… the dream …

WISH I COULD FIND MYSELF, thought Effie, in the shadowy corner of the bedroom at St. Ursula’s Hospital, it’s not true I’m here beside Marian, hearing her breathe, it can’t have been me myself who just sent the cable to Andy begging him to come to her, it can’t be me whispering to her every time she opens her eyes that of course he loves her, of course he will come back to her, of course he won’t let her die, of course he loves her, of course he does, it can’t be me saying these words to her, any more than that thin worn body on the bed can be Marian, the gay dancing girl in the pointed hat and Columbine ruff at the masquerade ball, the eager little infatuated creature forever feasting her eyes on Andy, hanging on his words long ago while I smiled. It cannot be true, said Effie, it cannot be true; and the heavy breathing of the woman on the bed drowned out her thoughts as soon as they were born as the drums of Santerre drowned out Louis XVI’s dying words.

I wish I could find myself again, but I hunt in vain for a familiar clue through every door of my mind and there is nothing of me there, nothing. There is no inside to me, nothing but tactile sensations—this momentary presence is tolerable, its absence pain, but why I do not know. It is as if a blowtorch had gone through me and left me outside the same but no furnishing within except a fear, a little fear left behind like an abandoned pet, an utterly cowardly deathly fear of being hurt more, but even that is not a human reaction but a mechanical one, shrill static in the empty cavern of the body, and hollowness hurts more than live quivering guts. Life, or even wonder about life, has vanished, my brain has broken up like an old wedding present into a thousand bits, I can put together only a few of them to spell out the anagram of my own misery. Repeated pain cancels itself, so that instead of details, facts, adding up, a blank appears at a given suggesting word or deed, and this blank, this mask, is more terrifying in its bleak impenetrability than any careful picture; it appears like a No Sale signal in a broken cash register when you know there was a sale, but it repeats the sinister blank inanely, endlessly.

This must be Marian, this must be the letter itself in my hand, this must be my own heart beating at the thought of Andy again on the fringes of my life.… What happens inside people like me who are braced for certain challenges and then spoiled a little, dikes weakened through lack of use, is that the storm, the ocean breaks in and we have nothing but our sheer shock, we have no emotional equipment to handle it, nothing, so that the lightning plays over naked heart and bowels, the blowtorch burns us out, and no pain is left, nothing but the numbed nerves, the broken will, the broken pride.

From a person one turns into a sick dog, defeating itself and its own recovery with every feeble whine. To wake and find myself gone, no part of me left, terrifies me, where am I?—is this Effie Thorne here in the chair, or is it Effie Thorne there on the bed breathing her last few hours away? Look, my hand, veins so clearly outlined, the turquoise on the engagement finger, my ring, my hand, but how quaintly remote, and my body, this very chair in which I wait, this heavy antiseptic air, all are part of another person’s life, not of mine, for I am not real, it is as if meeting Marian again had changed me from human to vegetable and I can be conscious only of the sun, of light, and of shadow.

Marian’s body twitched restlessly and Effie armored herself with a smile to greet her waking, a glittering unbreakable smile that should cut through dusk and suffering.

“Effie.”

“Yes, Marian.”

“You know I never meant—I mean—I did like you, Effie. It wasn’t really taking advantage of your house at first—I mean—it was just that Andy and I—”

“I know, Marian.”

“When this new girl came along a few months ago, this dancer, I realized things for the first time. I saw how you must have felt. I hated her—the way you hated me—”

Effie forced herself to interrupt the dry weary voice.

“I never hated you, Marian.”

“Well—I couldn’t stand their looking at each other and laughing. Can you understand that? Just that, I mean? I couldn’t bear their eyes suddenly meeting over a joke. It sounds silly, something got into me—I was sick, too—and I—well, I bought a ticket to America. I wanted to show him. Then I got sick as soon as I landed and I wouldn’t let anyone tell him. I thought I’d die just for revenge, but oh, Effie—I—”

“I know.” How well she knew!

“She never meant anything to him, not the way I did. You know he told me he never could write decently till he met me. He needed me, he said. He started the trilogy as soon as we settled down together—his best work, too—”

What’s the matter with my lips, they won’t open, why can’t I say something to her, why can’t I say that’s fine, that’s dandy? Effie wondered. The nurse came in, a sharp white line in the gray of the room. She turned on the light and adjusted the pillows.

“Isn’t it nice we’ve found your friend?” she murmured. “Now if we can only get hold of your husband and tell him to hurry right over.”

“Yes,” said Effie.

“This naughty girl wouldn’t let us tell anyone she was here for weeks and weeks. She said she didn’t want anyone to worry about her, so finally we just had to do a little detective work of our own. And now she’s glad, aren’t you, dear?”

“Terribly glad.”

The nurse picked up the water carafe and left.

Marian had not changed much, Effie thought. Thin and gaunt as she was, her body scarcely more than a long fold in the blanket, her face still held the eager hunger it had possessed at twenty-three, the heavy dark hair and thick lashes were the same, the same narrow pretty mouth.

“What did you say in the cable, Effie? Tell me again. You’re quite sure you didn’t say I was too—too sick, you’re quite sure you didn’t ask him to come out of pity?”

“I said ‘Marian ill,’ ” said Effie, “and the name of the hospital.”

“You do think he will come?”

“Yes, yes.”

Marian was silent, smiling a little to herself.

“I know he will,” she said presently. “I know he’d come to the ends of the world for me. I’m the only person he ever loved. He’s told me. Even after this girl came along. I’m the only person. So he’ll come to me.”

Effie got up and looked out the window into the gathering night, twin churches in twin dunce caps of illuminated spires across the street, a skyscraper emptied of workers now threaded with a single row of hall lights, and far-off flaming red sky over Broadway. Outside blurred suddenly into a shadowy reflection of herself in the windowpane, herself with churches, skyscraper, and red sky spreading over the ghostly outline of her head.

“Yes,” she said, almost inaudibly, “yes, Marian.”