FLUTTERING, FLYING, FLOATING, HER delicate body now arched like a bow ready to be sprung, now stiff, stark, her shadowed eyes only melting a look of tenderness and pity on the imaginary prostrate form round which she moved, her steps round him forming a magic circle to ward off death, to pant life in through his lips; then suddenly, tight and unyielding, she freezes; she has seen herself in an attitude of supplication. Nothing, no one is worth this; then hating herself and pitying him she half falls, half extends herself over him, guarding him. She is now perhaps a tree, a vine, anything that is wet with life, unsatisfied.
The flute permits an arm to rise slowly; the oboe floats the torso backwards; the strings free her entirely and she leaps, once, twice, three times. The basses nudge the imaginary form beneath her into movement. He stirs, turns toward her. She stops, afraid of what she has done, but he is alive now; there is no going back. She moves away from him in heavy steps as he advances. She no longer recognizes him. The tympany mutters and growls rhythmically. She has made him. They no longer have any relationship to each other. They are separate; no longer perfect.
The music stopped, the needle scraping harshly on the record. Elly lowered herself from her toes with a sigh. She touched her bosom. The leotard was wringing wet. She was exhausted. Dancing took so much out of her, but it was, in the main, what made the difference between going to school at Crofts, near home, and the excitement and fantastic froth of living that her first year at Vernon had been. Courses in every possible subject could be had anywhere, but Vernon was oriented toward the modern dance as a means of expression, adjustment and physical activity as well. Rose had been a little disturbed at first hearing of this.
“Does that mean she’ll be dancing with boys during school hours?” she had asked Max.
“No, dear,” he’d replied, “it’s not ballroom dancing. It’s … it’s supposed to be expressive. I don’t know. Something like ballet, only more so.”
“Oh, ballet. That’s nice.”
“And don’t you think she dances with boys, anyway?”
“All right, Max. All right. Lay off, please.”
The letters from home became increasingly interested in her dancing on her informing them she was to perform at the annual concert. Before that they had been concerned about her grades (which had been a little better than in high school, though not much) and with her social life (Don’t cheapen yourself, whatever you do, Elly. Remember your own value. Get a lot of sleep and don’t make friends with just anyone). Of course if her parents had had their way, Elly would be safely ensconced at home, with Max driving her to Crofts each morning and picking her up each afternoon.
Her victory had been hard won. Beginning with sulking she had proceeded to more drastic measures slowly. Gradually she began to increase the number of times she saw Jerry Wilson. The Wilsons were the poor people whom they had known for years, first in Indianapolis when Max first went into business for himself, and later in Colchester, where Wilson had moved for a job in Kaufman’s new factory.
Rose tried to stop Elly from seeing Jerry, it seemed to Max, because the Wilsons were the past, the struggling times. The Wilsons still struggled while Rose and Max Kaufman moved themselves and their daughter to the hill outside of town, to their glass house. Rose couldn’t bear the idea of Elly and Jerry. Max, on the other hand, didn’t like the family as people. Wilson had committed what was to Max the greatest possible sin: he had changed his name from Wilcowsky to the closest Anglo-Saxon equivalent. He knew their boy to be what he called a “wise guy.” The problem, however, meant much more to Rose than it did to him.
Elly let it be known that she had made up her mind to go to Vernon. She then drew quite clearly the parallel between going to Crofts and seeing Jerry Wilson or away to Vernon, out of danger. The first action Rose took was to forbid her daughter to see Jerry. Elly shrugged this maneuver off as preliminary and easily dealt with. They couldn’t watch her twenty-four hours a day and she altered her schedule accordingly, seeing him quite as often, but keeping odd hours, which aroused, in turn, further suspicion. Finally, as registration time approached and they showed no signs of cracking, Elly carefully moved into a full offensive: the locked door and refusal of food (but Rose caught Max smuggling a snack in, and refused to believe the girl was starving, thus dooming that strategy to failure). The hysterical threats of suicide were something Max, for one, could never believe, having heard the rhetorical “I’ll kill myself” from his mother and never having become an orphan, and having a wife addicted to meeting defiance of her will with “I’ll kill myself” and never having become a widower.
Finally, carefully planning it to coincide with Jerry Wilson’s trip to Chicago, Elly went (innocently enough it seemed to her hosts) to visit her cousin Charlotte and her father, Harry. The prediction of her parents’ interpretation of his disappearance proved correct. They called Mr. Wilson, who disclaimed all knowledge of Jerry and Elly running off together (a little wistfully, as the idea of a liaison between his son and Kaufman’s daughter could easily lead to a foreman’s job for him at the plant).
Finally, in a random call to Max’s brother Harry to inform him of their predicament, she was found. “I left you a note,” she lied coolly. “I can’t help it if it got lost.”
At this point Kaufman decided to take a hand for Elly. He was a little frightened by what he was certain was her lying about the note and by her fantastic determination to go away to college. The feeling of guilt, one which he was not familiar with, in regard to his family, began to creep into his consciousness. What had they done to her that she wanted to get away so terribly? At this point in his thinking, the early, empty years would return, the years during which (his wife had convinced him by now) he had been remiss as a father, attending instead to his business night and day. Flickering about the edges of this burden of responsibility was the half-admitted realization that what had happened had been just what Rose had wanted: himself away at the plant, Rose in command of Elly day and night with the added weapon of his quite necessary absence to keep him in line.
He saw now, and tried to explain to Rose that Elly seemed to be living life with them as a war, the giving and taking of land and forces in order to achieve goals. “Let her go,” he said. “She’s been too much with us. An only child. She lies, Rose. She’s too old to lie.”
“That’s just it. You can imagine how she could run wild out there.” An arm gestured to the great outside wilderness that was the world to Rose Kaufman.”
“Maybe she’ll learn self-control there. It’s a good school, with all kinds of girls.”
“Yes. All kinds. And all kinds of men too.”
“It’s a girls’ school. You’d rather have her with Jerry Wilson? You know a lot what she does with him!”
“She doesn’t do anything—except neck, I suppose.”
“I hope so.”
That did it. Rose threw herself into the shopping and preparations for Elly’s departure with as much vigor and determination as she had displayed in obstructing it. It was necessary for her to abandon all her doubts about Elly’s leaving, in order for her to participate at all. Feelings of horror at the prospect could not simply be laid aside or modified. They had to be replaced with enthusiasm, hope of some sort; otherwise she would break under the strain of the realization of her family’s actions not conforming to her desires. If her wishes could not prevail over reality, then her wishes adapted themselves completely to what was happening around her. Thus, that which occurred in spite of her was felt to have happened because of her. She became quite moral about parents who “hugged their children to death.”
Only at night did she sometimes awaken and, smoking a cigarette while Max slept soundly, wonder at the emptiness that seemed to wait for her until Elly would return, wonder if they ever did return, once having left, and sensing the beginning of tears in the corners of each eye, impatiently wipe them away. Looking through the door of the bedroom which stood ajar and seeing the large expanse of the living room, a small stretch of the glass wall peeping through the partially drawn draperies, she thought, Who needs such a big house for the two of us? “Max,” she said aloud, “what’s going to be with us?”
Her husband stirred in his sleep and grunted something, then lay still and silent. She didn’t want to cry. Was she going through change of life? Was she going to be one of “those” women? She’d heard of women going crazy at this time in their life. It wasn’t fair to her that Elly should leave.
What’s going to be with me? she thought, forgetting to crush her cigarette in the ash tray and letting the room fill with smoke as the tobacco became a long thin ash which was finally cold and crumbled at the touch of her breath when she reached over to shut off the lamp.
The day before she was to leave for Vernon, Vermont, Elly said good-by joyfully to all her friends in town, feeling love for those girls and boys she’d fought with and hated, and for Jerry Wilson a great pity as the voyager feels for the land-held. She was like a girl whose parents had been seafarers and who had died far inland, leaving her to make her way toward some dimly remembered sea. This was to be her first big step toward the coast beyond which was an enormous world of possibility.
That night after supper she walked about the house, running her hands over the cool glass, as if memorizing it by touch. She took snapshots of the house from many angles, even one from the bottom of the hill. Then, not from any desire, but because she knew they would be hurt if she didn’t, she asked her mother and father to pose for a picture in front of the house. They had furnished her with enough accouterments to last a lifetime, from an extensive wardrobe to a camera and flash-bulb outfit. In addition to this a lavish allowance was promised.
“What else should I do with my money?” Max said, when Elly had kissed him after being told how much she was to have each month.
She was feeling so benign toward the world in general that she took from her wallet an envelope, on which was written: Mrs. John Marron Lang. Inside reposed, as it had since she had written it five months before, the letter which began, “Dear Mrs. Lang: Your husband and I—” If she set a match to it now, she knew she would never write another one. It had served, during periods of deep depression in the months since Lang had left, as a potential action against, rather than Lang himself, the great world which had left her here, stranded far inland, while the world in which Lang moved, made love to his wife, built his houses, went on without her. It made her feel, in some odd way, a little less helpless; it was her secret weapon.
But, in her present elation, she could not imagine ever being so depressed again that she would want to use it, with trembling hand paste a stamp on it and drop it on its way to New York. She was no longer excluded from that world (although she had been expressly forbidden to go to New York while at school; her mother had promised to write the dean about it) and there was no need to move against it.
Something, however, made her blow out the match (tearing it up would not have been as final; it had to be by fire) without touching it to the letter. Perhaps the memory of past defeats, promises broken, hopes failing, the eternal treachery of the most loved, held her hand. Well, she would keep it but never use it. The possession of it stimulated her in an odd way. She tucked it in her bag and shut it. She was aroused, she could feel it in the insides of her thighs and her stomach. Probably the letter. After all it had been in this very room. She sat down on the edge of the bed and almost leaned back. But she jumped up, thinking. Not now. This is going to be a new life. None of that!
She had been wrong before. Happiness was not the remembrance of excitement. True happiness lay in the anticipation of it.
Whatever her dreams of life at Vernon had been, they had not encompassed the one factor which, it seemed to Elly on arrival, was central to it: multiplicity. There was so much. So many worlds within the confines of the small school that she was at first bewildered and then challenged by it.
“I haven’t felt so goddamned stimulated in years,” she told her cottage mate, Lois Harper. She rolled the goddamned slowly in her mouth, enjoying it. “What do you do first?”
“What do you mean?” asked Lois, a small girl with a little round face and a high piping voice.
“Oh, you know. Dramatics, modern dance, even fencing and—” she leaned forward dramatically—“love-making.”
“Oh, they don’t, Elly.”
“Yes, they do, yes, they do.”
“Oh, stop it for God’s sake!”
“All right! We’re going to be good friends, Lois.”
“I hope so, Elly.”
And it had developed so. They were good friends, but on Elly’s terms. Lois, she soon found, could be imposed on to an amazing degree, and Elly hesitated not at all. Now, two months after her arrival at Vernon, she thought of herself as a dancer. She dried her hot wet skin and changed into her skirt and peasant blouse, hanging her leotard up to dry. She was sitting on the cold radiator, gazing at the dangling garment, when Lois arrived.
“Hi, Elly. How’s the dance coming?”
“Beautiful. It’s going to be terrific. I wish I could have a real orchestra, though. The record is lousy.”
“Elly, guess what? Roy was talking to Miss Matthews—she comes to chamber music at his home sometimes—and she said you’re her best student and that you’re going to be the best at the concert. She said they don’t usually allow freshmen to dance in public. Isn’t that marvelous?”
“She really said that? Sometimes I’m amazed at how I took to it right away. Let’s get some lunch. Have you got any classes this afternoon? Neither have I. Let’s have lunch in town.”
Vernon College was a small, exclusive girls’ school of twelve hundred students about four miles outside of Vernon, Vermont. A bus ran by the Administration Building every half hour.
The bus dropped Elly and Lois off in the center of the small main street a few steps away from The Waffle, the school hangout.
“It’s really fantastic,” Elly was saying. “I used to hate lessons of any kind, because I couldn’t play the piano no matter what I did and you know how I love music. But I had this teacher, an older man, who tried to make love to me. Actually during a lesson he’d reach over and grab me—here.”
“No!” Lois squealed. “Did you tell your mother or father?”
“Oh, no,” Elly pronounced solemnly as she bit into a cheese sandwich, “I wouldn’t want to do that to an old man. It would have destroyed him. Ruined him.”
Lois nodded equally solemnly. Then she rustled around in her pocketbook and came up with two letters in her hand. “These came after you left the cottage this morning.”
One was from Elly’s father and one from her mother. She hesitated a moment, then opened Max’s letter first and read:
DEAREST ELLY:
Just a line to let you know all continues well here and hope the same for you.
I’m sending this so that it reaches you before Mother’s letter does. She has been pretty ill, although nothing so bad that you should worry about it. They are headaches, mostly, along with the flushes that women get at your mother’s time of life. It is a difficult time for her and I hope you’ll be considerate enough not to let yourself be upset if her letters are difficult sometimes and not to show it when you write to her if you are disturbed.
She feels, naturally, since you are gone, that she has very little purpose in life. We have a couple now, to take care of the house. Their names are Mimi and Justin.
Anyway, I am writing this mostly to tell you that I’m afraid Mother won’t be able to come to Vermont to see you dance at the concert. She’s really not well enough and the doctor agrees.
Wild horses couldn’t keep yours truly away, though, and you can count on me.
All my love,
YOUR LOVING DADDY
“What’s up?” Lois asked, seeing Elly’s frown as she folded the letter and tucked it in a pocket. “Not bad news, is it?”
“No,” Elly replied. “Good news.” She opened the second letter and read:
DEAR ELLY:
How are you? Your mother doesn’t wish to worry you but she has been deathly ill. The headaches have been at their worst. We miss you terribly, especially me, who needs you so. I won’t be able to come as five doctors have all agreed I shouldn’t make the trip now. But I don’t want you to worry. I’ll be all right. Especially after I see you at Christmas. Take care of yourself and don’t practice too hard for your concert. It’s too bad you never cared for piano playing because you can see now that I was right about your being talented. It’s too bad you have to use your body in what you do—in dancing—music is so much more pure, somehow. Your father is fine and will see you in a while.
Love,
MOTHER
P.S. Daddy is on the concert committee now and gets to know all the musical celebrities who come to town. It’s so exciting. I’ll bet you’d love it here now. By-by.
Why can’t I feel anything? she thought, digging her nails into her palms. It’s obvious the woman is suffering. I should feel something. But it’s all so far away from me. I don’t live there in mind or body any more. She remembered the poem they’d read in class the other day. Yeats, it had been: “I have drunk ale in the country of the young and I weep for I know all things.” I live in the country of the young. That’s what Vernon is, certainly. That’s why I couldn’t go to school at Crofts. You can’t mix the two of them, your family and this. All right, she thought, if I can’t feel her trouble, I can’t. I can feel lots of other things, God knows. She was so absorbed that she failed to notice that Danny and Roy had joined them.
“Hey,” Danny called, “snap out of it. Your cold tuna fish is getting cold.”
Danny was Lois’ boy friend, a tall, angular easygoing boy who towered above Lois when they walked together and who treated her solicitously, as if she were a fragile thing that might shatter if he weren’t careful with her. He and his friend Roy, and sometimes others with them, came up from Dartmouth almost every week end. Elly had sort of automatically paired off with Roy, but she was attracted by the intense care which Danny lavished on Lois. It reminded her of John Lang’s gentleness when speaking to her that other time.
“No pants today?” Roy asked, smiling.
“Are you referring to what I’m wearing, or the way I breathe?” Elly raised a sardonic eyebrow.
“You know,” Danny said, “I think you succeeded with Roy. When you wore pants every week end, not blue jeans or dungarees, like everybody else, but men’s trousers, neatly creased down the middle, Roy thought sure you were a Lesbian.”
“Maybe I am,” Elly replied.
Roy’s smile was a little glassy. He had discarded his suspicions but had not been as completely convinced as he would like to be. She had been pretty cool to his advances; this was suspect.
On arriving at Vernon and finding so many girls surrounding her, Elly had become disturbed and gloomy. She would be lost, she felt, in this sea of girls. She had been reading The Well of Loneliness. Shortly afterward she began to comb her long, dark-blond hair back, behind her ears, starkly accentuating the perfect oval of her face. This made her normally wide eyes seem enormous in their steady gaze. Combined with the wearing of trousers on week ends, when even the trouser-wearing outdoor girls doffed jeans for dresses, it gave rise to whispers and giggles in the corridors.
One evening, as Elly returned to her cottage from town, a small dark girl named Rema, whom she knew, fell into step beside her and with very little preparation proposed that she and Elly sign out for the night and take a hotel room in town. Rema was explaining how no one would suspect them in town, when Elly burst into terrified flight. The hair came back around her ears and cheeks and the skirts and blouses were worn again. She did wonder that night what it would have been like, to go with Rema, but did not linger on this for long. In the event of her now benign environment becoming suddenly hostile (a hangover from home, when no possible weapon for the war could be discarded), she noted Rema’s name on a slip of paper which she carried in her wallet next to the letter to Mrs. Lang. You never know, she thought, you never know.
“No,” Danny said, “you’re no Lesbian.”
“I should hope not.” Lois laughed. “What would that make me? Hey, Elly, the boys want to go fishing next week end. How about it?”
“Yeah, before it gets too cold,” Roy said. “I’ve got all the tackle.”
“Well, I’ve never fished before, but I love the idea,” Elly said.
“Fine. We’ll teach you.”
“I’ve fished,” said Lois, “but Dad always put the worms on for me.”
“Elly do that for you,” Elly said in a deep booming voice.
“I don’t know if I should let you go home with her,” Danny told Lois.
“I’ll scream if I need help.”
“Okay, kids. So next week end then. We’ll pick you up at the cottage. Tell ’em you’re going to visit Lois’ aunt in Hanover. By the way, Allan and Vicki, Roy’s cousin, are coming too.”
“Fine.”
Lois and Elly returned home to study.
Elly raised her head from her book. “Have you and Danny made love?”
“I don’t know as it’s any of your business.”
“Oh, you haven’t, eh?”
“How do you know?”
“Well, if you had you’d tell me.”
“That’s ridiculous. As a matter of fact we haven’t.”
“I didn’t think you had.”
“Well, I agree with Schopenhauer that sex is destructive to women. Unless, of course, you’re in love.”
“Not in love with Danny?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s too soon to tell.”
“You’re not a virgin, are you?”
“Well … no. There was a boy in Elgin. But never again until I fall in love.”
“Well, to be honest, Lois darling, I probably agree with you.”
But she didn’t know whether she did or not. She was grateful that the activity at Vernon was so furious she hadn’t been able to think too much about it. There had been no one since Lang.
That night her thoughts were whirling about long after Lois’ breathing had evened out with sleep. Her dance, Daddy in the audience watching, Danny and the fishing trip. It seemed to her that before coming to Vernon she had lived wrapped up tightly in a casing of her own flesh. Now she was alive to everything around her. She had read Walter Pater and had been a member of the cult of beauty for three days. There was Mr. Cooper, a lovely teacher, a lovely man she thought, who introduced her to bits and pieces of St. Thomas Aquinas. With him she was a neo-Thomist. Roy was a Catholic (Mother should know), who was conflicted about his duty to religion and his family. With him she was not quite sure whether there was or was not a supreme being. They got along fine. Danny was concerned about the twentieth-century dilemma and regretted bitterly that he had been too young to fight in the Spanish Civil War. With him she bemoaned Russia’s betrayal of the revolution. There was, to her mind, nothing inconsistent about this behavior. She lived in this new world of ideas the same way in which she had lived in the world of sensation, as an opportunist.
Her mind was quick, retentive of facts, smooth at organizing them to a purpose, although not capable of concentrating on a set of data for too long. The concept of allegiance to one or another set of principles was quite alien to her. Nothing she did or thought excluded anything else. She was all-inclusive.
She was remembering how Danny had held Lois’ arm protectively when they’d left The Waffle. She liked that quality in him. She hadn’t been attracted as much to any boy since arriving at Vernon. In this unexpected onslaught of feeling she was betrayed into the arms of an old habit which she’d hoped she’d left behind. She waited a few moments, however, to make sure Lois was quite asleep.
The sky was a slate blue, the September afternoon clear and cool. Everywhere Elly looked the horizon was rimmed with hills. They crossed under a barbed-wire fence, Roy and Allan holding the wire high so the girls could pass under, squealing but safe. Danny with the bulging knapsack in which reposed their lunch and possibly dinner (no one at the lodge outside of Hanover expected them back before dark) strapped to his back ranged on ahead, anxious, as always, to plan which way to turn next. Roy and Allan carried the bait. Elly wore slacks (there had been several jokes) and a polo shirt, and had a creel suspended at her right side from a strap over her left shoulder. Vicki wore the blue jeans that Elly had shunned as too unfeminine, and Lois the impractical skirt.
“You sure there are fish in this-here stream you know?” Roy called out to Danny.
“Thousands,” Danny flung over his shoulder. “Millions!”
“We mean fish, not guppies,” Elly shouted.
“Whales” was the reply.
They crossed a small stream. A log, all but stripped of its bark, served as a bridge. The stream ran fast and below the crystal-bluish surface there were hundreds of small pebbles packed closely together.
“This it?”
“Wise guy!”
It was, however, past the next field and across a dirt road into a patch of trees. Under a large rock they spread their paraphernalia. They broke up into pairs. Elly, on the pretext of needing a teacher, latched onto Danny. They went far up the stream to a place where the water had quieted and the only sound was of flies buzzing near the water’s surface. Danny caught a small pickerel almost immediately. Elly caught nothing. He had to caution her to be quiet so often that they took a break, Danny satisfied for the while that he had proved his fishing prowess. They lay on the grass smoking cigarettes and talking.
“How’s Dartmouth?” Elly asked, blowing clouds of smoke over her head.
“It’s okay. I’m a local boy. Grew up in Hanover.”
“Oh, I’m not. I’m just the opposite. Colchester, Indiana. It’s so dry and flat up there compared to here. So many hills. I love it.”
She showed him some snapshots of the house. He nodded appreciatively.
“They built it to keep me there.”
“So you were a captive princess, eh? How does it feel to be free?”
“It’s more than that. It’s like somebody suddenly took me out from under a great big snail’s shell and showed me what it was like outside. I don’t know, but I seem to be so much more aware of what’s going on around me, not only classes and all, but people are more real. Maybe it’s my dancing, because that’s like discovering how to walk. I studied at home, but it was so different. People should always dance.”
“Easier said than done. Maybe you’re describing what’s known as growing up.”
“Maybe you’re right. Anyway it’s had such a powerful effect on me that even dancing isn’t enough to express it. I’ve even taken to writing.”
“Really? What kind of stuff?”
“Oh, prose, you know. I have a couple of pages with me, if you want to read some.”
“Sure. Love to.”
She pulled a few folded sheets from her back pocket. The night before she had laboriously copied a section from a novel by Koestler, one of the more lyrical portions. She was anxious to impress Danny, hoping desperately that he hadn’t read this particular book. If he had she could always pass it off as a joke and, laughing, snatch the papers from him and tear them up. But, as he read, he shook his head admiringly, so she knew she was safe.
“Hey,” he said, “this stuff is good. What’s it going to be, a novel?”
She nodded. “There’s so much to do,” she sighed. Writing, dancing, besides just living. Nothing’s enough by itself.”
“That’s the idea. They’re all supposed to add up to something which the parts don’t make by themselves. That’s Gestalt, you know.”
“Yes.” She had the uneasy feeling that they were not really communicating. She stretched her long legs before her and one arm behind her and with the other arm indicated with a wide sweep the grass on which they lay, the running stream and the encircling hills.
“It seems to me, sometimes though, that this is all we have.”
“This?”
“Yes. Only the things you can experience directly. The grass you’re lying on and you can feel how damp it is, the hills over there—you can see how green they are and then how they get to be purpled after a while. The water you can hear, so you know it’s there even if you don’t see it. That’s all we have.”
“I don’t know if I understand exactly what you mean. You mean sensory experience?”
“You’re so academic. Yes, I guess that’s what I meant.”
She rolled her head close to his blond hair. She stared at him with the wide-open, steady gaze that had so unnerved John Lang. With the strange feeling small children have, of being able magically to control the world by their thoughts, she saw his face close in upon her and cover her eyes (which she then closed) and press hard on her lips. Now they were communicating.
They separated and she took a cigarette, tapped it four times on her thumb nail, then reversed it, tapped it four times again and lighted it. The day, she noticed, was no longer as fine as it had been. The sky was clouding over and the air was growing chilly. She shivered, rolled close to Danny, put her arms around him. Then she pulled away suddenly and, laughing, sprang to her feet and began to run, jumped across the smaller stream and toward the woods that began at the edge of the field.
“Look,” she called out, “I’m the booby prize. If you catch me you can have me.”
Danny leaped up, something within him responding to the ridiculous promise. His lips were dry after the kiss, and he began to run after Elly.
As she ran, Elly felt a drop of rain on her cheek and then one on her hand. She ran even faster. She lost him for a few moments and he was bewildered. Then she had her arms suddenly around his chest from the back for an instant and then ran off again. This time he caught her. She fell to the ground. The rain was still light, but a few minutes later it was drumming a ferocious tattoo against the leaves and was already moistening the two of them as they lay in the beginning of an embrace.
The wild sound of the rain was exciting to Elly. Danny made one convulsive movement of withdrawal when the wind blew the semiprotective covering of leaves aside and drenched them both with a stinging sheet of water, but she held him tightly and said, “No. Please.”
They found the others, just as soaked as they were by the sudden storm. Somehow Elly had expected them to be dry although there was no conceivable place to take shelter within running distance. The rain had steadied to a pat-pat-pat now and they all half ran, half walked back to the lodge outside of Hanover.
That evening they played checkers and parcheesi and Vicki read poetry aloud.
“Read us that thing you wrote, Elly,” Danny suggested. “The one you showed me.”
“I lost it in the storm,” she said, hastily adding, “along with my compact. I’ll have to borrow yours, Lois.” Later that night, when the girls in their room were preparing for bed, Elly remembered that she had expected Danny to be as gentle and solicitous with her as he seemed to be with Lois. But he had been ferocious, uncontrolled. Well, perhaps the rain had helped. Lois asked no questions and Elly was surprised and relieved and, thinking about it, she realized there were no questions to ask. The others assumed they had run to take shelter from the storm the way they had, that was all.
“Isn’t that your compact, Elly?” Vicki asked, wiping her lipstick off with a Kleenex.
“Oh, that one? Yes, I’d forgotten I had two with me.”
The incident was not mentioned when Lois returned to the room.
Elly had no desire to see Danny, and in the few encounters they had on week ends, when Lois saw him, they were cordial but nothing more. As in other matters Elly could not sustain interest once she had gone to what was, to her, the heart of the situation. To assuage whatever guilt she felt she asked Lois several times if she was in love with Danny and was gratified to receive a negative answer.
Her dance proceeded beautifully and her studies suffered commensurately. She named the piece “The Fire without Flame,” a title which her dancing instructor approved, although not quite sure of what significance it might hold for her pupil. A month passed—of practicing, unimpressive dates, letters from home and more practicing. Miss Matthews ventured the opinion that she might someday become a professional dancer, setting off a train of visions that haunted her for hours at a time.
One cold morning, when the frost could be traced clearly on the window for the first time, Elly paused in her series of pliés for which she used the window sill as a practice bar and realized the curse was three days overdue. She refused to let fright grasp her and remembered hearing that the first encounter after long abstinence could cause such a delay, and continued practicing. Three days later she lost her calm and confided in Lois, saying she couldn’t tell her who it had been.
Lois accepted this as honorable and said, “Let me tell Danny. Danny’ll know what to do.”
Elly agreed, happy to use Lois as her go-between, certain that Danny would not confess to her. After Lois left the room, she lay on the bed and laughed for a few moments. Then she lay quietly, touching her breasts gingerly now and then, and trying to quiet a rising panic.
The first visit to the doctor in Vernon was comparatively simple. The questions, the filled bottle, the second visit arranged for. When she returned, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, the doctor, a bachelor about fifty years old, informed her that the test was positive. She was pregnant. She was all cried out and just sat there rigidly.
“It is still early enough, Mrs. Kaufman—” he used the term for form’s sake; she wasn’t fooling him one bit: she wasn’t a day over nineteen—“to try some quinine tablets. They’re not infallible, but they do work sometimes. I think it’s early enough—if you’re lucky—”
“I tried to throw myself down the stairs,” Elly said slowly, “but I couldn’t do it.”
“Now,” he said, twirling a pencil nervously in his hands, “there’s no need for that or anything like it. You come back to see me in a week.”
Elly nodded. “I’ll try the pills,” she said hopelessly, knowing this was the end of the freedom, of the endless worlds, of everything.
When she had left, the doctor called in his nurse and said, “Make out a report on the girl and I’ll send it to the dean of Vernon and the dean of Larchville College. Those are the only two around here, aren’t they? I’ll wait and see how she is when she comes back next week, before I send it.”
“Yes, they’re the only colleges, Doctor, but do you have to—”
“Are you serious? Do you know how old that kid is? Not more than eighteen or nineteen. She needs her family more than anything right now. The school will see to it that they’re notified. You can’t let the kid wander around alone, and I don’t do abortions. Type the report up and we’ll hold it. If she ever mentioned my name—well …”
Lois found Elly sitting on the bathtub, her face ashen, her hands clutching at her stomach. In the bathtub was a filthy mess. Lois helped her to bed and then, sickened, she cleaned up the thing in the bathtub, returned and was violently ill herself. Later she interrupted her care of Elly to report her ill to the cottage superintendent.
When her stomach and what felt like her entire insides quieted down and was less painful, Elly was joyful and exuberant. Lois was horrified but pleased the trouble was over.
“You’re a lucky girl,” Lois told her.
“I know. I know. Isn’t it fantastic? I thought sure everything was over for me. I can’t thank you enough, Lois.” She really felt quite tender toward her roommate who had stood by her so well, completely forgetting for the moment that it was her own betrayal that had initiated the entire situation.
Even when Lois said, “Danny will be so glad to hear,” she did not connect the two experiences.
“Thank him for me, Lois.”
She had completely separated cause and effect. She was safe. The world had been outmaneuvered again.
That night she slept fitfully, uncomfortable because of the spasmodic bleeding. She dreamed that she was dancing, but not here at Vernon. She was dancing at home in the glass house and there was an entire company dancing with her and the green draperies had turned to sparkling red and the company was gone and she was alone with Mother and Father and she swept back the red material (still dancing) and the walls were not transparent glass but gave back her reflection and (still dancing) she tried to peer around the reflected girl and see outside but there was no clear glass at all, it was one great window and wherever she turned she saw her reflection and behind that, caught trembling in the mirrors, her mother and father, and somehow she knew it was a dream and she knew as well that there was something she had to do to wake up and she began to turn broad tour jetés, turning round and round so many of her in the glass turning round and round and (still dancing) she flung herself into the glass mirror-wall and it shattered with a crash and she was outside (still dancing) and bleeding from cuts and scratches on her arms and legs, but free and clear (still dancing) and she woke, forgetting for the moment where she was, thinking it was home, but who was that breathing so close? And then she remembered and was terrified of having a baby and then realized she wasn’t going to. Toward morning she fell into a dreamless sleep.
Three days later the bleeding eased off and a week after that she was not only taking classes but dancing again. The concert drew closer and so did examinations. She prepared vigorously for one and did her best to forget the existence of the other. The remembrance of her return appointment with the doctor never even crossed her mind.
Less than a week before the concert, Lois was called to the office of the dean. Standing before the wide desk, she was vaguely frightened, although she had done nothing wrong.
“Has your roommate, Elizabeth Kaufman, been in any trouble recently?” And as Lois hesitated, the dean added, “We already know about it, Lois. The doctor notified us, so there’s nothing to be gained by trying to cover up for Elizabeth.”
Lois told all she knew, which was nothing more or less than the doctor had already written in his report, adding only the success of the abortion.
“Thank you very much, Lois. And please don’t tell her. We’re not going to, either. It’s a matter for her family to handle. Her parents will be notified.”
“Will she—will she be expelled?”
“No. We’ll let her family withdraw her from Vernon. It’s near the end of the term, anyway. It’s only a question of her not enrolling for the new semester. You won’t say a word, of course, to anyone about this.”
Lois’ first reaction was a terrible sadness at what had happened to Elly. After a while, however, a certain guilty relief crept into her consciousness. Elly had begun to frighten her. Later that day she began to think about whom she would ask to room with her next semester.
Max Kaufman sat on the dirty green bench at the Vernon station, his short fat body slumping a little against the rear slats of the bench. His expensive gray striped suit was rumpled from the train ride and in spite of the chilly breeze his coat was piled next to him, on top of the suitcase he had hastily packed the evening before. If ever he had wanted to fly, it had been last night. But even under such stress he could not bring himself to step into a plane. The train ride had been tiring and he was sitting a while to regain his energy before proceeding to his hotel and then to the college.
He looked about him at the little station, the road dotted with a few crawling cars, the few stubble-covered fields which separated the station from the slow, sleepy town. So what’s so different? he thought. So what’s the big change from Colchester, that she had to come here away from us and have this happen? He must control himself. He did not want to cry. Last night had been the most difficult. As far as Rose was concerned he was only going to see Elly dance and bring her home for the Christmas vacation. He couldn’t tell her what had happened, she being so sick and all. He had no idea what it would do to her. He mustn’t think over and over again in that crazy way, Why? Why? Why had it happened? It happened, that’s all, and we have to continue living. The taste of tears was sour in his throat but he did not cry. She would come home with him after she danced and he would enroll her at Crofts College and they would live, that was all.
After settling himself at the hotel and changing his suit he went to see his daughter, determined, suddenly, not to say a word about it until after the concert. Maybe if she was too upset she wouldn’t be able to dance. The dean’s letter had been very polite: We feel it best for the parents to inform the student that we know about her trouble.
Elly ran into his arms as if she had been lost and was now found.
“Elly darling, how are you?”
“Fine, Daddy, fine. I’m so glad you came. Wait till you see me dance.”
“Are you nervous, baby?”
“No—well, a little. I’m a little scared, but that’s all right. Miss Matthews says everybody is nervous the first time, even Pavlova was.”
“Is everything all right, darling?” (Perhaps he could get her to tell him.)
“Just great. I love it here.”
He quickly changed the subject. “Have you eaten supper?”
“No. Let’s have a bite now, but I can’t have much. It’s only three hours to the concert and I don’t want to get sick. How’s Mom?”
“Oh, so-so. Headaches. You know.”
They ate in town and chatted about what was happening in Colchester and Elly described her routine and everything was kept, by Kaufman, light and gay, as a holiday should be. A dozen times he nearly told her she had to come with him for good, that she was not returning here to Vernon, but the words stuck in his throat.
Finally she went off to get dressed and he smoked a thoughtful cigarette with his coffee. Then he strolled over to the hall and picked up his ticket. In his seat, surrounded by hundreds of girls and their parents, he thought, Why couldn’t this be at home? This could be there, too. And, falling back on the strongest weapon he had: I could endow a dancing school at Crofts. If I’d have done it then—But that was foolish. She’d wanted to get away and she had and this was what had happened. He didn’t even want to know who the boy was, now that the immediate danger was past. Just to get her home.
When she stepped onto the stage and stood there, alone, poised and unafraid, Max did not breathe. The quiet sounds of strings that were emitted by the phonograph pushed her into movement, and Elly danced. She wore a brief, asymmetrical costume and her hair was loose and flying about her head and shoulders.
She’s so beautiful, Max thought. What can you do with her? She’s running around on a stage in front of all those people and what she’s done to herself—none of them would believe it. I’m glad I didn’t tell her I know yet. She wouldn’t have been able to dance. Or would she? She was so much stronger than he or Rose. His mind caught, like cloth on a jagged piece of metal, on the thought around which he had skirted for the last week. How could she, his Elly, only seventeen, have let a man touch her, use her, make her pregnant? He held his program before his face, in case he should erupt suddenly into tears. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself and embarrass Elly. What was he, sitting here at a dancing recital? Just a middle-aged Jew putting on too much weight and too much money. If he hadn’t made money he never could have afforded a college like this and she would have gone to school near home and none of this would have happened.
He watched her as the music grew louder and she crouched tensely at the corner of the stage before leaping forward. He watched her long hair flying, thinking what a stranger she was, how they had never spent time together the way a father and daughter should. He was always too busy. Had left her in Rose’s hands too much. Rose had never been very well, not the person for a child to be with all the time.
She bent over toward the audience and the low-cut leotard exposed something of her breast. Max looked away. What a terrible costume! He was glad Rose wasn’t there.
Someone in the row behind him murmured “How lovely!” and, forgetting for an instant all that had happened, he expanded with a prideful breath. He wanted to look at the person who had spoken but decided he had better not turn around.
There she was, seventeen years of his life, the cruel struggle, the steady groping toward something better, the terror of living with Rose. They had reached something better and for what? For the child, of course. And there she was, having people whisper “How lovely!” about her and dancing on a stage like a regular ballet dancer and none of it was any better, because she wasn’t happy, this daughter for whom all the struggling had been; she was unhappy enough to turn to a man. (He didn’t want to know who it had been. He couldn’t bear the idea of knowing of a specific person. It would have made it horribly real.)
The music was dying now and Elly knelt, hands cupped before her. Her lovely eyes were half closed and Max hardly breathed, feeling himself gross and dirty with his thoughts, all his infelicities mirrored in those half-shut eyes.
As the applause came and Elly bowed a little unsteadily, he allowed himself, under the cover of the program, to cry a little. Backstage he kissed her and she whispered exultantly, “Daddy, I’m going to be a dancer,” and he said, “Maybe, darling, it might be. Who knows?”
She was all packed and they stopped in, luggage and all, at a party Miss Matthews was giving for her dance class. With a smile and a nod he approved her sipping a cocktail, while he drank some eggnog. Max was pleased to see everyone make such a fuss over her. Then, increasingly frightened at the thought of telling her (he had decided that once they were on the train it would be all right), he had a few cocktails and then a couple more. By the time they were walking toward the station in the blue-black evening, their breath lighting a frosty path before them, he was a little high. Elly boarded the train, laughing at something her father had said, without a backward glance at the still campus, cold under the moonlight.
When he told her, she stared at him uncomprehendingly for a full moment, swallowed hard and said, “I see,” coldly, as if that had occurred which she had expected and she must not show surprise. She turned her head in a swift agonized movement, as Max licked his dry lips and thought of the next thing to say. She pressed her face to the glass, looking back hard, although the campus was now a dim blur beyond the barely visible station.
“I didn’t say good-by to anyone, not really,” she said quietly. There was no use fighting, she thought. Nothing could be won, now. “I didn’t even look at the campus or anything, not really,” she said.
Cry, damn you, Max thought, cry! He put his hand lightly on her arm and said, “No one will know, Elly—especially not your mother,” realizing for the first time in a deep sense how afraid his daughter was of her mother and how much he wanted to assure her that she was at least safe from reprisal.
“Okay, Dad,” she said numbly, “okay,” as if the ethics of war forbade complaining, arguing or struggling once defeat was known to be a reality.
“She’s too sick. It would be terrible for her to know,” he added lamely.
She was silent, overcome now by an enormous fatigue, the backwash of the month of anxiety over her illness and of the tension of the concert and the knowledge of having experienced, to a certain extent conquered and lost, a world. As the train moved and stopped, moved and stopped, Elly fell asleep, waking, before the Pullman porter was to make up her bed in the compartment, to cry, holding tightly to her father, as if no years had intervened between the first time she had fallen down on the hard pavement, bruising her soft flesh, and now, the Pullman porter taking the place of the innumerable strangers who always watched one cry.
It must have been about four in the morning when she decided, after staring at the ceiling for a half hour. Listening to her father’s even breathing and waiting for a break in the regularity, she carefully dressed. Her desire to do something was vague and unfocused and she knew whatever it was to be would be only temporary. Yet she would do it anyway. She would go to Uncle Alec in California. The last money order received from home hadn’t even been cashed as yet. There was enough there for her to fly. She could probably be there the following day. She had no idea to what point in the trip the train was carrying them through the black night which seemed pasted on the compartment window. The only thing to do was to wear her dressing gown over her clothes and wait for the train’s next stop, wherever it might be.
She stood near the door, ready to open it, hearing her father mumble in his sleep and shift a little uneasily. Oh my God! she thought. She knew suddenly that if he were to talk in his sleep, to say anything at all, no matter how meaningless or delirious, she could not go. But Max subsided into soft snores again and Elly slipped silently out. She took none of her luggage.
After a moment she returned and, finding a pencil in her father’s jacket, scribbled a note telling him where she had gone. That way there would be no police or anything, and she would still have a few days.
She had never known a train made so much noise. It screeched to a stop and she stepped down into the murmurous darkness, for a moment or a day, free.