“It’s so hard,” said Shell’s voice. “Everybody has a body.”
“I know,” Breavman said. “And there’s one point in an evening when the thing most urgently needed is just an arm around the shoulder.”
“I’m so glad we can still talk.”
Her honesty obliged her to describe her temptations. She wanted to keep nothing from him. They both understood the danger of this technique: there are humans that desire me. Keep me or they will.
He leaned against the wall in the dark kitchen and listened. How curious that anyone should speak to him so softly! How had he managed to arrange the miracle in which someone spoke softly to him? It was a magic he was sure he never possessed, like reading one’s first poems. But here was his own name whispered.
An ugly forecast developed in his heart that he would drive the whisperer to a hundred indifferent beds and silence her.
“Shell, I’m coming to New York tomorrow!”
“You’re quitting camp?”
“There’s nothing for me here.”
“Oh, Lawrence.”
It was raining when he went outside, her voice still with him. He began to circle one of the playing fields. The tall pines around the field and hills gave him the impression of a bowl which contained him. There was one black hill that seemed so connected with his father that he could hardly bear to look up at it as he came round and round, stumbling like a drunk.
The rain hazed the electric lights isolated here and there. An indescribable feeling of shame overwhelmed him. His father was involved in the hills, moving like a wind among the millions of wet leaves.
Then an idea crushed him — he had ancestors! His ancestors reached back and back, like daisies connected in a necklace. He completed circle after circle in the mud.
He stumbled and collapsed, tasting the ground. He lay very still while his clothes soaked. Something very important was going to happen in this arena. He was sure of that. Not in gold, not in light, but in this mud something necessary and inevitable would take place. He had to stay to watch it unfold. As soon as he wondered why he wasn’t cold he began to shiver.
He sent Shell a funny telegram explaining why he couldn’t come.