Chapter VI: Part 6

“Would you people like to have some tea somewhere?” Carol asked as they neared the zoo again. “How about that Russian place over by Carnegie Hall?”

“Rumpelmayer’s is right here,” Richard said. “Do you like Rumpelmayer’s?”

Therese sighed. And Carol seemed to hesitate. But they went there. Therese had been here once with Angelo, she remembered. She did not care for the place. Its bright lights gave her a feeling of nakedness, and it was annoying not to know if one were looking at a real person or at a reflection in a mirror.

“No, none of that, thanks,” Carol said, shaking her head at the great tray of pastry the waitress was holding.

But Richard chose something, chose two pastries, though Therese had declined.

“What’s that for, in case I change my mind?” she asked him, and Richard winked at her. His nails were dirty again, she noticed.

Richard asked Carol what kind of car she had, and they began discussing the merits of various car makes. Therese saw Carol glance about at the tables in front of her. She doesn’t like it here either, Therese thought. Therese stared at a man in the mirror that was set obliquely behind Carol. His back was to Therese, and he leaned forward, talking animatedly to a woman, jerking his spread left hand for emphasis. She looked at the thin, middle-aged woman he spoke to, and back at him, wondering if the aura of familiarity about him were real or an illusion like the mirror, until a memory fragile as a bubble swam upward in her consciousness and burst at the surface. It was Harge.

Therese glanced at Carol, but if Carol had noticed him, she thought, Carol would not know that he was in the mirror behind her. A moment later, Therese looked over her shoulder, and saw Harge in profile, much like one of the images she carried in her memory from the house—the short high nose, the full lower face, the receding twist of blond hair above the usual hairline. Carol must have seen him, only three tables away to her left.

Carol looked from Richard to Therese. “Yes,” she said to her, smiling a little, and turned back to Richard and went on with her conversation. Her manner was just as before, Therese thought, not different at all. Therese looked at the woman with Harge. She was not young, not very attractive. She might have been one of his relatives.

Then Therese saw Carol mash out a long cigarette. Richard had stopped talking. They were ready to leave. Therese was looking at Harge the moment he saw Carol. After his first glimpse of her, his eyes drew almost shut as if he had to squint to believe her, and then he said something to the woman he was with and stood up and went to her.

“Carol,” Harge said.

“Hello, Harge.” She turned to Therese and Richard. “Would you excuse me a minute?”

Watching from the doorway where she stood with Richard, Therese tried to see it all, to see beyond the pride and aggressiveness in Hargie’s anxious, forward leaning figure that was not quite so tall as the crown of Carol’s hat, to see beyond Carol’s acquiescent nods as he spoke, to surmise not what they talked of now but what they had said to each other five years ago, three years ago, that day of the picture in the rowboat. Carol had loved him once, and that was hard to remember.

“Can we get free now, Terry?” Richard asked her.

Therese saw Carol nod good-by to the woman at Harge’s table, then turn away from Harge. Harge looked past Carol, to her and Richard, and without apparently recognizing her, he went back to his table.

“I’m sorry,” Carol said as she rejoined them.

On the sidewalk, Therese drew Richard aside and said, “I’ll say good night, Richard. Carol wants me to visit a friend of hers tonight with her.”

“Oh.” Richard frowned. “I had those concert tickets for tonight, you know.”

Therese remembered suddenly. “Alex’s. I forgot. I’m sorry.”

He said gloomily, “It’s not important.”

It wasn’t important. Richard’s friend Alex was accompanying somebody in a violin concert, and had given Richard the tickets, she remembered, weeks ago.

“You’d rather see her than me, wouldn’t you?” he said.

Therese saw that Carol was looking for a taxi. Carol would leave them both in a moment. “You might have mentioned the concert this morning, Richard, reminded me, at least.”

“Was that her husband?” Richard’s eyes narrowed under his frown. “What is this, Terry?”

“What’s what?” she said. “I don’t know her husband.”

Richard waited a moment, then the frown left his eyes. He smiled, as if he conceded he had been unreasonable. “Sorry. I just took it for granted I’d see you tonight.” He walked toward Carol. “Good night,” he said.

He looked as if he were leaving by himself, and Carol said, “Are you going downtown? Maybe I can drop you.”

“I’m walking, thanks.”

“I thought you two had a date,” Carol said to Therese.

Therese saw that Richard was lingering, and she walked toward Carol, out of his hearing. “Not an important one. I’d rather stay with you.”

A taxi had slid up beside Carol. Carol put her hand on the door handle. “Well, neither is our date so important, so why don’t you go on with Richard tonight?”

Therese glanced at Richard, and saw that he had heard her.

“Bye-bye, Therese,” Carol said.

“Good night,” Richard called.

“Good night,” Therese said, and watched Carol pull the taxi door shut after her.

“So,” Richard said.

Therese turned toward him. She wouldn’t go to the concert, and neither would she do anything violent, she knew, nothing more violent than walk quickly home and get to work on the set she wanted to finish by Tuesday for Harkevy. She could see the whole evening ahead, with a half-dismal, half-defiant fatality, in the second it took for Richard to walk to her. “I still don’t want to go to the concert,” she said.

To her surprise, Richard stepped back and said angrily, “All right, don’t!” and turned away.

He walked west on Fifty-ninth Street in his loose, lopsided gait that jutted his right shoulder ahead of the other, hands swinging unrhythmically at his sides, and she might have known from the walk alone that he was angry. And he was out of sight in no time. The rejection from Kettering last Monday flashed across her mind. She stared at the darkness where Richard had disappeared. She did not feel guilty about tonight. It was something else. She envied him. She envied him his faith there would always be a place, a home, a job, someone else for him. She envied him that attitude. She almost resented his having it.

chapter thirteen

Richard began it.

“Why do you like her so much?”

It was an evening on which she had broken a date with Richard on the slim chance Carol would come by. Carol hadn’t, and Richard had come by instead. Now at five past eleven in the huge pink-walled cafeteria on Lexington Avenue, she had been about to begin, but Richard was ahead of her.

“I like being with her, I like talking with her. I’m fond of anybody I can talk to.” The phrases of some letter she had written to Carol and never mailed drifted across her mind as if to answer Richard. _I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me._

“You’ve got a hell of a crush on her,” Richard announced, explanatorily and resentfully.

Therese took a deep breath. Should she be simple and say yes, or should she try to explain it? What could he ever understand of it, even if she explained it in a million words?

“Does she know it? Of course she knows it.” Richard frowned and drew on his cigarette. “Don’t you think it’s pretty silly? It’s like a crush that schoolgirls get.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. She felt so very sure of herself. _I will comb you like music caught in the heads of all the trees in the forest...._

“What’s there to understand? But she understands. She shouldn’t indulge you. She shouldn’t play with you like this. It’s not fair to you.”

“Not fair to me?”

“What’s she doing, amusing herself with you? And then one day she’ll get tired of you and kick you out.”

Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion? She was angry, but she did not want to argue. She said nothing.

“You’re in a daze!”

“I’m wide awake. I never felt more awake.” She picked up the table knife and rubbed her thumb back and forth on the ridge at the base of the blade. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

He frowned. “Leave you alone?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, about Europe, too?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Listen, Terry—” Richard wriggled in his chair and leaned forward, hesitated, then took another cigarette, lighting it distastefully, throwing the match on the floor. “You’re in some kind of trance! It’s worse—”

“Just because I don’t want to argue with you?”

“It’s worse than being lovesick, because it’s so completely unreasonable. Don’t you understand that?”

No, she didn’t understand a word.

“But you’re going to get over it in about a week. I hope. My God!” He squirmed again. “To say—to say for a minute you practically want to say good-by to me because of some silly crush!”

“I didn’t say that. You said it.” She looked back at him, at his rigid face that was beginning to redden in the center of the flat cheeks. “But why should I want to be with you if all you do is argue about this?”

He sat back. “Wednesday, next Saturday, you won’t feel like this at all. You haven’t known her three weeks yet.”

She looked over toward the steam tables, where people edged slowly along, choosing this and that, drifting toward the curve in the counter where they dispersed. “We may as well say good-by,” she said, “because neither of us will ever be any different from what we are this minute.”

“Therese, you’re like a person gone so crazy, you think you’re saner than ever!”

“Oh, let’s stop it!”

Richard’s hand with its row of knuckles embedded in the white, freckled flesh was clenched on the table motionless, like a picture of a hand that had hammered some ineffectual, inaudible point. “I’ll tell you one thing, I think your friend knows what she’s doing. I think she’s committing a crime against you. I’ve half a mind to report her to somebody, but the trouble is you’re not a child. You’re just acting like one.”

“Why do you make so much out of it?” she asked. “You’re practically in a frenzy.”

“You make enough out of it to want to say good-by to me! What do you know about her?”

“What do _you_ know about her?”

“Did she ever make any passes at you?”

“God!” Therese said. She felt like saying it a dozen times. It summed up everything, her imprisonment now, here, yet. “You don’t understand.” But he did, and that was why he was angry. But did he understand that she would have felt the same way if Carol had never touched her? Yes, and if Carol had never even spoken to her after that brief conversation about a doll’s valise in the store. If Carol, in fact, had never spoken to her at all, for it had all happened in that instant she had seen Carol standing in the middle of the floor, watching her. Then the realization that so much had happened after that meeting made her feel incredibly lucky suddenly. It was so easy for a man and woman to find each other, to find someone who would do, but for her to have found Carol—“I think I understand you better than you understand me. You don’t really want to see me again, either, because you said yourself I’m not the same person. If we keep on seeing each other, you’ll only get more and more—like this.”

“Terry, forget for a minute I ever said I wanted you to love me, or that I love you. It’s you as a person, I mean. I like you. I’d like—”

“I wonder sometimes why you think you like me, or did like me. Because you didn’t even know me.”

“You don’t know yourself.”

“But I do—and I know you. You’ll drop painting someday and me with it. Just as you’ve dropped everything else you ever started, as far as I can see. The dry-cleaning thing, or the used-car lot—”

“That’s not true,” Richard said sullenly.

“But why do you think you like me? Because I paint a little, too, and we can talk about that? I’m just as impractical as a girl friend for you as painting is as a business for you.” She hesitated a minute, then said the rest of it, “You know enough about art anyway to know you’ll never make a good painter. You’re like a little boy playing truant as long as you can, knowing all the time what you ought to be doing and what you’ll finally be doing, working for your father.”

Richard’s blue eyes had gone suddenly cold. The line of his mouth was straight and very short now, the thin upper lip faintly curling. “All that isn’t quite the point now, is it?”

“Well—yes. It’s part of your hanging on when you know it’s hopeless, and when you know you’ll finally let go.”

“I will not!”

“Richard, there’s no point—!”

“You’re going to change your mind, you know.”

She understood that. It was like a song he kept singing to her.

A week later, Richard stood in her room with the same expression of sullen anger on his face, talking in the same tone. He had called up at the unusual hour of three in the afternoon, and insisted on seeing her for a moment. She was packing a bag to take to Carol’s for the week end. If she hadn’t been packing for Carol’s house, Richard might have been in quite another mood, she thought, because she had seen him three times the past week, and he had never been pleasanter, never been more considerate of her.

“You can’t just give me marching orders out of your life,” he said, flinging his long arms out, but there was a lonesome tone in it, as if he had already started on that road away from her. “What really makes me sore is that you act like I’m not worth anything, that I’m completely ineffectual. It isn’t fair to me, Terry. I can’t compete!”

No, she thought, of course he couldn’t. “I don’t have any quarrel with you,” she said. “It’s you who choose to quarrel over Carol. She hasn’t taken anything away from you, because you didn’t have it in the first place. But if you can’t go on seeing me—” She stopped, knowing he could and probably would go on seeing her.

“What logic,” he said, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye.

Therese watched him, caught by the idea that had just come to her, that she knew suddenly was a fact. Why hadn’t it occurred to her the night of the theater, days ago? She might have known it from a hundred gestures, words, looks, this past week. But she remembered the night of the theater especially—he had surprised her with tickets to something she particularly wanted to see—the way he had held her hand that night, and from his voice on the telephone, not just telling her to meet him here or there, but asking her very sweetly if she could. She hadn’t liked it. It was not a manifestation of affection, but rather a means of ingratiating himself, of somehow paving the way for the sudden questions he had asked so casually that night, “What do you mean you’re fond of her? Do you want to go to bed with her?” Therese had replied, “Do you think I would tell you if I did?” while a quick succession of emotions—humiliation, resentment, loathing of him—had made her speechless, had made it almost impossible for her to keep walking beside him. And glancing at him, she had seen him looking at her with that soft, inane smile that in memory now looked cruel, and unhealthy. And its unhealthiness might have escaped her, she thought, if it weren’t that Richard was so frankly trying to convince her she was unhealthy.

Therese turned and tossed into the overnight bag her toothbrush and her hairbrush, then remembered she had a toothbrush at Carol’s.

“Just what do you want from her, Therese? Where’s it going to go from here?”

“Why are you so interested?”

He stared at her and for a moment beneath the anger she saw the fixed curiosity she had seen before, as if he were watching a spectacle through a keyhole. But she knew he was not so detached as that. On the contrary, she sensed that he was never so bound to her as now, never so determined not to give her up. It frightened her. She could imagine the determination transformed to hatred and to violence.

Richard sighed, and twisted the newspaper in his hands. “I’m interested in _you_. You can’t just say to me, ‘Find someone else.’ I’ve never treated you the way I treated the others, never thought of you that way.”

She didn’t answer.

“Damn!” Richard threw the newspaper at the bookshelf, and turned his back on her.

The newspaper flicked the Madonna, and it tipped back against the wall as if astonished, fell over, and rolled off the edge. Richard made a lunge for it and caught it in both hands. He looked at Therese and smiled involuntarily.

“Thanks.” Therese took it from him. She lifted it to set it back, then brought her hands down quickly and smashed the figure to the floor.

“Terry!”

The Madonna lay in three or four pieces.

“Never mind it,” she said. Her heart was beating as if she were angry, or fighting.

“But—”

“To hell with it!” she said, pushing the pieces aside with her shoe.

Richard left a moment later, slamming the door.

What was it, Therese wondered, the Andronich thing or Richard? Mr. Andronich’s secretary had called about an hour ago and told her that Mr. Andronich had decided to hire an assistant from Philadelphia instead of her. So that job would not be there to come back to, after the trip with Carol. Therese looked down at the broken Madonna. The wood was quite beautiful inside. It had cracked cleanly along the grain.

Carol asked her in detail that evening about her talk with Richard. It irked Therese that Carol was so concerned as to whether Richard were hurt or not.

“You’re not used to thinking of other people’s feelings,” Carol said bluntly to her.

They were in the kitchen fixing a late dinner, because Carol had given the maid the evening off.

“What real reason have you to think he’s not in love with you?” Carol asked.

“Maybe I just don’t understand how he works. But it doesn’t seem like love to me.”

Then in the middle of dinner, in the middle of a conversation about the trip, Carol remarked suddenly, “You shouldn’t have talked to Richard at all.”

It was the first time Therese had told Carol any of it, any of the first conversation in the cafeteria with Richard. “Why not? Should I have lied to him?”

Carol was not eating. Now she pushed back her chair and stood up. “You’re much too young to know your own mind. Or what you’re talking about. Yes, in that case, lie.”

Therese laid her fork down. She watched Carol get a cigarette and light it. “I had to say good-by to him and I did. I have. I won’t see him again.”

Carol opened a panel in the bottom of the bookcase and took out a bottle. She poured some into an empty glass and slammed the panel shut. “Why did you do it now? Why not two months ago or two months from now? And why did you mention me?”

“I know—I think it fascinates him.”

“It probably does.”

“But if I simply don’t see him again—” She couldn’t finish it, about his not being apt to follow her, spy on her. She didn’t want to say such things to Carol. And besides, there was the memory of Richard’s eyes. “I think he’ll give it up. He said he couldn’t compete.”

Carol struck her forehead with her hand. “Couldn’t compete,” she repeated. She came back to the table and poured some of the water from her glass into the whisky. “How true. Finish your dinner. I may be making too much of it, I don’t know.”

But Therese did not move. She had done the wrong thing. And at best, even doing the right thing, she could not make Carol happy as Carol made her happy, she thought as she had thought a hundred times before. Carol was happy only at moments here and there, moments that Therese caught and kept. One had been in the evening they put away the Christmas decorations, and Carol had refolded the string of angels and put them between the pages of a book. “I’m going to keep these,” she had said. “With twenty-two angels to defend me, I can’t lose.” Therese looked at Carol now, and though Carol was watching her, it was through that veil of preoccupation that Therese so often saw, that kept them a world apart.

“Lines,” Carol said. “I can’t compete. People talk of classics. These lines are classic. A hundred different people will say the same words. There are lines for the mother, lines for the daughter, for the husband and the lover. I’d rather see you dead at my feet. It’s the same play repeated with different casts. What do they say makes a play a classic, Therese?”

“A classic—” Her voice sounded tight and stifled. “A classic is something with a basic human situation.”

* * * * *

When Therese awakened, the sun was in her room. She lay for a moment, watching the watery looking sunspots rippling on the pale green ceiling, listening for any sound of activity in the house. She looked at her blouse, hanging over the edge of the bureau. Why was she so untidy in Carol’s house? Carol didn’t like it. The dog that lived somewhere beyond the garages was barking intermittently, halfheartedly. There had been one pleasant interval last evening, the telephone call from Rindy. Rindy back from a birthday party at nine thirty. Could she give a birthday party on her birthday in April. Carol said of course. Carol had been different after that. She had talked about Europe, and summers in Rapallo.

Therese got up and went to the window, raised it higher and leaned on the sill, tensing herself against the cold. There were no mornings anywhere like the mornings from this window. The round bed of grass beyond the driveway had darts of sunlight in it, like scattered gold needles. There were sparks of sun in the moist hedge leaves, and the sky was a fresh solid blue. She looked at the place in the driveway where Abby had been that morning, and at the bit of white fence beyond the hedges that marked the end of the lawn. The ground looked breathing and young, even though the winter had browned the grass. There had been trees and hedges around the school in Montclair, but the green had always ended in part of a red brick wall, or a gray stone building that was part of the school—an infirmary, a woodshed, a toolhouse—and the green each spring had seemed old already, used and handed down by one generation of children to the next, as much a part of school paraphernalia as textbooks and uniforms.

She dressed in the plaid slacks she had brought from home, and one of the shirts she had left from another time, that had been laundered. It was twenty past eight. Carol liked to get up about eight thirty, liked to be awakened by someone with a cup of coffee, though Therese had noticed she never had Florence do it.

Florence was in the kitchen when she went down, but she had only just started the coffee.

“Good morning,” Therese said. “Do you mind if I fix the breakfast?” Florence hadn’t minded the two other times she had come in and found Therese fixing them.

“Go ahead, miss,” Florence said. “I’ll just make my own fried eggs. You like doing things for Mrs. Aird yourself, don’t you?” she said like a statement.

Therese was getting two eggs out of the refrigerator. “Yes,” she said, smiling. She dropped one of the eggs into the water that was just beginning to heat. Her answer sounded rather flat, but what other answer was there? When she turned around after setting the breakfast tray, she saw Florence had put the second egg in the water. Therese took it out with her fingers. “She wants only one egg,” Therese said. “That’s for my omelette.”

“Does she? She always used to eat two.”

“Well—she doesn’t now,” Therese said.

“Shouldn’t you measure that egg anyway, miss?” Florence gave her the pleasant professional smile. “Here’s the egg timer, top of the stove.”

Therese shook her head. “It comes out better when I guess.” She had never gone wrong yet on Carol’s egg. Carol liked it a little better done than the egg timer made it. Therese looked at Florence, who was concentrating now on the two eggs she was frying in the skillet. The coffee was almost all filtered. In silence, Therese prepared the cup to take up to Carol.

Later in the morning, Therese helped Carol take in the white iron chairs and the glider from the lawn in back of the house. It would be simpler with Florence there, Carol said, but Carol had sent her away marketing, then had a sudden whim to get the furniture in. It was Harge’s idea to leave them out all winter, she said, but she thought they looked bleak. Finally only one chair remained by the round fountain, a prim little chair of white metal with a bulging bottom and four lacy feet. Therese looked at it and wondered who had sat there.

“I wish there were more plays that happened out of doors,” Therese said.

“What do you think of first when you start to make a set?” Carol asked. “What do you start from?”

“The mood of the play, I suppose. What do you mean?”

“Do you think of the kind of play it is, or of something you want to see?”

One of Mr. Donohue’s remarks brushed Therese’s mind with a vague unpleasantness. Carol was in an argumentative mood this morning. “I think you’re determined to consider me an amateur,” Therese said.

“I think you’re rather subjective. That’s amateurish, isn’t it?”

“Not always.” But she knew what Carol meant.

“You have to know a lot to be absolutely subjective, don’t you? In those things you showed me, I think you’re too subjective—without knowing enough.”

Therese made fists of her hands in her pockets. She had so hoped Carol would like her work, unqualifiedly. It had hurt her terribly that Carol hadn’t liked in the least a certain few sets she had shown her. Carol knew nothing about it, technically, yet she could demolish a set with a phrase.

“I think a look at the West would do you good. When did you say you had to be back? The middle of February?”

“Well, now I don’t—I just heard yesterday.”

“What do you mean? It fell through? The Philadelphia job?”

“They called me up. They want somebody from Philadelphia.”

“Oh, baby. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, it’s just this business,” Therese said. Carol’s hand was on the back of her neck, Carol’s thumb rubbing behind her ear as Carol might have fondled a dog.

“You weren’t going to tell me.”

“Yes, I was.”

“When?”

“Sometime on the trip.”

“Are you very disappointed?”

“No,” Therese said positively.

They heated the last cup of coffee and took it out to the white chair on the lawn and shared it.

“Shall we have lunch out somewhere?” Carol asked her. “Let’s go to the club. Then I ought to do some shopping in Newark. How about a jacket? Would you like a tweed jacket?”

Therese was sitting on the edge of the fountain, one hand pressed against her ear because it was aching from the cold. “I don’t particularly need one,” she said.

“But I’d particularly like to see you in one.”

Therese was upstairs, changing her clothes, when she heard the telephone ring. She heard Florence say, “Oh, good morning, Mr. Aird. Yes, I’ll call her right now,” and Therese crossed the room and closed the door. Restlessly, she began to put the room in order, hung her clothes in the closet, and smoothed the bed she had already made. Then Carol knocked on the door and put her head in. “Harge is coming by in a few minutes. I don’t think he’ll be long.”

Therese did not want to see him. “Would you like for me to take a walk?”

Carol smiled. “No. Stay up here and read a book, if you want to.”

Therese got the book she had bought yesterday, the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, and tried to read it, but the words stayed separate and meaningless. She had a disquieting sense of hiding, so she went to the door and opened it.

Carol was just coming from her room, and for an instant, Therese saw the same look of indecision cross her face that Therese remembered from the first moment she had entered the house. Then she said, “Come down.”

Harge’s car drove up as they walked into the living room. Carol went to the door, and Therese heard their greeting, Carol’s only cordial, but Harge’s very cheerful, and Carol came in with a long flower box in her arms.

“Harge, this is Miss Belivet. I think you met her once,” Carol said.

Harge’s eyes narrowed a little, then opened. “Oh, yes. How do you do?”

“How do you do?”

Florence came in, and Carol handed the flower box to her.

“Would you put these in something?” Carol said.

“Ah, here’s that pipe. I thought so.” Harge reached behind the ivy on the mantel, and brought forth a pipe.

“Everything is fine at home?” Carol asked as she sat down at the end of the sofa.

“Yes. Very.” Harge’s tense smile did not show his teeth, but his face and the quick turns of his head radiated geniality and self-satisfaction. He watched with proprietary pleasure as Florence brought in the flowers, red roses, in a vase, and set them on the coffee table in front of the sofa.

Therese wished suddenly that she had brought Carol flowers, brought them on any of a half a dozen occasions past, and she remembered the flowers Dannie had brought to her one day when he simply dropped in at the theater. She looked at Harge, and his eyes glanced away from her, the peaked brow lifting still higher, the eyes darting everywhere, as if he looked for little changes in the room. But it might all be pretense, Therese thought, his air of good cheer. And if he cared enough to pretend, he must also care in some way for Carol.

“May I take one for Rindy?” Harge asked.

“Of course.” Carol got up, and she would have broken a flower, but Harge stepped forward and put a little knife blade against the stem and the flower came off. “They’re very beautiful. Thank you, Harge.”

Harge lifted the flower to his nose. Half to Carol, half to Therese, he said, “It’s a beautiful day. Are you going to take a drive?”

“Yes, we were,” Carol said. “By the way, I’d like to drive over one afternoon next week. Perhaps Tuesday.”

Harge thought a moment. “All right. I’ll tell her.”

“I’ll speak to her on the phone. I meant tell your family.”

Harge nodded once, in acquiescence, then looked at Therese. “Yes, I remember you. Of course. You were here about three weeks ago. Before Christmas.”

“Yes. One Sunday.” Therese stood up. She wanted to leave them alone. “I’ll go upstairs,” she said to Carol. “Good-by, Mr. Aird.”

Harge made her a little bow. “Good-by.”

As she went up the stairs, she heard Harge say, “Well, many happy returns, Carol. I’d like to say it. Do you mind?”

Carol’s birthday, Therese thought. Of course, Carol wouldn’t have told her.

She closed the door and looked around the room, realized she was looking for any sign that she had spent the night. There was none. She stopped at the mirror and looked at herself for a moment, frowningly. She was not so pale as she had been three weeks ago when Harge saw her, she did not feel like the drooping, frightened thing Harge had met then. From the top drawer, she got her handbag and took her lipstick out of it. Then she heard Harge knock on the door, and she closed the drawer.

“Come in.”

“Excuse me. I must get something.” He crossed the room quickly, went into the bathroom, and he was smiling as he came back with the razor in his hand. “You were in the restaurant with Carol last Sunday, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Therese said.

“Carol said you do stage designing.”

“Yes.”

He glanced from her face to her hands, to the floor, and up again. “I hope you see that Carol gets out enough,” he said. “You look young and spry. Make her take some walks.”

Then he went briskly out the door, leaving behind him a faint shaving-soap scent. Therese tossed her lipstick onto the bed, and wiped her palms down the side of her skirt. She wondered why Harge troubled to let her know he took it for granted she spent a great deal of time with Carol.

“Therese!” Carol called suddenly. “Come down!”

Carol was sitting on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. Harge had gone. She looked at Therese with a little smile. Then Florence came in and Carol said, “Florence, you can take these somewhere else. Put them in the dining room.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Carol winked at Therese.

Nobody used the dining room, Therese knew. Carol preferred to eat anywhere else. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your birthday?” Therese asked her.

“Oh!” Carol laughed. “It’s not. It’s my wedding anniversary. Get your coat and let’s go.”

As they backed out of the driveway, Carol said, “If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a hypocrite.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing of any importance.” Carol was still smiling.

“But you said he was a hypocrite.”

“Par excellence.”

“Pretending all this good humor?”

“Oh—just partially that.”

“Did he say anything about me?”

“He said you looked like a nice girl. Is that news?” Carol shot the car down the narrow road to the village. “He said the divorce will take about six weeks longer than we’d thought, due to some more red tape. That’s news. He has an idea I still might change my mind in the meantime. That’s hypocrisy. I think he likes to fool himself.”

Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder’s foot.

“Carol, I never took that check, you know,” Therese remarked suddenly. “I stuck it under the cloth on the table by the bed.”

“What made you think of that?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to tear it up? I started to that night.”

“If you insist,” Carol said.

chapter fourteen

Therese looked down at the big cardboard box. “I don’t want to take it.” Her hands were full. “I can let Mrs. Osborne take the food out and the rest can stay here.”

“Bring it,” Carol said, going out the door. She carried down the last dribble of things, the books and the jackets Therese had decided at the last minute that she wanted.

Therese came back upstairs for the box. It had come an hour ago by messenger—a lot of sandwiches in wax paper, a bottle of blackberry wine, a cake, and a box containing the white dress Mrs. Semco had promised her. Richard had had nothing to do with the box, she knew, or there would have been a book or an extra note in it.

An unwanted dress still lay on the couch, a corner of the rug was turned back, but Therese was impatient to be off. She pulled the door shut, and hurried down the steps with the box, past the Kellys’ who were both away at work, past Mrs. Osborne’s door. She had said good-by to Mrs. Osborne an hour ago when she had paid the next month’s rent.

Therese was just closing the car door, when Mrs. Osborne called her from the front steps.

“Telephone call!” Mrs. Osborne shouted, and reluctantly Therese got out, thinking it was Richard.

It was Phil McElroy, calling her to ask about the interview with Harkevy yesterday. She had told Dannie about it last night when they had had dinner together. Harkevy hadn’t promised her a job, but he had said to keep in touch, and Therese felt he meant it. He had let her come to see him backstage in the theater where he was supervising the set for _Winter Town_. He had chosen three of her cardboard models and looked very carefully at them, dismissed one as a little dull, pointed out some impracticality in the second, and liked best the hall-like set Therese had started the evening she had come back from the first visit to Carol’s house. He was the first person who had ever given her less conventional sets a serious consideration. She had called Carol up immediately and told her about the meeting. She told Phil about the Harkevy interview, but she didn’t mention that the Andronich job had fallen through. She knew it was because she didn’t want Richard to hear about it. Therese asked Phil to let her know what play Harkevy was doing sets for next, because he said he hadn’t decided himself between two plays. There was more of a chance he would take her on as apprentice, if he chose the English play he had talked about yesterday.

“I don’t know any address to give you yet,” Therese said. “I know we’ll get to Chicago.”

Phil said he might drop her a letter general delivery there.

“Was that Richard?” Carol asked when she came back.

“No. Phil McElroy.”

“So you haven’t heard from Richard?”

“I haven’t for the last few days. He sent me a telegram this morning.” Therese hesitated, then took it from her pocket and read it. “I HAVE NOT CHANGED. NEITHER HAVE YOU. WRITE TO ME. I LOVE YOU. RICHARD.”

“I think you should call him,” Carol said. “Call him from my house.”

They were going to spend the night at Carol’s house and leave early in the morning.

“Will you put on that dress tonight?” Carol asked.

“I’ll try it on. It looks like a wedding dress.”

Therese put on the dress just before dinner. It hung below her calf, and the waist tied in back with long white bands that in front were stitched down and embroidered. She went down to show it to Carol. Carol was in the living room writing a letter.

“Look,” Therese said, smiling.

Carol looked at her for a long moment, then came over and examined the embroidery at the waist. “That’s a museum piece. You look adorable. Wear it this evening, will you?”

“It’s so elaborate.” She didn’t want to wear it, because it made her think of Richard.

“What the hell kind of style is it, Russian?”

Therese gave a laugh. She liked the way Carol cursed, always casually, and when no one else could hear her.

“Is it?” Carol repeated.

Therese was going upstairs. “Is it what?”

“Where did you get this habit of not answering people?” Carol demanded, her voice suddenly harsh with anger.

Carol’s eyes had the angry white light she had seen in them the time she refused to play the piano. And what angered her now was just as trifling. “I’m sorry, Carol. I guess I didn’t hear you.”

“Go ahead,” Carol said, turning away. “Go on up and take it off.”

It was Harge still, Therese thought. Therese hesitated a minute, then went upstairs. She untied the waist and the sleeves, glanced at herself in the mirror, then tied them all back again. If Carol wanted her to keep it on, she would.

They fixed dinner themselves, because Florence had already started her three weeks’ leave. They opened some special jars of things that Carol said she had been saving, and they made stingers in the cocktail shaker just before dinner. Therese thought Carol’s mood had passed, but when she started to pour a second stinger for herself, Carol said shortly, “I don’t think you should have any more of that.”

And Therese deferred, with a smile. And the mood went on. Nothing Therese said or did could change it, and Therese blamed the inhibiting dress for not being able to think of the right things to say. They took brandied chestnuts and coffee up to the porch after dinner, but they said even less to each other in the semidarkness, and Therese only felt sleepy and rather depressed.

The next morning, Therese found a paper bag on the back doorstep. Inside it was a toy monkey with gray and white fur. Therese showed it to Carol.

“My God,” Carol said softly, and smiled. “Jacopo.” She took the monkey and rubbed her forefinger against its slightly dirty white cheek. “Abby and I used to have him hanging in the back of the car,” Carol said.

“Abby brought it? Last night?”

“I suppose.” Carol went on to the car with the monkey and a suitcase.

Therese remembered wakening from a doze on the glider last night, awakening to an absolute silence, and Carol sitting there in the dark, looking straight before her. Carol must have heard Abby’s car last night. Therese helped Carol arrange the suitcases and the lap rug in the back of the car.

“Why didn’t she come in?” Therese asked.

“Oh, that’s Abby,” Carol said with a smile, with the fleeting shyness that always surprised Therese. “Why don’t you go call Richard?”

Therese sighed. “I can’t now, anyway. He’s left the house by this time.” It was eight forty, and his school began at nine.

“Call his family then. Aren’t you going to thank them for the box they sent you?”

“I was going to write them a letter.”

“Call them now, and you won’t have to write them a letter. It’s much nicer to call anyway.”

Mrs. Semco answered the telephone. Therese praised the dress and Mrs. Semco’s needlework, and thanked her for all the food and the wine.

“Richard just left the house,” Mrs. Semco said. “He’s going to be awfully lonely. He mopes around already.” But she laughed, her vigorous, high-pitched laugh that filled the kitchen where Therese knew she stood, a laugh that would ring through the house, even to Richard’s empty room upstairs. “Is everything all right with you and Richard?” Mrs. Semco asked with the faintest suspicion, though Therese could tell she still smiled.

Therese said yes. And she promised she would write. Afterward, she felt better because she had called.

Carol asked her if she had closed her window upstairs, and Therese went up again, because she couldn’t remember. She hadn’t closed the window, and she hadn’t made her bed either, but there wasn’t time now. Florence could take care of the bed when she came in on Monday to lock the house up.

Carol was on the telephone when Therese came downstairs. She looked up at Therese with a smile and held the telephone toward her. Therese knew from the first tone that it was Rindy.

“... at—uh—Mr. Byron’s. It’s a farm. Have you ever been there, Mother?”

“Where is it, sweetheart?” Carol said.

“At Mr. Byron’s. He has horses. But not the kind you would like.”

“Oh. Why not?”

“Well, these are heavy.”

Therese tried to hear anything in the shrill, rather matter-of-fact voice that resembled Carol’s voice, but she couldn’t.

“Hello,” Rindy said. “Mother?”

“I’m still here.”

“I’ve got to say good-by now. Daddy’s ready to leave.” And she coughed.

“Have you got a cough?” Carol asked.

“No.”

“Then don’t cough into the phone.”

“I wish you would take me on the trip.”

“Well, I can’t because you’re in school. But we’ll have trips this summer.”

“Can you still call me?”

“On the trip? Of course I will. Every day.” Carol took the telephone and sat back with it, but she still watched Therese the minute or so more that she talked.

“She sounds so serious,” Therese said.

“She was telling me all about the big day yesterday. Harge let her play hooky.”

Carol had seen Rindy day before yesterday, Therese remembered. It had evidently been a pleasant visit, from what Carol had told Therese over the telephone, but she hadn’t mentioned any details about it, and Therese had not asked her anything.

Just as they were about to leave, Carol decided to make a last call to Abby. Therese wandered back into the kitchen, because the car was too cold to sit in.

“I don’t know any small towns in Illinois,” Carol was saying. “Why Illinois?... All right, Rockford.... I’ll remember, I’ll think of roquefort.... Of course I’ll take good care of him. I wish you’d come in, nitwit.... Well, you’re mistaken, very mistaken.”

Therese took a sip from Carol’s half-finished coffee on the kitchen table, drank from the place where the lipstick was.

“Not a word,” Carol said, drawling the phrase. “No one, so far as I know, not even Florence.... Well, you do that, darling. Cheerio now.”

Five minutes later, they were leaving Carol’s town on the highway marked on the strip map in red, the highway they would use until Chicago. The sky was overcast. Therese looked around her at the country that had grown familiar now, the clump of woods off to the left that the road to New York passed, the tall flagstaff in the distance that marked the club Carol belonged to.

Therese let a crack of air in at her window. It was quite cold, and the heater felt good on her ankles. The clock on the dashboard said quarter to ten, and she thought suddenly of the people working in Frankenberg’s, penned in there at a quarter of ten in the morning, this morning and tomorrow morning and the next, the hands of clocks controlling every move they made. But the hands of the clock on the dashboard meant nothing now to her and Carol. They would sleep or not sleep, drive or not drive, whenever it pleased them. She thought of Mrs. Robichek, selling sweaters this minute on the third floor, commencing another year there, her fifth year.

“Why so silent?” Carol asked. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” She did not want to talk. Yet she felt there were thousands of words choking her throat, and perhaps only distance, thousands of miles, could straighten them out. Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania they went through a section of pale sunshine, like a leak in the sky, but around noon, it began to rain. Carol cursed, but the sound of the rain was pleasant, drumming irregularly on the windshield and the roof.

“You know what I forgot?” Carol said. “A raincoat. I’ll have to pick one up somewhere.”

And suddenly, Therese remembered she had forgotten the book she was reading. And there was a letter to Carol in it, one sheet that stuck out both ends of the book. Damn. It had been separate from her other books, and that was why she had left it behind, on the table by the bed. She hoped Florence wouldn’t decide to look at it. She tried to remember if she had written Carol’s name in the letter, and she couldn’t. And the check. She had forgotten to tear that up, too.

“Carol, did you get that check?”

“That check I gave you?—You said you were going to tear it up.”

“I didn’t. It’s still under the cloth.”

“Well, it’s not important,” Carol said.

When they stopped for gas, Therese tried to buy some stout, which Carol liked sometimes, at a grocery store next to the gas station, but they had only beer. She bought one can, because Carol didn’t care for beer. Then they drove into a little road off the highway and stopped, and opened the box of sandwiches Richard’s mother had put up. There was also a dill pickle, a mozzarella cheese, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs. Therese had forgotten to ask for an opener, so she couldn’t open the beer, but there was coffee in the thermos. She put the beer can on the floor in the back of the car.

“Caviar. How very, very nice of them,” Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. “Do you like caviar?”

“No. I wish I did.”

“Why?”

Therese watched Carol take a small bite of the sandwich from which she had removed the top slice of bread, a bite where the most caviar was. “Because people always like caviar so much when they do like it,” Therese said.

Carol smiled, and went on nibbling, slowly. “It’s an acquired taste. Acquired tastes are always more pleasant—and hard to get rid of.”

Therese poured more coffee into the cup they were sharing. She was acquiring a taste for black coffee. “How nervous I was the first time I held this cup. You brought me coffee that day. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“How’d you happen to put cream in it that day?”

“I thought you’d like it. Why were you so nervous?”

Therese glanced at her. “I was so excited about you,” she said, lifting the cup. Then she looked at Carol again and saw a sudden stillness, like a shock, in Carol’s face. Therese had seen it two or three times before when she had said something like that to Carol about the way she felt, or paid Carol an extravagant compliment. Therese could not tell if she were pleased or displeased. She watched Carol fold the wax paper around the other half of her sandwich.

There was cake, but Carol didn’t want any. It was the brown-colored spicecake that Therese had often had at Richard’s house. They put everything back, into the valise that held the cartons of cigarettes and the bottle of whisky, with a painstaking neatness that would have annoyed Therese in anyone but Carol.

“Did you say Washington was your home state?” Therese asked her.

“I was born there, and my father’s there now. I wrote him I might visit him, if we get out that far.”

“Does he look like you?”

“Do I look like him, yes—more than like my mother.”

“It’s strange to think of you with a family,” Therese said.

“Why?”

“Because I just think of you as you. _Sui generis._”

Carol smiled, her head lifted as she drove. “All right, go ahead.”

“Brothers and sisters?” Therese asked.

“One sister. I suppose you want to know all about her, too? Her name is Elaine, she has three children and she lives in Virginia. She’s older than I am, and I don’t know if you’d like her. You’d think she was dull.”

Yes. Therese could imagine her, like a shadow of Carol, with all Carol’s features weakened and diluted.

Late in the afternoon, they stopped at a roadside restaurant that had a miniature Dutch village in the front window. Therese leaned on the rail beside it and looked at it. There was a little river that came out of a faucet at one end, that flowed in an oval stream and turned a windmill. Little figures in Dutch costume stood about the village, stood on patches of live grass. She thought of the electric train in Frankenberg’s toy department, and the fury that drove it on the oval course that was about the same size as the stream.

“I never told you about the train in Frankenberg’s,” Therese remarked to Carol. “Did you notice it when you—”

“An electric train?” Carol interrupted her.

Therese had been smiling, but something constricted her heart suddenly. It was too complicated to go into, and the conversation stopped there.

Carol ordered some soup for both of them. They were stiff and cold from the car.

“I wonder if you’ll really enjoy this trip,” Carol said. “You so prefer things reflected in a glass, don’t you? You have your private conception of everything. Like that windmill. It’s practically as good as being in Holland to you. I wonder if you’ll even like seeing real mountains and real people.”

Therese felt as crushed as if Carol had accused her of lying. She felt Carol meant, too, that she had a private conception of her, and that Carol resented it. Real people? She thought suddenly of Mrs. Robichek. And she had fled her because she was hideous.