“Yes,” I panted, “yes. The worst. Anything, I don’t care, as long as I don’t have to go through any more of this—”
“Then you wait for me out here. It’s better if he doesn’t know that I’m trying to find out for someone else. He lives right in the same house here—” And she gave me a little consolatory clasp on each of the upper arms with her two hands at once.
“Try to tell me if there’s any chance—” I begged. “If they’ve all been lost—”
“I’ll be down as soon as I can,” she whispered. And she turned from me and went in, and I was alone in that brooding doorway of the oracle.
I heard her step going up inside, thinning until it had faded out. I said to myself, Do you hear that? That is just the tread of a tired girl, a drudge, working somewhere in a factory or shop, going up inside a tenement house; nothing more. Why have you come here? Why do you stand here waiting, for her to bring you down knowledge that no one in this place can possibly have, that no one in this city can possibly have yet tonight? You fool, you fool, why do you strain your ears to catch it to its last? That is not a step going up into rarefied regions of prescience, that is just a shoddy step upon a crumbling stair within a moldering building, a sound such as the inmates make all the time, coming and going, night and day. Why do you hang upon it so?
I was left alone there a long time. I could see, all right, and know the things about me. My car was there at the curb, glistening in the dark, with a thin ripple of wet orange paint running down its hood in one place where the light from the doorway struck out at it. A ripple that never moved, and yet was warped and liquid as running ripples are. I even shifted once, from where she had left me standing, and moved over to it, and stood up close beside it, my hands pressing down tight upon the top of the door, as if I were unsteady and needed something to cling to in order to remain upright. My head inclined, as if peering intently at the upholstery of the seat backs.
Yes, the car was real, it was there. My hands could feel it, my eyes could see it, I had but to touch a button to make light shoot out of it, light that no shadows could withstand; but yet the shadows had the best of it, it was powerless to rive this pall that blanketed the eyes that looked at it, the mind that considered it. It could not take me out of the shade, it was I who had brought it into the shade with me; its powers of contrast were lost, it became one with the other Gothic shadows about me. For the shadows came from within, and so anything they fell upon was shadowed. Just as if you front your eyes with a piece of smoked glass, the most sparkling sunlight will become somber.
Each unto himself has his own world that he looks out upon, and though someone else were to stand on the very selfsame inch of ground your feet were placed upon, guided by chalk marks, he would not see the same things you did. There would have been two different views there, not just one. Or is there any world at all, I wondered, out there before us as we look upon it; may it not be inside, behind the eyes, and out front nothing, just a blank infinite? But madness lurked along that trail, and I quickly turned aside.
A little ownerless dog came along the quiet emptiness of the street, on soundless trotting paws, and veered over toward me when he saw me standing there, and sniffed sketchily toward my shoe. I looked down at him, and his eyes found mine and looked straight into them for a moment, from that low level. He moved his tail once, in memory of some past friendliness, and then he turned and trotted away. His light-colored body blurred into the shadows and spiraled to extinction with a sort of optical swirl, that left nothing as it closed up at its center.
You are trapped too, I thought; just as trapped as I am. You had to come along at this precise moment and through this exact street. You could not come at any other moment, nor through any other street. That halt you made, that sniff you gave, that single tail wag, all those things it was ordered that you do, it was written for you to do, hundreds of hours ago, or perhaps hundreds of years ago, I don’t know which. They lay waiting for you to do, there was no escape from them, no turning aside, until you had arrived at them.
Yes, we are trapped, you and I; but I am even more trapped than you, for you at least did not know you had to do those things, but I—now—know that you did have to.
I raised my shuddering face from the squared frame of my arms upon the car doortop as I heard her step coming slowly down the stairs again, inside there in the house. The sound seemed to enlarge, as if it were an empty shell or husk that surrounded her, so that I could catch it even outside there where I was, and yet it wasn’t a very heavy tread nor a very sharp one. More like a dried leaf whispering and scratching as it idly rolled from step to step.
I stood motionless a moment, unable to release the car, unable to order my body about. The leafy patter had reached bottom, had stopped. Then when I turned, she was already in the doorway, immobile herself, leaning against the side of it, inert, looking over at me, with her head propped over to the brick facing as if it were loose upon her shoulders.
He’s gone! flashed in me. Every limp line of her body expresses—
The intervening sidewalk seemed to give a tug under me, as when someone bodily pulls a rug you are standing on, and I was up on the doorstep close beside her.
“It frightens me,” she moaned, “whenever I hear him do it. I can’t stand it—” She pressed both hands against herself. “My stomach gets all cold—”
I could see that her teeth must be chattering; her lips were pulsing, without speech, so it must have been that.
“He knows—He knew—” she whimpered. “Before I even had gotten up the courage to say anything— Maybe he could tell by the look on my face. But that always scares me too. He must’ve known you were right down here. ‘Go down and tell her—’ he said.”
“Maybe he saw the car from the window.” I wasn’t aware I’d said it aloud, but I must have, for I heard her answer me.
“His room’s in the back of the house.”
That flicked by unnoticed, a twig carried past on the dark stream lashing about me, threatening to break over my head. I held onto her, as one would who was literally in danger of being engulfed and swept away; my hands clung to the front edges of her coat and pulled them out toward me.
“What?” I breathed. “Eileen, what?”
“They’re all dead. All fourteen. No one was left alive in it.”
I could feel darkness, like a cold whiplash, coil close about my throat, about to be pulled tight.
Her voice came from far away, it seemed to have to travel a long distance before it could reach me. She was holding me now, and not I her. And we were close; yet her voice seemed to come from far off. “Then he said, ‘But tell her she’ll see her father again.’ Do you hear me, Miss Reid? Can you understand what I’m saying? He said, ‘Tell her to go home, she’ll have word.’”
“But he was on it. I know, because I phoned a moment too late, and it had already taken off, and he was on it. And if there was no one left alive in it—”
“Here, let me help you over to your car. Do as he says. Go home—”
I was in the car now. She stood there watching me. I could see her face blurredly.
“Are you all right? Shall I get you something? Are you able to drive?”
“I guess so,” I said vaguely. “You don’t have to do much. You just push your foot down a little, and keep the wheel steady—”
Her face slipped slowly backward in the darkness, and I must have been driving.
I’d see him again. Oh, yes, I supposed I would; but how? As a dead body on a stretcher, being taken out of a plane a few days from now?
The two things contradicted each other. If they were all dead on that plane, then he was too. If I would see him again alive, then they were not all dead on that plane. And of the two, I believed the first.
Once a red light stopped me at a busy intersection. I would not have stopped for the light itself, but there was a car in front of me, and that did, and I stopped for that, gently nosing into it until I remembered to brake
. Some other car came up alongside me, on the outside lane, and stopped abreast. I think it was a taxi, I don’t know. The monotonous, staccato running account of a prizefight was blaring from its radio, driver and two back-seat passengers alike huddled forward to catch every word.
And then suddenly there was a break, an instant’s silence, and a voice said with knell-like clarity: “We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a news flash just received. Ground parties have now reached the scene of the transcontinental air liner that crashed. It has now been definitely established that there are no survivors. The bodies of all those who were on the plane when it took off from its last stopping place have now been accounted for. Some of them were found at a distance of as much as—”
Horns were honking angrily behind me. The red light was gone long ago, and the car ahead of me was gone, and the taxi alongside was gone. My own car was standing there in midroadway, damming up the flow of traffic.
It was easy; there wasn’t much to remember. You just put your foot down lightly, like that, and kept the wheel from swinging too much. And you waited to cry until you got home. You kept your face numb and stony like that.
You weren’t sure that it was home, even when you’d driven up before it. Your hands on the wheel seemed to have guided you without your knowledge, and they had no eyes, only memories. You looked twice to make sure, and even then you weren’t sure. But then the door opened, and they were standing there in it, waiting to admit you, so you knew you had come back to the right place after all.
They were all standing around in the entrance hall waiting for me, when I came in. They were all looking at me in that mute, helpless way people have, when they want to tell you something and don’t know how to go about it.
“I know about it,” I said quietly. “I heard it on the street just now.”
Somebody’s arm came tentatively toward me, and I said, “No, I can get to the stairs all right. Just let me through, just make way—”
Somebody sobbed surreptitiously behind me, and was hushed peremptorily by someone else, in an undertone. I suppose it was Mrs. Hutchins.
If only they wouldn’t stand there ranged about watching me go up, I knew I could go up quite steadily. Five steps already, without a fluctuation, and with just one hand to the rail.
“Miss Reid,” somebody said timidly from their midst.
I turned my head inquiringly, and it was Signe. I wouldn’t have known, but Mrs. Hutchins’ angry little slash of the hand, in an effort to silence her that came too late, pointed her out to me.
“Yes?”
“And then this come, too.”
I saw where their eyes all turned to look, afraid to touch it. It was a maize envelope on the edge of a table, one corner stabbing out over the rim.
The death-telegram. The official notification.
“Give it to me,” I said. “I’ll take it up with me.”
Mrs. Hutchins snatched at it and hurried up the three or four steps after me to hand it to me herself.
I turned away, and went up another step. And then still a step more. It was harder now. The telegram seemed to weigh so much.
I stopped again. There was a ripping sound, and my finger had burst through its flap. The envelope fell away over the banister.
The violet ink had blurred; the capitals were all out of focus. But then as I stared, it coalesced again into clean, thin lines of print.
JUST HEARD. DON’T WORRY, UNHARMED. STAYED
OVER FOR BUSINESS. ARRIVING DAY AFTER
TOMORROW BY TRAIN.
FATHER.
I heard Mrs. Hutchins’ voice again. It seemed to come up toward me from the telegram, as though the message itself were speaking. But that might have been because the telegram, and I as well, were going effortlessly down toward her on the lower steps where she stood.
“Quick! Help me with her, one of you! Can’t you see she’s falling into a dead faint?”
At the station waiting for the train, I thought at first that I was going to tell him right away, that it would be the first thing to pass my lips. And then when I saw him coming through the gate, saw that blur of tan camel’s-hair coat that I had already detected through the transverse lattices, chopped up into segments, cohere into his single form and come toward me through the funneling-out crowd; and when I ran to him and crushed myself against him and held still, I couldn’t say a word. Nothing would come; neither that nor anything else. Just being up against him, just feeling him hold me to him, was enough. It was so warm there and so safe, against his coat. There was no night there, against his coat. There were no stars looking down at you. Just his face, just the warmth of his breath was all that was over you.
We stood there, riveted, until the disgorging crowd had thinned to a trickle, and then the last laggards had filed through and dispersed, and we were alone there, in the middle of that vast, gloomy floor space. Oblivious in our motionless embrace, conspicuous. The way a submerged piling or rock formation stands out when the water level has dropped all around it.
“It did something to you,” he said compassionately.
He tried to take my chin and turn my face more fully so he could see it. I held it back from him.
“Don’t let’s stand here any more,” I said muffledly. “Let’s go outside and get away from here.”
We started walking out of the station, still clinging together.
“Have you been waiting long?” he asked.
“Since daylight.”
I felt a momentary hitch snarl the evenness of his pace beside me.
“But this is a nine-o’clock train; I thought you always knew that.”
“I know. But I had to go part of the way to meet it, even if it was only up to the outside of the gate. That seemed to be the only way to bring it in quicker.”
“Poor kid,” he said under his breath.
He hadn’t seen my face clearly until now; only a quick flash as we rushed together in the gloom back there. He saw it now, in the little channel of clear daylight that was all there was between the cavernous station mouth and the car. He didn’t say anything. He stopped short in his tracks, and a flicker passed across his own face, and then he went on again. We went on together, for our arms were still interlocked behind our backs, mine on the inside of his loose-hanging coat.
“Drive?” he said, when I’d closed the door after us.
“Yes, go ahead.”
Our hands touched on the wheel rim.
“Your hands are cold.”
“They’ve been cold for three days straight.” I blew on them. “They’ll be all right now.” I ran one in under his arm, and the other one around on the outside, and linked them there.
“It gave you the works,” he said huskily, scowling at the traffic up ahead.
He didn’t say anything more until we’d lost most of it again and were in the clear, near home.
“How long were you like that? I tried to get word to you fast as I could. Was there much of a time lag between the news and my wire?”
“That wasn’t it,” I said briefly. I changed the tense. “It isn’t that. Not the smashup.”
He thought that over for a while, and I saw that he couldn’t make it out.
“Jean,” he said concernedly, “you’re a different girl. All the fuzz is off, and— I don’t know, it’s as though I’d been away ten years.”
I felt like saying, I’m not a different girl. It’s just that the world I’m in is a different world.
They were all glad to see him; they said so in a word or two, in varying stages of intensity. But the difference was, it was over for them, they were back again where they’d been before it came along. I wasn’t; I never could be again.
Weeks took his hat and coat in a special way, folded the coat downward over his arm, almost caressingly, as though it were very fragile, very precious. That was his way of showing it. Cook said, “I’ve made some molasses muffins for you, sir,” with her eyes a little moister than molasses muffins would seem to warran
t. Mrs. Hutchins gave the rest of them a lot of crackling, unnecessary orders, sent them scattering in all directions with good-natured severity.
But they were lucky, all of them. For them it was over.
Presently we went in and sat down together at the breakfast table. He said, “Ah, this is nice!” and planed his hands together briskly. The sunlight was like jonquil pollen, lying all over the tablecloth, and even streaking his shoulder and the edge of his sleeve. And the glassware sparkled, and there was a swollen little face leering back at mine from the nearest facet of the mirrored percolator. He shuffled through the accumulation of mail, without opening any of it.
I waited. But it had to come out sooner or later. It was there, it had to come out. Sunlight couldn’t dissolve it. The fact that he was back couldn’t dissolve it. It was like a cake of ice formed around my heart. It needed a pick and tongs to pry it away.
“Jean,” he said, “what is it? What’s been done to you?”
We both slowed up in our eating. Then we both stopped eating entirely, before we’d reached the point at which we were through. The little scattered noises of our cups and plates stopped, and we were quiet, and we were just looking at each other.
“Look,” I said abruptly. “I’ve got to talk about it. I’ve got to talk about it to you. It’s no good trying not to. I’m thinking of it every minute of the time, by day, by night. It’s got to come out. It’s got to!” I banged my fist down on the table, once and twice and again, each time more lightly than the time before.
He jumped up and came around the table to my side, and standing beside my chair, held my head and shoulders pressed against him. And I clung to him like that, and turned my face inward against him.
“But it’s over, Jean. It’s over. Just think of it that way.”
“I tried to tell you outside in the car. It’s not the smashup, not the close shave.”
“Then what? What’s done this to you?”
“It’s that I was told it was coming before it came. There’s a man here in this city that said it would happen. And it did.”
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