Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

  Now, she thought. I shall move now, but she did not. No one looked at her at the moment, and the thought of the strength required to draw every eye in the room to her direction wearied her for a moment, so that the order to her muscles to arise, counteracted halfway, brought her convulsively out of her chair in an abrupt movement that spilled the ashtray onto the floor. Then, while Arthur waited patiently in mid-paragraph, she collected the cigarette butts and the burnt matches, thinking as she did so, Ungainly, awkward, clumsy—and she left the ashes. Elizabeth Langdon watched her without expression; she needs some more positive explanation of what I am doing, Natalie decided, before she estimates it and decides on a reaction, particularly in this new personality of hers, which still does not fit her very well. Perhaps she wants to be angry at someone and is trying to see if I am the one; I could so easily be a good person for Elizabeth to hate, and also I am the only person now standing in this room, and Elizabeth is usually angry at the largest moving target; Arthur cannot mention me now because the course of his argument is planned out for the next paragraph and it does not include me; he is probably, however, going ahead with the other parts of his mind to construct a new paragraph for use when I come back.

  She set the ashtray back on the arm of the chair where she would be sure to knock it off again when she sat down after coming back, and threaded her way tactfully and gracelessly through the people sitting on the floor, excusing herself to those in chairs as though they were a higher order of being; she avoided spilling a drink that sat on the floor, and stepped in an ashtray. Someone took advantage of her movement to begin a paragraph of his own. “On the other hand,” his voice began from another part of the room, “while this is all very true, you can hardly call it a complete picture of the problem. Take Kafka, for instance—I think you mentioned him as an example, and—”

  There were never any real silences in this conversation, except for the involuntary secret moment of dismay everyone felt at seeing Natalie move; these people—although there seemed to be so many of them, there were only nine or ten—all carried with them, seemingly, arguments of their own, arguments against the invisible, always-defeated antagonist who mocked ineffectually from the darkness of the bedroom at night, the bathroom wall, the window beyond the typewriter. They all carried their arguments well, and spoke when they could, and laughed occasionally, and sometimes found themselves in agreement with one another, although always the mocking antagonist needed to be conquered again, and, conquered, returned, in the face in the mirror, the logs in the fire, with his ceaseless nagging.

  “I was just about to explain that point,” Arthur Langdon said, his voice overriding the other. “When, for example, we consider the whole question as one purely of . . .”

  Natalie sighed as she reached the small foyer, and found the door ahead, and the porch beyond, and the cool night air awaiting her; with the door shut it was not possible to hear Arthur’s voice.

  The porch was actually only a miserable excuse for a place to sit; it was no more than a step up or a step down, so that sitting on the porch steps at the Langdons’ house meant the knees under the chin and the feet awkwardly placed and the back twisted, but the same trees were outside, living in the ground without curiosity about the insides of houses, and growing toward death as surely as Natalie. When one tree demonstrated that it was not rooted and perhaps not completely indifferent by disengaging itself from the others and coming toward Natalie where she sat on the porch step, she was not surprised—it was an odd night, anyway, and the day after tomorrow she should be going home for a while—and said only, with some crossness, “I don’t want to talk.”

  “All right.”

  It was almost companionable, and Natalie without intention moved over on the narrow step to leave room. “It’s so cool out here,” she said.

  “Then you do want to talk?” said the girl Tony.

  “They’re all talking, inside,” Natalie said.

  The girl Tony had not been invited within, Natalie knew wisely, and thought, She doesn’t care whether she sits on the steps of people who don’t invite her or whether she stands around with trees or whether she talks to me or not. She knew she ought not to talk because she had said she was not going to and because she knew this calm girl Tony calmly expected her to do what she said she was going to, but she said anyway, “You weren’t invited?”

  “No.”

  “Would you go if you were invited?” Natalie asked.

  “That depends,” said Tony carefully, “on where I was invited to go.”

  “This damn place,” Natalie said, “it always turns out not to have the things I want, after all. I get up inside and I knock over an ashtray and everyone looks at me and here I come rushing outdoors because I think it’s where I want to be, and then when I get out here it turns out to be the same old place I passed coming in.”

  “That’s because you came out the same door,” suggested Tony.

  She stood up, and Natalie thought quickly, She’s bored with me, and said, “You going away?”

  “I’ll see you again,” Tony said. “Good night.”

  It was not pleasant sitting on the porch after Tony had gone; a spot where two people have been talking, however briefly, is not after that a spot for one person to sit alone. Natalie got awkwardly to her feet and turned to go inside.

  In the brief foyer she met Elizabeth Langdon; the space was so small that they almost touched standing together, and Natalie crushed herself back against the door.

  “I came to look for you,” Elizabeth said. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  How she would love to help her fallen sisters, Natalie thought. “I was all right,” she said.

  “I saw you with someone,” Elizabeth said.

  For a minute Natalie was surprised at Elizabeth’s tone; does she think I made an appointment with the girl Tony to meet her during Elizabeth’s party? Natalie wondered; does she think I intended to invite her inside? or does she think we meet outside in the darkness, as though we had been outlawed from meeting in the light? For a minute Natalie wanted poignantly to ask Elizabeth what she thought she had seen through the eyes which for Elizabeth registered what Elizabeth’s brain recorded, and then she said instead, “Let’s go back inside.”

  Arthur seemed hardly to have stopped for breath, although his glass had been refilled, and he was saying, “It is not impossible to imagine a situation in which . . .”

  Saturday morning

  Dear Dad,

  I’m terribly sorry that I can’t come home, and I’m sorry too that this letter won’t reach you in time. I would have called you except I didn’t know until a little while ago that I couldn’t make it. You see, Arthur Langdon has given us this paper to do, and I’ve simply got to get it in by Monday, so of course I can’t come home, because the paper has to be very long and detailed and I’ll probably spend all weekend working on it. And even if I did come home, of course, I’d have to work all the time. So I’m really terribly sorry.

  By the way, you remember Tony? The girl I wrote you about? Well, I finally met her and I like her a lot. She lives in a house on the other side of the campus and yesterday afternoon we walked about four miles through the country just beyond the campus. I think she’s terribly interesting. Well, I’m sorry about not being able to come home. I’ll keep enough money from the check for my train fare home at Thanksgiving. I’m sure I can make it then. Hope Mother’s not disappointed. Give her my love.

  Natalie.

  Perhaps—and this was her most persistent thought, the thought that stayed with her and came suddenly to trouble her at odd moments, and to comfort her—suppose, actually, she were not Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Waite, a creature of deep lovely destiny; suppose she were someone else?

  Suppose, for instance, that all of this, from the day she could first remember (running through the grass, calling, “Daddy? Da
ddy?”), suppose it had all been no more than a split second of time, as in a dream, perhaps under an anesthetic; suppose that after this split second when her wandering mind fancied she was someone named Natalie Waite, that then she should wake up, bemused at first, and speaking thickly, and not really quite sure of her surroundings and the nurse bending over her and the voices saying, “There now, it wasn’t so bad, was it?” and suppose, waking, she should turn out to be someone else, someone real as Natalie was not? An old woman, perhaps, with a year or so to live, or a child having its tonsils removed, or a woman with twelve children having a charity operation, or a man. And, waking, looking around the white room and at the clean nurse, she could say, “I had the funniest dream all this time; I dreamed I was Waitalie Nat”—the dream already fading, and not complete—and the nurse could easily say, “Everyone has dreams under ether,” moving capably forward with a thermometer.

  Or even suppose, imagine, could it be true? that she was confined, locked away, pounding wildly against the bars on the window, attacking the keepers, biting at the doctors, screaming down the corridors that she was someone named Watalie Naite . . . suppose, during the time she thought she was eating in the dining room and going unwillingly to classes and sitting in her room reading . . . suppose these things were not real? Could it be that some sudden lucid horrible moment (a new treatment, perhaps? An inevitable return to actuality?) should show her brutally that the dining room and the professors were not at all there, but existed far away in her mind, provoked into life only by her mania? “I’m not prepared today,” she could be saying to her music professor, and the doctor, turning back her eyelid to look at her cornea, would murmur, “How long has she been in this particular stage?”

  But then, perhaps she was not dreaming, not mad, but alive and sound—living in this caught second of life only in the musing mind of some salesgirl or waitress or prostitute or some drab creature to whom the life of a girl in college named Naitalie Wat seemed romantic; suppose somewhere a murderess slept lightly, dreaming for a minute that she was young again and had a life to live; suppose that some minute, any minute, she should suddenly turn, move her head, speak strangely, and find herself not at all real?

  It was this that made her write her name crazily on everything, knowing and yet forgetting that her books and her clothes and her written sheets of paper would be gone with Natalie Waite, were only part of a larger dream; it was this which gave her the sudden sense, in conversation perhaps, that this particular portion of her dream might be condensed, only a fleeting shorthand scrap of words to be remembered later as a whole conversation; it was this which brought her abruptly to a perception that if she were dreaming her room and her words, she might well be dreaming her world, and so when she awoke she might say, amused, to the nurse, to the girl in the room next door, to the police, “Listen to what I dreamed; I dreamed there was a war; I dreamed there was a thing called television; I dreamed—listen to this—that there was something called an atom bomb. An atom bomb—I don’t know; I tell you I dreamed it.”

  Beyond this sense, however, of swift transient passage, was the worse, the frightful, conviction, of perhaps being in reality no more than Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold, and unable to brush away the solidity of this world but forced to deal with it as actual and dreary. Yet then—why, if this were true, the sudden sharp sympathetic picture of the white walls and the nurse coming closer? Why the graphically remembered room with the iron bedstead, the sure knowledge of the moment to slip the poison into the cup, the remembered pain? Why, above all, the constant unusual shock of the sound of her own name said aloud?

  It must be assumed that at one point, to be known as there, was the college, dark and drowsy under Natalie’s absence, and that at another point, known as here, was the home where her mother and father and brother lived, and to which she had been brought during a passage of time that in retrospect seemed nothing, so that her transition from there to here seemed no more than a fading in of one place upon another, a travel between points in time rather than in space.

  When her father met her at the bus stop late on Wednesday night Natalie was embarrassed, thinking of the seventy-five days, the ten and a half weeks, the two and a third months, since she had seen him or her mother or her brother or her home; he did not look different in that he still as always resembled the various pictures of him in so many different places, but before he had a chance to speak to her, Natalie said quickly, “I’ve got to go back on Friday—” before he had a chance, that is, to spoil everything by expecting too much of her, and he, after a long and surprised look, nodded and said, “It’s nice to see you again.”

  Once in the car, she asked, “How is Mother?”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “And Bud?”

  “Fine.”

  “You look well.”

  “I am, thanks, quite well.”

  Natalie thought then, He expects some embarrassment; he expects to even it off when we can sit and talk as usual. “How is everything?” she asked.

  “Much the same.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t come home before.”

  This was such an extraordinary statement that he obviously felt it impossible to answer. It was strange being close to him again in the car, just as they had been many times before, when for so long (seventy-five days, for instance) he had been a signature on a letter, a name she had used speaking to people, no more than the absent father of Natalie Waite.

  “Have you been well?” she asked to console him.

  “Very well, thank you,” he said.

  On the bus, in the hour and a half it took her to reach the bus stop where he met her, Natalie had conscientiously tried to plan out a suitable greeting for him. A theatrical “Daddy!” shouted while throwing herself into his arms was probably undesirable, considering that Mr. Waite could most likely not be counted on to stand agreeably and catch daughters hurling themselves at his head; no more could she consider seriously a brief handshake and a meaningful look, a caught breath, and a murmured “Father”; her favorite greeting, which she saw vaguely as taking up and carrying on a conversation as though they had just left it off, was impossible because she could not think how to start a conversation which might not have been finished; not, at least, a conversation with her father, who might leave many things undone but never a word unsaid. Because she had not quite made up her mind by the time she alighted from the bus, what had happened was what she had never stopped to consider, which is that her father—perhaps phrasing impossible greetings in his own plan of action and had with wisdom apparently decided to pass over the whole question of greeting as a useless civility and one only to be regretted later, and had decided to do his real receiving of Natalie at some more appropriate time. When Natalie stepped down from the bus and recognized her father, with an unfilial shock of dismay, she stood and he stood, and then she said, not at all truthfully until she heard herself saying it, “I have to go back on Friday.”

  “I’m sorry I have to go back on Friday,” she said again in the car.

  “Your mother will be disappointed,” he said dryly.

  “How is Mother?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  The driveway to her own house came as a surprise, and for a minute she was comfortable in recognizing, with a satisfactory feeling of difference, the old landmarks, and looking with the pride of new places on the stay-at-home grass and trees and flowers, and regarding with contempt the former narrow boundaries of her world.

  “It’s good to be home,” she said inadequately; unbelievable would perhaps have been a better word, or stupefying.

  Greeting her mother was no problem at all; for a minute the air was so full of Natalie’s appearance, her probable health, her shocking clothes, that there was no need for anyone to answer until her mother, accustomed again to Natalie after three minutes, subsided into her usual civil silence; Natalie and her br
other greeted one another with false cordiality and endeavored heartily not to speak again to one another past necessity.

  It was by then ten o’clock in the evening, and all four of them realized at once that they had from then on an evening of sorts to get through; they traditionally stayed up late, and tonight was a kind of gala evening, since everyone had been persuaded to give up other plans because Natalie was coming home, and Natalie herself had avoided appointments in order to come, and then, once Natalie had come and had turned out to be very little more entertaining or novel than the Natalie who had left seventy-five days before, there was nothing left to do except carry on the sort of formal conversation suited to the formal sort of guest Natalie had become. Seventy-five days before not one of them would have thought it necessary to address her unless they wanted to, but now it was almost obligatory to assure her warmly of the fact that she was always welcome in her own home—always welcome, with the clear implication that she was thus always a visitor there.

  As a result Mrs. Waite exerted herself to say, “I have a twenty-pound turkey for tomorrow, Natalie.” All such remarks as this were, too, directed pointedly and almost accusingly at Natalie by the addition of her name. “Biggest turkey I could get.”

  “Fine,” Natalie said, with an enthusiasm she had not ever before shown toward turkeys. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a good meal.”

  “How are the college meals?” Mrs. Waite asked eagerly.

  “Terrible,” Natalie said, trying to remember the college meals.

  “How do you like it there?” her brother asked, making a supreme effort.

  “Fine,” Natalie assured him earnestly. “I think it’s fine. How is your school?”

  “Oh, fine,” he said. “Fine.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Waite said fondly, and sighed, surveying her family circle. “All home again at last, and all together.”

  “Studying hard?” Natalie asked her brother hastily.