He thought about it. “What you just told me about being ill — I suppose that’s it. They were worried about your health.”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t because I’d once been ill. They didn’t try to keep that from me; I knew it anyway. It was something beyond that. Some knowledge that they had, but that I was forever excluded from. Some knowledge that it would be terrible for me to come into possession of. So many times a look would pass between them, a remark would be exchanged, that they knew the meaning of, but I didn’t. Like in that game that children play, where a ball is tossed over your head, for somebody else to catch behind you. It was as though — as though I were a thing apart. Different from all other girls. They taught me all the things a girl is supposed to know, and then they kept me from using them. They crammed eighteen years of education into just about four years, and then they kept me just shut up in that house. They even taught me to dance. And then they wouldn’t let any boy come close enough to dance with me. They had an instructress come down to the house from Baltimore two or three times a week and give me lessons. I learned the steps, but for the longest time I thought that just women were supposed to dance with one another, like she and I were doing. It never occurred to me that one partner was supposed to be a man.”
He made a grimace of distaste.
She sighed whimsically. “So I waltz beautifully, but until I came on this ship with you, I’d never been in a man’s arms on a dance floor.”
A little flare of resentment kindled in him for a moment. “Who were they, anyway? What were they? An elderly man, and a younger one. What were you doing with them, a girl like you? Those are associations that don’t just happen. How’d it come about? Those are the things I’d like to know!”
“And those,” she said softly, “are the things I would, too. And I never did know. And I still don’t. He was writing, all the time writing, Fredericks. I think it was a book. And I think it had to do with me. They’d subject me to all kinds of tests. And then he’d jot things down. And then he’d lock himself up in that room in the back, and write for hours.”
“They didn’t — mistreat you in any way?”
“No, no,” she assured him. “Nothing like that. But you need a lot more than just — kindness.”
“Yes,” he said, as if to himself. “You need love.”
“I used to hear that word all the time,” she said. “That was one subject, though, they tried to keep in the background. When this dancing teacher I just told you about came to give me lessons, she brought a portable phonograph with her, and various records. Most of them were straight instrumental, but a few had vocal choruses. And right in the middle, they’d pop out with this talk about love. They’d swoon about it, they’d go into a fever about it. Sometimes they were happy about it, sometimes they were sad about it, sometimes they were mad about it. Sometimes it was a girl sobbing for a man. Sometimes it was a man groaning for a girl. Once it was four men at once, and they were all in love with the same girl. I think she was called Diane. I said to the teacher, ‘What is that? Why does it do that to them?’ She just sighed and dropped her eyes. But Fredericks overheard me. And before she left, he sorted out the records, and told her not to bring any more that had vocal choruses.”
She shrugged. “But it was in the books I read, anyway. They were full of it. In one play, the lovers killed themselves. He took poison and she stabbed herself.”
“Romeo and Juliet,” he assented.
“It was strange,” she reflected, “to hear of it all around you, and yet not know what it was.”
“Wasn’t there anyone before me? I suppose every husband asks his brand-new wife that at least once. And this is my once to ask it. But wasn’t there anyone at all?”
“No one. You were the first. You were the first who ever kissed me. You were even the first I ever rode with in a car, and that was the night we ran away to Baltimore.”
He blew out his breath in a sort of soundless whistle.
“Only once,” she continued, “did a boy ever get as far as the door of that house. And that was as far as he did get, the door. That was about a year before that night that you lost your way and knocked on the door to ask directions.”
“He lost his way too?”
“No, it was different that time. I wasn’t on the lookout that time, as I was when you came along. I didn’t have any little balled-up note prepared, to throw down to him out of the window, as I did to you. I missed the chance. He was opportunity, and, as they say, opportunity knocks only once, and then goes away again.”
“Tell me about it. Let’s hear.”
“They’d taken me in to a dinner party in the city, in Baltimore. I suppose it was to complete my education, as a sort of extension course in social behavior. It was at the house of... oh, I don’t know who he was, some college professor or famous man of some sort. There were no boys and girls there my own age. All elderly people, very learned men, most of them with beards, scientists and doctors and what not. This boy was the nephew of somebody who was present. He didn’t even live there in the house, just popped in with a message for a minute. Before he’d popped out again, he’d seen me from the far end of the room. And I’d seen him. That was really all there was to it. Not even a single word was exchanged between us. But the eyes can do wonderfully quick work. I remember he smiled at me from the doorway. So I smiled back. Before he could go any further, get himself introduced to me, suddenly my wraps had been brought, very suddenly, and I was being hustled home, with Fredericks marching on one side of me and Cotter on the other, like bodyguards.
“I made one more sign. I turned my head a little and looked back over my shoulder. He was just standing back there forlornly. He hadn’t even been able to be introduced to them, so what chance did he have to get to me? But—”
“He followed through.”
“He tried to. He found out where I lived, and a couple of evenings later he showed up at the door, complete with a box of chocolates. You know, the usual first call. They wouldn’t let me come down, of course, but I crept out to the head of the stairs and overheard the whole thing from there. Fredericks got rid of him in the oddest way.”
“What was it?”
“Well, he wasn’t brusque, he didn’t slam the door on him. He was kind about it, fatherly, almost. That’s the point I’m trying to bring out. As if he were trying to warn him off for his own good. As if he were trying to keep him from dire misfortune.”
“What was it he said to him?”
“It was the implication, more than the words themselves. He slung his hand to the boy’s shoulder, and gently turned him around the other way. ‘You seem like a nice boy,’ he said. ‘For your own sake, I want you to listen carefully to me. You find some other girl. There are plenty around. Some other girl, who’ll be just right for you. This one — isn’t the one you want. That’s all I can say to you. You’ll live to regret it if you don’t take my advice. Don’t come near here any more. Forget this house. Forget your way to it. Forget my foster daughter. Forget you ever saw her.’
“And there was something about the way he said it that made my blood run cold. As though there were some horrid thing, some terror, waiting to be unleashed if this boy — or any other — forced his acquaintance on me any further.
“It wasn’t a bluff he was putting on, either. You could tell by the ring of sincerity in his voice that he meant it.
“And the boy must have felt it too. I noticed he didn’t argue, didn’t insist any further, seemed glad to leave. I watched him from the window. He threw the candy away on the lawn, climbed into his car, and drove away fast, without looking back.