“Dagny,” she asked once, “don’t you ever want to have a good time?” Dagny looked at her incredulously and answered, “What do you think I’m having?”
The decision to give her daughter a formal debut cost Mrs. Taggart a great deal of anxious thought. She did not know whether she was introducing to New York society Miss Dagny Taggart of the Social Register or the night operator of Rockdale Station; she was inclined to believe it was more truly this last; and she felt certain that Dagny would reject the idea of such an occasion. She was astonished when Dagny accepted it with inexplicable eagerness, for once like a child.
She was astonished again, when she saw Dagny dressed for the party. It was the first feminine dress she had ever worn—a gown of white chiffon with a huge skirt that floated like a cloud. Mrs. Taggart had expected her to look like a preposterous contrast. Dagny looked like a beauty. She seemed both older and more radiantly innocent than usual; standing in front of a mirror, she held her head as Nat Taggart’s wife would have held it.
“Dagny,” Mrs. Taggart said gently, reproachfully, “do you see how beautiful you can be when you want to?”
“Yes,” said Dagny, without any astonishment.
The ballroom of the Wayne-Falkland Hotel had been decorated under Mrs. Taggart’s direction; she had an artist’s taste, and the setting of that evening was her masterpiece. “Dagny, there are things I would like you to learn to notice,” she said, “lights, colors, flowers, music. They are not as negligible as you might think.” “I’ve never thought they’re negligible,” Dagny answered happily. For once, Mrs. Taggart felt a bond between them; Dagny was looking at her with a child’s grateful trust. “They’re the things that make life beautiful,” said Mrs. Taggart. “I want this evening to be very beautiful for you, Dagny. The first ball is the most romantic event of one’s life.”
To Mrs. Taggart, the greatest surprise was the moment when she saw Dagny standing under the lights, looking at the ballroom. This was not a child, not a girl, but a woman of such confident, dangerous power that Mrs. Taggart stared at her with shocked admiration. In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but meat—Dagny’s bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one’s half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this—thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling—was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her feel relieved.
The relief lasted only for a few hours. At the end of the evening, she saw Dagny in a comer of the ballroom, sitting on a balustrade as if it were a fence rail, her legs dangling under the chiffon skirt as if she were dressed in slacks. She was talking to a couple of helpless young men, her face contemptuously empty.
Neither Dagny nor Mrs. Taggart said a word when they rode home together. But hours later, on a sudden impulse, Mrs. Taggart went to her daughter’s room. Dagny stood by the window, still wearing the white evening gown; it looked like a cloud supporting a body that now seemed too thin for it, a small body with sagging shoulders. Beyond the window, the clouds were gray in the first light of morning.
When Dagny turned, Mrs. Taggart saw only puzzled helplessness in her face; the face was calm, but something about it made Mrs. Taggart wish she had not wished that her daughter should discover sadness.
“Mother, do they think it’s exactly in reverse?” she asked.
“What?” asked Mrs. Taggart, bewildered.
“The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?”
“Darling, what do you mean?”
“There wasn’t a person there who enjoyed it,” she said, her voice lifeless, “or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.”
“Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.”
“How? By being stupid?”
“I mean, for instance, didn’t you enjoy meeting the young men?”
“What men? There wasn’t a man there I couldn’t squash ten of.”
Days later, sitting at her desk at Rockdale Station, feeling light heartedly at home, Dagny thought of the party and shrugged in contemptuous reproach at her own disappointment. She looked up: it was spring and there were leaves on the tree branches in the darkness outside; the air was still and warm. She asked herself what she had expected from that party. She did not know. But she felt it again, here, now, as she sat slouched over a battered desk, looking out into the darkness: a sense of expectation without object, rising through her body, slowly, like a warm liquid. She slumped forward across the desk, lazily, feeling neither exhaustion nor desire to work.
When Francisco came, that summer, she told him about the party and about her disappointment. He listened silently, looking at her for the first time with that glance of unmoving mockery which he reserved for others, a glance that seemed to see too much. She felt as if he heard, in her words, more than she knew she told him.
She saw the same glance in his eyes on the evening when she left him too early. They were alone, sitting on the shore of the river. She had another hour before she was due at Rockdale. There were long, thin strips of fire in the sky, and red sparks floating lazily on the water. He had been silent for a long time, when she rose abruptly and told him that she had to go. He did not try to stop her; he leaned back, his elbows in the grass, and looked at her without moving; his glance seemed to say that he knew her motive. Hurrying angrily up the slope to the house, she wondered what had made her leave; she did not know; it had been a sudden restlessness that came from a feeling she did not identify till now: a feeling of expectation.
Each night, she drove the five miles from the country house to Rockdale. She came back at dawn, slept a few hours and got up with the rest of the household. She felt no desire to sleep. Undressing for bed in the first rays of the sun, she felt a tense, joyous, causeless impatience to face the day that was starting.
She saw Francisco’s mocking glance again, across the net of a tennis court. She did not remember the beginning of that game; they had often played tennis together and he had always won. She did not know at what moment she decided that she would win, this time. When she became aware of it, it was no longer a decision or a wish, but a quiet fury rising within her. She did not know why she had to win; she did not know why it seemed so crucially, urgently necessary; she knew only that she had to and that she would.
It seemed easy to play; it was as if her will had vanished and someone’s power were playing for her. She watched Francisco’s figure -a tall, swift figure, the suntan of his arms stressed by his short white shirt sleeves. She felt an arrogant pleasure in seeing the skill of his movements, because
this
was the thing which she would beat, so that his every expert gesture became her victory, and the brilliant competence of his body became the triumph of hers.
She felt the rising pain of exhaustion—not knowing that it was pain, feeling it only in sudden stabs that made her aware of some part of her body for an instant, to be forgotten in the next: her arm socket—her shoulder blades—her hips, with the white shorts sticking to her skin -the muscles of her legs, when she leaped to meet the ball, but did not remember whether she came down to touch the ground again—her eyelids, when the sky went dark red and the ball came at her through the darkness like a whirling white name—the thin, hot wire that shot from her ankle, up her back, and went on shooting straight across the air, driving the ball at Francisco’s figure.... She felt an exultant pleasure—because every stab of pain begun in her body had to end in his, because he was being exhausted as she was—what she did to herself, she was doing it also to him—this was what he felt—this was what she drove him to—it was not her pain that she felt or her body, but his.
In the moments when she saw his face, she saw that he was laughing. He was looking at her as if he understood. He was playing, not to win, but to make it harder for her—sending his shots wild to make her run —losing points to see her twist her body in an agonizing backhand—standing still, letting her think he would miss, only to let his arm shoot out casually at the last moment and send the ball back with such force that she knew she would miss it. She felt as if she could not move again, not ever—and it was strange to find herself landing suddenly at the other side of the court, smashing the ball in time, smashing it as if she wished it to burst to pieces, as if she wished it were Francisco’s face.
Just once more, she thought, even if the next one would crack the bones of her arm ... Just once more, even if the air which she forced down in gasps past her tight, swollen throat, would be stopped altogether ... Then she felt nothing, no pain, no muscles, only the thought that she had to beat him, to see him exhausted, to see him collapse, and then she would be free to die in the next moment.
She won. Perhaps it was his laughing that made him lose, for once. He walked to the net, while she stood still, and threw his racket across, at her feet, as if knowing that this was what she wanted. He walked out of the court and fell down on the grass of the lawn, collapsing, his head on his arm.
She approached him slowly. She stood over him, looking down at his body stretched at her feet, looking at his sweat-drenched shirt and the strands of his hair spilled across his arm. He raised his head. His glance moved slowly up the line of her legs, to her shorts, to her blouse, to her eyes. It was a mocking glance that seemed to see straight through her clothes and through her mind. And it seemed to say that he had won.
She sat at her desk at Rockdale, that night, alone in the old station building, looking at the sky in the window. It was the hour she liked best, when the top panes of the window grew lighter, and the rails of the track outside became threads of blurred silver across the lower panes. She turned off her lamp and watched the vast, soundless motion of light over a motionless earth. Things stood still, not a leaf trembled on the branches, while the sky slowly lost its color and became an expanse that looked like a spread of glowing water.
Her telephone was silent at this hour, almost as if movement had stopped everywhere along the system. She heard steps approaching outside, suddenly, close to the door. Francisco came in. He had never come here before, but she was not astonished to see him.
“What are you doing up at this hour?” she asked.
“I didn’t feel like sleeping.”
“How did you get here? I didn’t hear your car.”
“I walked.”
Moments passed before she realized that she had not asked him why he came and that she did not want to ask it.
He wandered through the room, looking at the clusters of waybills that hung on the walls, at the calendar with a picture of the Taggart Comet caught in a proud surge of motion toward the onlooker. He seemed casually at home, as if he felt that the place belonged to them, as they always felt wherever they went together. But he did not seem to want to talk. He asked a few questions about her job, then kept silent.
As the light grew outside, movement grew down on the line and the telephone started ringing in the silence. She turned to her work. He sat in a corner, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, waiting.
She worked swiftly, feeling inordinately clear-headed. She found pleasure in the rapid precision of her hands. She concentrated on the sharp, bright sound of the phone, on the figures of train numbers, car numbers, order numbers. She was conscious of nothing else.
But when a thin sheet of paper fluttered down to the floor and she bent to pick it up, she was suddenly as intently conscious of that particular moment, of herself and her own movement. She noticed her gray linen skirt, the rolled sleeve of her gray blouse and her naked arm reaching down for the paper. She felt her heart stop causelessly in the kind of gasp one feels in moments of anticipation. She picked up the paper and turned back to her desk.
It was almost full daylight. A train went past the station, without stopping. In the purity of the morning light, the long line of car roofs melted into a silver string, and the train seemed suspended above the ground, not quite touching it, going past through the air. The floor of the station trembled, and glass rattled in the windows. She watched the train’s flight with a smile of excitement. She glanced at Francisco: he was looking at her, with the same smile.
When the day operator arrived, she turned the station over to him, and they walked out into the morning air. The sun had not yet risen and the air seemed radiant in its stead. She felt no exhaustion. She felt as if she were just getting up.
She started toward her car, but Francisco said, “Let’s walk home. We’ll come for the car later.”
“All right.”
She was not astonished and she did not mind the prospect of walking five miles. It seemed natural; natural to the moment’s peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk.
The road led through the woods. They left the highway for an old trail that went twisting among the trees across miles of untouched country. There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.