Then, without warning, one blinding beam of the big spot turned suddenly and fell directly upon me, fell also upon the chrome plating of the coffeepot, striking from its sides a silver dazzle. And I knew that the moment I always feared had come. My voice broke in the middle of a word, and my eyes stared. My body froze into a state that was almost catatonic, though I knew, as if from a distance, what was going on around me. Vaguely I heard voices raised in alarm, heard someone speaking my name. But there was nothing I could do except stare in utmost terror at that silver flash of light. Then the spot was turned off, in response to Hillary’s shouted command. I was aware of what was happening, but I couldn’t move. Red was alternately whining and barking wildly. Red knew.
Hillary came behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders, shaking me gently. Someone whispered, and I heard him stop the whisper curtly. With the light turned off the nightmare broke its spell, releasing me, and I could look about in shame and dismay.
I was trembling and my body was bathed in sweat, but the spinning was gone, the tension released. The moment of frightful revelation had once more been postponed.
Hillary pulled back my chair and helped me up. “We’ll take a break,” he told the others, and I went with him blindly to a side door that opened upon the June morning, leaving the whispering behind.
We sat on the grass beside the pond, not bothering with a bench. Inside the theater someone had released Red, and he came dashing out to frolic around us, making friends with Hillary at once. At least I had stopped shivering.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m all right now. I really am,” but my voice broke as I spoke the words.
He was studying me with a sympathy that was as welcome as it was unexpected. I needed someone to cling to, if only for this passing moment.
“Has this happened to you before?” he asked.
“Not for a long time. I’m so awfully sorry—”
“Stop apologizing,” he told me. “I shouldn’t have drawn you into something you didn’t want to do.”
I liked his saying that. Usually men considered very little what I wanted, but were given to instructing me in what they thought I ought to do.
“Do you know what causes it?” he went on.
“No, not really. Yet it seems to happen when there are strong lights around. Perhaps they hypnotize me in some way. I’m not unconscious. I know what’s happening, but I just freeze.”
“I see,” he said quietly. “I’d like to understand.”
With complete naturalness he took my hand in his and held it gently.
“You’re very pretty,” he said, “and much too frightened. What can I do to help?”
For the first time since Peter’s death I wanted to let myself go, to respond to a touch, to accept anything that might be offered. Hillary Lange was even more compelling up close than he was on a stage, and I felt all my resistance weakening.
“Try to talk about it,” he said. “Talking may help.”
That was what Peter had always said, and sometimes I had tried. Now I tried again, haltingly, putting my few memories into words, finding it almost easier to talk to a stranger than to my husband.
Mostly, I remembered mountains. Not the gentle mountains of the eastern coastline, but the tall, fierce mountains of the West. Sometimes I could close my eyes and glimpse a rugged cone-shaped outline that stood up alone against the sky.
Over the years I’d had a strange half-waking dream in which I seemed to be on a horse riding wildly toward the high, dominant mountain, driven by the desperate knowledge that I must help someone. Someone I loved who was in terrible danger. In my dream I could feel a cold wind stinging my face, and hear the sound of hooves pounding after me in frightening pursuit. But I never followed through to any conclusion, and when I was fully awake the dream had no meaning.
All this I poured out in a tumble of words to Hillary Lange, and he listened gravely, considerately.
There was something more that I had never told anyone, and that I couldn’t put into words even now. I could almost remember the face of a young boy, perhaps a few years older than I. A face that could appear stubborn and rebellious, yet always kind when he looked at me. I had no name to attach to the memory, but only a sense of warmth and comfort. The memory of a time of frantic fear, when young arms had held me awkwardly, young hands had soothed me as they might have soothed a lost kitten.
Perhaps I’d never told Peter because he would have analyzed a precious feeling out of existence. He would have told me that I was looking for a protector and this was my sexual fantasy, my fantasy man. Whether that was true or not, I didn’t want to tell any of this to the stranger beside me. But there was something else that I could speak of.
“I remember a mountain town with one main street and false fronts that made it look like a movie set. Except that these were the real thing. And there was a house. My grandmother’s house, I think. The house of my father’s mother.”
“Take me into your house,” Hillary said. I could sense the electric urgency in him, and knew that he had the actor’s ability to empathize, to almost become me.
But not even in response to so intense an interest could I open the door of that house.
I had tried before, at Peter’s instigation, but I could never force mind and memory beyond the closed door. Sometimes there were flashes that came without warning. Glimpses in my mind’s eye of an enormous shadowy room, of a flat box of some dark wood that sat on a table. A box I was forbidden to touch. Vaguely, too, I remembered my grandmother. Grandmother Persis of Morgan House. Her first husband’s name had been Morgan, like mine. The “silver Morgans” of Jasper, Colorado. This I knew from my mother’s tales. But I couldn’t remember my grandfather—if I’d ever known him. And there had been another man. That man named Noah. But here my thoughts flinched away, not wanting to remember.
I went on aloud to Hillary. “Something must have happened in that house when I was about eight years old. Something so terrible that it made me dangerously ill. Afterward my mother brought me home to the East, where she had grown up, and I was in a hospital for a long while. When I was well again, I couldn’t remember anything about that time in Colorado. What was more, my mother didn’t want me to remember. I never saw my grandmother again. So much is gone.”
Gone except for those disturbing glimpses that came like flashes of light, and those times when the feeling of tension began to build and I grew horribly afraid. It was as though something in me knew that once I remembered I would be annihilated. My reason—everything—would go! Peter said that was ridiculous, but he could never convince me of anything else.
I spoke abruptly to Hillary. “Let’s go back. Tell them to keep those lights off, and I’ll try again.”
He looked approving. “Good for you. I like courage. Come along then.”
Courage? The thing Peter had always told me I had too little of? I stiffened my spine and my will, and went back with an inner quaking that I didn’t allow anyone to suspect. And I read my lines straight through, coming in properly on the cues. When the reading was over the actors crowded around me, and some of them even patted me demonstratively, as people were often given to doing. As though I were a child who had fallen and been hurt and was recovering, much to everyone’s relief. It was a role I was very tired of playing.
Hillary stood aside and said nothing, offered me no soothing words or pats, but there seemed something truly concerned in his watchfulness that reached me. When the company broke for lunch, he led Red and me out to his bright yellow car and drove us to Aunt Ruth’s. She came to the door with a raised eyebrow when I brought Hillary up the porch steps, but she greeted him guardedly and invited him in.
His refusal was graceful enough, and I expected him to vanish out of my life and never be seen again. Instead he held my hand for just a moment.
“Will you have dinner with me tonight, Laurie? This is our night off at the theater.”
It was my new self who answered, “I’d love to.�
��
“Then I’ll pick you up around six-thirty. There’s a good place out on the highway.”
I wondered if there was a tiny edge of triumph in the laughing look he turned on Aunt Ruth, as though he guessed that she didn’t wholly approve. Then he was gone, driving off in that yellow car, and I followed her inside.
“That was fast,” she said. “Where did you find him?”
She knew very well about those spells I’d had most of my life, and I told her just what had happened, perhaps sounding a little pleased with myself.
“Watch out with that one,” she said when I was through. “He’s pretty overwhelming.”
“I know,” I said, and she let it go.
She had tried to bring me down to earth, but I was too keyed up, too newly intoxicated. I ran past her up the stairs to my room—the room that always waited for me. It wasn’t necessary—or possible—to explain to anyone about Hillary Lange. There was something I had glimpsed in him out there beside the pond when he had been concerned about me and trying to help. Like my mother, like Peter, Hillary Lange might be another “nurturer.” And did I really want that?
“Here we go again,” I said to Red, and he barked his approval. Red had liked Hillary too.
I tried to reassure myself. An interesting event had happened in my life, and I didn’t mean to turn away from it. I needn’t ever again be as dependent as I had in the past—of that I was sure—but I wanted a friend. Even as unlikely a friend as Hillary Lange, and I wasn’t going to let Aunt Ruth’s prejudice stop me.
Falling in love was something else. That wasn’t for me right now. I closed my eyes, determinedly foolish, and began to think about the coming dinner tonight.
II
In mid-July, Hillary’s dressing room backstage at the Dillon Theater was warm and close. The small fan turning listlessly on his makeup shelf didn’t help a great deal as I sat waiting for the curtain to ring down on the evening performance. The telegram that had brought me here lay folded in my purse, and I didn’t need to read it again until Hillary was with me.
What a lovely few weeks these had been. Nearly over now, leaving me still unsure of what lay ahead. From the first, Hillary had sensed the troubled ground on which I walked, sensed my readiness to draw back in the face of even the slightest coercion. So there had been no pressure on his part, but simply an alert waiting.
In a way that puzzled me. Why Laurie Morgan for Hillary Lange? He could have almost any woman he wanted. It was a little like Peter all over again, and I was by turns happy and doubtful, and still terribly unsure—of myself. I wasn’t ready for any irrevocable step, and he seemed to be willing to wait. Bit by bit he had drawn me out—“discovering” me, as he put it. Mostly, wonderfully, we liked the same things. We liked Tennessee Williams and Paul Zindel and Neil Simon. We enjoyed the novels of Jorge Luis Borges—and Agatha Christie. We adored Alec Guinness and Paul Newman and the Marx Brothers, and we were in thorough agreement as to the excellence of Jean Stapleton and Maureen of the same name. We agreed about Laurence Olivier and argued over Richard Burton, finding it as much fun to argue as to agree. We were fervently for peace and wanted to do something about world hunger—though what, we weren’t entirely sure.
We were, I suppose, entirely self-absorbed. I managed a leave of absence from my job, and felt only a slight pang when it was so easily granted. Aunt Ruth was a good sport. Though she spoke her mind from time to time, she let me stay with her until Hillary’s season ended. This was to happen in a week or so because the stock company run had not been an unmitigated success and a summer play boasting name actors was coming to fill out the rest of July and August.
Occasionally, when Hillary had the time, we drove to a nearby stable, since we both loved horses and riding. A residue for me from the days when I’d visited my grandmother in Colorado and learned to ride by the time I was six. Hillary had done some work in Hollywood and ridden in a few cowboy pictures, among other things, so he was at home in a saddle.
Probably by this time he knew more about me than I did about him. I knew that his father, whom he’d loved, had walked out when he was quite young, though father and son had been reunited later. Other than that he told me very little. I sensed that he was a man who enjoyed possessing, but that it was hard for him to give himself away to another human being. In spite of his open manner there was a reserve in him, a privacy, that I respected. If he had to allow me time, I had to make the same gift to him. So to some extent we moved warily with each other. He could be moody at times, turning touchy and remote.
I knew that he remembered unhappiness and was afraid of total commitment, of marriage, of permanent ties. So we left each other free—and I liked that best too. Yet I sensed that with the season’s ending there must be a change. Either a strengthening of our relationship or its dissolving. I had a feeling of waiting, of marking time, of something about to happen. I was not entirely sure of what it was that I really wanted.
There was one trait of Hillary’s that disturbed me. He was, I discovered, capable of exploding into terrible rage. I saw this happen one morning when I was watching a rehearsal, and I knew that everyone on the stage was alarmed by him in that moment. He went off by himself afterward for a few hours of recovery and we left him alone. When I next saw him, he seemed himself again, but the explosion had frightened me. There was an uncertainty that lay behind my affection, and I knew that nothing was firmly settled between us yet.
Now as I sat in his dressing room, laughter rang out from the stage. The play was nearing its end, and in a little while the applause would sound. After the curtain calls Hillary would come rushing in, keyed to that high that actors reach after a good performance. The company and the players might not have been remarkably successful, but audiences came to see Hillary Lange, and the applause was for him, no matter what role he played.
Often I had the feeling that while Hillary was enormously talented, he had yet to find himself. He had written an unsuccessful play or two, tried his hand at directing—yet had always fallen back on acting for his bread and butter. Not so much because he was especially gifted as an actor, but because of that mesmerizing spell he could cast upon an audience, and that made him valuable in any play. He had only to be himself. Already I knew that he wanted a great deal more than that, but exactly what I had no idea, and perhaps he didn’t know either. Not yet.
Just once he had alarmed me by his talk of writing another play—about me. About amnesia. My sudden anger had surprised us both. I knew it stemmed from what Peter had done. I meant never to be anyone’s guinea pig again, and when he saw my reaction Hillary told me to forget it. Of course he would write nothing that might hurt and upset me. Yet a certain damage had been done, and I moved uneasily with him for a time after that. We weren’t quite sure of each other yet, and we both held back, sensing perhaps that this might be a greater commitment than any casual affair. A greater commitment than either of us was as yet ready to make.
One of the things that most disturbed me was a sense of his watching, observing, questioning. As though I were a puzzle he must unravel. Yet he was always gentle with me, never demanding. Actors were like that, I began to realize. It was necessary for them to study the raw material at hand. How else could they transfer reality to the make-believe world they inhabited? So I mustn’t mind his watching.
Then today everything had changed. The telegram had come. I had taken it to Aunt Ruth at once, and she had told me the one thing I’d never dreamed. During all these years she had felt duty-bound to report from time to time to my grandmother in Jasper, whether the old lady showed any interest in me or not. For a year or two there had been a lapse into silence, and then, a few weeks ago, Persis Morgan had written asking for my address. Something she had never done before. Without consulting me, Aunt Ruth had told her I was spending the summer in her house.
After all these years of deliberate silence the telegram had been sent directly to me, and it had thrown me into a state of quivering uncertainty. It
was as if quicksand had opened beneath my feet, dragging me under, as though there were no safe step I could take in any direction.
“You don’t have to go,” Aunt Ruth said flatly when I showed her the wire.
But perhaps I did have to. That was what frightened me.
“Persis Morgan,” she signed herself, so she, too, had taken back the Morgan name—the name of John Morgan, her first husband and my grandfather. Once I had loved her, as a very small girl. I seemed to remember that. And then in my growing years I’d come to hate her as an unknown ogre who had abandoned me and hurt my mother. For all that time there had never been any letters, never a Christmas or birthday card, and when I asked Mother about her, she had wept so bitterly that I learned not to question. So I had thrust back my resentment toward a heartless grandmother and put her out of my mind.
Nevertheless, over the years, because of my pleading, Mother had told me a little of the past. Grandmother Persis’ father had been an Englishman with the romantic name of Malcolm Tremayne. He was a younger son left nearly penniless by the system of entailing that allowed only the eldest son to inherit title and property. He had come, like a good many young Englishmen of that day, as an adventurer to Colorado. With his partner, Tyler Morgan, he had been lucky enough to strike silver in the side of a mountain, and they had named the mine the Old Desolate, after the mountain itself. Malcolm had married a pretty dance hall girl named Sissy Farrar, who was playing the “Silver Circuit,” and brought her to live in the town of Domino, which sprang up below the mine. Thus my grandmother was born in Domino and grew up there to marry Tyler Morgan’s son, Johnny.
I had never known my grandfather because he was already dead when we visited Jasper. Persis had married again, but about my grandmother’s second husband my mother would never speak.
Now after all these years, when I hadn’t known whether she was dead or alive, there had come this peremptory wire from Persis Morgan. She must be in her eighties now, and I couldn’t understand why she had suddenly chosen to send for me. Interesting that she, too, had taken back the name of Morgan.
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