Price Of Salt, The

by Claire Morgan

  Why talk of Richard now, Therese thought irritably. She felt that Carol liked Richard—which could only be her own fault—and a distant jealousy prickled her, sharp as a pin.

  "Actually, I admire that more than the men who live alone or think they live alone, and end by making the stupidest blunders with women."

  Therese stared at Carol's pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She could find Carol's perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of evergreen, and she wanted to follow it, to put her arms around Carol.

  "It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?"

  "What?" Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.

  "Harge is the kind of man who doesn't let a woman enter his life. And on the other hand, your friend Richard might never marry. But the pleasure Richard will get out of thinking he wants to marry." Carol looked at Therese from head to foot. "The wrong girls," she added. "Do you dance, Therese? Do you like to dance?"

  Carol seemed suddenly cool and bitter, and Therese could have wept. "No," she said. She should never have told her anything about Richard, Therese thought, but now it was done.

  "You're tired. Come on to bed."

  Carol took her to the room that Harge had gone into Sunday, and turned down the covers of one of the twin beds. It might have been Harge's room, Therese thought. There was certainly nothing about it that suggested a child's room. She thought of Rindy's possessions that Harge had taken from this room, and imagined Harge moving first from the bedroom he shared with Carol, then letting Rindy bring her things into this room, keeping them here, closing himself and Rindy away from Carol.

  Carol laid some pajamas on the foot of the bed. "Good night, then," she said at the door. "Merry Christmas. What do you want for Christmas?"

  Therese smiled suddenly. "Nothing."

  That night she dreamed of birds, long, bright red birds like flamingos, zipping through a black forest and making scallopy patterns, arcs of red that curved like their cries. Then her eyes opened and she heard it really, a soft whistle curving, rising and coming down again with an extra note at the end, and behind it the real, feebler twitter of birds. The window was a bright gray. The whistling began again, just below the window, and Therese got out of bed. There was a long open-topped car in the driveway, and a woman standing in it, whistling. It was like a dream she looked out on, a scene without color, misty at the edges.

  Then she heard Carol's whisper, as clearly as if all three of them were in the same room together, "Are you going to bed or getting up?"

  The woman in the car with her foot on the seat said just as softly, "Both," and Therese heard the tremor of repressed laughter in the word and liked her instantly. "Go for a ride?" the woman asked. She was looking up at Carol's window with a big smile that Therese had just begun to see.

  "You nitwit," Carol whispered.

  "You alone?"

  "No."

  "Oh-oh."

  "It's all right. Do you want to come in?" The woman got out of the car.

  Therese went to the door of her room and opened it. Carol was just coming into the hall, tieing the belt of her robe.

  "Sorry I wakened you," Carol said. "Go back to bed."

  "I don't mind. Can I come down?"

  "Well, of course!” Carol smiled suddenly. "Get a robe out of the closet."

  Therese got a robe, probably a robe of Harge's, she thought, and went downstairs.

  "Who made the Christmas tree?" the woman was asking. They were in the living room.

  "She did." Carol turned to Therese. "This is Abby. Abby Gerhard, Therese Belivet."

  "Hello," Abby said.

  "How do you do." Therese had hoped it was Abby. Abby looked at her now with the same bright, rather popeyed expression of amusement that Therese had seen when she stood in the car.

  "You make a fine tree," Abby told her.

  "Will everybody stop whispering?" Carol asked.

  Abby chafed her hands together and followed Carol into the kitchen. "Got any coffee, Carol?"

  Therese stood by the kitchen table, watching them, feeling at ease because Abby paid no further attention to her, only took off her coat and started helping Carol with the coffee. Her waist and hips looked perfectly cylindrical, without any front or back, under her purple knitted suit. Her hands were a little clumsy, Therese noticed, and her feet had none of the grace of Carol's. She looked older than Carol, and there were two wrinkles across her forehead that cut deep when she laughed and her strong arched eyebrows rose higher. And she and Carol kept laughing now, while they fixed coffee and squeezed orange juice, talking in short phrases about nothing, or nothing that was important enough to be followed.

  Except Abby's sudden, "Well"—fishing a seed out of the last glass of orange juice and wiping her finger carelessly on her own dress—"how's old Harge?"

  "The same," Carol said. Carol was looking for something in the refrigerator, and watching her, Therese failed to hear all of what Abby said next, or maybe it was another of the fragmentary sentences that Carol alone understood, but it made Carol straighten up and laugh, suddenly and hard, made her whole face change, and Therese thought with sudden envy, she could not make Carol laugh like that, but Abby could.

  "I'm going to tell him that," Carol said. "I can't resist."

  It was something about a Boy Scout pocket gadget for Harge.

  "And tell him where it came from," Abby said, looking at Therese and smiling broadly, as if she should share in the joke, too. "Where're you from?" she asked Therese as they sat down in the table alcove at one side of the kitchen.

  "She's from New York," Carol answered for her, and Therese thought Abby was going to say, why how unusual, or something silly, but Abby said nothing at all, only looked at Therese with the same expectant smile, as if she awaited the next cue from her.

  For all their fussing about breakfast, there was only orange juice and coffee and some unbuttered toast that nobody wanted. Abby lighted a cigarette before she touched anything.

  "Are you old enough to smoke?" she asked Therese, offering her a red box that said Craven A's.

  Carol put her spoon down. "Abby, what is this?" she asked with an air of embarrassment that Therese had never seen before.

  "Thanks, I'd like one," Therese said, taking a cigarette. Abby settled her elbows on the table. "Well, what's what?" she asked Carol.

  "I suspect you're a little tight," Carol said.

  "Driving for hours in the open air? I left New Rochelle at two, got home and found your message, and here I am."

  She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day except what she felt like doing.

  "Well?" Abby said.

  "Well—I didn't win the first round," Carol said. Abby drew on her cigarette, showing no surprise at all. "For how long?"

  "For three months."

  "Starting when?"

  "Starting now. Starting last night, in fact." Carol glanced at Therese, then looked down at her coffee cup, and Therese knew Carol would not say any more with her sitting there.

  "That's not set already, is it?" Abby asked.

  "I'm afraid it is," Carol answered casually, with a shrug in her tone. "Just verbally, but it'll hold. What're you doing tonight? Late."

  "I'm not doing anything early. Dinner's at two today."

  "Call me sometime."

  "Sure."

  Carol kept her eyes down, looking down at the orange juice glass in her hand, and Therese saw a downward slant of sadness in her mouth now, a sadness not of wisdom but of defeat.

  "I'd take a trip," Abby said. "Take a little trip away somewhere." Then Abby looked at Therese, another of the bright, irrelevant, friendly glances, as if to include her in something it was impossible she could be included in, and anyway, Therese had gone stiff with the thought that Carol might take a trip away from her.

  "I'm not much in the mood," Carol said, but Therese heard the play of possibility in it n
evertheless.

  Abby squirmed a little and looked around her. "This place is gloomy as a coalpit in the mornings, isn't it?"

  Therese smiled a little. A coalpit, with the sun beginning to yellow the window sill, and the evergreen tree beyond it?

  Carol was looking at Abby fondly, lighting one of Abby's cigarettes. How well they must know each other, Therese thought, so well that nothing either of them said or did to the other could ever surprise, ever be misunderstood.

  "Was it a good party?" Carol asked.

  "Mm," Abby said indifferently. "Do you know someone called Bob Haversham?"

  "No."

  "He was there tonight. I met him somewhere before in New York. Funnily enough, he said he was going to work for Rattner and Aird in the brokerage department."

  "Really."

  "I didn't tell him I knew one of the bosses.”

  "What time is it?" Carol asked after a moment. Abby looked at her wrist watch, a small watch set in a pyramid of gold panels. "Seven thirty. About. Do you care?"

  "Want to sleep some more, Therese?"

  "No. I'm fine."

  "I'll drive you in whenever you have to go," Carol said.

  But it was Abby who drove her finally, around ten o'clock, because she had nothing else to do, she said, and she would enjoy it.

  Abby was another one who liked cold air, Therese thought as they picked up speed on the highway. Who rode in an open-topped car in December?

  "Where'd you meet Carol?" Abby yelled at her.

  Therese felt she might almost, but not quite, have told Abby the truth. "In a store," Therese yelled back.

  "Oh?" Abby drove erratically, whipping the big car around curves, putting on speed where one didn't expect it. "Do you like her?"

  "Of course!" What a question! Like asking her if she believed in God.

  Therese pointed out her house to Abby when they turned into the street. "Do you mind doing something for me?" Therese asked. "Could you wait here a minute? I want to give you something to give to Carol."

  "Sure," Abby said.

  Therese ran upstairs and got the card she had made, and stuck it under the ribbon of Carol's present. She took it back down to Abby. "You're going to see her tonight, aren't you?"

  Abby nodded, slowly, and Therese sensed the ghost of a challenge in Abby's curious black eyes, because she was going to see Carol and Therese wasn't, and what could Therese do about it?

  "And thanks for the ride in."

  Abby smiled. "Sure you don't want me to take you anywhere else?"

  "No, thanks," Therese said, smiling, too, because Abby would certainly have been glad to take her even to Brooklyn Heights.

  She climbed her front steps and opened her mailbox. There were two or three letters in it, Christmas cards, one from Frankenberg's. When she looked into the street again, the big cream-colored car was gone, like a thing she had imagined, like one of the birds in the dream.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “And now you make a wish," Richard said.

  Therese wished it. She wished for Carol.

  Richard had his hands on her arms. They were standing under a thing that looked like a beaded crescent, or a section of a starfish, that hung from the hall ceiling. It was ugly, but the Semco family attributed almost magical powers to it, and hung it up on special occasions. Richard's grandfather had brought it from Russia.

  "What did you wish?" He smiled down at her possessively. This was his house, and he had just kissed her, though the door into the living room was open and filled with people.

  "You're not supposed to tell," Therese said.

  "You can tell in Russia."

  "Well, I'm not in Russia."

  The radio roared louder suddenly, voices singing a carol. Therese drank the rest of the pink eggnog in her glass. "I want to go up to your room," she said. Richard took her hand, and they started up the stairs. "Ri—chard?"

  The aunt with the cigarette holder was calling him from the living-room door.

  Richard said a word Therese didn't understand, and waved a hand at her. Even on the second floor, the house trembled with the crazy dancing below, the dancing that had nothing to do with the music. Therese heard another glass fall, and pictured the pink foamy eggnog rolling across the floor. This was tame compared to the real Russian Christmases they had used to celebrate in the first week in January, Richard said. Richard smiled at her as he closed the door of his room.

  "I like my sweater," he said.

  "I'm glad." Therese swept her full skirt in an arc and sat on the edge of Richard's bed. The heavy Norwegian sweater she had given Richard was on the bed behind her, lying across its tissued box. Richard had given her a skirt from an East India shop, a long skirt with green and gold bands and embroidery. It was lovely, but Therese did not know where she could ever wear it.

  "How about a real shot? That stuff downstairs is sickening." Richard got his bottle of whisky from his closet floor.

  Therese shook her head. "No, thanks."

  "This'd be good for you."

  She shook her head again. She looked around her at the high-ceilinged, almost square room, at the wallpaper with the barely discernible pattern of pink roses, at the two peaceful windows curtained in slightly yellowed white muslin. From the door, there were two pale trails in the green carpet, one to the bureau and one to the desk in the corner. The pot of brushes and the portfolio on the floor by the desk were the only signs of Richard's painting. Just as painting took up only a corner of his brain, she felt, and she wondered how much longer he would go on with it before he dropped it for something else. And she wondered, as she had often wondered before, if Richard liked her only because she was more sympathetic with his ambitions than anyone else he happened to know now, and because he felt her criticism was a help to him. Therese got up restlessly and went to the window. She loved the room—because it stayed the same and stayed in the same place—yet today she felt an impulse to burst from it. She was a different person from the one who had stood here three weeks ago. This morning she had awakened in Carol's house. Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her.

  "You're different today," Richard said so abruptly that a thrill of peril passed down her body.

  "Maybe it's the dress," she said.

  She was wearing a blue taffeta dress that was God knows how old, that she hadn't put on since her first months in New York. She sat down on the bed again, and looked at Richard who stood in the middle of the floor with the little glass of straight whisky in his hand, his clear blue eyes moving from her face to her feet in the new high-heeled black shoes, back to her face again.

  "Terry." Richard took her hands, pinned her hands to the bed on either side of her. The smooth, thin lips descended on hers, firmly, with the flick of his tongue between her lips and the aromatic smell of fresh whisky. "Terry, you're an angel," Richard's deep voice said, and she thought of Carol saying the same thing.

  She watched him pick up his little glass from the floor and set it with the bottle into the closet. She felt immensely superior to him suddenly, to all the people below stairs. She was happier than any of them. Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out—

  "Pretty?" Richard said.

  Therese sat up. "It's a beauty!"

  "I finished it last night. I thought if it was a good day, we'd go to the park and fly it." Richard grinned like a boy, proud of his handiwork. "Look at the back."

  It was a Russian kite, rectangular and bowed like a shield, its slim frame notched and tied at the corners. On the front, Richard had painted a cathedral with whirling domes and a red sky behind it.

  "Let's go fly it now," Therese said.

  They carried the kite downstairs. Then everybody saw them and came into the hall, uncles, aunts, and cousins, until the hall was a din and Richard had to hold the kite in the air to protect it. The noise irritated Therese, but Rich
ard loved it.

  "Stay for the champagne, Richard!" one of the aunts shouted, one of the aunts with a fat midriff straining like a second bosom under a satin dress.

  "Can't," Richard said, and added something in Russian, and Therese had a feeling she often had, seeing Richard with his family, that there must have been a mistake, that Richard might be an orphan himself, a changeling, left on the doorstep and brought up a son of this family. But there was his brother Stephen standing in the doorway, with Richard's blue eyes, though Stephen was even taller and thinner.

  "What roof?" Richard's mother asked shrilly. "This roof?"

  Someone had asked if they were going to fly the kite on the roof, and since the house hadn't a roof one could stand on, Richard's mother had gone off into peals of laughter. Then the dog began to bark.

  "I'm going to make you that dress!" Richard's mother called to Therese, wagging her finger admonishingly. "I know your measurements!"

  They had measured her with a tape in the living room, in the midst of all the singing and present opening, and a couple of the men had tried to help, too. Mrs. Semco put her arm around Therese's waist, and suddenly Therese embraced her and kissed her firmly on the cheek, her lips sinking into the soft powdered cheek, in that one second pouring out in the kiss, and in the convulsive clasp of her arm, the affection Therese really had for her, that Therese knew would hide itself again as if it did not exist, in the instant she released her.