Chapter III: Part 3

The hum of the refrigerator came louder now. Through all the house, there was no sound but those they made. Therese did not want the cold drink, but she took the bottle and carried it downstairs after Carol, through the kitchen and into the back garden she had seen from the window. Beyond the fountain were a lot of plants some three feet high and wrapped in burlap bags that looked like something, standing there in a group, Therese thought, but she didn’t know what. Carol tightened a string that the wind had loosened. Stooped in the heavy wool skirt and the blue cardigan sweater, her figure looked solid and strong, like her face, but not like her slender ankles. Carol seemed oblivious of her for several minutes, walking about slowly, planting her moccasined feet firmly, as if in the cold flowerless garden she was at last comfortable. It was bitterly cold without a coat, but because Carol seemed oblivious of that, too, Therese tried to imitate her.

“What would you like to do?” Carol asked. “Take a walk? Play some records?”

“I’m very content,” Therese told her.

She was preoccupied with something, and regretted after all inviting her out to the house, Therese felt. They walked back to the door at the end of the garden path.

“And how do you like your job?” Carol asked in the kitchen, still with her air of remoteness. She was looking into the big refrigerator. She lifted out two plates covered with wax paper. “I wouldn’t mind some lunch, would you?”

Therese had intended to tell her about the job at the Black Cat Theatre. That would count for something, she thought, that would be the single important thing she could tell about herself. But this was not the time. Now she replied slowly, trying to sound as detached as Carol, though she heard her shyness predominating, “I suppose it’s educational. I learn how to be a thief, a liar, and a poet all at once.” Therese leaned back in the straight chair so her head would be in the warm square of sunlight. She wanted to say, and how to love. She had never loved anyone before Carol, not even Sister Alicia.

Carol looked at her. “How do you become a poet?”

“By feeling things—too much, I suppose,” Therese answered conscientiously.

“And how do you become a thief?” Carol licked something off her thumb and frowned. “You don’t want any caramel pudding, do you?”

“No, thank you. I haven’t stolen yet, but I’m sure it’s easy there. There are pocketbooks all around, and one just takes something. They steal the meat you buy for dinner.” Therese laughed. One could laugh at it with Carol. One could laugh at anything with Carol.

They had sliced cold chicken, cranberry sauce, green olives, and crisp white celery. But Carol left her lunch and went into the living room. She came back carrying a glass with some whisky in it, and added some water to it from the tap. Therese watched her. Then for a long moment, they looked at each other, Carol standing in the doorway and Therese at the table, looking over her shoulder, not eating.

Carol asked quietly, “Do you meet a lot of people across the counter this way? Don’t you have to be careful whom you start talking to?”

“Oh, yes,” Therese smiled.

“Or whom you go out to lunch with?” Carol’s eyes sparkled. “You might run into a kidnaper.” She rolled the drink around in the iceless glass, then drank it off, the thin silver bracelets on her wrist rattling against the glass. “Well—do you meet many people this way?”

“No,” Therese said.

“Not many? Just three or four?”

“Like you?” Therese met her eyes steadily.

And Carol looked fixedly at her, as if she demanded another word, another phrase from Therese. But then she set the glass down on the stove top and turned away. “Do you play the piano?”

“Some.”

“Come and play something.” And when Therese started to refuse, she said imperatively, “Oh, I don’t care how you play. Just play something.”

Therese played some Scarlatti she had learned at the Home. In a chair on the other side of the room, Carol sat listening relaxed and motionless, not even sipping the new glass of whisky and water. Therese played the C major Sonata, which was slowish and rather simple, full of broken octaves, but it struck her as dull, then pretentious in the trill parts, and she stopped. It was suddenly too much, her hands on the keyboard that she knew Carol played, Carol watching her with her eyes half closed, Carol’s whole house around her, and the music that made her abandon herself, made her defenseless. With a gasp, she dropped her hands in her lap.

“Are you tired?” Carol asked calmly.

The question seemed not of now but of always. “Yes.”

Carol came up behind her and set her hands on Therese’s shoulders. Therese could see her hands in her memory—flexible and strong, the delicate tendons showing as they pressed her shoulders. It seemed an age as her hands moved toward her neck and under her chin, an age of tumult so intense it blotted out the pleasure of Carol’s tipping her head back and kissing her lightly at the edge of her hair. Therese did not feel the kiss at all.

“Come with me,” Carol said.

She went with Carol upstairs again. Therese pulled herself up by the banister and was reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.

“I think a nap wouldn’t hurt you,” Carol said, turning down the flowered cotton bedspread and the top blanket.

“Thanks, I’m not really—”

“Slip your shoes off,” Carol said softly, but in a tone that commanded obedience.

Therese looked at the bed. She had hardly slept the night before. “I don’t think I shall sleep, but if I do—”

“I’ll wake you in half an hour.” Carol pulled the blanket over her when she lay down. Carol sat down on the edge of the bed. “How old are you, Therese?”

Therese looked up at her, unable to bear her eyes now but bearing them nevertheless, not caring if she died that instant, if Carol strangled her, prostrate and vulnerable in her bed, the intruder. “Nineteen.” How old it sounded. Older than ninety-one.

Carol’s eyebrows frowned, though she smiled a little. Therese felt that she thought of something so intensely, one might have touched the thought in the air between them. Then Carol slipped her hands under her shoulders, and bent her head down to Therese’s throat, and Therese felt the tension go out of Carol’s body with the sigh that made her neck warm, that carried the perfume that was in Carol’s hair.

“You’re a child,” Carol said, like a reproach. She lifted her head. “What would you like?”

Therese remembered what she had thought of in the restaurant, and she set her teeth in shame.

“What would you like?” Carol repeated.

“Nothing, thanks.”

Carol got up and went to her dressing table and lighted a cigarette. Therese watched her through half-closed lids, worried by Carol’s restlessness, though she loved the cigarette, loved to see her smoke.

“What would you like, a drink?”

Therese knew she meant water. She knew from the tenderness and the concern in her voice, as if she were a child sick with fever. Then Therese said it: “I think I’d like some hot milk.”

The corner of Carol’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Some hot milk,” she mocked. Then she left the room.

And Therese lay in a limbo of anxiety and sleepiness all the long while until Carol reappeared with the milk in a straight-sided white cup with a saucer under it, holding the saucer and the cup handle, and closing the door with her foot.

“I let it boil and it’s got a scum on it,” Carol said annoyedly. “I’m sorry.”

But Therese loved it, because she knew this was exactly what Carol would always do, be thinking of something else and let the milk boil.

“Is that the way you like it? Plain like that?”

Therese nodded.

“Ug,” Carol said, and sat down on the arm of a chair and watched her.

Therese was propped on one elbow. The milk was so hot, she could barely let her lip touch it at first. The tiny sips spread inside her mouth and released a melange of organic flavors. The milk seemed to taste of bone and blood, of warm flesh, or hair, saltless as chalk yet alive as a growing embryo. It was hot through and through to the bottom of the cup, and Therese drank it down, as people in fairy tales drink the potion that will transform, or the unsuspecting warrior the cup that will kill. Then Carol came and took the cup, and Therese was drowsily aware that Carol asked her three questions, one that had to do with happiness, one about the store, and one about the future. Therese heard herself answering. She heard her voice rise suddenly in a babble, like a spring that she had no control over, and she realized she was in tears. She was telling Carol all that she feared and disliked, of her loneliness, of Richard, and of gigantic disappointments. And of her parents. Her mother was not dead. But Therese had not seen her since she was fourteen.

Carol questioned her, and she answered, though she did not want to talk about her mother. Her mother was not that important, not even one of the disappointments. Her father was. Her father was quite different. He had died when she was six—a lawyer of Czechoslovakian descent who all his life had wanted to be a painter. He had been quite different, gentle, sympathetic, never raising his voice in anger against the woman who had nagged at him, because he had been neither a good lawyer nor a good painter. He had never been strong, he had died of pneumonia, but in Therese’s mind, her mother had killed him. Carol questioned and questioned her, and Therese told of her mother’s bringing her to the school in Montclair when she was eight, of her mother’s infrequent visits afterward, for her mother had traveled a great deal around the country. She had been a pianist—no, not a first-rate one, how could she be, but she had always found work because she was pushing. And when Therese was about ten, her mother had remarried. Therese had visited at her mother’s house in Long Island in the Christmas holidays, and they had asked her to stay with them, but not as if they wanted her to stay. And Therese had not liked the husband, Nick, because he was exactly like her mother, big and dark haired, with a loud voice, and violent and passionate gestures. Therese was sure their marriage would be perfect. Her mother had been pregnant even then, and now there were two children. After a week with them, Therese had returned to the Home. There had been perhaps three or four visits from her mother afterward, always with some present for her, a blouse, a book, once a cosmetic kit that Therese had loathed simply because it reminded her of her mother’s brittle, mascaraed eye-lashes, presents handed her self-consciously by her mother, like hypocritical peace offerings. Once her mother had brought the little boy, her half brother, and then Therese had known she was an outsider. Her mother had not loved her father, had chosen to leave her at a school when she was eight, and why did she bother now even to visit her, to claim her at all? Therese would have been happier to have no parents, like half the girls in the school. Finally, Therese had told her mother she did not want her to visit again, and her mother hadn’t, and the ashamed, resentful expression, the nervous sidewise glance of the brown eyes, the twitch of a smile and the silence—that was the last she remembered of her mother. Then she had become fifteen. The sisters at the school had known her mother was not writing. They had asked her to write, and she had, but Therese had not answered. Then when graduation came, when she was seventeen, the school had asked her mother for two hundred dollars. Therese hadn’t wanted any money from her, had half believed her mother wouldn’t give her any, but she had, and Therese had taken it.

“I’m sorry I took it. I never told anyone but you. Some day I want to give it back.”

“Nonsense,” Carol said softly. She was sitting on the arm of the chair, resting her chin in her hand, her eyes fixed on Therese, smiling. “You were still a child. When you forget about paying her back, then you’ll be an adult.”

Therese did not answer.

“Don’t you think you’ll ever want to see her again? Maybe in a few years from now?”

Therese shook her head. She smiled, but the tears still oozed out of her eyes. “I don’t want to talk any more about it.”

“Does Richard know all this?”

“No. Just that she’s alive. Does it matter? This isn’t what matters.” She felt if she wept enough, it would all go out of her, the tiredness and the loneliness and the disappointment, as though it were in the tears themselves. And she was glad Carol left her alone to do it now. Carol was standing by the dressing table, her back to her. Therese lay rigid in the bed, propped up on her elbow, racked with the half-suppressed sobs.

“I’ll never cry again,” she said.

“Yes, you will.” And a match scraped.

Therese took another cleansing tissue from the bed table and blew her nose.

“Who else is in your life besides Richard?” Carol asked.

She had fled them all. There had been Lily, and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in the house where she had first lived in New York. Frances Cotter and Tim at the Pelican Press. Lois Vavrica, a girl who had been at the Home in Montclair, too. Now who was there? The Kellys who lived on the second floor at Mrs. Osborne’s. And Richard. “When I was fired from that job last month,” Therese said, “I was ashamed and I moved—” She stopped.

“Moved where?”

“I didn’t tell anyone where, except Richard. I just disappeared. I suppose it was my idea of starting a new life, but mostly I was ashamed. I didn’t want anyone to know where I was.”

Carol smiled. “Disappeared! I like that. And how lucky you are to be able to do it. You’re free. Do you realize that?”

Therese said nothing.

“No,” Carol answered herself.

Beside Carol on the dressing table, a square gray clock ticked faintly, and as Therese had done a thousand times in the store, she read the time and attached a meaning to it. It was four fifteen and a little more, and suddenly she was anxious lest she had lain there too long, lest Carol might be expecting someone to come to the house.

Then the telephone rang, sudden and long like the shriek of a hysterical woman in the hall, and they saw each other start.

Carol stood up, and slapped something twice in her palm, as she had slapped the gloves in her palm in the store. The telephone screamed again, and Therese was sure Carol was going to throw whatever it was she held in her hand, throw it across the room against the wall. But Carol only turned and laid the thing down quietly, and left the room.

Therese could hear Carol’s voice in the hall. She did not want to hear what she was saying. She got up and put her skirt and her shoes on. Now she saw what Carol had held in her hand. It was a shoehorn of tan-colored wood. Anyone else would have thrown it, Therese thought. Then she knew one word for what she felt about Carol: pride. She heard Carol’s voice repeating the same tones, and now opening the door to leave, she heard the words, “I have a guest,” for the third time calmly presented as a barrier. “I think it’s an excellent reason. What better?... What’s the matter with tomorrow? If you—”

Then there was no sound until Carol’s first step on the stair, and Therese knew whoever had been talking to her had hung up on her. Who dared, Therese wondered.

“Shouldn’t I leave?” Therese asked.

Carol looked at her in the same way she had when they first entered the house. “Not unless you want to. No. We’ll take a drive later, if you want to.”

She knew Carol did not want to take another drive. Therese started to straighten the bed.

“Leave the bed.” Carol was watching her from the hall. “Just close the door.”

“Who is it that’s coming?”

Carol turned and went into the green room. “My husband,” she said. “Hargess.”

Then the doorbell chimed downstairs, and the latch clicked at the same time.

“No end prompt today,” Carol murmured. “Come down, Therese.”

Therese felt sick with dread suddenly, not of the man but of Carol’s annoyance at his coming.

He was coming up the stairs. When he saw Therese, he slowed, and a faint surprise crossed his face, and then he looked at Carol.

“Harge, this is Miss Belivet,” Carol said. “Mr. Aird.”

“How do you do?” Therese said.

Harge only glanced at Therese, but his nervous blue eyes inspected her from head to toe. He was a heavily built man with a rather pink face. One eyebrow was set higher than the other, rising in an alert peak in the center, as if it might have been distorted by a scar. “How do you do?” Then to Carol, “I’m sorry to disturb you. I only wanted to get one or two things.” He went past her and opened the door to a room Therese had not seen. “Things for Rindy,” he added.

“Pictures on the wall?” Carol asked.

The man was silent.

Carol and Therese went downstairs. In the living room Carol sat down, but Therese did not.

“Play some more, if you like,” Carol said.

Therese shook her head.

“Play some,” Carol said firmly.

Therese was frightened by the sudden white anger in her eyes. “I can’t,” Therese said, stubborn as a mule.

And Carol subsided. Carol even smiled.

They heard Harge’s quick steps cross the hall and stop, then descend the stairs slowly. Therese saw his dark clad figure and then his pinkish blond head appear.

“I can’t find that watercolor set. I thought it was in my room,” he said complainingly.

“I know where it is.” Carol got up and started toward the stairs.

“I suppose you want me to take her something for Christmas,” Harge said.

“Thanks, I’ll give the things to her.” Carol went up the stairs.

They are just divorced, Therese thought, or about to be divorced.

Harge looked at Therese, almost offered her his cigarette case, and didn’t. He had an intense expression that curiously mingled anxiety and boredom. The flesh around his mouth was firm and heavy, rounding into the line of his mouth so that he seemed lipless. He lighted a cigarette for himself. “Are you from New York?” he asked.

Therese felt the disdain and incivility in the question, like the sting of a slap in the face. “Yes, from New York,” she answered.

He was on the brink of another question to her, when Carol came down the stairs. Therese had steeled herself to be alone with him for minutes. Now she shuddered as she relaxed, and she knew that he saw it.

“Thanks,” Harge said as he took the box from Carol. He walked to his overcoat that Therese had noticed on the loveseat, sprawled open with its black arms spread as if it were fighting and would take possession of the house. “Good-by,” Harge said to her. He put the overcoat on as he walked to the door. “Friend of Abby’s?” he murmured to Carol.

“A friend of mine,” Carol answered.

“Are you going to take the presents to Rindy? When?”

“What if I gave her nothing, Harge?”

“Carol—” He stopped on the porch, and Therese barely heard him say something about making things unpleasant. Then, “I’m going to see Cynthia now. Can I stop by on the way back? It’ll be before eight.”

“Harge, what’s the purpose?” Carol said wearily. “Especially when you’re so disagreeable.”

“Because it concerns Rindy.” Then his voice faded unintelligibly.

Then an instant later, Carol came in alone and closed the door. Carol stood against the door with her hands behind her, and they heard the car outside leaving. Carol must have agreed to see him tonight, Therese thought.

“I’ll go,” Therese said. Carol said nothing. There was a deadness in the silence between them now, and Therese grew more uneasy. “I’d better go, hadn’t I?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Harge. He’s not always so rude. It was a mistake to say I had any guest here at all.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Carol’s forehead wrinkled and she said with difficulty, “Do you mind if I put you on the train tonight, instead of driving you home?”

“No.” She couldn’t have borne Carol’s driving her home and driving back alone tonight in the darkness.

They were silent also in the car. Therese opened the door as soon as the car stopped at the station.

“There’s a train in about four minutes,” Carol said.

Therese blurted suddenly, “Will I see you again?”

Carol only smiled at her, a little reproachfully, as the window between them rose up. “Au revoir,” she said.

Of course, of course, she would see her again, Therese thought. An idiotic question!

The car backed fast and turned away into the darkness.

Therese longed for the store again, longed for Monday, because Carol might come in again on Monday. But it wasn’t likely. Tuesday was Christmas Eve. Certainly she could telephone Carol by Tuesday, if only to wish her a merry Christmas.

But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.

chapter seven

The man looked at it, holding it carelessly between thumb and forefinger. He was bald except for long strands of black hair that grew from a former brow line, plastered sweatily down over the naked scalp. His underlip was thrust out with the contempt and negation that had fixed itself on his face as soon as Therese had come to the counter and spoken her first words.

“No,” he said at last.

“Can’t you give me anything for it?” Therese asked.

The lip came out farther. “Maybe fifty cents.” And he tossed it back across the counter.

Therese’s fingers crept over it possessively. “Well, what about this?” From her coat pocket she dragged up the silver chain with the St. Christopher medallion.

Again the thumb and forefinger were eloquent of scorn, turning the coin like filth. “Two fifty.”

But it cost at least twenty dollars, Therese started to say, but she didn’t because that was what everybody said. “Thanks.” She picked up the chain and went out.

Who were all the lucky people, she wondered, who had managed to sell their old pocketknives, broken wrist watches and carpenters’ planes that hung in clumps in the front window? She could not resist looking back through the window, finding the man’s face again under the row of hanging hunting knives. The man was looking at her, too, smiling at her. She felt he understood every move she made. Therese hurried down the sidewalk.

In ten minutes, Therese was back. She pawned the silver medallion for two dollars and fifty cents.

She hurried westward, ran across Lexington Avenue, then Park, and turned down Madison. She clutched the little box in her pocket until its sharp edges cut her fingers. Sister Beatrice had given it to her. It was inlaid brown wood and mother-of-pearl, in a checked pattern. She didn’t know what it was worth in money, but she had assumed it was rather precious. Well, now she knew it wasn’t. She went into a leather goods shop.

“I’d like to see the black one in the window—the one with the strap and the gold buckles,” Therese said to the salesgirl.

It was the handbag she had noticed last Saturday morning on the way to meet Carol for lunch. It had looked like Carol, just at a glance. She had thought, even if Carol didn’t keep the appointment that day, if she could never see Carol again, she must buy the bag and send it to her anyway.

“I’ll take it,” Therese said.

“That’s seventy-one eighteen with the tax,” the salesgirl said. “Do you want that gift wrapped?”

“Yes, please.” Therese counted six crisp ten-dollar bills across the counter and the rest in singles. “Can I leave it here till about six thirty tonight?”

Therese left the shop with the receipt in her billfold. It wouldn’t do to risk bringing the handbag into the store. It might be stolen, even if it was Christmas Eve. Therese smiled. It was her last day of work at the store. And in four more days came the job at the Black Cat. Phil was going to bring her a copy of the play the day after Christmas.

She passed Brentano’s. Its window was full of satin ribbons, leather-bound books, and pictures of knights in armor. Therese turned back and went into the store, not to buy but to look, just for a moment, to see if there was anything here more beautiful than the handbag.

An illustration in one of the counter displays caught her eye. It was a young knight on a white horse, riding through a bouquetlike forest, followed by a line of page boys, the last bearing a cushion with a gold ring on it. She took the leather-bound book in her hand. The price inside the cover was twenty-five dollars. If she simply went to the bank now and got twenty-five dollars more, she could buy it. What was twenty-five dollars? She hadn’t needed to pawn the silver medallion. She knew she had pawned it only because it was from Richard, and she didn’t want it any longer. She closed the book and looked at the edges of the pages that were like a concave bar of gold. But would Carol really like it, a book of love poems of the middle ages? She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember the slightest clue as to Carol’s taste in books. She put the book down hurriedly and left.

Upstairs in the doll department, Miss Santini was strolling along behind the counter, offering everybody candy from a big box.

“Take two,” she said to Therese. “Candy department sent ’em up.”

“I don’t mind if I do.” Imagine, she thought, biting into a nougat, the Christmas spirit had struck the candy department. There was a strange atmosphere in the store today. It was unusually quiet, first of all. There were plenty of customers, but they didn’t seem in a hurry, even though it was Christmas Eve. Therese glanced at the elevators, looking for Carol. If Carol didn’t come in, and she probably wouldn’t, Therese was going to telephone her at six thirty, just to wish her a happy Christmas. Therese knew her telephone number. She had seen it on the telephone at the house.

“Miss Belivet!” Mrs. Hendrickson’s voice called, and Therese jumped to attention. But Mrs. Hendrickson only waved her hand for the benefit of the Western Union messenger who laid a telegram in front of Therese.

Therese signed for it in a scribble, and tore it open. It said:

MEET YOU DOWNSTAIRS AT 5PM. CAROL.

Therese crushed it in her hand. She pressed it hard with her thumb into her palm, and watched the messenger boy who was really an old man walk back toward the elevators. He walked ploddingly, with a stoop that thrust his knees far ahead of him, and his puttees were loose and wobbly.

“You look happy,” Mrs. Zabriskie said dismally to her as she went by.

Therese smiled. “I am.” Mrs. Zabriskie had a two months’ old baby, she had told Therese, and her husband was out of work now. Therese wondered if Mrs. Zabriskie and her husband were in love with each other, and really happy. Perhaps they were, but there was nothing in Mrs. Zabriskie’s blank face and her plodding walk that would suggest it. Perhaps once Mrs. Zabriskie had been as happy as she. Perhaps it had gone away. She remembered reading—even Richard once saying—that love usually dies after two years of marriage. That was a cruel thing, a trick. She tried to imagine Carol’s face, the smell of her perfume, becoming meaningless. But in the first place could she say she was in love with Carol? She had come to a question she could not answer.

At a quarter to five, Therese went to Mrs. Hendrickson and asked permission to leave a half hour early. Mrs. Hendrickson might have thought the telegram had something to do with it, but she let Therese go without even a complaining look, and that was another thing that made the day a strange one.

Carol was waiting for her in the foyer where they had met before.

“Hello!” Therese said. “I’m through.”

“Through what?”

“Through with working. Here.” But Carol seemed depressed, and it dampened Therese instantly. She said anyway, “I was awfully happy to get the telegram.”

“I didn’t know if you’d be free. Are you free tonight?”

“Of course.”

And they walked on, slowly, amid the jostling crowd, Carol in her delicate looking suede pumps that made her a couple of inches taller than Therese. It had begun to snow about an hour before, but it was stopping already. The snow was no more than a film underfoot, like thin white wool drawn across the street and sidewalk.

“We might have seen Abby tonight, but she’s busy,” Carol said. “Anyway, we can take a drive, if you’d like. It’s good to see you. You’re an angel to be free tonight. Do you know what?”

“No,” Therese said, still happy in spite of herself, though Carol’s mood was disquieting. Therese felt something had happened.

“Do you suppose there’s a place to get a cup of coffee around here?”

“Yes. A little farther east.”

Therese was thinking of one of the sandwich shops between Fifth and Madison, but Carol chose a small bar with an awning in front. The waiter was reluctant at first, and said it was the cocktail hour, but when Carol started to leave, he went away and got the coffee. Therese was anxious about picking up the handbag. She didn’t want to do it when Carol was with her, even though the package would be wrapped.

“Did something happen?” Therese asked.

“Something too long to explain.” Carol smiled at her but the smile was tired, and a silence followed, an empty silence as if they traveled through space away from each other.

Probably Carol had had to break an engagement she had looked forward to, Therese thought. Carol would of course be busy on Christmas Eve.

“I’m not keeping you from doing anything now?” Carol asked.

Therese felt herself growing tense, helplessly. “I’m supposed to pick up a package on Madison Avenue. It’s not far. I can do it now, if you’ll wait for me.”

“All right.”

Therese stood up. “I can do it in three minutes with a taxi. But I don’t think you will wait for me, will you?”

Carol smiled and reached for her hand. Indifferently, Carol squeezed her hand and dropped it. “Yes, I’ll wait.”

The bored tone of Carol’s voice was in her ears as she sat on the edge of the taxi seat. On the way back, the traffic was so slow, she got out and ran the last block.

Carol was still there, her coffee only half finished.

“I don’t want my coffee,” Therese said, because Carol seemed ready to go.

“My car’s downtown. Let’s get a taxi down.”

They went down into the business section not far from the Battery. Carol’s car was brought up from an underground garage. Carol drove west to the Westside Highway.

“This is better.” Carol shed her coat as she drove. “Throw it in back, will you?”

And they were silent again. Carol drove faster, changing her lane to pass cars, as if they had a destination. Therese set herself to say something, anything at all, by the time they reached the George Washington Bridge. Suddenly it occurred to her that if Carol and her husband were divorcing, Carol had been downtown to see a lawyer today. The district there was full of law offices. And something had gone wrong. Why were they divorcing? Because Harge was having an affair with the woman called Cynthia? Therese was cold. Carol had lowered the window beside her, and every time the car sped, the wind burst through and wrapped its cold arms around her.

“That’s where Abby lives,” Carol said, nodding across the river.

Therese did not even see any special lights. “Who’s Abby?”

“Abby? My best friend.” Then Carol looked at her. “Aren’t you cold with this window open?”

“No.”

“You must be.” They stopped for a red light, and Carol rolled the window up. Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the first time that evening, and under her eyes that went from her face to her hands in her lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had bought at a roadside kennel, that Carol had just remembered was riding beside her.

“What happened, Carol? Are you getting a divorce now?”

Carol sighed. “Yes, a divorce,” she said quite calmly, and started the car.

“And he has the child?”

“Just tonight.”

Therese was about to ask another question, when Carol said, “Let’s talk about something else.”

A car went by with the radio playing Christmas carols and everyone singing.

And she and Carol were silent. They drove past Yonkers, and it seemed to Therese she had left every chance of talking further to Carol somewhere behind on the road. Carol insisted suddenly that she should eat something, because it was getting on to eight, so they stopped at a little restaurant by the roadside, a place that sold fried-clam sandwiches. They sat at the counter and ordered sandwiches and coffee, but Carol did not eat. Carol asked her questions about Richard, not in the concerned way she had Sunday afternoon, but rather as if she talked to keep Therese from asking more questions about her. They were personal questions, yet Therese answered them mechanically and impersonally. Carol’s quiet voice went on and on, much quieter than the voice of the counter boy talking with someone three yards away.

“Do you sleep with him?” Carol asked her.

“I did. Two or three times.” Therese told her about those times, the first time and the three times afterward. She was not embarrassed, talking about it. It had never seemed so dull and unimportant before. She felt Carol could imagine every minute of those evenings. She felt Carol’s objective, appraising glance over her, and she knew Carol was about to say she did not look particularly cold, or perhaps, emotionally starved. But Carol was silent, and Therese stared uncomfortably at the list of songs on the little music box in front of her. She remembered someone telling her once she had a passionate mouth, she couldn’t remember who.

“Sometimes it takes time,” Carol said. “Don’t you believe in giving people another chance?”

“But why? It isn’t pleasant. And I’m not in love with him.”

“Don’t you think you might be, if you got this worked out?”

“Is that the way people fall in love?”

Carol looked up at the deer’s head on the wall behind the counter. “No,” she said, smiling. “What do you like about Richard?”

“Well, he has—” But she wasn’t sure if it really was sincerity. He wasn’t sincere, she felt, about his ambition to be a painter. “I like his attitude—more than most men’s. He does treat me like a person instead of just a girl he can go so far with or not. And I like his family—the fact that he has a family.”

“Lots of people have families.”

Therese tried again. “He’s flexible. He changes. He’s not like most men that you can label doctor or—or insurance salesman.”

“I think you know him better than I knew Harge after months of marriage. At least you’re not going to make the same mistake I did, to marry because it was the thing to do when you were about twenty, among the people I knew.”

“You mean you weren’t in love?”

“Yes, I was, very much. And so was Harge. And he was the kind of man who could wrap your life up in a week and put it in his pocket. Were you ever in love, Therese?”

She waited, until the word from nowhere, false, guilty, moved her lips, “No.”

“But you’d like to be.” Carol was smiling.

“Is Harge still in love with you?”

Carol looked down at her lap, impatiently, and perhaps she was shocked at her bluntness, Therese thought, but when Carol spoke, her voice was the same as before, “Even I don’t know. In a way, he’s the same emotionally as he’s always been. It’s just that now I can see how he really is. He said I was the first woman he’d ever been in love with. I think it’s true, but I don’t think he was in love with me—in the usual sense of the word—for more than a few months. He’s never been interested in anyone else, it’s true. Maybe he’d be more human if he were. That I could understand and forgive.”

“Does he like Rindy?”

“Dotes on her.” Carol glanced at her smiling. “If he’s in love with anyone, it’s Rindy.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“Nerinda. Harge named her. He wanted a son, but I think he’s even more pleased with a daughter. I wanted a girl. I wanted two or three children.”

“And—Harge didn’t?”

“I didn’t.” She looked at Therese again. “Is this the right conversation for Christmas Eve?” Carol reached for a cigarette, and accepted the one Therese offered her, a Philip Morris.

“I like to know all about you,” Therese said.

“I didn’t want any more children, because I was afraid our marriage was going on the rocks anyway, even with Rindy. So you want to fall in love? You probably will soon, and if you do, enjoy it, it’s harder later on.”

“To love someone?”

“To fall in love. Or even to have the desire to make love. I think sex flows more sluggishly in all of us than we care to believe, especially men care to believe. The first adventures are usually nothing but a satisfying of curiosity, and after that one keeps repeating the same actions, trying to find—what?”

“What?” Therese asked.

“Is there a word? A friend, a companion, or maybe just a sharer. What good are words? I mean, I think people often try to find through sex, things that are much easier to find in other ways.”

What Carol said about curiosity, she knew was true. “What other ways?” she asked.

Carol gave her a glance. “I think that’s for each person to find out. I wonder if I can get a drink here.”

But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back toward New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to her house for a while, and Therese said to Carol’s house. She remembered the Kellys had asked her to drop in on the wine and fruitcake party they were having tonight, and she had promised to, but they wouldn’t miss her, she thought.

“What a rotten time I give you,” Carol said suddenly. “Sunday and now this. I’m not the best company this evening. What would you like to do? Would you like to go to a restaurant in Newark where they have lights and Christmas music tonight? It’s not a night club. We could have a decent dinner there, too.”

“I really don’t care about going anywhere—for myself.”

“You’ve been in that rotten store all day, and we haven’t done a thing to celebrate your liberation.”

“I just like to be here with you,” Therese said, and hearing the explanatory tone in her voice, she smiled.

Carol shook her head, not looking at her. “Child, child, where do you wander—all by yourself?”

Then a moment later on the New Jersey highway, Carol said, “I know what.” And she turned the car into a graveled section off the road and stopped. “Come out with me.”

They were in front of a lighted stand piled high with Christmas trees. Carol told her to pick a tree, one not too big and not too small. They put the tree in the back of the car, and Therese sat in front beside Carol with her arms full of holly and fir branches. Therese pressed her face into them and inhaled the dark-green sharpness of their smell, their clean spice that was like a wild forest and like all the artifices of Christmas—tree baubles, gifts, snow, Christmas music, holidays. It was being through with the store and being beside Carol now. It was the purr of the car’s engine, and the needles of the fir branches that she could touch with her fingers. I am happy, I am happy, Therese thought.

“Let’s do the tree now,” Carol said as soon as they entered the house.

Carol turned the radio on in the living room, and fixed a drink for both of them. There were Christmas songs on the radio, bells breaking resonantly, as if they were inside a great church. Carol brought a blanket of white cotton for the snow around the tree, and Therese sprinkled it with sugar so it would glisten. Then she cut an elongated angel out of some gold ribbon and fixed it to the top of the tree, and folded tissue paper and cut a string of angels to thread along the branches.

“You’re very good at that,” Carol said, surveying the tree from the hearth. “It’s superb. Everything but presents.”

Carol’s present was on the sofa beside Therese’s coat. The card she had made for it was at home, however, and she didn’t want to give it without the card. Therese looked at the tree. “What else do we need?”

“Nothing. Do you know what time it is?”

The radio had signed off. Therese saw the mantel clock. It was after one. “It’s Christmas,” she said.

“You’d better stay the night.”

“All right.”

“What do you have to do tomorrow?”

“Nothing.”

Carol got her drink from the radio top. “Don’t you have to see Richard?”

She did have to see Richard, at twelve noon. She was to spend the day at his house. But she could make some kind of excuse. “No. I said I might see him. It’s not important.”

“I can drive you in early.”

“Are you busy tomorrow?”

Carol finished the last inch of her drink. “Yes,” she said.

Therese began to clean up the mess she had made, the scraps of tissue and snippets of ribbon. She hated cleaning up after making something.

“Your friend Richard sounds like the kind of man who needs a woman around him to work for. Whether he marries her or not,” Carol said. “Isn’t he like that?”

Why talk of Richard now, Therese thought irritably. She felt that Carol liked Richard—which could only be her own fault—and a distant jealousy prickled her, sharp as a pin.

“Actually, I admire that more than the men who live alone or think they live alone, and end by making the stupidest blunders with women.”

Therese stared at Carol’s pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She could find Carol’s perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of evergreen, and she wanted to follow it, to put her arms around Carol.

“It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?”

“What?” Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.

“Harge is the kind of man who doesn’t let a woman enter his life. And on the other hand, your friend Richard might never marry. But the pleasure Richard will get out of thinking he wants to marry.” Carol looked at Therese from head to foot. “The wrong girls,” she added. “Do you dance, Therese? Do you like to dance?”

Carol seemed suddenly cool and bitter, and Therese could have wept. “No,” she said. She should never have told her anything about Richard, Therese thought, but now it was done.

“You’re tired. Come on to bed.”

Carol took her to the room that Harge had gone into Sunday, and turned down the covers of one of the twin beds. It might have been Harge’s room, Therese thought. There was certainly nothing about it that suggested a child’s room. She thought of Rindy’s possessions that Harge had taken from this room, and imagined Harge moving first from the bedroom he shared with Carol, then letting Rindy bring her things into this room, keeping them here, closing himself and Rindy away from Carol.

Carol laid some pajamas on the foot of the bed. “Good night, then,” she said at the door. “Merry Christmas. What do you want for Christmas?”

Therese smiled suddenly. “Nothing.”

That night she dreamed of birds, long, bright red birds like flamingos, zipping through a black forest and making scallopy patterns, arcs of red that curved like their cries. Then her eyes opened and she heard it really, a soft whistle curving, rising and coming down again with an extra note at the end, and behind it the real, feebler twitter of birds. The window was a bright gray. The whistling began again, just below the window, and Therese got out of bed. There was a long open-topped car in the driveway, and a woman standing in it, whistling. It was like a dream she looked out on, a scene without color, misty at the edges.

Then she heard Carol’s whisper, as clearly as if all three of them were in the same room together, “Are you going to bed or getting up?”

The woman in the car with her foot on the seat said just as softly, “Both,” and Therese heard the tremor of repressed laughter in the word and liked her instantly. “Go for a ride?” the woman asked. She was looking up at Carol’s window with a big smile that Therese had just begun to see.

“You nitwit,” Carol whispered.

“You alone?”

“No.”

“Oh-oh.”

“It’s all right. Do you want to come in?”

The woman got out of the car.

Therese went to the door of her room and opened it. Carol was just coming into the hall, tying the belt of her robe.

“Sorry I wakened you,” Carol said. “Go back to bed.”

“I don’t mind. Can I come down?”

“Well, of _course_!” Carol smiled suddenly. “Get a robe out of the closet.”

Therese got a robe, probably a robe of Harge’s, she thought, and went downstairs.

“Who made the Christmas tree?” the woman was asking.

They were in the living room.

“She did.” Carol turned to Therese. “This is Abby. Abby Gerhard, Therese Belivet.”

“Hello,” Abby said.

“How do you do.” Therese had hoped it was Abby. Abby looked at her now with the same bright, rather popeyed expression of amusement that Therese had seen when she stood in the car.

“You make a fine tree,” Abby told her.

“Will everybody stop whispering?” Carol asked.

Abby chafed her hands together and followed Carol into the kitchen. “Got any coffee, Carol?”

Therese stood by the kitchen table, watching them, feeling at ease because Abby paid no further attention to her, only took off her coat and started helping Carol with the coffee. Her waist and hips looked perfectly cylindrical, without any front or back, under her purple knitted suit. Her hands were a little clumsy, Therese noticed, and her feet had none of the grace of Carol’s. She looked older than Carol, and there were two wrinkles across her forehead that cut deep when she laughed and her strong arched eyebrows rose higher. And she and Carol kept laughing now, while they fixed coffee and squeezed orange juice, talking in short phrases about nothing, or nothing that was important enough to be followed.

Except Abby’s sudden, “Well”—fishing a seed out of the last glass of orange juice and wiping her finger carelessly on her own dress—“how’s old Harge?”

“The same,” Carol said. Carol was looking for something in the refrigerator, and watching her, Therese failed to hear all of what Abby said next, or maybe it was another of the fragmentary sentences that Carol alone understood, but it made Carol straighten up and laugh, suddenly and hard, made her whole face change, and Therese thought with sudden envy, she could not make Carol laugh like that, but Abby could.

“I’m going to tell him that,” Carol said. “I can’t resist.”

It was something about a Boy Scout pocket gadget for Harge.

“And tell him where it came from,” Abby said, looking at Therese and smiling broadly, as if she should share in the joke, too. “Where’re you from?” she asked Therese as they sat down in the table alcove at one side of the kitchen.

“She’s from New York,” Carol answered for her, and Therese thought Abby was going to say, why how unusual, or something silly, but Abby said nothing at all, only looked at Therese with the same expectant smile, as if she awaited the next cue from her.

For all their fussing about breakfast, there was only orange juice and coffee and some unbuttered toast that nobody wanted. Abby lighted a cigarette before she touched anything.

“Are you old enough to smoke?” she asked Therese, offering her a red box that said Craven A’s.

Carol put her spoon down. “Abby, what is this?” she asked with an air of embarrassment that Therese had never seen before.

“Thanks, I’d like one,” Therese said, taking a cigarette.

Abby settled her elbows on the table. “Well, what’s what?” she asked Carol.

“I suspect you’re a little tight,” Carol said.

“Driving for hours in the open air? I left New Rochelle at two, got home and found your message, and here I am.”

She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day except what she felt like doing.

“Well?” Abby said.

“Well—I didn’t win the first round,” Carol said.

Abby drew on her cigarette, showing no surprise at all. “For how long?”

“For three months.”

“Starting when?”

“Starting now. Starting last night, in fact.” Carol glanced at Therese, then looked down at her coffee cup, and Therese knew Carol would not say any more with her sitting there.

“That’s not set already, is it?” Abby asked.

“I’m afraid it is,” Carol answered casually, with a shrug in her tone. “Just verbally, but it’ll hold. What’re you doing tonight? Late.”

“I’m not doing anything early. Dinner’s at two today.”

“Call me sometime.”

“Sure.”

Carol kept her eyes down, looking down at the orange juice glass in her hand, and Therese saw a downward slant of sadness in her mouth now, a sadness not of wisdom but of defeat.

“I’d take a trip,” Abby said. “Take a little trip away somewhere.” Then Abby looked at Therese, another of the bright, irrelevant, friendly glances, as if to include her in something it was impossible she could be included in, and anyway, Therese had gone stiff with the thought that Carol might take a trip away from her.

“I’m not much in the mood,” Carol said, but Therese heard the play of possibility in it nevertheless.

Abby squirmed a little and looked around her. “This place is gloomy as a coalpit in the mornings, isn’t it?”

Therese smiled a little. A coalpit, with the sun beginning to yellow the window sill, and the evergreen tree beyond it?

Carol was looking at Abby fondly, lighting one of Abby’s cigarettes. How well they must know each other, Therese thought, so well that nothing either of them said or did to the other could ever surprise, ever be misunderstood.

“Was it a good party?” Carol asked.

“Mm,” Abby said indifferently. “Do you know someone called Bob Haversham?”

“No.”

“He was there tonight. I met him somewhere before in New York. Funnily enough, he said he was going to work for Rattner and Aird in the brokerage department.”

“Really.”

“I didn’t tell him I knew one of the bosses.”

“What time is it?” Carol asked after a moment.

Abby looked at her wrist watch, a small watch set in a pyramid of gold panels. “Seven thirty. About. Do you care?”

“Want to sleep some more, Therese?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“I’ll drive you in whenever you have to go,” Carol said.

But it was Abby who drove her finally, around ten o’clock, because she had nothing else to do, she said, and she would enjoy it.