Seven

The family, the family. They had been brought up to care for each other. In every emergency, and there had been emergencies, it was always the sense of family that brought them all together.

Alone, in his room, and unable to sleep, he was looking at the grey shadows of branches outside his window that traced themselves in marbly patterns on the white ceiling in the moonlight. And he was thinking about the family, and how it was the catastrophies that united them, and brought out the best in them. He was remembering Georgia Warm Springs, eighteen years ago, at the end of that long summer. They had all come there to be with him. His mother had taken a little house on the Shiloh Road, just five minutes from the Foundation, to be near him; his father had flown down on week-ends, and his Aunt Reba had flown down. Once or twice his little sister Pansy had been brought down for a visit, and there were cousins who had come, and other members of the family. But his mother was there constantly. He remembered those long, hot and windless afternoons, through that autumn and into the winter, and the way the sun changed in the dusty grass. Every morning, sprinklers played on the grass for hours, washing it green, but by evening it was brown again, covered with dust. His mother had worked with him, taking over where the nurses left off, and he remembered her beside him as he lay in the swimming baths, coaching him, making him move in the swirling, tepid water, making him do what he was sure he couldn’t do, saying to him, “Turn. Now turn. Kick. Kick your leg. Kick your leg. Again. Again. Now turn …”

“I can’t!” he would say.

“You can. Certainly you can. Now turn. Lift your arm. Up and down. Up and down.”

And, in his bed, she would massage him, kneading the stiffened muscles between her strong hands, rubbing him. Sometimes, in his dreams, he still felt the endless motion of her fingers. In those days, she had kept her long curved fingernails, which had been such a point of pride with her, pruned short and round, like a boy’s, and unpolished. She had given up the extravagant clothes, and wore smocks and house dresses that she bought by the dozens at Montgomery Ward’s, and she had let her hair go to its natural colour, a lustreless ash-blonde with premature streaks of grey. She had abandoned cosmetics and, for once in her life, looked her age. As she rubbed, sometimes she read to him. What had she read? Sometimes it seemed to him that she had read to him every book in the world, everything from Black Beauty to Anna Karenina. She had brought him things to do: paints and brushes and crayons, paper and scissors and paste, wood-burning sets and knitting needles; and she had sat beside him, making him use them, making him knit a sweater for himself, a scarf, a pair of mittens, making him paint awkward pictures of houses and dogs and trees and, while he painted, she rubbed, and talked to him about what they were going to do, the places they were going to see, the fun they were going to have together, when he was better.

Sometimes, when he was so tired that he could not keep his eyes open any longer, and would let the brush or the needles drop, she would make him turn, and would begin the rubbing in a new place. Sometimes, when he was fast asleep, she would wake him for the rubbing, the massage, the exercise. The nurses and the doctors had had nothing but admiration for her, this drably dressed, dedicated, and seemingly tireless woman. They had called her magnificent too. She had met President Roosevelt there, and had brought the president in to see him. He and the president had talked for over half an hour, and his mother had been so impressed with the president that she had become a Democrat, a thing no Pryor had ever done before.

And then, after that, when there had been the slow series of operations on his leg and arm, she had been there, always beside him. And he remembered the times, after the anæsthetic, that he could not urinate, and he remembered her standing beside him at the toilet, running cold water in the basin, rubbing his arms and wrists and hands with wet cloths and saying, “Now. Do it now.”

And he had said, “I can’t, I can’t,” weeping from the pain, and she had only said, “Yes, you can. Of course you can. Let your breath out. Do it. Do it now.” Until he had done it.

And then, after that, he remembered them together on the beach at St. Simons Island. She had made him plunge into the water, made him swim to the sand bar, made him lie and float in the rocking waves that gathered just beyond the breakers. Then, out of the water, she had made him run on the beach. “I’ll race you to that palm tree,” she would say, and when he would fall on the sand, she would pick him up and make him continue the race. And when the race was over and he sat panting by the tree, she would make him get up and race again. “Run, run, run,” she would say to him.

“Please—no more running!” he would beg her.

“Come on. Run. I’ll race you back into the water.”

And so it had gone. You could never forget scenes like those—scenes which had been lived at such a pitch, with such intensity. As long as he lived he would not forget them. They were etched indelibly on his memory.

Lying here now, in his room, trying to nudge himself over the lip of sleep, these scenes were vividly all around him. He was remembering them, and then afterwards, when he had been able to go back to school. For some reason he was remembering one day at Millbrook, when the headmaster had declared a holiday, and when he and Joe Wallace, who had been his room-mate there as later on at Yale, had got permission to take a train to Bash Bish Falls, with a picnic lunch. It had been one of those extraordinary May days in the Berkshire hills when spring had suddenly surrendered itself to summer, and when they had got to Bash Bish, hiking in on the dirt road from the railroad station, it had been very hot, with swarms of aphids in the air. They had stripped off their clothes and gone for a swim in the small pool of cold and faintly sulphurous water at the bottom of the falls. Then, after the swim, he and Joe lay naked on a flat rock in the sun, their bodies smelling of Skol and citronella, thinking that it would be a fine idea to get an over-all tan between now and the end of summer. And their talk, as it so often seemed to do in those days, turned to girls, and what they thought of certain ones, and what their opinions were of the sex as a whole.

“There’s this girl at home,” Hugh had said, “Edrita Everett. She’s going to Dobbs now. I like her quite a lot.”

“Did you ever make out with her?” Joe asked. (“Making out”—that was the tentative, evasive expression they all used then; “Did you make out with her?” Yes. No. It meant both everything and nothing.)

“Aw, come on, Joe!” Hugh had said.

“Did you? Did you?” Joe asked eagerly. “Hey, I’ll bet you did. What was it like?”

“Aw, now come on,” Hugh had said.

“Come on? Come on? What does that mean? I’ll just bet you did.” And then Joe, not to be outdone or thought inexperienced in such matters, had begun a long, rambling account of a girl he knew from his home town in Monmouth County, New Jersey, a telephone operator named Louise. Louise was game for anything, it seemed, and, from Joe’s description of it anyway, he had made out with Louise dozens of times. “You know,” Joe said, “there’s a little special nerve, or something, in a woman’s back. Right below and a little to the left of her right shoulder blade. If you can get your arm around her, and find that little nerve, and press it, then—whammo! She’ll do anything.”

“No kidding?” Hugh said.

“That’s a medical fact about women. You’ve just got to find that little special nerve.”

They lay in silence, chins resting on their hands. “There was this nurse in the hospital at Warm Springs,” Hugh said. “This real cute little nurse, about twenty-one or twenty-two.”

“Oh, boy,” Joe said. “Those nurses. They’re the easiest ones in the world to make out with. Did you make out with her?”

“Hell,” Hugh said, “I was only about twelve or thirteen.”

“Oh,” Joe said, disappointed. “Well—”

“One day she was giving me a sponge bath,” Hugh said.

“Yeah?” Joe said, interested again. “What happened?”

“Well, she was giving me this sponge bath—you know, the kind they give you in hospitals—this pretty little nurse, this Miss Forbes. And I mean she was really pretty.”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “but they always hand you the sponge, don’t they, and make you wash certain things yourself?”

“Well, sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t,” Hugh said. “They don’t when—well, anyway, she didn’t, not that time. And she was giving me this sponge bath, you see, and—”

“And what? What did she do? What happened?”

“Well, as I say, she was real pretty and she was giving me this sponge bath, and—well, I guess I got a little excited.”

“Yeah?” Joe said, turning and resting on his elbow. “Yeah? And then what?”

“Well,” Hugh said, wondering now why he had begun this pointless story, which had nowhere near the colour of Joe’s about Louise, “well, I guess she noticed something, and anyway she slapped me.”

“She slapped you?”

“Yes. Well, not a hard slap. Just a little slap. But enough.’

“She slapped you in the face?”

“No, not in the face. She sort of slapped me—you know—there.”

Joe stretched himself flat on the rock and emitted a long sigh of disgust. “Ahhh,” he said. “Boy, if some damn’ nurse ever did that to me, I’d punch her in the jaw. Why didn’t you punch her right in the jaw? Boy, but that’s typical though, isn’t it? That’s typical of the way a woman is. They make you think—they lead you on—and then they pull some deal like that. Boy, but that’s what disgusts me about women sometimes. But that’s the way they are, isn’t it? That’s the way a woman is different from a man. A woman can either take it or leave it alone, and there’s not a damn’ thing you can do.”

“Well, not all of them are like that,” Hugh said.

“Most of them, though. But you’re right, not all. Now take that girl Ted Stranahan had up for the Senior Dance. What was her name? Anne Cromwell?”

“Yes, the blonde.”

“Yeah. I hear she’s a pretty hot little neck. I hear Stranahan took her out behind the gym and necked hell out of her. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stranahan made out with her, too, some time during that week-end.”

“Aw, how could he have made out with her?” Hugh said. “Where is there around this school that you could take a girl to make out with her?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of places,” Joe said.

“Where? Name one.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” Joe said, “I’ve heard of one easy place. You know that house where some of the cooks and the maids live?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I guess this school doesn’t pay those cooks and maids much. So I’ve heard that if you slip one of those cooks or maids five or ten bucks, they’ll let you use their room for an hour or so.”

“No kidding? And not tell the school about it?”

“Why should they tell the school about it? That’s what you slip them the five or ten bucks for.”

“No kidding?”

“Well, that’s what I’ve heard,” Joe said.

“And you think that’s what Stranahan did?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I wouldn’t be surprised. That Anne Cromwell is supposed to be a real hot little neck.”

“Well, necking is one thing …” Hugh said.

“Say,” Joe said, “you ought to take her out yourself. Why don’t you? I bet you could make out with her. And she likes you, I could tell. I saw you dancing with her.”

“Aw, I don’t know,” Hugh said. “Why don’t you take her out?”

“Me? Oh, she wouldn’t look at me. She wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

“Why not?”

Joe was a slender, well-built boy and, at fifteen or sixteen, which was the age they both were then, he had had a habit of tugging at the sandy-coloured forelock of his hair and pulling it down across his forehead, towards the ridge of his nose, when he was nervous or thoughtful, or worried about something. He seized his hair with his fingers and began this tugging motion now. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said slowly. “She just wouldn’t, that’s all.”

“I bet she would.”

“No,” he said, “Stranahan’s told me all about her. She’s a regular little snob. She won’t go out with a guy unless he’s in the Social Register.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah, that’s what Stranahan said. Her mother told her to look up every guy who asks her out in the Social Register, before she says yes. Do you know what he says she does? She carries around a copy of the Social Register in her suitcase whenever she goes anywhere for a week-end, so she can check up on every guy she meets. And do you know what else she carries around in her suitcase?”

“What?”

“A baby pillow. A god-damned baby pillow. Some baby pillow she had when she was a kid. Stranahan told me she takes that god-damned baby pillow wherever she goes. He says she can’t get to sleep at night unless she’s got that baby pillow beside her in her bed.”

“No kidding?”

“That’s what he said. And now, I mean that’s disgusting, isn’t it? What kind of a girl would do that? I mean, really, Stranahan said that even he was kind of disgusted when he found out about that. You should see that old baby pillow, Stranahan said. He said it was kind of all dirty, and old, and torn. It just looked like some old piece of rag, he said.”

Suddenly Hugh had laughed loudly. “Boy!” he said. “I can just see it! Can’t you see it, Joe? Can’t you see them all? Stranahan and Anne Cromwell, off in some funny old cook’s room, making out—with her baby pillow. Can you see it?” He had rolled several times across the flat rock, clutching his sides, whooping with laughter. “Can you?” he said. “Can you see it, Joe?”

Joe had laughed too. “Well, I guess it is pretty funny. But she’s still a damn’ nice-looking girl, though.”

“Well,” Hugh said, still laughing, “I guess I wouldn’t stand much chance with her either, if you’ve got to be in the Social Register to take her out.”

“Hell,” Joe said, “you’re in it.”

“Am I?” He looked across at Joe, surprised.

“Sure. You’re in it. There’s a copy in the library and I looked you up. You’re in it.”

“I didn’t know that,” Hugh said.

“Well, you are.”

“Are you?”

“Hell, no.”

They lay in silence on the rock for a while, baking in the sun. Joe’s mood had changed, and he seemed to be brooding about something, fiddling with the short forelock of his hair, pulling it straight down across his forehead.

After a while, Joe said, “Hugh, are you religious? Do you believe in God?”

Hugh thought about this for a minute. “Well,” he said finally, “I don’t know how religious I am. But yes, I guess I believe in God.”

Joe said nothing.

“No,” Joe said. “No, I don’t.”

“What do you believe in, then?”

“I believe in nature,” Joe said, looking at the falls that cascaded across the rocks into the pool. “I believe in the eternal laws of nature. And in the powers of the human will.”

“Well, I guess I believe in that, too,” Hugh said.

“Yes,” Joe said. “That’s what I believe in. But I believe that man, not God, is all-powerful.”

“Oh,” Hugh said.

“I mean, like take you. What do you want to do? When you get out of college, I mean.”

“You mean seriously what do I want to do?”

“Yes, seriously.”

“Well,” Hugh said, “I do have one idea.”

“What is it?”

“Well,” Hugh said, “it’s like this. I like sports. But—well, I can’t play any sports very well, you see. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to, but I just can’t play any of them really well, and I never will be able to. But I do like them, and maybe I’m even a little bit more interested in sports than guys like yourself, who can really play them. And so, for the last couple of years I’ve been thinking that what I’d really like to be someday is a sports reporter for a newspaper.”

“H’mm!” Joe said thoughtfully. “A sports reporter. Not much money in that, is there?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe not right at the start. But I guess you can work your way up in something like that, just like in anything else.”

“Well, maybe,” Joe said.

“What about you, Joe? What do you want to do?”

“Well,” Joe said, “I really think that this is the time of life to start planning—right now—and stop wasting time. I figure this is the time to start setting your sights towards what you want to get and to pay attention only to those things that you figure are going to help you get there, and skip all the things that aren’t. I mean, it’s the same way with girls. I figure—oh, I’ve fooled around with girls a lot, in the past. But now I’m going to be different because I figure that if you fool around—you know—too much with girls, it can make you dissatisfied with the wife you finally get. So I’m going to be a little more choosy from now on.”

“What else do you want?” Hugh had asked him.

“Oh, I want—I want a lot of things,” Joe said.

“Tell me.”

“Well, I want a job where I can make a lot of money. I want to be making at least fifty thousand dollars a year by the time I’m thirty. And then, by the time I’m making enough money to afford to do the sort of things I’d like to do for a wife, I’ll get married. And—oh, I want a great big Park Avenue apartment. A big apartment on Park Avenue, on right about Seventieth Street. And I want a house—a big house for the summer on the beach somewhere. Somewhere like Deal, for instance, on the Jersey shore. And I want my wife to have a butler and a maid and a cook, and a mink coat, and I want a chauffeur to drive me to my office, and I want a fancy car—a Rolls-Royce, maybe, or a car like your mother’s red car. And I want—” The list had contained several items.

Joe’s dreams, Hugh had realised, were always orderly, specific. Matters of the heart were tailored to those dreams. (“If you fool around—you know—too much with girls, it can make you dissatisfied with the wife you finally get.”) And he lay on the rock, thinking about the tidy avenues of Joe’s heart, with their pruned shade trees, their ornamental catalpas, and wondering why his own heart’s landscape seemed to contain so many unruly clumps of shrubbery. He had always admired Joe’s certainty, his specificness, the directness and purpose with which he went about getting what he wanted. (In their room, Joe would pick up a book, flip it open, sit down, and say, “I’m going to get an A on this damn’ history test,” and, as it would turn out, he would get the A.) With Hugh himself, it was always different. The future did not define itself in such a precise, clear way. Yet it beckoned just as surely, if in vaguer terms. Lying there in the warm May sun, with his eyes and all his senses awake, his life and the future seemed to be somewhere ahead of him, but hidden behind a bright bit of gauze, yet with glitter-dust and sunshine dazzling all around it.

He looked at Bash Bish Falls, that pounded in the noisy rhythm of their Indian name. Suddenly he jumped to his feet. “Look!” he said.

At the brink of the falls, high above them, a fawn was standing. And now it leaped, arching in the air, for the opposite side of the stream. But it landed short of the rock in the water. “Oh, God!” Hugh said, as it began to go over the falls.

It fell with a terrible slowness, seeming to take an eternity to reach the bottom. At times it seemed arrested in the thick cataract of falling water—perhaps as, with its feet, it found brief anchoring places in the rocks behind the falls—and for several repeated instants it seemed as though the fawn might save itself and be able to jump to safety. But it continued to fall, in these endless stages, until it last it lay turning slowly in the pool where Hugh and Joe had just been swimming, its white belly floating upwards, its neck twisted backward and broken.

“Oh, God,” Hugh whispered. “That was my fault. I startled it when I jumped up.”

Joe Wallace was standing beside him, looking at the dead fawn, at the gathering circle of crimson blood around it in the water. “No, it wasn’t your fault,” Joe said. “It’s just the laws of nature I was talking about. The survival of the fittest.”

Coming back, they had almost missed the train. Just as he and Joe got to the station, the train had been pulling out They had had to run down the track after it and jump aboard.

He remembered Joe Wallace telling his mother about it when she had come up to the school the following week-end. “Boy, you should have seen us, Mrs. Carey,” Joe had said. “Running down the old track, waving and yelling our heads off, trying to catch the old train.”

“Did Hugh make it?” she had demanded in her tense voice.

“Sure,” Joe said easily. “Sure he made it, Mrs. Carey.”

“Oh, thank God!”

His mother had always talked to him very frankly about all the girls he knew; she told him what she liked about them, and what she didn’t. “Too bad she’s so hippy,” she would say of one. And “God, but doesn’t she have a marvellous figure!” she would say of another. She analysed them all for him. “Watch out for little Barbara Brewster, darling,” she would say. “She wants to marry you—I see that gleam in her eye.” And “Don’t you think Diana Barnes is a gorgeous thing? She has a marvellous, abandoned look. Abandonnée, as the French say. She can be had, baby, I’ll wager anything. Take a tip from the wise, darling—that pretty little thing can be had!”

And much later, in his senior year at college, he had come up to the house for a week-end from New Haven. And he had mentioned to her that he had been thinking—at least off and on lately—seriously, about Edrita. She had been equally explicit about that.

“We always reach upward, you and I,” she said. “Not downward, or towards some middle ground.”

And when he had asked her what she meant, how this applied to Edrita, she had said, “Darling, the Everetts aren’t much. Really they aren’t. Henry Everett made a lot of money back in the twenties by pulling off a lot of very shady stock deals, and he got out of the market just in time, before the crash. He’s been extremely lucky in a way, and he’s been very smart. He’s been smart enough to cover up all his deals and come out of it all seeming to be absolutely soaked with respectability. But if the truth were ever known about some of Henry Everett’s manipulations, Henry Everett would be in jail.”

“But I think Edrita’s nice,” he said.

“Oh, so do I! I think she’s very nice, too. Very nice. I just don’t like her, that’s all.”

“What is it you don’t like about her?”

“Doesn’t she strike you, Hugh, as a little fresh and brassy? Doesn’t she? Look at her a little more closely, dear. Try to look at her dispassionately. She’s—well, she’s a little cheap, darling. I hate to say it, but the lack of breeding and background does show through.”

“I think that’s very silly,” he said.

“Do you? Well, let me try to give you a tiny example of what I mean. Do you know what Clara Everett asked me once? She said to me, ‘Alexandra’—Clara always calls me Alexandra—she said, ‘Alexandra, darling, tell me something: Do you wash your milk bottles before returning them to the milkman? My maid never bothers to, and the other day the milkman complained to me about taking back dirty milk bottles.’ Clara said to me, ‘Alexandra, what do you do?’ Now, really. That’s the kind of person Clara Everett is.”

He laughed. “Well,” he said, “what did you tell her? What do you do with your milk bottles?”

“My dear, I didn’t know what to tell her. I said to her, ‘Clara, that’s the most bewildering question I’ve ever had asked me.’ I really hadn’t the faintest idea what we did with milk bottles at the house. Frankly, I didn’t even realise milk came from bottles. I know it comes from cows, but how it gets from the cow to me is something I’ve never really looked into.”

“Well,” he said, “I wasn’t talking about her mother, Sandy. I was talking about Edrita.”

“Darling,” she said, “all I ask you to do is to think a little bit. Try to look at the thing sensibly. Think about her, and about your feelings towards her. You see, my dear, I know you awfully well. We’ve been very close, you and I. We’ve been through a lot together. I think I know what would be best for you, and also the kind of girl who would make you happy. You just wouldn’t be happy with Edrita, baby. I know you wouldn’t because I know you. Do you want me to tell you exactly why you think you might like to marry her?”

“Yes,” he said. “Tell me.”

“Because she’s close,” she said. “She’s next door. You’ve grown up with her, played together as children. She’s the easy one. She’s the obvious one—the one you can marry without half trying. You’re reaching years of discretion, a lot of your friends are getting engaged, and now you’re thinking perhaps you should get married, too. And you’ve thought: Well, there’s Edrita, a stone’s throw away. A lead-pipe cinch. Well, darling, this is not the sort of attitude that leads to a successful marriage, I can assure you of that.”

He had said nothing.

Then she had said, “And there’s another thing. I hate to mention it, but I will. You’ve made marvellous progress, extraordinary progress. Sometimes it’s hard to believe the great progress you’ve made. But your health is—well, you’ve got to realise, you’ve got to face the fact that you’ve always got to be careful—not to tire yourself, to keep yourself rested, and in shape. It’s the most important thing you have to do. And Edrita—well, she’s such a husky, active girl. All-night parties, that sort of thing. I’m afraid if you married a girl like that she’d wear you out!”

Later that same afternoon, his sister Pansy had come into his room. Pansy was seven years younger, about fourteen at the time, and she had come in in a pair of blue jeans and Western riding boots and flopped down across the top of his bed. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi, Pan,” he said.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

He reached in his shirt pocket for a pack and handed her one.

Pansy lighted it, blew out the match, and coughed. “God, I’ve been smoking too much,” she said.

He smiled at her. “I guess maybe you have,” he said.

“Sandy doesn’t know about it, of course. Don’t tell her.”

“I won’t tell her,” he said.

She held the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger, studying the lighted end. “Joanne Gibbs and I are both going to quit for Lent,” she said.

“Good idea.”

“Hugh,” she said, “I heard you and Sandy talking downstairs before.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. I don’t know what Sandy means, Hugh.”

“Means about what?”

“About Edrita.”

“Well, I guess Sandy doesn’t think Edrita and I would be the perfect match,” he said.

“Hugh,” she said, “is Sandy a snob?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “In some ways, I suppose. But in some ways everybody’s a snob.”

“Really?”

“In some ways. We’re all snobbish about certain things, I guess. We all try to imitate what we think better people do—or smarter people, or more successful people. Or, in your case, older people.”

“What do you mean, in my case?”

“Smoking that cigarette, for instance.”

She smiled faintly. “Oh,” she said. “I see what you mean.”

“Yes.”

She rolled over on her back, put the cigarette between her lips, and blew a thin stream of smoke straight up at the ceiling. “Well,” she said, “I like Edrita. I just wanted you to know that.”

“I like her, too,” he said.

“I think she’s—very nice. I think she’s the nicest of all the older girls I know. I think she’s the nicest of all the girls you’ve ever taken out, I really do. And I think it would be very nice if you married her.”

“Well,” he said, “I haven’t really decided anything yet, Pan. There’s plenty of time to decide things like that.”

“Hugh,” she said, “don’t act superior to me. Please don’t act superior.”

“I didn’t mean to be,” he said. “Was I?”

“I thought you were being—just then. Just a little bit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Because I’m really very mature for my age. I really am,” she said. She put her booted foot on her knee and put her head way back, her short brown hair falling backwards from her face, across the coverlet, staring at the ceiling. “Sometimes I think that I think too much,” she said.

“About what?”

“About life, death. Marriage. Things like you and Edrita. Hugh, would you like me to intercede for you with Sandy? Tell her that I think you should marry Edrita?”

“I think we should let the subject lie for the time being,” he said.

She sighed. “Of course,” she said, “I really don’t know anything about anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—marriage, for instance. I don’t know anything about that. Nobody will tell me anything.” She continued to look up at the ceiling. “Hugh,” she said, “will you tell me?”

“Tell you about what?”

“Tell me about everything. I told you—I don’t know anything. About anything. I mean, literally, I don’t. I don’t know what it means, or—you know, what married people do. Not even that.”

“Get Sandy to tell you all about that,” he said.

“She won’t. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to ask her. All she’ll say is, ‘Don’t worry about things like that yet, dear. Just run along and be pretty.’ But I do worry about things like that, Hugh. I do.” She paused. “You see, I want to become deeply involved in life.”

“Well—” he began.

“I mean literally. I mean I’ve seen—you know, words. Written places. But I don’t know what those words mean. The other day, for instance, at school—somebody said something about a—a jock strap. I didn’t know what that meant, and they said it was sort of like a brassière. But how could that be? I don’t understand what that means. All I know is that it has something to do with sex.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” he said. “Not really.”

“Well, what is it? Can you tell me any of these things, Hugh? I’m the only one of any of my friends, you see, who has an older brother, and I thought—perhaps—”

“Really, I think this whole subject is something you’d better discuss with Sandy.”

“But she won’t, I tell you! I told you what she says—run along and be pretty.”

“Discuss it with Sandy, or—”

“Or who? Who is there? Won’t you tell me anything, Hugh? You know something about some of these things, don’t you? After all, if you’re thinking about getting married—”

“I know, but—from a male point of view. And you’re a girl, which is different. You should hear about it from another woman, like your mother. Or a book. Why not ask her if there’s a book you can read.”

“Oh, I don’t want to read about life in some old book!” she said. “I want to hear about it from people, real people.”

“Ah, Pan, I can’t explain any of these things to you,” he said. “Really, I just can’t. It isn’t going to be right, coming from me. It’s got to be from Sandy. Or—or how about Reba?”

“What does Reba know about marriage? Reba’s an old maid.”

“Or a book.”

She was silent for a moment. “You’re just—just too embarrassed to tell me things, aren’t you?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “perhaps I am.”

She lay on the bed, frowning at the ceiling. She put her cigarette to her mouth again, took a deep pull, and blew out a cloud of smoke. “Oh, nobody tells me anything!” she said.

As it had turned out, in the years after the day at Bash Bish Falls, he had begun taking Anne Cromwell out. He had taken her out a good deal, in fact. His mother had liked Anne. Anne came from an old and distinguished New York family, and she lived, in the winter, in an apartment on Fifth Avenue, and, in summer, in a large house in Locust Valley, on Chicken Valley Road. She was a beautiful girl, blonde, with high, fine cheekbones; she had gone to Spence and Vassar and, as he had found out later, the story about the baby pillow was true enough. It had been, she confessed, a silly childish habit, and she had outgrown it by the time she got to college. But it seemed doubtful that the baby pillow had ever joined her and Ted Stranahan in a room sub-let from a Millbrook cook. When Anne was a débutante, Hugh had been invited to all the parties that Anne went to, and—because he had nothing against Anne, and really liked her quite a lot—he hadn’t thought anything about it when his mother invited her up to the house in’ Connecticut for week-ends, or when her family invited him to New York or to Long Island. Only once had his mother said to him, with a little laughing look, “Darling, if you want to marry someone—marry Anne!”

He remembered the summer after he had graduated from Yale, when he and Anne had been sitting beside the pool at the Piping Rock Club. They had been playing canasta most of the afternoon and then, bored with that, Anne had stretched out, slim and tanned in her bathing suit, on her stomach on the terrace, and had started doing card tricks.

“Pick a card, any card,” Anne said, fanning out the deck in her hand.

“This one?”

“Fine. Look at it. Don’t show it to me.”

He had looked at it.

“Now put it back on the top of the deck. Now,” she said, “watch me very closely. I’m going to cut the cards, see? See, I’m cutting them. Now I’m going to shuffle them. Watch me. Now see, I’m shuffling them. Is one shuffle enough?”

“Shuffle them again,” he said.

“Gladly, sir,” she said. “See? I’m shuffling them again. Now, do you agree that the cards are thoroughly shuffled?”

“They’re shuffled,” he nodded.

“Now I’m going to find your card,” she said, and she started going through the deck, biting her lower lip as she concentrated on the magic she was about to perform. “Let me see,” she said, “is it the nine of clubs?”

“No,” he said, smiling.

“Then it must be the jack of hearts?”

“No,” he said.

“Then it is—uh, is it the five of clubs?”

“No again,” he said, laughing.

“Darn!” she said. “It worked yesterday.”

“It was the seven of spades.”

“Darn,” she said.

“What you have to do,” he said, “is to give the deck a very sloppy shuffle. You see, what you did was to look at the top card on the deck and then put mine on top of that. When you cut and shuffled, you had to just hope that those two cards would stay together so that when you went through the deck again, and found your old top card, mine would still be next to it. But it doesn’t always work.”

“Meanie!” she said. “You knew the trick all along!” And, in mock rage, she tossed the cards across the terrace, scattering them in all directions.

Then she had picked up her bottle of sweet-smelling suntan oil, and, cupping a few drops of oil in her palm, began rubbing it across his back. She spread the lotion, in slow, angel-wing patterns, across his shoulders, down his back, along the top of his trunks, spreading it smoothly and gently and evenly with the practised motion of her cool fingers.

“You have marvellous shoulders, Hugh,” she said.

And he had suddenly turned on his side and said to her, “Anne, will you marry me?”

And she had laughed softly and said, “All right.”

He had gone to tell Edrita. “I’m going to marry Anne Cromwell,” he had said.

“Oh,” she had said. “I see.”

“I wanted—you know, to tell you.”

“Well, I’m glad you did. I’ve met Anne. I like her. She’s very nice.”

“I love her very much,” he had said.

“Do you, Hugh?”

“Yes. And I’m very happy. I think we’re both going to be very happy.”

“I’m sure you will be,” she had said. “Anne’s a nice girl.”

“Well,” he said, “I just wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know. You see, Edrita, it just wouldn’t have worked out for us. Would it?”

“I don’t really think that’s the point,” she had said.

“I mean we wouldn’t have been happy together, not really.”

She had laughed and said, “But that’s not the point.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that the point is not whether you and I would have been happy together or not, or whether it would have worked out or not.”

“I don’t understand, Edrita.”

“The point is simply that you and I would never have had the slightest chance—not the slightest chance in the world—to even see whether or not we’d have been happy, or whether it would work out.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, Hugh. There’s never been the smallest possibility that you and I would ever marry each other.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I don’t know about that.”

“Don’t you? I do. It’s always been out of the question. I’ve never considered it the remotest possibility.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” he said.

“I’m not talking about the way I feel,” she said. “But I gave up any consideration of marrying you—oh, two or three years ago. When I was seventeen or eighteen and was wise enough to get the lay of the land. I thought you’d see it too, how things had to be.”

“What do you mean—the way things had to be?”

“How could we ever get married? Your mother wouldn’t permit it.”

“My mother has nothing to do with it,” he said.

“Doesn’t she? Well, all I know is that your mother would never let you marry me, and when I was wise enough to see that—that was that. I put the whole idea out of my mind entirely.”

“Listen,” he said to her, “my mother has absolutely nothing to do with this. This decision to marry Anne was entirely my own—I decided it myself, and my mother had nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, poor Hugh, poor Hugh,” she had said. “We weren’t talking about you and Anne. We were talking about you and me! Your mother would never allow you to marry me. She’d simply say no. And everybody knows that you always do everything your mother says.”