“Oh, yeah?”
“Well, you asked me not to get tight, and I’m not a bit tight. You said I could drink. Let’s go outside. I want to talk to you.”
“No. I don’t want to go out.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too cold, for one thing. And I don’t feel like it.”
“Well, that’s the best reason. Does that mean you’re not going to keep our date at intermission?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.” She spoke slowly.
He said nothing. Then presently she spoke. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go out with you.”
They danced to the foyer, broke, and ran to the anonymous sedan nearest the verandah. They got in and she sat with her arms drawn close to her ribs. He lit a cigarette for her.
“What is the matter, darling?” he said.
“God, I’m cold.”
“Do you want to talk, or are you going to just say how cold you are?”
“What do you want to talk about?” she said.
“About you. Your attitude. I want to try to find out what’s eating you. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done tonight that you can find fault with.”
“Except calling me a horse’s ass.”
“You’re crazy! I didn’t call you that. That was what old What’s Iss called Harry Reilly. I said you gave me a pain in the ass, which isn’t quite the same.”
“All right.”
“And I said I was sorry, and I am sorry. But that’s not the point. We’re just quibbling—”
“You mean I am.”
“Yes, frankly. I do mean that. Oh, Christ! What the hell is it? Please say something. Tell me what’s the matter. Bawl me out or do anything you like, but don’t sit there freezing like a martyr. Like some kind of a St. Stephen.”
“What?”
“St. Stephen was the first martyr. Father Creedon told me that.”
“My, you kept the talk on a high plane, didn’t you?”
“Will you for the last time, will you tell me why you have a fig—what’s the matter?”
“I’m freezing, Julian. I’ve got to go in. I shouldn’t have come out without a coat.”
“I’ll look around in the other cars and borrow a robe, if you’ll stay.”
“No, I don’t think we’d better,” she said. “I’m going in. This was a mistake, coming out here.”
“You had no intention of talking when you came out.”
“No. I don’t suppose I did, but I didn’t want to have a scene on the dance floor.”
“Have a scene on the dance floor! All right. You can go. I won’t keep you. Just one question. Is there something I’ve done? Any one thing that you’re sore about?”
“No. Not exactly. No. There isn’t.”
“One more question. Maybe I’d better not ask it.”
“Go ahead,” she said, with her hand on the door of the sedan.
“All right: Is there something you’ve done? Have you done anything? Have you fallen in love with someone else?”
“Or necked someone else?” she said. “Or laid someone else while you were sneaking your drinks in the locker-room? No. My attitude, as you call it, comes from something much more subtle than that, Julian, but we won’t go into it now.”
He took her in his arms. “Oh, I love you so much. I always will. I always have and I always will. Don’t do this.” She held up her chin while he kissed her neck and rubbed his mouth and nose against her breast, but when he cupped his left hand over her right breast she said, “No. No. I don’t want you to do that. Let me go, please.”
“Have you got the curse?”
“Please don’t talk that way, say things like that. You know perfectly well I haven’t.”
“That’s right. I do. I thought you might have got it suddenly.”
“You think that’s the only possible explanation for the way I feel?”
“At least there is some explanation, or there ought to be. You won’t tell me what it is?”
“It’d take too long. And now I am going. It isn’t like you to keep me waiting out here with the temperature near zero.”
“Mm. Giving me a break. Okay. Let’s go.” He got out of the car and made one last effort to take her in his arms by carrying her to the verandah, but she was on the steps without even seeming to spurn his gesture. She went inside and immediately went up the stairs to the ladies’ quarters. He knew she did not expect him to be waiting when she came down, so he went out and joined the stag line. He saw Mill Ammermann and he was waiting for her to dance or be danced close enough to the stag line and he was going to cut in on her, when suddenly something happened that was like migraine: he did not see anyone in the room nor anything, yet the people and the lights and the things hurt his eyes. And the reason for it was that in one and the same instant he remembered that he had not asked Caroline to say yes or no about the date at intermission—and he realized that he did not need to ask her.
He recovered a sense which may not have been sight, but whatever it was it enabled him to find his way back to the locker-room, where there was enough liquor for anyone in the world to get drunk.
5
When Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him. That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States, and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness. She was four years out of college then, and she was twenty-seven years old, which is as old as anyone ever gets, or at least she thought so at the time. She found herself thinking more and more and less and less of men. That is the way she put it, and she knew it to be sure and right, but she did not bother to expand the -ism. “I think of them oftener, and I think of them less often.” She had attained varying degrees of love, requited and unrequited—but seldom the latter. Men, and damn good men, fell in love with her with comforting regularity, and she had enough trouble with them, in one way or another, to make it impossible for her to tell herself honestly that she was unattractive. She was sorry she was not beautiful—until a nice old gentleman, a Philadelphian who painted society women’s portraits, told her that he never had seen a beautiful woman.
That summer she thought of her life after college in three ways: she thought of it as unicellular, but a life that reversed the amoeba’s performance. The days got together and formed one life, losing their separate identities. Again, she thought of those four years as calendar years, broken formally by the Assembly (New Year’s Eve), the July 3 Assembly, Easter, Hallowe’en, Labor Day. Put together they made four years, the length of time she had passed at Bryn Mawr, and like the years of college in that they seemed so long a time and so short a time, but also not at all like the college years, because she felt she had got something out of college. These four years had not had the compactness of college, and they seemed wasted.
They were wasted. She took her turn teaching the Italian and Negro children at the Gibbsville Mission, which is what passes for the Junior League in Gibbsville. But she didn’t like it. She had no poise or assurance with those children, or any group of children, and she knew she was not a teacher. She almost loved two or three of the children, but somewhere in the back of her mind she recognized the reason: the Mission children that she liked best were the ones who were least like the other Mission children and more like Lantenengo Street children, the children of her friends. There was one exception: a red-headed Irish brat who she was certain had let the air out of her tires and hid her hat. He never called her Miss Walker or Miss Car’line, as the other little sycophants did. He was about eleven years old—the limit of Mission children was twelve years of age—and he had a face that it would take him at least twenty more years to grow up to. She liked him but she hated him; she was afraid of him and the way he sometimes would stare at her when he wasn’t making trouble. At home when she thought of him she would tell herself that he was a child whose great energy could and ought to be directed into useful channels. He was just a mischievous kid, and he could be “saved.”…Thus practically her entire sociological knowledge at the time. She was to learn a little more.