. Her body began to shake, the sidewalk tilted under her feet, and she took a step forward and leaned her forehead against the cool, smooth surface of the window. The blonde, the brunette, and the redhead smiled at her from inside.

Oh, the reasoning was logical. A child could follow it. It was like a syllogism. You could state it very clearly in a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. She stated it, leaning her head against the glass, thinking each statement through carefully in advance, putting it in exactly the right words. Trouble is the color of the hair. The color of the hair can be changed. Therefore, it is possible to change the color of the hair from the wrong color to the right color and thus end trouble. The end of trouble in a bottle, price one dollar, special offer. Very easy to apply. Using the brush which was provided, you started at the roots and brushed outward with long, even strokes.

The bus fare had been three dollars and fourteen cents. The price of peace kept getting cheaper and cheaper.

She smiled back at the blonde, the brunette, and the redhead. Her eyes lingering last and longest on the redhead, she was reminded of the calendar on the wall of the bare little room at police headquarters, of the small boy with the rooster. The boy had such red hair, the reddest hair she had ever seen. That was the color of hair to have, all right, because it left no question in anyone’s mind and was obviously just what it was. There was about its bold, bright honesty nothing nameless and abominable.

Grasping the purse which she had remembered to bring with her from police headquarters while forgetting entirely the small bag, she pushed herself back from the glass and went into the store. Identical twins of the blonde, the brunette, and the redhead were sitting on a glass counter. She went back and stood under their smiles and awaited the arrival of a tall woman who came toward her on the other side of the counter. The woman had shining yellow hair that was set in an elaborate coiffure and was obviously supposed to be an example of what anyone could do with one of the special dollar bottles with directions attached. Her mouth was scarlet and moist, extended carefully beyond the natural lines of her lips, and her lashes were impossibly long and thick and looked as if they were about to start dripping. Flesh surrounding mouth and eyes had a lacquered finish, bright and brittle. If the woman were to smile like the three on glass, Kathy thought, her face would surely crack and check like a cheap china plate.

“How do you do,” the woman said. “May I help you?”

“Yes. I want a bottle of the hair dye. Red, please.”

The woman jeopardized her face by permitting plucked eyebrows to climb the brittle skin. “Red? Are you quite sure, honey? Or is it for someone else? Your natural coloring...”

“I’m quite sure. I want the red. Nothing will do but the red.”

The woman shrugged. Wrapping the bottle of dye, she handed it across the counter. “One dollar, two cents tax, one dollar and two cents, please.”

Kathy lay a bill and two pennies on the glass and took the package. Now that she had the simple stuff of a miracle in her possession, she was driven to set it working at once. With a sense of being under pressure of time, she hurried out of the store and turned on the street in the direction of her apartment. Lights were coming on now, incandescents and fluorescents and colored neon tubing twisted into countless spellings, the frail foes of darkness. The earth moved, and time moved, and she must hurry, hurry, hurry. She didn’t know why. She only knew that after killing the day she was now imperiled by the passing of time and that it was urgent to do quickly whatever was to be done at all.

In the apartment, she stood with her shoulders against the door behind her and drew her breath in deep, ragged gasps. After a few minutes, her breathing slowed, became shallow, the pressure of time and peril relaxing. With the door closed between her and whatever had pursued her through the streets, she was somewhat reassured. Carrying the bottle of dye, she went into the bedroom and, placing the bottle flat on a chest of drawers so that there was no possibility of its tipping over and breaking, removed her clothing down to her slip. Then she took the bottle and went into the bathroom.

Standing before the little mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet, she unwrapped the package and laid the bottle and the little brush in the lavatory. Retaining the sheet of directions, she sat down on the edge of the bathtub to read. It was really the most simple thing imaginable to work so great a miracle. One had only to brush the dye onto the hair with the little brush, just as it had said in the window, starting at the roots and brushing outward with long strokes to insure even application. The directions said to pour the contents of the bottle into a shallow bowl or pan or any kind of ordinary open container, and so she got up and went back out through the bedroom and living room into the kitchen for a bowl. In the bathroom again, she set the bowl in the sink, first removing the bottle and brush, and then she poured the contents of the bottle into the bowl. It was certainly red, all right. It was as red as fresh blood. It was as red as Paul’s Scarlet roses nodding in a June night. Oh, it was a glorious, shining, trouble-free red so wonderfully clear that she could see in it, looking down, the softly distorted reflection of her own face.

The little brush looked a lot like the kind of brush which one used with shoe polish, only it was much softer, of course. Proceeding with great care in exact accordance with directions, leaning forward to follow in the little mirror the progress and effect of her effort, she began to apply the dye. She took into her fingers only a few strands of hair at a time, holding them apart from the rest of her hair and pulling them taut under the stroke of the brush. The dye had a rather unpleasant odor, somewhat like some kind of disinfectant, she thought, and it burned her scalp. At first the dyed strands of hair looked merely a little darker than the rest, as if they were wet with plain water, but after a while, as they began to dry a little, she saw that they assumed an unmistakable red-orange hue, and this filled her with an exorbitant feeling of accomplishment.

It required a long time to do all the hair, and when she was finished at last, the bowl in the sink was almost empty. Inspecting the final effect of her work in the mirror, she was forced to laugh at herself. She was forced to admit that she looked very funny. The hair, unequally dried, was still of various shades, and it was, moreover, quite sticky. It stuck out stiffly in all directions from her head, and it looked even more ludicrous than it might have otherwise because her face below it was so thin and sad. She was like one of these sad-faced clowns who make comedy of misfortune. She laughed and laughed at herself because she was funny and because the miracle had really worked and her hair was another color, or other colors, and she was therefore very happy. The directions had warned her about the stickiness. After the dye had set, you washed the hair in luke warm water and the stickiness disappeared.

She went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed to wait for the dye to set. Now that she had taken positive action to end her trouble, she didn’t mind thinking about things that had happened or might happen, and so she began thinking about what the newspapers and the radio newscasts would say and about the effect of what was said on certain people. She found that this was a great pleasure to her, stimulating a sly, malicious amusement that made waiting easier. For a while she thought about Jacqueline, and then she went back beyond Jacqueline and thought about Vera Telsa. It was certain that both knew by this time that she had been questioned by the police about the murder of Angus Brunn, and it was certain that one of them knew she was guilty. That was not important, though. So far as they were concerned, murder and guilt were minor, and nothing was important or of any consequence whatever except what might be said and become known. And now, at this time, while the possible instrument of their incidental destruction sat on the edge of her bed and waited for her hair to dry, they were feeling the cold fear of the uniquely vulnerable, the grim, oppressive threat of the merciless They.

Sitting there thinking about their fear and how she was the cause of it, she was as delighted as a perverse child. She sat erect, the primness in her posture, and inside she felt rather light and gaseous, and the light feeling, the gas, swelled and gained volume and came up through her throat in the form of laughter. She sat without moving for almost an hour, sometimes laughing a little and sometimes mute as well as motionless, very pleased to think that Jacqueline and Vera were so frightened about something that was not worth being frightened about, because now, of course, since she had discovered this simple way to change herself entirely, she would never do anything bad again, and nothing would happen because of anything bad she had ever done. Being changed, being a different person, she was naturally not responsible for whatever had been done by the person she no longer was.

Eventually it was time to see if her hair was ready to wash. The directions had said approximately an hour. Surely an hour had passed. She got up and returned to the bathroom and peered at her reflection in the little mirror, and she could see immediately that she had again been made the victim of a monstrous joke, and the small tiled room reverberated to the thunderous, rollicking laughter above the lip of the world. For the dye wasn’t going to work after all. She should have known, having had so much experience with the caprice of God, that it would never work. Oh, her hair had changed color, all right, and it was still a bright red-orange to casual observation, but this was only part of the joke, the necessary stimulus of false hope, and she could see in the glass that the real color was already beginning to return and that it could never be altered or disguised, never on earth.

So she would have to destroy it. She knew that now. That which cannot be altered can nevertheless be destroyed. If your eye offends you, pluck it out. The Bible said that. If your hair offends you, pluck it out. Whether it said eye or hair didn’t really matter. It was the idea that mattered. It was the idea of destroying whatever was offensive.

In the mirror, her thin, sad face crumpled and blurred, and she reached up and took her ridiculous orange hair in both hands and pulled as hard as she could. Some of the hair came out in her hands, but only a little, and it was very painful pulling it out that way. She doubted that she could stand the pain. She would probably faint long before she had all the hair pulled out.

Turning away from the mirror, she went into the bedroom and pawed through the top drawer of the chest until she found a pair of scissors. With the scissors, she cut her hair off, doing as she had done with the dye, taking a few strands at a time and cutting them off as close to the scalp as she could. When she was finished, she returned the scissors to the drawer and went back into the bathroom and looked into the mirror again. There was nothing on her head now but a fine bristle over the scalp, and she saw that her scalp was covered with large orange blotches from the dye. She was quite pleased with what she saw. She rubbed a palm over the bristles and laughed into the mirror.

But the hair would return, would it not? Wouldn’t it grow back? Of course it would. Unless the roots were dead, unless you were really bald, hair always grew back. But did it grow back the same color that it was? Exactly the same color? Might there not be a subtle and significant change in pigmentation? Even a little change might make a great difference.

She would know, of course, after it had grown a little, but hair grew so slowly. She had lately waited so often and so long, she was so worn out with waiting, that she couldn’t bear the thought of waiting for this, to see how the hair would come in, if it would be the same or different. Once, when she had been waiting for something, for a time to come, she had taken a sleeping tablet, and waiting had been easy. She had simply wakened to a time that was there.

The sleeping tablets. The little green dragons. What had she done with them? She concentrated, trying to recall where she had put them, and she felt a little foolish when she remembered that they were right in front of her in the medicine cabinet. She had only to lift a hand and open the door and take out the unlabeled box. Having done so, she stood for a moment looking at the tablets and wondering how many she should take, and she decided, since hair grew so slowly, that it would be necessary to take quite a few. It would be necessary, she decided, to take all of them.

Filling a glass with tepid water from the tap, she took the tablets one at a time, swallowing a little of the water after each tablet, and when they had all been taken, she went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. She was afraid of the dark, of what she might see in it, and so she left the light burning, but pretty soon it began to get dark anyhow, even with the light on, and she was delighted to discover that she saw nothing and was not afraid at all.

Chapter 12

Vera Telsa left the library of Burlington College and walked across the campus toward the street on which she lived. On the way she met the dean. She spoke with crisp courtesy and would have passed immediately if the dean hadn’t stopped. Vera didn’t want to talk with the dean at that moment and resented being forced to do so. She hid her resentment, however, behind a small smile and a faintly deferential attitude.

“I’ve been intending to speak with you, Dr. Telsa,” the dean said. “About this girl who killed the man up in the city and committed suicide afterward. Kathryn Gait, her name was. Such a terrible shock. Of course it’s been several years since she was here, but she was rather a favorite of yours, as I recall.”

Vera’s small smile didn’t waver. “Not particularly. She was a member of my little group of specials, and so I was naturally somewhat interested in her.”

“To be sure. Did you know that your class was the only one in which she made a passing mark?”

“I understood that she made a deplorable showing generally.”

“Yes. Quite an intelligent girl, too. I had nearly forgotten her until this tragic thing happened, and then I went back in the records and reviewed her file. I was forced to dismiss her from school at mid-year, you know. I tried to get her to see Dr. Sandstrom, but she refused flatly. Now, in the light of events, I wonder if I really did all I might have, if I shouldn’t have insisted...”

“You really shouldn’t blame yourself. I’m sure you did all you could.”

“I dare say I did. Certainly I had no idea... Well, I won’t detain you any longer, Doctor. Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon, Dean.”

Relieved, Vera completed her crossing of the campus. She felt light and vigorous, strangely uplifted. Her mood was, in fact, almost manic. She would not think of the awful episode of fear from which she had escaped. She would never think of it again. It was true that the fear, the remembrance of it, was still perilously near the surface of her consciousness, still broke the surface briefly at odd times, but she was quite adroit at the technique of repression. In time she would bury it.

In her house, she fixed herself a cup of tea and carried it into the living room. Her little group was meeting later, and she hoped the conversation would be stimulating. While she was waiting, it would be pleasant to listen to some music.

She went over to the console phonograph and adjusted the mechanism. The lilting music of Chopin was released in the room.

Jacqueline Wieland sat on a tall stool under ersatz stars and drank a daiquiri. She had almost ordered a Sidecar before she recalled at the last moment that she had decided not to drink Sidecars any more. She had also decided not to patronize the Bronze Lounge any more, for that matter, but she had reversed the decision. She had done so because she understood that it was dangerous to defer to ghosts, to allow her thoughts and actions to be regulated by irrational fear of certain associations.

It had been a difficult day at the store — a series of minor problems terminating with another irritating conference with the old fool from Furniture. But actually, she supposed, the day had been no more difficult than the average. It was just that she had been abnormally sensitized to any emotional impact, however trivial in nature, by the deadly threat to the structure of her life that had just removed itself. She was like a person who had just recovered from pneumonia and had to protect himself from every petty exposure. There had even been trauma in her escape, in the sudden release from fear, for it is, after all, a rather frightening and shattering experience to realize that you are capable of feeling a fierce, unholy joy in someone’s death.

She finished her daiquiri and thought that she would have another. The bartender appropriated her empty glass, and she nodded to indicate a refill. Sitting on the stool with her hands lying in her lap, feeling more relaxed than she had felt at any other time since the instant of the radio newscaster’s announcement and her own instantaneous reaction of terrible relief and joy, she watched the bartender measure ingredients into an electric blender. He was a small man with a tired face and a shining bald head, and he conducted his business with the bored, assured economy of motion that comes from long familiarity with simple routine. Placing a clean glass on the bar before her, he poured from the container of the blender and then moved away to resume an interrupted conversation with a beer drinker two stools down. Her attention followed him idly, enlarging to include the sense of his words to the beer drinker, and after the first words, she wished that it had not, that something had diverted it in time, or that she had left after the first daiquiri.

“Like I was saying,” the bartender said to the beer drinker, “she was in here that evening, the evening before the day it came out in the papers about her being suspected of knifing this guy. She was drunk, all right, really drunk, but somehow not drunk like the standard lush. It was more like she was drinking to get away from something. That’s what I thought at the time, and now I can see it was true. She kept drinking straight rye and talking crazy as hell, but it was more than the rye talking, it was something behind the rye, something on her mind that was driving her nuts. She kept saying things about her hair, the color of it, how the color was wrong and how God must love me because He made me bald, and finally she said something about the empty cup of the world.”

“Jesus,” the beer drinker said.

“Yeah. It made a guy feel kind of queer to hear it.” The bartender looked down at the bar and shook his head, remembering. “I finally got her into a booth and got her a cup of black coffee, but then she just got up all of a sudden and walked out. She left her purse behind in the booth, and I put it away, thinking she’d be back for it, but then the very next day, like I said, it came out about her being suspected of murder, and so I called the cops, and a snotty lieutenant named Ridley came around to pick it up. I told him all this that I’m telling you, and he just stood and listened as if I were passing the time of day, and after I was finished he said okay, just to forget it, and he walked out with the purse without so much as a go to hell. Maybe he didn’t figure a bartender could have any sense, or he wouldn’t be a bartender, and he might be right, at that. Anyhow, the dame cut off all of her hair that same night and took a handful of sleeping pills, so I guess there was some kind of crazy meaning in what she said, even if he didn’t think so.”

“Psycho,” the beer drinker said. “I was reading in a magazine that there are more psychos now than ever before. It’s the pressure. Too much pressure on everyone.”

The bartender kept on looking at the bar and shaking his head. He said slowly, “I don’t know. There was something about her. Something kind of young and all mixed up. I felt sorry for her. I keep thinking that she was looking for help, trying to find someone to help her, and there wasn’t anyone, not anyone in the world.”

It was then that Jacqueline left. Outside, she stood on the curb and waited for a taxi to come along, a tall and striking woman, beautifully and severely groomed and tailored. In the grace of her posture and the tilt of her head, there was pride and a certain arrogance. The taxi driver who finally responded to her signal thought she was real class, the kind of dame you saw once in a coon’s age.

Lieutenant Ridley sat in his office and watched three sparrows.

There was one window in the room that overlooked a narrow brick alley. The window was recessed about eight inches in the wall of the building, leaving an outside sill wide enough for the accommodation of birds. Sometimes pigeons sat on the sill, but this afternoon three sparrows had assumed possession, and they had been sitting out there for a long time. They sat in a row so precisely spaced that it seemed someone must have measured the distance between them. Occasionally, one of the sparrows would stir and stretch its feathers, but none of them ever signified any serious intention of flying away. Ridley knew that this was true because he had been watching them. He had started watching them at four, and it was now five, and he could guarantee that the same three sparrows had been there all the time.

He was thankful for the company of the small, gray birds. He sat in his chair with his back to the desk and the door and wondered why this was. Perhaps, he thought, it was because they were birds of no importance, just drab little bits of life that were harbingers of nothing. When you’d descended the social strata of birds to the sparrow, there just wasn’t any place lower to go. That was even implied in the scriptures. When the scriptures said that God marked the fall of the sparrow, it was supposed to indicate the ultimate in concern and compassion. If a lousy little sparrow got consideration, there was plenty for everyone. Back home, the kids around the neighborhood had called them sparkies and had shot them with B-B guns. He’d never owned a B-B gun himself. He’d never enjoyed killing anything until, for a short while between then and now, he’d learned to enjoy killing men.

Someone came into the room behind him and sat down. Without turning around to see, he knew by the pace and weight of the tread that it was Tromp. He waited for Tromp to speak and wished that he wouldn’t.

“It’s all wrapped up, then?” Tromp said.

Ridley stirred in his chair, still watching the sparrows. “Why not?”

“No reason, I guess. I guess she was guilty, all right.”

“Of course she was guilty. I don’t know what a jury would’ve thought about the evidence, but that doesn’t matter now. She was guilty, and she’s dead, and that’s the end of it.”

“I wish she’d left a note — a confession. Usually they do that.”

“Not the ones like her. Not the ones who have the big break. They don’t stop to write a note for the convenience of cops.”

“Yeah.” Tromp’s voice was heavy. “She was a real psycho, all right. Why didn’t we hold her? We had enough to justify it.”

Ridley ignored the subtle undertone of accusation, for he had, after all, been asking himself the same question. Why didn’t you hold her, James J. Ridley? She was guilty, and she was ready to break, and you knew that both of these things were true, so why didn’t you hold her? He didn’t answer the question. Someday he would answer it, because he was basically honest even with himself, but he was not ready now. For the present, it was better to sit and watch the sparrows on the window sill.

“All that dyed hair on the floor,” Tromp said. “Her scalp all stained with that orange stuff the way it was. Why would a dame do something like that?”

“She was unbalanced. Off the deep end. You said it yourself, Sergeant. Psycho, you said.”

“Sure. But that doesn’t explain anything. You know that as well as I do. Crazy people do crazy things, but what makes them do certain kinds of crazy things? They’ve got reasons, just like anyone else.”

“That’s not our problem. Leave it to the head doctors.”

“Maybe it’s our problem if it indicates a motive. We still I don’t know why she killed the guy. We can make a pretty good guess, but we don’t really know. That crazy stuff about her hair was on her mind. She started talking it right away the night I was there, the night she came in plastered. Then she ends up trying a dye job, dead with an old-fashioned convict’s haircut. That’s not coincidence. It means something.”

“All right, Sergeant, all right.”

Ridley shifted his weight in the chair. He wanted Tromp to quit talking. He wanted Tromp to go away. He closed his eyes, obliterating the sparrows. Behind his lids, the thin face and hairless head of Kathy Gait was a soft illumination. A kind of cross between innocence and obscenity, he thought. He opened his eyes and the sparrows were still there.

Behind him, there was a measured, padded sound, and he realized that Tromp was pounding a clenched fist into a palm.

“Those pills,” Tromp said bitterly. “Those Goddamn green pills. They were in the medicine cabinet when I was there the first time. I should’ve taken them.”

“Why? She’d have found another way. Maybe a less pleasant one.”

“I should’ve known what they were. I should’ve taken them.”

“You can’t anticipate suicide in the case of everyone with a supply of soporifics.”

“This was different. In this case there were pointers.”

“Look, Sergeant. You’ve been in this game long enough to know better than to bleed for something that can’t be helped. You’d better forget it.”

“Sure. You’re right, of course.”

Tromp stood up. He felt that Ridley was holding back, and it made him sore. Ridley knew what it was all about, no question of that. That hair stuff. Why all this had happened. He’d known from the first, right from the moment he’d sniffed the scent over the telephone, but he wasn’t putting out. That was pretty apparent by now. All right, Goddamn him. Let the smart bastard stay buttoned up. To hell with all of it.

“I think I’ll get along home,” he said.

“Sure. See you tomorrow.”

Tromp left, and Ridley began to think that maybe it would have been better, on the whole, if he’d married and established a home himself. It might be pretty nice, having a wife. Maybe a kid or two. Of course he was comfortable enough in his room. He had all the books there that he’d read and liked well enough to keep, and he had a lot more that he wanted to read and had never got around to. There were so many things a man never got around to.

How did it start? How did it grow? How did a pretty girl a man could have loved come in such a twisted way to such a bad end?

He wasn’t thinking about murder. Murder was incidental.

He told himself that he’d better quit thinking about it at all. He’d better follow his advice to Tromp and forget it. He’d better get out of here and go to his room and read a book. Maybe he’d read Ecclesiastes. He didn’t read the Bible much any more, and he hadn’t read Ecclesiastes for a long time. Pretty soon he’d go get a drink and go to his room and read it again: The words of the Preacher, the son of David...

In the meantime, he watched the sparrows.

Content

Fletcher Flora
Strange Sisters

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12