chapter twenty-two

In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?

She walked to the hotel. In her room, she wet a face towel with cold water to put over her eyes. The room was chilly, so she took off her dress and shoes and got into bed.

From outside, a shrill voice, muted in empty space, cried: “Hey, Chicago Sun-Times!”

Then silence, and she debated trying to fall asleep, while fatigue already began to rock her unpleasantly, like drunkenness. Now there were voices in the hall, talking of a misplaced piece of luggage, and a sense of futility overwhelmed her as she lay there with the wet, medicinally smelling face towel over her swollen eyes. The voices wrangled, and she felt her courage running out, and then her will, and in panic she tried to think of the world outside, of Dannie and Mrs. Robichek, of Frances Cotter at the Pelican Press, of Mrs. Osborne, and of her own apartment still in New York, but her mind refused to survey or to renounce, and her mind was the same as her heart now and refused to renounce Carol. The faces swam together like the voices outside. There was also the face of Sister Alicia, and of her mother. There was the last room she had slept in at school. There was the morning she had sneaked out of the dormitory very early and run across the lawn like a young animal crazy with spring, and had seen Sister Alicia running crazily through a field herself, white shoes flashing like ducks through the high grass, and it had been minutes before she realized that Sister Alicia was chasing an escaped chicken. There was the moment, in the house of some friend of her mother’s, when she had reached for a piece of cake and had upset the plate on the floor, and her mother had slapped her in the face. She saw the picture in the hall at school, it breathed and moved now like Carol, mocking and cruel and finished with her, as if some evil and long-destined purpose had been accomplished. Therese’s body tensed in terror, and the conversation went on and on in the hall obliviously, falling on her ear with the sharp, alarming sound of ice cracking somewhere out on a pond.

“What do you mean you did?”

“No....”

“If you did, the suitcase would be downstairs in the checkroom....”

“Oh, I told you....”

“But you want me to lose a suitcase so you won’t lose your job!”

Her mind attached meaning to the phrases one by one, like some slow translator that lagged behind, and at last got lost.

She sat up in bed with the end of a bad dream in her head. The room was nearly dark, its shadows deep and solid in the corners. She reached for the lamp switch and half closed her eyes against the light. She dropped a quarter into the radio on the wall, and turned the volume quite loud at the first sound she got. It was a man’s voice, and then music began, a lilting, Oriental-sounding piece that had been among the selections in music appreciation class at school. “In a Persian Market,” she remembered automatically, and now its undulant rhythm that had always made her think of a camel walking took her back to the rather small room at the Home, with the illustrations from Verdi operas around the walls above the high wainscoting. She had heard the piece occasionally in New York, but she had never heard it with Carol, had not heard it or thought of it since she had known Carol, and now the music was like a bridge soaring across time without touching anything. She picked up Carol’s letter opener from the bed table, the wooden knife that had somehow gotten into her suitcase when they packed, and she squeezed the handle and rubbed her thumb along its edge, but its reality seemed to deny Carol instead of affirm her, did not evoke her so much as the music they had never heard together. She thought of Carol with a twist of resentment, Carol like a distant spot of silence and stillness.

Therese went to the basin to wash her face in cold water. She should get a job, tomorrow if she could. That had been her idea in stopping here, to work for two weeks or so, not to weep in hotel rooms. She should send Mrs. Cooper the hotel name as an address, simply for courtesy’s sake. It was another of the things she must do, although she did not want to. And was it worth while to write to Harkevy again, she wondered, after his polite but explicit note in Sioux Falls. “... I should be glad to see you again when you come to New York, but it is impossible for me to promise anything this spring. It would be a good idea for you to see Mr. Ned Bernstein, the co-producer, when you get back. He can tell you more of what is happening in designing studios than I can....” No, she wouldn’t write again about that.

Downstairs, she bought a picture post card of Lake Michigan, and deliberately wrote a cheerful message on it to Mrs. Robichek. It seemed false as she wrote it, but walking away from the box where she had dropped it, she was conscious suddenly of the energy in her body, the spring in her toes, the youth in her blood that warmed her cheeks as she walked faster, and she knew she was free and blessed compared to Mrs. Robichek, and what she had written was not false, because she could so well afford it. She was not crumpled or half blind, not in pain. She stood by a store window and quickly put on some more lipstick. A gust of wind made her step to catch her balance. But she could feel in the wind’s coldness its core of spring, like a heart warm and young inside it. Tomorrow morning, she would start to look for a job. She should be able to live on the money she had left, and save whatever she earned to get back to New York on. She could wire her bank for the rest of her money, of course, but that was not what she wanted. She wanted two weeks of working among people she didn’t know, doing the kind of work a million other people did. She wanted to step into someone else’s shoes.

She answered an advertisement for a receptionist-filing clerk that said little typing required and call in person. They seemed to think she would do, and she spent all morning learning the files. Then one of the bosses came in after lunch and said he wanted a girl who knew some shorthand. Therese didn’t. The school had taught her typing, but not shorthand, so she was out.

She looked through the help-wanted columns again that afternoon. Then she remembered the sign on the fence of the lumberyard not far from the hotel. “Girl wanted for general office work and stock. $40 weekly.” If they didn’t demand shorthand, she might qualify. It was around three when she turned into the windy street where the lumberyard lay. She lifted her head and let the wind blow her hair back from her face. And she remembered Carol saying, I like to see you walking. When I see you from a distance, I feel you’re walking on the palm of my hand and you’re about five inches high. She could hear Carol’s soft voice under the babble of the wind, and she grew tense, with bitterness and fear. She walked faster, ran a few steps, as if she could run out of that morass of love and hate and resentment in which her mind suddenly floundered.

There was a wooden shack of an office at the side of the lumberyard. She went in and spoke with a Mr. Zambrowski, a slow moving baldheaded man with a gold watch chain that barely stretched across his front. Before Therese asked him about shorthand, he volunteered that he didn’t need it. He said he would try her out the rest of the afternoon and tomorrow. Two other girls came in for the job the next morning, and Mr. Zambrowski took their names, but before noon, he said the job was hers.

“If you don’t mind getting here at eight in the morning,” Mr. Zambrowski said.

“I don’t mind.” She had come in at nine that morning. But she would have gotten there at four in the morning if he had asked her to.

Her hours were from eight to four thirty, and her duties consisted simply in checking the mill shipments to the yard against the orders received, and in writing letters of confirmation. She did not see much lumber from her desk in the office, but the smell of it was in the air, fresh as if the saws had just exposed the surface of the white pine boards, and she could hear it bouncing and rattling as the trucks pulled into the center of the yard. She liked the work, liked Mr. Zambrowski, and liked the lumberjacks and truck drivers who came into the office to warm their hands at the fire. One of the lumberjacks named Steve, an attractive young man with a golden stubble of beard, invited her a couple of times to have lunch with him in the cafeteria down the street. He asked her for a date on Saturday night, but Therese did not want to spend a whole evening with him or with anyone yet.

One night, Abby telephoned her.

“Do you know I had to call South Dakota twice to find you?” Abby said irritably. “What’re you doing out there? When’re you coming back?”

Abby’s voice brought Carol as close as if it were Carol she heard. It brought the hollow tightness in her throat again, and for a moment she couldn’t answer anything.

“Therese?”

“Is Carol there with you?”

“She’s in Vermont. She’s been sick,” Abby’s hoarse voice said, and there was no smile in it now. “She’s taking a rest.”

“She’s too sick to call me? Why don’t you tell me, Abby? Is she getting better or worse?”

“Better. Why didn’t you try to call to find out?”

Therese squeezed the telephone. Yes, why hadn’t she? Because she had been thinking of a picture instead of Carol. “What’s the matter with her? Is she—”

“That’s a fine question. Carol wrote you what happened, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do you expect her to bounce up like a rubber ball? Or chase you all over America? What do you think this is, a game of hide and seek?”

All the conversation of that lunch with Abby crashed down on Therese. As Abby saw it, the whole thing was her fault. The letter Florence had found was only the final blunder.

“When’re you coming back?” Abby asked.

“In about ten days. Unless Carol wants the car sooner.”

“She doesn’t. She won’t be home in ten days.”

Therese forced herself to say, “About that letter—the one I wrote—do you know if they found it before or after?”

“Before or after what?”

“After the detectives started following us.”

“They found it afterward,” Abby said, sighing.

Therese set her teeth. But it didn’t matter what Abby thought of her, only what Carol thought. “Where is she in Vermont?”

“I wouldn’t call her if I were you.”

“But you’re not me and I want to call her.”

“Don’t. That much I can tell you. I can give her any message—that’s important.” And there was a cold silence. “Carol wants to know if you need any money and what about the car.”

“I don’t need any money. The car’s all right.” She had to ask one more question. “What does Rindy know about this?”

“She knows what the word divorce means. And she wanted to stay with Carol. That doesn’t make it easier for Carol, either.”

Very well, very well, Therese wanted to say. She wouldn’t trouble Carol by telephoning, by writing, by any messages, unless it was a message about the car. She was shaking when she put the telephone down. And she immediately picked it up again. “This is room six eleven,” she said. “I don’t want to take any more long distance calls—none at all.”

She looked at Carol’s letter opener on the bed table, and now it meant Carol, the person of flesh and blood, the Carol with freckles and the corner nicked off one tooth. Did she owe Carol anything, Carol the person? Hadn’t Carol been playing with her, as Richard had said? She remembered Carol’s words, “When you have a husband and child it’s a little different.” She frowned at the letter opener, not understanding why it had become only a letter opener suddenly, why it was a matter of indifference to her whether she kept it or threw it away.

Two days later, a letter arrived from Abby enclosing a personal check for a hundred and fifty dollars that Abby told her to “forget about.” Abby said she had spoken with Carol, and that Carol would like to hear from her, and she gave Carol’s address. It was a rather cold letter, but the gesture of the check was not cold. It hadn’t been prompted by Carol, Therese knew.

“Thank you for the check,” Therese wrote back to her. “It’s terribly nice of you, but I won’t use it and I don’t need it. You ask me to write to Carol. I don’t think I can or that I should.”

Dannie was sitting in the hotel lobby one afternoon when she came home from work. She could not quite believe it was he, the dark-eyed young man who got up from the chair smiling and came slowly toward her. Then the sight of his loose black hair, mussed a little more by the upturned coat collar, the symmetrical broad smile, was as familiar as if she had seen him only the day before.

“Hello, Therese,” he said. “Surprised?”

“Well, terrifically. I’d given you up. No word from you in—two weeks.” She remembered the twenty-eighth was the day he said he would leave New York, and it was the day she had come to Chicago.

“I’d just about given you up,” Dannie said, laughing. “I got delayed in New York. I guess it’s lucky I did, because I tried to telephone you and your landlady gave me your address.” Dannie’s fingers kept a firm grip on her elbow. They were walking slowly toward the elevators. “You look wonderful, Therese.”

“Do I? I’m awfully glad to see you.” There was an open elevator in front of them. “Do you want to come up?”

“Let’s go have something to eat. Or is it too early? I didn’t have any lunch today.”

“It’s certainly not too early, then.”

They went to a place Therese knew about, that specialized in steaks. Dannie even ordered cocktails, though he usually never drank.

“You’re here by yourself?” he said. “Your landlady in Sioux Falls told me you left by yourself.”

“Carol couldn’t come out finally.”

“Oh. And you decided to stay out longer?”

“Yes.”

“Until when?”

“Until just about now. I’m going back next week.”

Dannie listened with his warm dark eyes fixed on her face, without any surprise. “Why don’t you just go west instead of east and spend a little time in California. I’ve got a job in Oakland. I have to be there day after tomorrow.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Researching—just what I asked for. I came out better than I thought I would on my exams.”

“Were you first in the class?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it. They weren’t graded like that. You didn’t answer my question.”

“I want to get back to New York, Dannie.”

“Oh.” He smiled, looking at her hair, her lips, and it occurred to her Dannie had never seen her with this much make-up on. “You look grown up all of a sudden,” he said. “You changed your hair, didn’t you?”

“A little.”

“You don’t look frightened any more. Or even so serious.”

“That pleases me.” She felt shy with him, yet somehow close, a closeness charged with something she had never felt with Richard. Something suspenseful, that she enjoyed. A little salt, she thought. She looked at Dannie’s hand on the table, at the strong muscle that bulged below the thumb. She remembered his hands on her shoulders that day in his room. The memory was a pleasant one.

“You did miss me a little, didn’t you, Terry?”

“Of course.”

“Did you ever think you might care something about me? As much as you did for Richard, for instance?” he asked with a note of surprise in his own voice, as if it were a fantastic question.

“I don’t know,” she said quickly.

“But you’re not still thinking about Richard, are you?”

“You must know I’m not.”

“Who is it then? Carol?”

She felt suddenly naked, sitting there opposite him. “Yes. It was.”

“But not now?”

Therese was amazed that he could say the words without any surprise, any attitude at all. “No. It’s—I can’t talk to anyone about it, Dannie,” she finished, and her voice sounded deep and quiet in her ears, like the voice of another person.

“Don’t you want to forget it, if it’s past?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know just how you mean that.”

“I mean, are you sorry?”

“No. Would I do the same thing again? Yes.”

“Do you mean with somebody else, or with her?”

“With her,” Therese said. The corner of her mouth went up in a smile.

“But the end was a fiasco.”

“Yes. I mean I’d go through the end, too.”

“And you’re still going through it.”

Therese didn’t say anything.

“Are you going to see her again? Do you mind if I ask you all these questions?”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “No, I’m not going to see her again. I don’t want to.”

“But somebody else?”

“Another woman?” Therese shook her head. “No.”

Dannie looked at her and smiled, slowly. “That’s what matters. Or rather, that’s what makes it not matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’re so young, Therese. You’ll change. You’ll forget.”

She did not feel young. “Did Richard talk to you?” she asked.

“No. I think he wanted to one night, but I cut it off before he got started.”

She felt the bitter smile on her mouth, and she took a last pull on her short cigarette and put it out. “I hope he finds somebody to listen to him. He needs an audience.”

“He feels jilted. His ego’s suffering. Don’t ever think I’m like Richard. I think people’s lives are their own.”

Something Carol had said once came suddenly to her mind: every adult has secrets. Said as casually as Carol said everything, stamped as indelibly in her brain as the address she had written on the sales slip in Frankenberg’s. She had an impulse to tell Dannie the rest, about the picture in the library, the picture in the school. And about the Carol who was not a picture, but a woman with a child and a husband, with freckles on her hands and a habit of cursing, of growing melancholy at unexpected moments, with a bad habit of indulging her will. A woman who had endured much more in New York than she had in South Dakota. She looked at Dannie’s eyes, at his chin with the faint cleft. She knew that up to now she had been under a spell that prevented her from seeing anyone in the world but Carol.

“Now what are you thinking?” he asked.

“Of what you said once in New York, about using things and throwing them away.”

“Did she do that to you?”

Therese smiled. “I shall do it.”

“Then find someone you’ll never want to throw away.”

“Who won’t wear out,” Therese said.

“Will you write to me?”

“Of course.”

“Write me in three months.”

“Three months?” But suddenly she knew what he meant. “And not before?”

“No.” He was looking at her steadily. “That’s a fair time, isn’t it?”

“Yes. All right. It’s a promise.”

“Promise me something else—take tomorrow off so you can be with me. I’ve got till nine tomorrow night.”

“I can’t, Dannie. There’s work to do—and I’ve got to tell him anyway that I’m leaving in another week.” Those weren’t quite the reasons, she knew. And perhaps Dannie knew, looking at her. She didn’t want to spend tomorrow with him, it would be too intense, he would remind her too much of herself, and she still was not ready.

Dannie came round to the lumberyard the next day at noon. They had intended to have lunch together, but they walked and talked on Lake Shore Drive for the whole hour instead. That evening at nine, Dannie took a plane westward.

Eight days later, she started for New York. She meant to move away from Mrs. Osborne’s as soon as possible. She wanted to look up some of the people she had run away from last fall. And there would be other people, new people. She would go to night school this spring. And she wanted to change her wardrobe completely. Everything she had now, the clothes she remembered in her closet in New York, seemed juvenile, like clothes that had belonged to her years ago. In Chicago she had looked around in the stores and hungered for the clothes she couldn’t buy yet. All she could afford now was a new haircut.