“YOU MUSTN’T be shocked by anything. That’s the first lesson for the artist,” said Sandy Gray, seriously. He was a tall Australian with a brown beard who had formerly been an art critic on an English magazine. He was wearing a black wool shirt, black dungarees, and black wading boots and was knocking out a black pipe on Dolly Lamb’s table. It was mid-morning. Dolly had been painting, on the ridge outside her house, when she saw a strange man striding through the pond toward her, cutting down the pickerel weed with a hunting knife as he went. She shaded her eyes to watch him, but he ignored her anxious figure, while making straight for the spot where she was standing—like a guided missile, she fancied. A mild, half-humorous fear crinkled her forehead. She was readily dismayed by the most ordinary encounters; everything for her was numinous—the butcher with his cleaver, the hunter in the woods. Her virgin heart feared the Angel Gabriel in the milkman, bumping along the road in his truck, and did not dare refuse the milk, cream, eggs, and butter he offered her, far beyond her small wants. Behold the handmaiden of the Lord—she lived meekly in the age of fable, amid powers that had to be propitiated. The intruder today, in a black visored cap, swashing through the pond, advanced on her like a superman from a comic book or the man from the telephone company; in either case, the same perplexity presented itself: who was to speak first? “Hello,” she called out bravely, when he was twenty feet away. “Hi,” he retorted and flailed his way up the slope to her easel. He studied her painting in silence, scratching his ear. He then walked into the house in his wet boots, followed by Dolly. “I’m Sandy Gray,” he stated, in a voice that took her aback by its softness. “Have you got a cup of coffee?” “Only instant,” confessed Dolly. “That’ll do,” he answered. “Fix us a couple of cups.”
Out in the kitchen, as she put on the water to boil and measured out the coffee, she could see him, hunched on her studio couch, reading her copy of Art News, his black cap pulled down and his hunting knife stuck in his belt. Dolly was perturbed. Apprehension had told her who he was even before he had introduced himself: a typical backwoods blowhard, according to John Sinnott; a horrible boor, said Martha. He was a former Communist, it seemed, who made sandals in the summertime, for the tourist trade, and rode a motorcycle and used to feed his children on peanut butter and send them to school barefoot, till the S.P.C.C. stepped in. On no account, warned Martha, was Dolly to give him any encouragement, if he dropped by to call on her. His fourth wife had just left him, and he was on the prowl again. He would want to be neighborly and to advise her about her painting, but he was only after liquor and somebody to cook his meals for him.
He did not need any encouragement, Dolly inwardly cried. He seemed so at home that it was she who felt like the interloper. When he had finished his coffee, he took his cap off, tossed it on the couch, and walked up and down her small living room, his thumbs stuck in his belt, examining her effects just as if he were alone in the house. He opened and closed the door to her bedroom, glanced up the chimney flue, picked up a picture postcard and scanned the message on the back of it. He stood for a long time staring at the books in her makeshift bookcase, lifted out one, riffled through it, and replaced it, upside down. During this inspection, not a word was spoken. Dolly’s soul was outraged, but her tongue refused to move. She did not know how to forbid him the extraordinary liberties he was taking. He behaved like a higher authority with a warrant to search out evidence of her personal tendency. As she sat, meekly watching, a thread of silvery humor wove in and out of her thoughts, tracing a delicate embroidery. At the same time, suspense began to mount in her; her heart beat faster under her pale-blue shirtwaist and golden chamois jacket. She could not escape the thought that he was here to pronounce a judgment.
On the driftwood table, by the window, there was a bowl of poisonous mushrooms, brought her by the Sinnotts, which she had set up to paint. He bent down to smell them and made a noise of disgust. “Corrupt and dainty,” he said, in his soft, breathy voice. “Throw them out. They stink.” And before Dolly could protest, from her footstool by the fireplace, he had taken the dish from the table, opened the screen door, and flung the deadly mushrooms out into the pinewoods. “Damn you!” cried Dolly, jumping up indignantly. “You’ve just ruined my still life.” She confronted him, quivering, her arms akimbo, while he watched her, unperturbed, from his greater height. In a minute Dolly fell back, discountenanced by the grave look of his deep-set eyes, which swept back and forth, slowly, across her face, like two searchlights set in the bushy camouflage of hair and beard and brows. Having lost her temper and sworn at him, she found herself mysteriously translated onto a plane of intimacy, and she listened, a little bemused, as he proceeded to give her a lecture on decadence, with illustrations drawn from what he had found in her dwelling. The fact that he claimed to “know” her without even knowing her name imparted a sort of dreamlike solemnity to the home truths he was telling her; he descended on her like some meddlesome old prophet twitching the sleeve of a busy monarch with a message from on high.
“Stop hoarding,” he said gently, pointing to her collection of seashells and to the starfish arranged in a graduated series on her mantelpiece. “It’s your own shit you’re assembling there, in neat, constipated little packages.” Dolly’s cheeks suddenly flamed. She was as a matter of fact given to constipation and she felt as if he had peeked into her medicine-cabinet and found the bottle of Nujol. Moreover, she detested coarse language. The British, she told herself dutifully, were less nice in their speech than the Americans. But even as she strove not to mind, not to be insular and puritanical, tears sprang to her eyes, and she had to wipe them away hastily on the sleeve of her jacket. “Are you shocked?” he asked with a face of polite inquiry. When Dolly nodded mutely, he stood pulling his beard and frowning. She expected that he was going to leave, in disgust with her, and she found that now, contrarily, as always seemed to happen, she wanted him to stay. “You’re angry with me,” she ventured in a small voice. He shook his head. “I try to be honest,” he explained, “and I hurt people, like an abrasive. I want to sand them down to their essentials, scrape off the veneers. When I saw your picture, out there, I knew I had something to tell you.” “You liked it?” she said wonderingly. “No. I hated it. It made me want to spew.” Her work was sick, he told her—cramped with preciosity and mannerisms. Underneath, he discerned talent, but it was crippled, like some poor tree tortured out of shape by a formal gardener. She needed to be bolder and freer.
Dolly frowned. She had heard this from every one of her teachers and she supposed that it must be true. But it wearied and confused her to be assured that there was a vital force imprisoned inside her that was crying to be let out. How did they know, she used to mutter to herself in secret outrage. If there was anybody else inside her—as far as she could testify—it was a creature still more daunted and mild and primly scrupulous than the one the world saw. For years, she had been trying obediently to be bold and free in her work, and the results had always been discouraging, even to her counselors. When she “let herself go,” her paintings got big and mechanical; she painted drearily, in the style of the teacher who had advised her to be herself. She was tired, moreover, of being told she had talent. She had come to feel that it was like a disease that she toted from doctor to doctor, seeking a new opinion, a new treatment. Her last teacher, whom she had stayed with a year, had been a neo-romantic; before that, she had had an intra-subjectivist and before that, a magic realist. And it was always the same story. Each began, enthusiastically, by undoing the errors of his predecessor. That was the easy part, but what came next, supposedly—the leap forward, the breakthrough—never was accomplished. She parted from each master sadly, with the knowledge that she had disappointed him. Perhaps it was her money, Martha had lightly observed; perhaps she was like the rich young man in the Bible, who could not accomplish his breakthrough unless he sold all he had and gave to the poor. . . . Dolly resented this suggestion; she had been thinking about it in the last few days, pacing up and down the wooded path with her hands dug in her pockets. Everybody, she felt, had been trying to change her, to take something away from her. For the first time, all alone here, with her teeth gritted, she had dared think that it was she who had the right to be disappointed. In the silence of her house, her heart murmured against her teachers and well-wishers; they had promised miracles and then let her down.
As she listened to Mr. Sandy Gray, echoing the familiar cavils, this resentment suddenly exploded. “But I am precious,” she exclaimed, leaning forward on the footstool and striking a blow on her chest. “I’m inhibited. I’m afraid of life. I’m decadent. That is me. Why can’t I paint that if I want to?” Sandy Gray smiled. “You can’t paint a negation,” he said. Dolly clenched her fists. “What about Bosch?” she demanded, seizing the name arbitrarily as a standard to rally to. “Bosh, my dear girl,” he answered. “You know better than that. Horror isn’t a negation. Only fear. You mustn’t be afraid.” Dolly sighed. She could not tell him the truth: that every moment of her life was shot through with terrors; peril stirred all around her, whimsically, in the rustling of the trees, in the sound of the icebox running or the gurgling of kerosene in the tank. This was what she was straining to show in her painting: the absurd powers that were bending her to their will—nature as animate and threatening and people as elemental forces. But what her critics saw in her small canvases was only “meticulous craftsmanship,” “timid conceits,” “quaint charm.” If they did not urge her to break through, they advised her to illustrate children’s books.
“Are you afraid of me?” Sandy Gray queried. Dolly considered and then shook her head, smiling. Strangely enough, she was not; she was only afraid of what the Sinnotts would think of her for letting him stay so long. He was so much like one of her bogeys that she could deprecate his terrors. He had come out of the pond just like a myth, she said to herself with amusement. She was far more fearful of what she called normal people: John and Martha, for instance.
Even if they had not told her, she would have known how her visitor looked to them. She could borrow their sharp eyes, alas, as easily as she could have put on Martha’s severe, horn-rimmed reading glasses. To the normal vision, Sandy Gray was just another rusticated bohemian, solemn and loquacious and self-vaunting, a not-very-intelligent and pretentious bore. And yet, to Dolly’s eyes, there was something Christlike about his appearance. His hair and beard were a soft, delicate brown. His skin was white, and he had deep-set, light-brown eyes with strange bluish whites. He carried himself stiffly, almost as if he had a spinal injury, and his long arms were frail. The black shirt and jeans and boots and gruff manners were deliberately misleading. He was really a gentle person.
As soon as she had said this to herself, Dolly felt a defiant quiver of pleasure. She had two kinds of friends: those she described to herself as “gentle” and the others. The second kind was always criticizing the first kind and saying they were unworthy of her. The more the second kind criticized, the more she clung to the first. Her aunts, who themselves were oddities in the New England manufacturing town she came from (one of them smoked cigars and was deaf and enormously fat), always used to complain that she had odd, unsuitable friends. They would never let her choose her pets either, and all her life Dolly had felt herself in the position of a little girl in a big house stealing out to give a saucer of milk to a stray cat, which, as her aunts used to warn her, was probably diseased. She had loved her aunts; she loved John and Martha and all the other sensible, sharp-spoken people who had succeeded to her aunts’ place in knowing what was right for her—her trustees, her teachers, and their European-born wives, who fixed her hair for her and put mascara on her quivering lashes, before an art opening, and told her when to let her hems down and how to walk into a room. These rational guardians of her interests were all somewhat alike; the world admired them, and so did Dolly. Her “gentle” friends were all different, resembling each other only in the stubborn quaintness of choice that had selected them. She had the queerest collection, picked up on her travels, priests and nuns, elderly doctors with tropical diseases, destitute baronesses, progressive high-school principals, housewives, young soldiers, broken-down artistes; many of her friends were children. A psychiatrist once told her that she was afraid of being overrun by strong people and sought out weak ones, whom she could protect. This was not quite exact, Dolly herself recognized. Everybody wanted to tyrannize over her, the weak far more insistently, she had to admit, than the strong, who sometimes had other things to think about than telling her what to do.
She was taken in too easily, her trustees said, examining her check stubs. But that was not the case. She knew very well when she was being exploited by the kind of person she called gentle, and she claimed the right to be exploited, hugging it to herself like a toy that somebody was trying to wrest from her. Down deep, in the bedrock of her soul, there was a mistrustfulness of good sense. Behind every caution, she suspected a deprivation; something was being withheld. The demand to see for herself, ever since her thirtieth birthday, had been developing into a secret mania; she wanted to live. Outwardly, she was just the same, quiet and decorous, but in her soul she pioneered obstinately, inverting every notion that was offered her, especially where people were concerned. Much as she loved John and Martha, whenever she was with them she had to fight off the suspicion that her judgment was being constrained.
The first night she had arrived here, they had had her to dinner and put her to bed afterward, in their guest bedroom, despite her insistence that she wanted to sleep in her own house. The water was not turned on yet, John pointed out, and the house would be damp and cold from having been shut since Labor Day. In the morning, he would settle her in and see that everything was in order. He and Martha were extraordinarily helpful; they loved preparations and bustle and giving advice. After dinner, in their parlor John had handed Dolly a list of all the people she might need: the plumber, the electrician, the laundress, the odd-job man, the woman who would clean, if Dolly wanted her. Her garbage, he said, she would do best to take to the dump, and, for one person, it was wiser not to have the milkman; better buy milk when she needed it from the store. Between them, they had thought of everything. They told her the best places to swim at this time of year and where to get the freshest eggs. John drew a map, showing where mussels were to be found, on the old pier, and where you could dig clams and collect oysters; he marked some painting sites on it in red pencil, with stars. Martha made him show where the Indian pipe grew and where a file of cigar-colored boletus marched down a sand road, like a Mexican army on parade. They did everything, Dolly felt, but paint the pictures for her, so eager were they to be useful and anticipate her needs. It was a sign of love, and she knew it; moreover, it was a sign of intelligence. She was pleased (or had been, until today) with the painting ideas they had given her, which suited her painstaking brush. The frail Indian pipes, gray-white shading into pink, with a delicate black fringe on the petals, like a glass-blower’s flowers, had turned out awfully well; the boletus picture was not finished, but the conception was splendid.
And John had done everything for her, without being asked. He had come to put back the screens when the late mosquitoes bothered her and he had dug her a garbage pit when he saw that she did not like to take the can to the dump, which had a horrible smell and rats and human scavengers, eagerly picking over the refuse. He chopped some pine wood for her and found out what was wrong when the chimney smoked. Martha had come, with extra pots and pans and dishes. She had brought Dolly a cook book with the best recipes marked. And she always knew the best; that, to Dolly was the worst of it. If Dolly followed instructions, everything came out right; and if she tried a different recipe from the one recommended by Martha, the result was a disaster. The Sinnotts always knew; it was an instinct with them. And they never compromised or pretended that anything was other than it was. This quality had never failed to amaze Dolly, in all the years she had known them—their sense of life’s topography. Everything in New Leeds was where they said it was and looked precisely as they had described it, the good and the bad, the wilted lettuces and withering carrots in the grocery-store bins, the sunset from Long Hill. When Dolly, hopefully, would find that they had been wrong in some particular, it would turn out that she had not followed the directions. John, especially, was a born guide. After a day in Hell—Dolly felt certain—he could conduct a guided tour of all the circles, walking ahead with his long, bounding step, commenting on the architecture and pointing out the denizens whom it would be worth while to meet.
This trait, to Dolly, was both wonderful and terrible. It was the distillation of all she feared and mistrusted, admired and envied. John and Martha were like parents to her, though they all three were nearly the same age. They could not help thinking for her (no one could, apparently), and if she let them, everything sparkled with high spirits and certainty. In these bright October days, they were living, the three of them, in a sort of idyl, full of games and laughter. They made a charming picture—Dolly had studied it, as though in a mirror or in the still glass of one of the roseate ponds: the dark young man and the two fair-haired girls. In the mornings, John worked on a brochure he was doing for the Historical Society, while Martha wrote and Dolly painted, on a schedule he had devised. Nearly every afternoon, they met for a swim or to go musseling or mushrooming. On especially good days, they picnicked on the beach, with a hamper of fried chicken and a cranberry pie. They often had dinner together, cooking over Dolly’s fire or eating, more formally, in Martha’s pink dining room. They read poetry and argued heatedly about books and pictures; Martha spun theories out of John’s and Dolly’s perceptions. Late at night, armed with a star book and a flashlight, they went out to have Dolly identify the stars for them. There was the promise of a French play-reading at the Coes’, about which the Sinnotts appeared to be squabbling.
John did not want them to go, and Martha protested that it would be unkind not to. She had already cast Dolly in the role of the queen, Bérénice, and was sketching out a costume for her, though there was no plan of dressing up. Dolly was troubled by these arguments between the Sinnotts, quick and laughing as they were. In the ten days she had been here, she had become aware of a change in their relation. She could see, behind the screen of persiflage, that John was worried about money and that Martha’s play was not going well. Several times it had been on the tip of her tongue to offer them a loan, but the fear of intruding kept her silent. They were going, she sensed, through a period of testing, in which no outsider, even a second cousin, could help. Dolly often wondered, especially since Martha’s visit, whether it had not been a mistake on their part to try themselves out here, of all places, where there were so many bad memories for Martha to live down. But it was precisely like the Sinnotts to seek out the severest conditions. They would not compromise, Dolly knew, any more than they would drink instant coffee; they demanded the supreme test.
She herself had no doubt about their power of survival; it was her own she questioned as she lay awake at night in her bunk-bed, listening to animals that John assured her were only squirrels. Influenced perhaps by their example, she too felt that she had reached a point of decision. But her own little bark was not even launched yet on the unknown waters that beckoned her, while John and Martha were already at sea, having chosen to sink or swim. It was an awful choice; Dolly could see why they were scared, even though, for once, she thought she knew better than they did and could promise them that it would be all right for them in the end. But they would not believe her if she told them. “You only see the surface,” Martha had said once, gloomily, when they had all had a lot of red wine at dinner and Dolly had been telling them what a beautiful life they had made here. “Are you different when you’re alone?” Dolly had asked in alarm. No, said the Sinnotts; they had fights, sometimes, but it was not that. It was something else, said Martha. “All this,” she declared, with a sweeping gesture that took in her long, shadowed dining room. “We made it, but I can’t believe that it’s real.”
She did not want Dolly to stay on here. Only till Thanksgiving, she told Dolly firmly. After that, Dolly would not like it. The winds would begin to blow and it would be too unpleasant to go sketching and the people would get on her nerves. But it was just here that Dolly disagreed with her. Despite what Martha said, she felt determined to extend her stay through the winter. She did not want only the “best part,” as Martha called the fall season; she wanted the whole thing. And it distressed her to be told, repeatedly, by both John and Martha that it would be fatal for her to get to know the people here. She had heard it from them the first night, in their white parlor, when her head was swimming with the information that was being pressed on her. Sandy Gray’s name, she ruefully remembered, had led the list of persons especially to be avoided, if, as Martha said, she had come down here to work. That was the point, both the Sinnotts had averred, talking very fast and underscoring each other’s words. If you came here to work, there were only a few people you could safely see: the Coes, a couple called the Hubers, who were much older, and one or two others whose names Dolly could not remember. The rest were death, said Martha, stamping out a cigarette.
“But why?” Dolly had murmured, sleepy and confused. “They don’t work,” said the Sinnotts, with an air of having explained the universe. Dolly did not understand. There were lots of nice people who didn’t work, she protested, feeling a wayward loyalty spring up toward this criticized group. The Sinnotts shook their heads. The local drones were different, they explained: they had turned New Leeds into a hive of inactivity. They not only did not work but they proselytized for sloth. They had even converted the natives. “Do you know,” cried John, “what the carpenter told me the other day when I called him in to look at some sills? He said, ‘Believe it or not, we try to do a good job.’ ” Dolly laughed dubiously; she could see that the Sinnotts were very much excited. These people here, they continued, had no object in life except to see each other incessantly, over a bottle. They did not read; they did not travel, farther than Digby or to Trowbridge, the county seat, when one of them was arrested for drunken driving or had to appear in a divorce case. They did not even keep house or take care of their children any longer. Their wants were reduced to a minimum—shelter, something to eat, blue jeans and a Mackinaw, and a bottle of Imperial. They were like people of the future, said Martha—a planner’s nightmare of what the world would be like when work had been abolished and everybody took a vitamin pill instead of bothering to cook.
“But why shouldn’t they live like that if they want to?” Dolly had been saying to herself, over and over again, in a plaintive voice, alone in her shack, as she answered the Sinnotts on behalf of these New Leedsians whom she had never been permitted to meet. “Why should they work if they don’t have to?” She herself was industrious, even in her pleasures, like a sober little girl making mud pies, but it seemed to her that it was unfair of the Sinnotts to expect the rest of humanity to be like them. Moreover, she was curious, which was, she felt, her right as a woman. She was restive, living in an idyl, with two omniscient beings cautioning her not to open Pandora’s box, not to light Psyche’s taper, not to eat the apple.
“Yes!” she cried, jumping up, when Sandy Gray proposed that she come for a walk in the woods with him.
“Why shouldn’t I if I want to?” she said aloud, rubbing her pale curls thoughtfully, as if she were just waking up. She let him lead her off up a hidden trail, leaving her easel where it was and her brushes unwiped. It was a wonderful walk. He knew the woods better than John and Martha; he showed her foxholes and deer tracks and where a skunk had its den. They explored an old logging trail, very much overgrown. He helped her climb over trees that had been blown down by the last hurricane. Brambles tore her stockings and a hornet stung her, but he hurried down to a little stream and made a mud plaster to put on her cheek. They scaled a high ridge, going cross-country, and found a place where you could look out and see seven ponds. Outdoors, he was a different person, courteously doing the honors as if nature were his home. His hand was always ready, at her elbow, to guide her up a steep spot when she needed it, and he looked the other way when she had to stop to take the stones out of her shoes. They talked about the difficulties of painting from nature, which was always changing just as you got your colors set, and about chess and the Great Barrier Reef. Just before lunch-time, they saw a fawn.
“It looks like you,” he said, turning to scan her with a short, gusty laugh. “The startled fawn.” Dolly colored; it was not the first time she had heard this allusion made. Nevertheless, she liked him, she said to herself, as she peered into the little mirror that was tacked up over the kitchen sink. She was a sight. There were burrs in her hair and her face was streaked with mud, but her cheeks were glowing. He was still there, in the living room, drinking a glass of white wine while she fixed them some lunch: Portuguese bread and hard salami and tomatoes and cheese. He was telling her about his children, who had been handed over to his third wife by a court order when his fourth wife left him. He was suing to get them back. His lawyer was going to show that she was living with a French Canadian truckdriver, down on the bay front, in a house made of cement blocks, and using the maintenance money to buy her paramour presents. “Which one?” called Dolly, slicing the salami. “You mean the fourth or the third?” He meant the third, he said, but the fourth wife was here too, working at the counter of the grille. All his wives were here, except the second one; the first was in the graveyard, up by the high school—a very fine woman, he observed, used to be a singer, older than he was, one of the pioneer artists to settle in New Leeds. For some reason, the dead woman’s presence seemed obscurely shocking to Dolly. Remembering the Sinnotts’ stories, she did not dare ask what she had died of, lest she hear that she had burned up or fallen down a stairway. “What about the second one?” she murmured, setting down the plate of bread and cheese before him and slipping into the place opposite.
A dour expression darkened his face. “Ellen,” he said, slowly, munching a piece of bread. “You’ve heard about Ellen?” Dolly shook her head. “You must have,” he exclaimed. “Your friend Martha must have told you.” Dolly shook her head again. Fear tightened her throat; it was the first time Martha had been mentioned between them, and there was something ugly, a sneer, in the way he pronounced her name. Yet why should he like Martha, she asked herself; after all, Martha did not like him. “That beats all,” he remarked. “Why?” said Dolly, faintly, after a silence. “They were best friends,” he said. “Thick as thieves.” “Oh?” Dolly quavered, filling his glass with wine and pouring milk for herself. “I loved Ellen,” he said, chewing. “She was the only one I loved.” “But what happened?” said Dolly. “She left me,” he retorted. “Seven years ago.” Dolly drew a quick breath. “Martha Murphy,” he said, “put her up to it. I have proof. I found the letters. I pieced them together from the wastepaper basket.” “Letters?” “From Martha to Ellen—general delivery,” he said impatiently. “Urging her to leave me, for her soul’s sake. Ellen was weak. She didn’t want to leave me. She did it because she was told she ought to. Everything Martha did, she copied.” Dolly bit her lip; she could see the possibility of this all too clearly. On the other hand, she could see that Martha might have had reasons. The more he spoke of Ellen, who had been young and blond and beautiful and was disowned by her parents when she married him, the more Dolly felt that the marriage had been unsuitable. “Where is she now?” she inquired, pushing a bowl of grapes toward him. “In Mexico.” She had gone through her own money, it seemed, and was living with a Mexican on the alimony from her second husband. But Sandy Gray still loved her and still wanted her back. Now that he was between marriages, he had started writing to her again, and she had answered. . . .
Dolly glanced at him thoughtfully from beneath lowered brows. Here was a man, she perceived, who was living on hope. Ellen, his children—he expected to get them all back at once and start a new life. He had no idea, apparently—she thought with pity—that anything was ever finished. He was still toying with the notion that he might have sued Martha for alienation of affections, along with his mother-in-law, who had also written letters. Miles Murphy had told him he should have done it when he went to him as a therapist. The word, therapist, prickled Dolly’s sensibilities. He had a number of jargon terms that embarrassed her and she did not care for his Americanisms, which sounded awfully queer in his Australian voice. And his table manners were disturbing. He talked earnestly, with his mouth full, and particles of food kept falling into his beard. All that was unimportant, she said to herself, watching him spit the grape seeds out onto his plate. He had a fearsome sincerity that made good manners seem false.
This sincerity appalled Dolly, for his sake. He was living here in the woods like a mole in a tunnel. The outside did not exist for him, evidently. He was utterly free of self-consciousness—the consciousness, that is, of how he might look to others. It made Dolly feel guilty even to question his hopes, to peep at him through the eyes of the judge in Trowbridge or through the eyes of the woman, Ellen, whose snapshot he took out of his black breast pocket to show her. She held the snapshot at arm’s length, narrowing her eyes to appraise it in the light of his expectations. It was a pretty blond girl, thin, with a long bob and a pearl choker, wearing a sun dress. Dolly felt as if she knew her; she had known the type in college—the strained, squirrelly debutantes who dropped out in the sophomore year to make a reckless marriage. She will never come back to you, she said to herself, remorseful for her percipience. “She’s lovely,” she said aloud, handing back the photograph. He nodded, stowing the picture away with a little pat of satisfaction.
He remained, musing, at the table, drawing on his pipe, while Dolly washed the dishes. He did not offer to help her, and she was grateful for this. There was not room for two in the little kitchen, Dolly had found; when John Sinnott washed up for her, they kept bumping into each other. She did not want to be at such close quarters, indoors, with Mr. Sandy Gray. In the house, his clothes gave off a slightly sour, musty smell, like that of an unaired closet. His fingernails were clean—she had looked to see—but she could not rid herself of the notion that his white soft skin was dirty, underneath his clothes, which she could not imagine ever going to the cleaners’ and coming back on hangers, like middle-class apparel. If he bathed at all, she conjectured, it must be in the pond. She could picture his long white form immersing itself naked, as if in a baptism, with a cake of Ivory soap.
“Would you like a swim?” His voice came suddenly from the sitting room. Dolly started. More than once, she had had the uneasy feeling that he could read her thoughts. “No, thanks,” she answered, in a muffled voice. He would expect her to take her clothes off. Even the Sinnotts had been surprised, the first afternoon, when she produced her gray wool bathing suit. “You don’t need that here,” said Martha, but John had been more tactful and left his underdrawers on, in the water, while Martha had swum nude. After that, they had both brought bathing suits, whenever they came, which Dolly felt was an imposition on them, for the whole point of New Leeds—she could hear Martha saying it—was that you could go in naked.
“Good!” came the voice from the sitting room. “Most people swim too much here.” Despite her relief, Dolly again was troubled; she felt that her friends were being criticized. And what was wrong with swimming? She dared not ask. “The natives never swim,” the voice answered her silent inquiry. “It’s a city person’s fad, like cooking in the fireplace.” “Good Lord!” said Dolly, raising a stricken hand to her cheek. “Wasn’t that what they were used for, originally?” she ventured, hanging up the dish towel. “Hell, yes,” he said. “They did it from necessity. Now it’s phoney, an artifice. ‘Oh, I adore these old fireplaces,’ ” he quoted in falsetto.
Dolly came reluctantly into the sitting room. Her fireplace was not old, but her two wire broilers and an asbestos glove stood beside it, bearing witness against her. She could not make out whether he had seen them. And his point of view was mysterious to her; she could not locate where he stood, with such an uncompromising air. New Leeds, he declared, was being ruined by an influx of smart people with money and artificial standards. Dolly rubbed her eyes. Who did he mean, she asked herself wonderingly. The Sinnotts, if he meant them, had no money. And who else could answer to this description? She could only suppose that he must be referring to her. “Who?” she interrupted. “Who are you talking about?” He smiled. “My dear girl,” he said. “You must have met them and been entertained in their homes.” Dolly shook her head. “I don’t know who you mean,” she said stubbornly. He puffed on his pipe. “The Coes,” he said finally. “The Hubers.” And he named off the very people whom Martha had said she could see. Dolly pressed her lips firmly together to stifle the laughter that was bubbling up. “The Coes!” she cried faintly. “You’re dreaming.” She started to add that she had been served a drink in a jelly glass in their establishment, but prudence closed her mouth just in time; she did not want him to find her with an artificial standard showing. “The Coes are all right,” he conceded. “But they’re rich people and they want to set the tone. They’ve formed a choice little group: your friend Martha, of course, and poor old Miles, when they can snag him.”
Dolly laughed uncomfortably. “I thought you liked Mr. Murphy,” she protested. Sandy Gray nodded. “Miles was my friend,” he said somberly. “Now I don’t know him any more. Or he doesn’t know me. It’s this damned change. He’s got a new woman and he’s gone respectable. He drives around in a Cadillac, wearing a sports jacket. If I ask him to drop in to see me, he explains that his white-wall tires won’t take these back roads or his wheels will get out of alignment. Or he’s busy with his philosophical work. There’s something slick and hard about the guy now that he’s got his life fixed up. ‘First things first,’ I said to him the last time we met and he stared at me like a boiled lobster.” Dolly smiled bleakly at the comparison; she felt touched and troubled by what she was hearing. “Perhaps he is busy,” she suggested. The fact that she herself had seen him the other day at the Coes’ weighed heavy on her conscience. “First things first,” Sandy Gray repeated. “Let me give you an example. I went down to see him last month, on my motorbike. I had the idea that I might get him to testify for me, professionally, as a psychologist, about the kids’ condition. Miles knows Clover, my third wife, from way back; she grew up here; her father wrote for the pulps. He knows she’s an unfit mother; she used to take care of his kid for him when he was living with Martha. I figured he could drop in to see her now and report what he found to my lawyer.” Dolly’s brows furrowed; a deep sense of horror overcame her; her stomach felt queasy. Her sympathies, by instinct, flew to the mother’s side and repelled the idea of spying on her. But she immediately felt rebuked by another inner voice that told her she was being conventional. Many fathers, she knew, made better parents than many mothers; it was only tradition that shrank from the facts. Moreover, there was spying and spying; in a good cause, she supposed, it was justified. “I told him the whole story,” Sandy Gray was relating. “And he sat there at his desk, in that damned windmill, listening, tapping his foot and doodling on a piece of paper. “So what happened?” said Dolly. “Did he refuse you?”
Sandy Gray snorted. “He never gave me the chance to ask him. He cut me short in the middle of a sentence. ‘Well, well,’ he said, getting up and looking at his wrist watch, the way he used to do when the hour was over. ‘Interesting case, Sandy. It will make a judgment of Solomon when it comes to the court in November.’ ” Despite herself, Dolly laughed. “And that was all?” she murmured, sobering her face. “That was all. He had an engagement, he told me. He went to the door and rang a bell for his wife.”
A silence fell. Dolly herself became conscious of the passage of time. She dared not look at her wrist watch, but the sun had left the windows and it must be, she realized, at least three o’clock. In an hour, the sun would set, and nothing was accomplished. She had not gone for the mail or bought her groceries; her brushes and paints and easel were still outside. Yet she tried not to think of these things, which were mere details, she told herself. Her work, her life, her mind were cluttered with detail. “First things first,” she muttered under her breath, like a lesson. An hour ago, she had been on the edge of something—a straightforward relation with a man. And now suddenly it was spoiled, by her having, so to speak, underthoughts. The silence, as it continued, propagated trivia; she looked about her and saw crumbs and tobacco everywhere, which she could not wipe up because it would be conventional. The need to make conversation became an uncomfortable urgency, but she could think of nothing to say but something about the weather. Moreover, she was afraid that John and Martha might come. And on top of everything else, she had to go to the bathroom.
She jumped up and lit a match to the fire laid in the fireplace. He turned to watch her, crouching at the hearth. “How old are you?” he said abruptly. Dolly told him her age. “Are you a virgin?” he demanded. Dolly’s spine stiffened; she rose, slowly, and backed up against the fireplace wall. Nobody had asked her this question since she had been in college. She had often yearned to discuss what was the central fact in her life, but everybody steered shy of it, even her closest friends. Yet now that she had been asked, finally, her tongue remained paralyzed. She stared at him speechlessly, trying to feel indignation.
“Well?” he said. “Are you or aren’t you?” Dolly looked at him in anguish. “Don’t you know?” he said, ironically. This, in literal fact, was the case. She had had a single experience, five years before, on a boat, at night, on the deck, behind a stack of steamer chairs. A sailor had interrupted them, and she had fled in shame to her cabin, not sure whether or not the act, as the books said, had been completed. The next morning they had landed, and she had never seen her partner, a young student, again. Since that time, men had made love to her, and she had responded, even while resisting. But they got discouraged too easily; they gave up, like her painting teachers, just when she might have let herself go. Several times, she had nearly made the plunge. She had permitted what her aunts used to call liberties and was ready to give the final favor, though she still weakly pushed and struggled, when the man, straightening his necktie, would get up and say he was sorry. “Don’t be sorry,” she had several times cried out, but they took this as mere courtesy on her part. The older she got, the more men hesitated to tamper with her, because they thought she was a virgin, and she could not correct this impression, because she was not sure.
As she stood gazing at Sandy Gray, she felt the gates of her speech miraculously unlocking. She was going to tell; his wish to know was impersonal. After all, she reminded herself, he was in love with another woman. Recklessly, she opened her mouth and took a deep breath, but at that moment he got up and yawned, stretching his long arms. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry. Don’t tell me.” He picked up his cap from the studio couch. “But I’ll tell you one thing,” he observed thoughtfully. “You’ve never been in love.”
Dolly’s rueful gaze rested, startled, on him. It was true, but how did he know it? Her stubborn nature had known many passionate attachments—to animals, to her teachers, to her friends. But she had never loved a man, in the sense that he meant, except in daydreams. “How do you know?” she said. He shrugged. “I see it everywhere,” he replied, gesturing with his cap. “In your work. In the way you stand, backed up against the wall. In your books. Noli me tangere.” Tears came to Dolly’s eyes for the second time that day. “Don’t cry,” he said. “I like you. You’re a good little child in your pinafore. You love Mummy and Daddy and Nanny and little brother and sister and your teddy bear. Some day you may grow up to be a woman.”
He put on his cap. “Drop over to see me,” he said. “I live on the other side of the pond, behind that pine grove.” Dolly stood watching him go, the way he had come, striking with his knife at the pickerel weed. She felt shattered. A long-sought opportunity had been missed. Another time, if she saw him, everything would be different: she would know him too well to speak openly. It was because he had come to her as a stranger, out of the pond, like a water god, that she had nearly confessed herself. She was tempted to run after him, but another feeling, a sense of proud umbrage, held her where she was. He was wrong about her, she said to herself triumphantly. He had missed the point altogether. She had no Mummy or Daddy or brother or sister. She was an orphan. He was stupid not to have seen that. And John and Martha were right. Thanks to him, she had lost a day’s painting. Perplexity smote her. She struck herself a violent blow on the forehead. “Oh damn,” she cried. “Damn, damn, damn!”