Chapter IX: Part 9

“Do you?” Therese asked, and she realized suddenly it was a question as big as the one Carol had asked her without words in the room in Waterloo. In fact, the same question.

“No. I think you’re right,” Carol said. “You make me realize it.”

Carol went to telephone. It was three o’clock. Therese got the check, then sat there waiting, wondering when it was going to be over, whether the reassuring word would come from Carol’s lawyer or from Abby, or whether it was going to get worse before it got better. Carol was gone about half an hour.

“My lawyer hasn’t heard anything,” she said. “And I didn’t tell him anything. I can’t. I’ll have to write it.”

“I thought you would.”

“Oh, you did,” Carol said with her first smile that day. “What do you say we get a room here? I don’t feel like traveling any more.”

Carol had her lunch sent up to their room. They both lay down to take a nap, but when Therese awakened at a quarter to five, Carol was gone. Therese glanced around the room, noticing Carol’s black gloves on the dressing table, and her moccasins side by side near the armchair. Therese sighed, tremulously, unrefreshed by her sleep. She opened the window and looked down. It was the seventh or eighth floor, she couldn’t remember which. A streetcar crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it crossed her mind to jump. She looked off at the drab little skyline of gray buildings and closed her eyes on it. Then she turned around and Carol was in the room, standing by the door, watching her.

“Where have you been?” Therese asked.

“Writing that damned letter.”

Carol crossed the room and caught Therese in her arms. Therese felt Carol’s nails through the back of her jacket.

When Carol went to the telephone, Therese left the room and wandered down the hall toward the elevators. She went down to the lobby and sat there reading an article on weevils in the _Corngrower’s Gazette_, and wondered if Abby knew all that about corn weevils. She watched the clock, and after twenty-five minutes went upstairs again.

Carol was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette. Therese waited for her to speak.

“Darling, I’ve got to go to New York,” Carol said.

Therese had been sure of that. She came to the foot of the bed. “What else did Abby say?”

“She saw the fellow named Bob Haversham again.” Carol raised herself on her elbow. “But he certainly doesn’t know as much as I do at this point. Nobody seems to know anything, except that trouble’s brewing. Nothing much can happen until I get there. But I’ve got to be there.”

“Of course.” Bob Haversham was the friend of Abby’s who worked in Harge’s firm in Newark, not a close friend either of Abby’s or Harge’s, just a link, a slim link between the two of them, the one person who might know something of what Harge was doing, if he could recognize a detective, or overhear part of a telephone call, in Harge’s office. It was worth almost nothing, Therese felt.

“Abby’s going to get the check,” Carol said, sitting up on the bed, reaching for her moccasins.

“Has she got a key?”

“I wish she had. She’s got to get it from Florence. But that’ll be all right. I told her to tell Florence I wanted a couple of things sent to me.”

“Can you tell her to get a letter, too? I left a letter to you in a book in my room. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t know you were going to have Abby go there.”

Carol gave her a frowning glance. “Anything else?”

“No. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

Carol sighed, and stood up. “Oh, let’s not worry any more. I doubt if they’ll bother about the house, but I’ll tell Abby about the letter anyway. Where is it?”

“In the _Oxford Book of English Verse_. I think I left it on top of the bureau.” She watched Carol glance around the room, looking anywhere but at her.

“I don’t want to stay here tonight after all,” Carol said.

Half an hour later, they were in the car going eastward. Carol wanted to reach Des Moines that night. After a silence of more than an hour, Carol suddenly stopped the car at the edge of the road, bent her head, and said, “Damn!”

She could see the darkish sinks under Carol’s eyes in the glare of passing cars. Carol hadn’t slept at all last night. “Let’s go back to that last town,” Therese said. “It’s still about seventy-five miles to Des Moines.”

“Do you want to go to Arizona?” Carol asked her, as if all they had to do was turn around.

“Oh, Carol—why talk about it?” A feeling of despair came over her suddenly. Her hands were shaking as she lighted a cigarette. She gave the cigarette to Carol, and lighted one for herself.

“Because I want to talk about it. Can you take another three weeks off?”

“Of course.” Of course, of course. What else mattered except being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow? There was the Harkevy show in March, Harkevy might recommend her for a job somewhere else, but the jobs were uncertain and Carol was not.

“I shouldn’t have to stay in New York more than a week at most, because the divorce is all set, Fred, my lawyer, said so today. So why don’t we have a few more weeks in Arizona? Or New Mexico? I don’t want to hang around New York the rest of the winter.” Carol drove slowly. Her eyes were different now. They had come alive, like her voice.

“Of course I’d like to. Anywhere.”

“All right. Come on. Let’s get to Des Moines. How about you driving a while?”

They changed places. It was a little before midnight when they got to Des Moines and found a hotel room.

“Why should you go back to New York at all?” Carol asked her. “You could keep the car and wait for me somewhere like Tucson or Santa Fe, and I could fly back.”

“And leave you?” Therese turned from the mirror where she was brushing her hair.

Carol smiled. “What do you mean, leave me?”

It had taken Therese by surprise, and now she saw an expression on Carol’s face, even though Carol looked at her intently, that made her feel shut off, as if Carol had thrust her away in a back corner of her mind to make room for something more important. “Just leave you now, I meant,” Therese said, turning back to the mirror. “No, it might be a good idea. It’s quicker for you.”

“I thought you might prefer staying somewhere in the West. Unless you want to do something in New York those few days,” Carol’s voice was casual.

“I don’t.” She dreaded the cold days in Manhattan, when Carol would be too busy to see her. And she thought of the detective. If Carol flew, she wouldn’t be haunted by his trailing her. She tried to imagine it already, Carol arriving in the East alone, to face something she didn’t yet know, something impossible to prepare for. She imagined herself in Santa Fe, waiting for a telephone call, waiting for a letter from Carol. But to be two thousand miles away from Carol, she could not imagine that so easily. “Only a week, Carol?” she asked, drawing the comb along her part again, flicking the long, fine hair to one side. She had gained weight, but her face was thinner, she noticed suddenly, and it pleased her. She looked older.

In the mirror, she saw Carol come up behind her, and there was no answer but the pleasure of Carol’s arms sliding around her, that made it impossible to think, and Therese twisted away more suddenly than she meant to, and stood by the corner of the dressing table looking at Carol, bewildered for a moment by the elusiveness of what they talked about, time and space, and the four feet that separated them now and the two thousand miles. She gave her hair another stroke. “Only about a week?”

“That’s what I said,” Carol replied with a smile in her eyes, but Therese heard the same hardness in it as in her own question, as if they exchanged challenges. “If you mind keeping the car, I can have it driven East.”

“I don’t mind keeping it.”

“And don’t worry about the detective. I’ll wire Harge that I’m on my way.”

“I won’t worry about that.” How could Carol be so cold about it, Therese wondered, thinking of everything else but their leaving each other? She put the hairbrush down on the dressing table.

“Therese, do you think I’m going to enjoy it?”

And Therese thought of the detectives, the divorce, the hostility, all Carol had to face. Carol touched her cheek, pressed both palms hard against her cheeks so her mouth opened like a fish’s, and Therese had to smile. Therese stood by the dressing table and watched her, watching every move of her hands, of her feet as she peeled off her stockings and stepped into her moccasins again. There were no words, she thought, after this point. What else did they need to explain, or ask, or promise in words? They did not even need to see each other’s eyes. Therese watched her pick up the telephone, and then she lay face down on the bed, while Carol made her plane reservation for tomorrow, one ticket, one way, tomorrow at eleven A.M.

“Where do you think you’ll go?” Carol asked her.

“I don’t know. I might go back to Sioux Falls.”

“South Dakota?” Carol smiled at her. “You wouldn’t prefer Santa Fe? It’s warmer.”

“I’ll wait and see it with you.”

“Not Colorado Springs?”

“No!” Therese laughed, and got up. She took her toothbrush into the bathroom. “I might even take a job somewhere for a week.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Any kind. Just to keep me from thinking of you, you know.”

“I want you to think of me. Not a job in a department store.”

“No.” Therese stood by the bathroom door, watching Carol take off her slip and put her robe on.

“You’re not worrying about money again, are you?”

Therese slid her hands into her robe pockets and crossed her feet. “If I’m broke, I don’t care. I’ll start worrying when it’s used up.”

“I’m going to give you a couple of hundred tomorrow for the car.” Carol pulled Therese’s nose as she passed by. “And you’re not to use that car to pick up any strangers.” Carol went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Therese came in after her. “I thought I was using this john.”

“I’m using it, but I’ll let you come in.”

“Oh, thanks.” Therese took off her robe as Carol did.

“Well?” Carol said.

“Well?” Therese stepped under the shower.

“Of all the nerve.” Carol got under it, too, and twisted Therese’s arm behind her, but Therese only giggled.

Therese wanted to embrace her, kiss her, but her free arm reached out convulsively and dragged Carol’s head against her, under the stream of water, and there was the horrible sound of a foot slipping.

“Stop it, we’ll fall!” Carol shouted. “For Christ’s sake, can’t two people take a shower in peace?”

chapter twenty

In Sioux Falls, Therese stopped the car in front of the hotel they had stayed in before, the Warrior Hotel. It was nine thirty in the evening. Carol had got home about an hour ago, Therese thought. She was to call Carol at midnight.

She took a room, had her bags carried up, then went out for a walk through the main street. There was a movie house, and it occurred to her she had never seen a movie with Carol. She went in. But she was in no mood to follow the picture, even though there was a woman in it whose voice was a little like Carol’s, not at all like the flat nasal voices she heard all around her. She thought of Carol, over a thousand miles away now, thought of sleeping alone tonight, and she got up and wandered out on the street again. There was the drugstore where Carol had bought cleansing tissues and toothpaste one morning. And the corner where Carol had looked up and read the street names—Fifth and Nebraska streets. She bought a pack of cigarettes at the same drugstore, walked back to the hotel and sat in the lobby, smoking, savoring the first cigarette since she had left Carol, savoring the forgotten state of being alone. It was only a physical state. She really did not feel at all alone. She read some newspapers for a while, then took the letters from Dannie and Phil, that had come in the last days at Colorado Springs, out of her handbag and glanced over them.

I saw Richard two nights ago in the Palermo all by himself
[Phil’s letter said]. I asked about you and he said he wasn’t
writing to you. I gather there has been a small rupture, but I
didn’t press for information. He was in no mood for talking. And
we are not too chummy lately, as you know.... Have been talking
you up to an angel named Francis Puckett who will put up fifty
thousand if a certain play from France comes over in April. Shall
keep you posted, as there is not even a producer yet.... Dannie
sends his love, I am sure. He is leaving soon for somewhere
probably, he has that look, and I’ll have to scout for new winter
quarters or find a roommate.... Did you get the clippings I sent
you on _Small Rain_?

Best, Phil

Dannie’s short letter was:

Dear Therese,

There is a possibility I may go out to the Coast at the end of
the month to take a job in California. I must decide between this
(a lab job) and an offer in a commercial chemical place in
Maryland. But if I could see you in Colorado or anywhere else for
a while, I would leave a little early. Shall probably take the
California job, as I think it has better prospects. So would you
let me know where you’ll be? It doesn’t matter. There are a lot
of ways of getting to California. If your friend wouldn’t mind,
it would be nice to spend a few days with you somewhere. I’ll be
in New York until the 28 of February anyway.

Love,
Dannie

She had not yet answered him. She would send him an address tomorrow, as soon as she found a room somewhere in the town. But as to the next destination, she would have to talk to Carol about that. And when would Carol be able to say? She wondered what Carol might already have found tonight in New Jersey, and Therese’s courage sank dismally. She reached for a newspaper and looked at the date. February fifteenth. Twenty-nine days since she had left New York with Carol. Could it be so few days?

Upstairs in her room, she put the call through to Carol, and bathed and got into pajamas. Then the telephone rang.

“Hel-_lo_,” Carol said, as if she had been waiting a long while. “What’s the name of that hotel?”

“The Warrior. But I’m not going to stay here.”

“You didn’t pick up any strangers on the road, did you?”

Therese laughed. Carol’s slow voice went through her as if she touched her. “What’s the news?” Therese asked.

“Tonight? Nothing. The house is freezing and Florence can’t get here till day after tomorrow. Abby’s here. Do you want to say hello to her?”

“Not right there with you.”

“No-o. Upstairs in the green room with the door shut.”

“I _don’t_ really want to talk to her now.”

Carol wanted to know everything she had done, how the roads were, and whether she had on the yellow pajamas or the blue ones. “I’ll have a hard time getting to sleep tonight without you.”

“Yes.” Immediately, out of nowhere, Therese felt tears pressing behind her eyes.

“Can’t you say anything but yes?”

“I love you.”

Carol whistled. Then silence. “Abby got the check, darling, but no letter. She missed my wire, but there isn’t any letter anyway.”

“Did you find the book?”

“We found the book, but there’s nothing in it.”

Therese wondered if the letter could be in her own apartment after all. But she had a picture of the letter in the book, marking a place. “Do you think anybody’s been through the house?”

“No. I can tell by various things. Don’t worry about that. Will you?”

A moment later, Therese slid down into bed and pulled her light out. Carol had asked her to call tomorrow night, too. For a while the sound of Carol’s voice was in her ears. Then a melancholy began to seep into her. She lay on her back with her arms straight at her sides, with a sense of empty space all around her, as if she were laid out ready for the grave, and then she fell asleep.

The next morning, Therese found a room she liked in a house on one of the streets that ran uphill, a large front room with a bay window full of plants and white curtains. There was a four-poster bed and an oval hooked rug on the floor. The woman said it was seven dollars a week, but Therese said she was not sure if she would be here a week, so she had better take it by the day.

“That’ll be the same thing,” the woman said. “Where’re you from?”

“New York.”

“Are you going to live here?”

“No. I’m just waiting for a friend to join me.”

“Man or a woman?”

Therese smiled. “A woman,” she said. “Is there any space in those garages in back? I’ve got a car with me.”

The woman said there were two garages empty, and that she didn’t charge for the garages, if people lived here. She was not old, but she stooped a little and her figure was frail. Her name was Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper. She had been keeping roomers for fifteen years, she said, and two of the three she had started with were still here.

The same day, she made the acquaintance of Dutch Huber and his wife who ran the diner near the public library. He was a skinny man of about fifty with small curious blue eyes. His wife Edna was fat and did the cooking, and talked a great deal less than he. Dutch had worked in New York for a while years ago. He asked her questions about sections of the city she happened not to know at all, while she mentioned places Dutch had never heard of or had forgotten, and somehow the slow, dragging conversation made them both laugh. Dutch asked her if she would like to go with him and his wife to the motorcycle races that were to be held a few miles out of town on Saturday, and Therese said yes.

She bought cardboard and glue and worked on the first of the models she meant to show Harkevy when she got back to New York. She had it nearly done when she went out at eleven thirty to call Carol from the Warrior.

Carol was not in and no one answered. Therese tried until one o’clock, then went back to Mrs. Cooper’s house.

Therese reached her the next morning around ten thirty. Carol said she had talked over everything with her lawyer the day before, but there was nothing she or her lawyer could do until they knew Harge’s next move. Carol was a little short with her, because she had a luncheon appointment in New York and a letter to write first. She seemed anxious for the first time about what Harge was doing. She had tried to call him twice without being able to reach him. But it was her brusqueness that disturbed Therese most of all.

“You haven’t changed your mind about anything?” Therese said.

“Of course not, darling. I’m giving a party tomorrow night. I’ll miss you.”

Therese tripped on the hotel threshold as she went out, and she felt the first hollow wave of loneliness break over her. What would she be doing tomorrow night? Reading in the library until it closed at nine? Working on another set? She went over the names of the people Carol had said were coming to the party—Max and Clara Tibbett, the couple who had a greenhouse on some highway near Carol’s house and whom Therese had met once, Carol’s friend Tessie she had never met, and Stanley McVeigh, the man Carol had been with the evening they went to Chinatown. Carol hadn’t mentioned Abby.

And Carol hadn’t said to call tomorrow.

She walked on, and the last moment she had seen Carol came back as if it were happening in front of her eyes again. Carol waving from the door of the plane at the Des Moines airport, Carol already small and far away, because Therese had had to stand back of the wire fence across the field. The ramp had been moved away, but Therese had thought, there were still a few seconds of time before they closed the door, and then Carol had appeared again, just long enough to stand still in the doorway for a second, to find her again, and make the gesture of blowing her a kiss. But it meant an absurd lot that she had come back.

Therese drove out to the motorcycle races on Saturday, and took Dutch and Edna with her, because Carol’s car was bigger. Afterward, they invited her to supper at their house, but she did not accept. There hadn’t been a letter from Carol that day, and she had expected a note at least. Sunday depressed her, and even the drive she took up the Big Sioux River to Dell Rapids in the afternoon did not change the scene inside her mind.

Monday morning, she sat in the library reading plays. Then around two, when the noonday rush was slacking off in Dutch’s diner, she went in and had some tea, and talked with Dutch while she played the songs on the juke box that she and Carol had used to play. She had told Dutch that the car belonged to the friend for whom she was waiting. And gradually, Dutch’s intermittent questions led her to tell him that Carol lived in New Jersey, that she would probably fly out, that Carol wanted to go to New Mexico.

“Carol does?” Dutch said, turning to her as he polished a glass.

Then a strange resentment rose in Therese because he had said her name, and she made a resolution not to speak of Carol again at all, not to anyone in the city.

Tuesday the letter came from Carol, nothing but a short note, but it said Fred was more optimistic about everything, and it looked as if there would be nothing but the divorce to worry about and she could probably leave the twenty-fourth of February. Therese began to smile as she read it. She wanted to go out and celebrate with someone, but there was no one, so there was nothing to do but take a walk, have a lonely drink at the bar of the Warrior, and think of Carol five days away. There was no one she would have wanted to be with, except perhaps Dannie. Or Stella Overton. Stella was jolly, and though she couldn’t have told Stella anything about Carol—whom could she tell?—it would have been good to see her now. She had meant to write Stella a card days ago, but she hadn’t yet.

She wrote to Carol late that night.

The news is wonderful. I celebrated with a single daiquiri at the
Warrior. Not that I am conservative, but did you know that one
drink has the kick of three when you are alone?... I love this
town because it all reminds me of you. I know you don’t like it
any more than any other town, but that isn’t the point. I mean
you are here as much as I can bear you to be, not being here....

Carol wrote:

I never liked Florence. I say this as a prelude. It seems
Florence found the note you wrote to me and sold it to Harge—at a
price. She is also responsible for Harge’s knowing where we (or
at least I) were going, I’ve no doubt. I don’t know what I left
around the house or what she might have overheard, I thought I
was pretty silent, but if Harge took the trouble to bribe her and
I’m sure he did, there’s no telling. They picked us up in
Chicago, anyway. Darling, I had no idea how far this thing had
gone. To give you the atmosphere—nobody tells me anything, things
are just suddenly discovered. If anyone is in possession of the
facts, it is Harge. I spoke with him on the phone, and he refuses
to tell me anything, which of course is calculated to terrorize
me into giving all my ground before the fight has even begun.
They don’t know me, any of them, if they think I will. The fight
of course is over Rindy, and yes, darling, I’m afraid there will
be one, and I can’t leave the 24th. That much Harge did tell me
when he sprang the letter this morning on the phone. I think the
letter may be his strongest weapon (the dictaphone business only
went on in Colorado S. so far as I can possibly imagine) hence
his letting me know about it. But I can imagine the kind of
letter it is, written even before we took off, and there’ll be a
limit to what even Harge can read into it. Harge is merely
threatening—in the peculiar form of silence—hoping I will back
out completely as far as Rindy is concerned. I won’t, so there
will come some kind of a showdown, I hope not in court. Fred is
prepared for anything however. He is wonderful, the only person
who talks straight to me, but unfortunately he knows least of all
too.

You ask if I miss you. I think of your voice, your hands, and
your eyes when you look straight into mine. I remember your
courage that I hadn’t suspected, and it gives me courage. Will
you call me, darling? I don’t want to call you if your phone is
in the hall. Call me collect around 7 P.M. preferably, which is 6
your time.

And Therese was about to call her that day when a telegram came:

DON’T TELEPHONE FOR A WHILE. EXPLAIN LATER. ALL MY LOVE, DARLING.
CAROL.

Mrs. Cooper watched her reading it in the hall. “That from your friend?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Hope nothing’s the matter.” Mrs. Cooper had a way of peering at people, and Therese lifted her head deliberately.

“No, she’s coming,” Therese said. “She’s been delayed.”

chapter twenty-one

Albert Kennedy, Bert to people he liked, lived in a room at the back of the house, and was one of Mrs. Cooper’s original lodgers. He was forty-five, a native of San Francisco, and more like a New Yorker than anyone Therese had met in the town, and this fact alone inclined her to avoid him. Often he asked Therese to go to the movies with him, but she had gone only once. She was restless and she preferred to wander about by herself, mostly just looking and thinking, because the days were too cold and windy for any outdoor sketching. And the scenes she had liked at first had grown too stale to sketch, from too much looking, too much waiting. Therese went to the library almost every evening, sat at one of the long tables looking over half a dozen books, and then took a meandering course homeward.

She came back to the house only to wander out again after a while, stiffening herself against the erratic wind, or letting it turn her down streets she would not otherwise have followed. In the lighted windows she would see a girl seated at a piano, in another a man laughing, in another a woman sewing. Then she remembered she could not even call Carol, admitted to herself she did not even know what Carol was doing at this moment, and she felt emptier than the wind. Carol did not tell her everything in her letters, she felt, did not tell her the worst.

In the library, she looked at books with photographs of Europe in them, marble fountains in Sicily, ruins of Greece in sunlight, and she wondered if she and Carol would really ever go there. There was still so much they had not done. There was the first voyage across the Atlantic. There were simply the mornings, mornings anywhere, when she could lift her head from a pillow and see Carol’s face, and know that the day was theirs and that nothing would separate them.

And there was the beautiful thing, transfixing the heart and the eyes at once, in the dark window of an antique shop in a street where she had never been. Therese stared at it, feeling it quench some forgotten and nameless thirst inside her. Most of its porcelain surface was painted with small bright lozenges of colored enamel, royal blue and deep red and green, outlined with coin gold as shiny as silk embroidery, even under its film of dust. There was a gold ring at the rim for the finger. It was a tiny candlestick holder. Who had made it, she wondered, and for whom?

She came back the next morning and bought it to give to Carol.

A letter from Richard had come that morning, forwarded from Colorado Springs. Therese sat down on one of the stone benches in the street where the library was, and opened it. It was on business stationery: The Semco Bottled Gas Company. Cooks—Heats—Makes Ice. Richard’s name was at the top as General Manager of the Port Jefferson Branch.

Dear Therese,

I have Dannie to thank for telling me where you are. You may
think this letter unnecessary and perhaps it is to you. Perhaps
you are still in that fog you were, when we talked that evening
in the cafeteria. But I feel it is necessary to make one thing
clear, and that is that I no longer feel the way I did even two
weeks ago, and the letter I wrote you last was nothing but a last
spasmodic effort, and I knew it was hopeless when I wrote it, and
I knew you wouldn’t answer and I didn’t want you to. I know I had
stopped loving you then, and now the uppermost emotion I feel
toward you is one that was present from the first—disgust. It is
your hanging onto this woman to the exclusion of everyone else,
this relationship which I am sure has become sordid and
pathological by now, that disgusts me. I know that it will not
last, as I said from the first. It is only regrettable that you
will be disgusted later yourself, in proportion to how much of
your life you waste now with it. It is rootless and infantile,
like living on lotus blossoms or some sickening candy instead of
the bread and meat of life. I have often thought of those
questions you asked me the day we were flying the kite. I wish I
had acted then before it was too late, because I loved you enough
then to try to rescue you. Now I don’t.

People still ask me about you. What do you expect me to tell
them? I intend to tell them the truth. Only that way can I get it
out of myself—and I can no longer bear to carry it around with
me. I have sent a few things you had at the house back to your
apartment. The slightest memory or contact with you depresses me,
makes me not want to touch you or anything concerned with you.
But I am talking sense and very likely you are not understanding
a word of it. Except maybe this: I want nothing to do with you.

Richard

She saw Richard’s thin soft lips tensed in a straight line as they must have looked when he wrote the letter, a line that still did not keep the tiny, taut curl in the upper lip from showing—she saw his face clearly for a moment, and then it vanished with a little jolt that seemed as muffled and remote from her as the clamor of Richard’s letter. She stood up, put the letter back in the envelope, and walked on. She hoped he succeeded in purging himself of her. But she could only imagine him telling other people about her with that curious attitude of passionate participation she had seen in New York before she left. She imagined Richard telling Phil as they stood some evening at the Palermo bar, imagined him telling the Kellys. She wouldn’t care at all, whatever he said.

She wondered what Carol was doing now, at ten o’clock, at eleven in New Jersey. Listening to some stranger’s accusations? Thinking of her, or was there time for that?

It was a fine day, cold and almost windless, bright with sun. She could take the car and drive somewhere. She had not used the car for three days. Suddenly she realized she did not want to use it. The day she had taken it out and driven it up to ninety on the straight road to Dell Rapids, exultant after a letter from Carol, seemed very long ago.

Mr. Bowen, another of the roomers, was on the front porch when she came back to Mrs. Cooper’s house. He was sitting in the sun with his legs wrapped in a blanket and his cap pulled down over his eyes as if he were asleep, but he called out, “Hi, there! How’s my girl?”

She stopped and chatted with him for a while, asked him about his arthritis, trying to be as courteous as Carol had always been with Mrs. French. They found something to laugh at, and she was still smiling when she went to her room. Then the sight of the geranium ended it.

She watered the geranium and set it at the end of the window sill, where it would get the sun for the longest time. There was even brown at the tips of the smallest leaves at the top. Carol had bought it for her in Des Moines just before she took the plane. The pot of ivy had died already—the man in the shop had warned them it was delicate, but Carol had wanted it anyway—and Therese doubted that the geranium would live. But Mrs. Cooper’s motley collection of plants flourished in the bay window.

“I walk and walk around the town,” she wrote to Carol, “but I wish I could keep walking in one direction—east—and finally come to you. When can you come, Carol? Or shall I come to you? I really cannot stand being away from you so long....”

She had her answer the next morning. A check fluttered out of Carol’s letter onto Mrs. Cooper’s hall floor. The check was for two hundred and fifty dollars. Carol’s letter—the long loops looser and lighter, the t-bars stretching the length of the word—said that it was impossible for her to come out within the next two weeks, if then. The check was for her to fly back to New York and have the car driven East.

“I’d feel better if you took the plane. Come now and don’t wait,” was the last paragraph.

Carol had written the letter in haste, had probably snatched a moment to write it, but there was a coldness in it, too, that shocked Therese. She went out and walked dazedly to the corner and dropped the letter she had written the night before into the mailbox anyway, a heavy letter with three airmail stamps on it. She might see Carol within twelve hours. The thought did not bring any reassurance. Should she leave this morning? This afternoon? What had they done to Carol? She wondered if Carol would be furious if she telephoned her, if it would precipitate some crisis into a total defeat if she did?

She was sitting at a table somewhere with coffee and orange juice in front of her, before she looked at the other letter in her hand. In the upper left corner she could just make out the scrawly handwriting. It was from Mrs. R. Robichek.

Dear Therese,

Thank you very much for the delicious sausage that came last
month. You are a nice sweet girl and I am glad to have the
opportunity to thank you many times. It was nice of you to think
of me making such a long trip. I enjoy the pretty post cards,
specially the big one from Sioux Falls. How is in South Dakota?
Are mountains and cowboys? I have never had chance to travel
except Pennsylvania. You are a lucky girl, so young and pretty
and kind. Myself I still work. The store is just the same.
Everything is the same but it is colder. Please visit me when you
come back. I cook a nice dinner for you not from delicatessen.
Thank you for the sausage again. I lived from it for many days,
really something special and nice. With best regards and yours
truly.

Ruby Robichek

Therese slid off the stool, left some money on the counter and ran out. She ran all the way to the Warrior Hotel, put the call in and waited with the receiver against her ear until she heard the telephone ringing in Carol’s house. No one answered. It rang twenty times and no one answered. She thought of calling Carol’s lawyer, Fred Haymes. She decided she shouldn’t. Neither did she want to call Abby.

That day it rained, and Therese lay on her bed in her room, staring up at the ceiling, waiting for three o’clock, when she intended to telephone again. Mrs. Cooper brought her a tray of lunch around midday. Mrs. Cooper thought she was sick. Therese could not eat the food, however, and she did not know what to do with it.

She was still trying to reach Carol at five o’clock. Finally the ringing stopped and there was confusion on the wire, a couple of operators questioning each other about the call, and the first words Therese heard from Carol were “Yes, damn it!” Therese smiled and the ache went out of her arms.

“Hello?” Carol said brusquely.

“Hello?” The connection was bad. “I got the letter—the one with the check. What happened, Carol?... What?”

Carol’s harassed sounding voice repeated through the crackling interference, “_This wire I think is tapped, Therese...._ Are you all right? Are you coming home? I can’t talk very long now.”

Therese frowned, wordless. “Yes, I suppose I can leave today.” Then she blurted, “What is it, Carol? I really can’t stand this, not knowing anything!”

“_Therese!_” Carol drew the word all across Therese’s words, like a deletion. “Will you come home so I can talk to you?”

Therese thought she heard Carol sigh impatiently. “But I’ve got to know now. Can you see me at all when I come back?”

“Hang onto yourself, Therese.”

Was this the way they talked together? Were these the words they used? “But can you?”

“I don’t know,” Carol said.

A chill ran up her arm, into the fingers that held the telephone. She felt Carol hated her. Because it was her fault, her stupid blunder about the letter Florence had found. Something had happened and perhaps Carol couldn’t and wouldn’t even want to see her again. “Has the court thing started yet?”

“It’s finished. I wrote you about that. I can’t talk any longer. Good-by, Therese.” Carol waited for her to reply. “I’ve got to say good-by.”

Therese put the receiver slowly back on the hook.

She stood in the hotel lobby, staring at the blurred figures around the front desk. She pulled Carol’s letter out of her pocket and read it again, but Carol’s voice was closer, saying impatiently, “Will you come home so I can talk to you?” She pulled the check out and looked at it again, upside down, and slowly tore it up. She dropped the pieces into a brass spittoon.

But the tears did not come until she got back to the house and saw her room again, the double bed that sagged in the middle, the stack of letters from Carol on the desk. She couldn’t stay here another night.

She would go to a hotel for the night, and if the letter Carol had mentioned wasn’t here tomorrow morning, she would leave anyway.

Therese dragged her suitcase down from the closet and opened it on the bed. The folded corner of a white handkerchief stuck out of one of the pockets. Therese took it out and lifted it to her nose, remembering the morning in Des Moines when Carol had put it there, with the dash of perfume on it, and the derisive remark Carol had made about putting it there, that she had laughed at. Therese stood with her hand on the back of a chair and the other hand clenched in a fist that rose and fell aimlessly, and what she felt was as blurred as the desk and the letters that she frowned at in front of her. Then her hand reached out suddenly for the letter propped against the books at the back of the desk. She hadn’t seen the letter before, though it was in plain view. Therese tore it open. This was the letter Carol had meant. It was a long letter, and the ink was pale blue on some pages and dark on others, and there were words crossed out. She read the first page, then went back and read it again.

Monday

My darling,

I am not even going into court. This morning I was given a
private showing of what Harge intended to bring against me. Yes,
they have a few conversations recorded—namely Waterloo, and it
would be useless to try to face a court with this. I should be
ashamed, not for myself oddly enough, but for my own child, to
say nothing of not wanting you to have to appear. Everything was
very simple this morning—I simply surrendered. The important
thing now is what I intend to do in the future, the lawyers said.
On this depends whether I would ever see my child again, because
Harge has with ease now complete custody of her. The question was
would I stop seeing you (and others like you, they said!). It was
not so clearly put. There were a dozen faces that opened their
mouths and spoke like the judges of doomsday—reminding me of my
duties, my position, and my future. (What future have they fixed
up for me? Are they going to look in on it in six months?)—I said
I would stop seeing you. I wonder if you will understand,
Therese, since you are so young and never even knew a mother who
cared desperately for you. For this promise, they present me with
their wonderful reward, the privilege of seeing my child a few
weeks of the year.

Hours later—

Abby is here. We talk of you—she sends you her love as I send
mine. Abby reminds me of the things I know already—that you are
very young and you adore me. Abby does not think I should send
this to you, but tell you when you come. We have just had quite
an argument about it. I tell her she does not know you as well as
I, and I think now she does not know me as well as you in some
ways, and those ways are the emotions. I am not very happy today,
my sweet. I am drinking my ryes and you would tell me they
depress me, I know. But I wasn’t prepared for these days after
those weeks with you. They were happy weeks—you knew it more than
I did. Though all we have known is only a beginning. I meant to
try to tell you in this letter that you don’t even know the rest
and perhaps you never will and are not supposed to—meaning
destined to. We never fought, never came back knowing there was
nothing else we wanted in heaven or hell but to be together. Did
you ever care for me that much, I don’t know. But that is all
part of it and all we have known is only a beginning. And it has
been such a short time. For that reason it will have shorter
roots in you. You say you love me however I am and when I curse.
I say I love you always, the person you are and the person you
will become. I would say it in a court if it would mean anything
to those people or possibly change anything, because those are
not the words I am afraid of. I mean, darling, I shall send you
this letter and I think you will understand why I do, why I told
the lawyers yesterday I would not see you again and why I had to
tell them that, and I would be underestimating you to think you
could not and to think you would prefer delay.

She stopped reading and stood up, and walked slowly to her writing table. Yes, she understood why Carol had sent the letter. Because Carol loved her child more than her. And because of that, the lawyers had been able to break her, to force her to do exactly what they wanted her to do. Therese could not imagine Carol forced. Yet here it was in Carol’s writing. It was a surrender. Therese knew no situation in which she was the stake could have wrested from Carol. For an instant there came the fantastic realization that Carol had devoted only a fraction of herself to her, Therese, and suddenly the whole world of the last month, like a tremendous lie, cracked and almost toppled. In the next instant, Therese did not believe that. Yet the fact remained, she had chosen her child. She stared at Richard’s envelope on her table, and felt all the words she wanted to say to him, that she had never said to him, rising in a torrent inside her. What right had he to talk about whom she loved or how? What did he know about her? What had he ever known?

... exaggerated and at the same time minimized [she read on
another page of Carol’s letter]. But between the pleasure of a
kiss and of what a man and woman do in bed seems to me only a
gradation. A kiss, for instance, is not to be minimized, or its
value judged by anyone else. I wonder do these men grade their
pleasure in terms of whether their actions produce a child or
not, and do they consider them more pleasant if they do. It is a
question of pleasure after all, and what’s the use of debating
the pleasure of an ice cream cone versus a football game—or a
Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa. I’ll leave that to the
philosophers. But their attitude was that I must be somehow
demented or blind (plus a kind of regret, I thought, at the fact
a fairly attractive woman is presumably unavailable to men).
Someone brought “aesthetics” into the argument, I mean against me
of course. I said did they really want to debate that—it brought
the only laugh in the whole show. But the most important point I
did not mention and was not thought of by anyone—that the rapport
between two men or two women can be absolute and perfect, as it
can never be between man and woman, and perhaps some people want
just this, as others want that more shifting and uncertain thing
that happens between men and women. It was said or at least
implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the
depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a good
deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on
like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one
person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial
thing—that is degeneration. Or to live against one’s grain, that
is degeneration by definition.

Darling, I pour all this out to you [the next lines were crossed
out]. You will undoubtedly handle your future better than I. Let
me be a bad example to you. If you are hurt now beyond what you
think you can bear and if it makes you—either now or one day—hate
me, and this is what I told Abby, then I shan’t be sorry. I may
have been that one person you were fated to meet, as you say, and
the only one, and you can put it all behind you. Yet if you
don’t, for all this failure and the dismalness now, I know what
you said that afternoon is right—it needn’t be like this. I do
want to talk with you once when you come back, if you’re willing,
unless you think you can’t.

Your plants are still thriving on the back porch. I water them
every day....

Therese could not read any more. Beyond her door she heard footsteps slowly descending the stairs, walking more confidently across the hall. When the footsteps were gone, she opened her door and stood there a moment, struggling against an impulse to walk straight out of the house and leave everything behind her. Then she went down the hall to Mrs. Cooper’s door in the rear.

Mrs. Cooper answered her knock, and Therese said the words she had prepared, about leaving that night. She watched Mrs. Cooper’s face that didn’t listen to her but only reacted to the sight of her own face, and Mrs. Cooper seemed suddenly her own reflection, that she could not turn away from.

“Well, I’m sorry, Miss Belivet. I’m sorry if your plans have gone wrong,” she said, while her face registered only shock and curiosity.

Then Therese went back to her room and began to pack, laying in the bottom of her suitcase the cardboard models she had folded flat, and then her books. After a moment, she heard Mrs. Cooper approaching her door slowly, as if she carried something, and Therese thought, if she was bringing her another tray, she would scream. Mrs. Cooper knocked.

“Where shall I forward your mail to, honey, in case there’s any more letters?” Mrs. Cooper asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to write and let you know.” Therese felt lightheaded and sickish when she straightened up.

“You’re not starting back for New York this late at night, are you?” Mrs. Cooper called anything after six “night.”

“No,” Therese said. “I’ll just go a little ways.” She was impatient to be alone. She looked at Mrs. Cooper’s hand bulging the gray checked apron under the waistband, at the cracked soft house shoes worn paper thin on these floors, that had walked these floors years before she came here and would go on in the same foot tracks years after she was gone.

“Well, you be sure and let me hear how you make out,” Mrs. Cooper said.

“Yes.”

She drove to a hotel, a different hotel from the one where she had always called Carol. Then she went out for a walk, restlessly, avoiding all the streets she had been in with Carol. She might have driven to another town, she thought, and stopped, half decided to go back to the car. Then she walked on, not caring, actually, where she was. She walked until she was cold, and the library was the closest place to go and get warm. She passed the diner and glanced in. Dutch saw her, and with the familiar dip of his head, as if he had to look under something to see her through the window, he smiled and waved to her. Automatically, her hand waved back, good-by, and suddenly she thought of her room in New York, with the dress still on the studio couch, and the corner of the carpet turned back. If she could only reach out now and pull the carpet flat, she thought. She stood staring down the narrowish, solid looking avenue with its round street lights. A single figure walked along the sidewalk toward her. Therese went up the library steps.

Miss Graham, the librarian, greeted her as usual, but Therese did not go into the main reading room. There were two or three people there tonight, the baldheaded man with the black-rimmed glasses who was often at the middle table, and how often had she sat in that room with a letter from Carol in her pocket? With Carol beside her. She climbed the stairs, passed the history and art room on the second floor, up to the third floor where she had never been before. There was a single large dusty looking room with glass-front bookcases around the walls, a few oil paintings and marble busts on pedestals.