“Why doesn’t she talk to you about it here?”
“It’s something very personal, and we have no privacy here. You know we’re not allowed to close the door when we’re visiting.”
“Well, if she goes with us, I’ll be there. She still won’t have any privacy.”
“Oh. I thought perhaps you’d let us . . . be alone for a little while.” She drops her head, watching patiently her slender, sunlit feet. A monstrous indignation swells suddenly within me. I begin to speak quickly, rather senselessly.
“I don’t understand you. What do you expect me to do? I don’t want her to go with us. How can we—”
“Oh, Vincent, please. Just this once. She’s been such a dear friend to me here, and she’s such a sweet person. Won’t you do this for her?”
“No. She’s no friend of mine. I don’t like her at all. I don’t like you having her for a friend. I won’t do it.”
She stands patiently, gazing at her white feet, crouching down in a moment to clasp their warm arches in her hands, her shoulders huddled, her hair blazing. I stare down at her, in spite of my indignation weakened by her beauty.
“I thought you would be kinder to me, Vincent.”
“I don’t call that a kindness,” I say bitterly. She does not reply, and I add less violently in a moment, thinking she has relinquished the request, “You know I couldn’t allow you to be alone together, anyway. Neither of you has privileges. It’s very strictly forbidden.” I am not aware of the absurdity of my protest until I have spoken it. She crouches before me, caressing her feet musingly, and says very gently in a moment, “Yes, there are many forbidden things; but we have done them, Vincent. I wonder what they would do if they knew?”
A wave of incredulity, outrage, pain that scalds my mind and heart like fumes of acid. I say harshly, agonized, “What do you mean?”
“If you don’t let her come with us, I’ll tell them, Vincent.”
It is true, then. Some ancient, lugubrious sage within me nods wearily. I feel my lips and eyes grow pale with fury. Very well, then. Nothing is barred. But I shall win. My voice is strained, softly shrill: “Tell them, if you like. Do you think they’ll believe you? I have a reputation here for being very conscientious—a very honest, dedicated worker. And you are a madwoman. Do you think they’ll take your word against my own? Tell them.”
She looks up at me with a pained, importunate expression, as if she hates to hurt me in this way. “But if someone on the staff were to support my story, were to offer evidence, even, then perhaps they would.”
“Someone on the staff? What are you talking about? You don’t know these people!”
“Yes, I do. I think perhaps Mr. Mandel could be persuaded to support me.”
I stand pale and shocked with anguished disbelief at this piece of treachery. She rises quickly, her face suddenly weary with a compassion which I cannot believe or understand.
“Oh, my dear.” She reaches toward me and touches my hand timidly.
“Don’t touch me,” I say harshly.
“You mustn’t suffer, Vincent. Oh, my love, I don’t want to make you suffer, believe me. Don’t you understand?”
“Yes. I understand. It’s monstrous, terrible.”
“No, Vincent. It’s beautiful. We mustn’t deny each other joy—any joy that is possible. We must rejoice at it. We must help each other to be perfect in our capacity for it. Don’t you understand that I love you now as much as I ever have, as much as I always shall love you?”
I stare at her in grief, still not able to believe. “Lilith, you wouldn’t really tell them?” I whisper hoarsely. “You couldn’t do anything so terrible. Don’t you know they would dismiss me? That I’d never see you again?”
She watches my eyes pityingly but unwaveringly. “Yes, I suppose they would.”
“And doesn’t it matter to you? Doesn’t it matter that we’d never see each other again?”
“If you aren’t strong enough to follow me, if you don’t love me enough to follow me—then it will not matter.” She takes my hand and bows her head above it, clasping it to her cheek. Her hair spills over my forearm, warm from the sun. She kisses my fingers, murmuring passionately, “Afterwards you will understand, I know. I’ll teach you to understand, and to rejoice with me.” I stand, weak with revulsion, betrayal. “Now come with me. Come and tell Yvonne she may go with us.”
What can I do? There must be something I can do! I follow her numbly to the door. Perhaps on the way I will think of something—while we are walking. I must have time to think. I follow her mechanically down the corridor, my mind apparently paralyzed. We stop outside of Mrs. Meaghan’s door, at which I stare wanly for a moment.
“You must knock,” Lilith whispers. I look at her desperately. Her eyes are cool, unyielding, almost lifeless in their purity, like those of the china fairy I won for her with the toss of a rope quoit at the fair. “Knock, Vincent.” An attendant prowls stolidly past us down the corridor—small, clipped, knoblike head, big shoulders, arrogant gait; it is Mandel. Lilith looks toward him briefly, then at me, with perfect, implacable eyes. Ah, God! I raise my clenched hand quickly, rap the panel twice. How loud it sounds! The gentle astringent European voice invites me in immediately. I push the door open and stand on the threshold clutching the doorknob, as if unwilling wholly to enter this lair. She is seated at the table by her window, writing letters. The blue bowl is filled this morning with floating purple asters. Her pale-violet stationery has an embossed silver crest at the top which she strokes lightly with her finger tips while she speaks. She raises her head with a mild, ironic look of inquiry.
“Good morning, Mr. Bruce.”
“Good morning.” My voice is parched with shame and has the slightly unnatural rapidity of hysteria. “Miss Arthur says you have asked to go walking with us.”
“Why, I did, yes.”
“Would you still like to come?”
“How very kind of you to ask. Are you sure it won’t be an inconvenience?”
“No, not at all,” I say, with a craven, idiotic pretense of ignorance of the plot, which seems to be the only way I can salvage any semblance of dignity. I stumble on in a pathetic attempt to reinforce the impression. “I’m sure it will do you good.”
“So you have been telling me all summer; and at last I am convinced. You see how persuasive you have been?” Foul woman! I stare at her with crippled loathing. She rises, setting her pen down gently on the table. “I wonder if I have time to change my shoes?”
“Yes, of course. I have to report to the office, anyway. You can meet me at the elevator.”
“Thank you.”
I close the door, swinging past Lilith blindly toward the office. Miss Donohue is still busy with her towels.
“Are you checking out?” she asks, barely glancing at me.
“Yes. I’m taking Meaghan too.”
“Meaghan?” She looks up at me with surprise.
“Yes. She asked to go.”
“Wonderful. I don’t think she’s been out in six weeks. How did you do it?” Another minor triumph for me! I cringe at her look of approbation, feigning interest in a syringe that lies on the shelf beside me so that I can turn my face from her.
“She wanted to go. Who’s having sedative?”
“Oh, that was Carter’s. Did I tell you she blew up?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Don’t forget to give us a report on Meaghan when you get back. They’ll want to see that.”
“No, I won’t.”
They are standing together in casual conversation at the elevator door as I emerge from the office. We descend in burning silence, Mrs. Meaghan, with an air of satirical fastidiousness, arranging the pleats of her light woolen skirt. Outside, in the morning sunlight, she seems for a moment unsure, pausing and turning toward us with a faint look of alarm. I rejoice at her fear, silently and savagely invoking all her nameless devils to beset her. But Lilith, with a swift, fleeting gesture of comfort—of command, perhaps—takes her hand; I see their fingers twine and clench for an instant, then loosen and part convulsively. (How often has she taken my hand in just that way—both in the promise of love and in its consummation! A white knife of pain divides my mind.) A moment later the woman is perfectly assured, walking beside us in dignified composure through the shadows of the poplars that fall across the drive.
“I think it was wise of me to come,” she says. “It is a beautiful morning. What are these trees? They are quite lovely.”
Lilith waits for a moment for me to reply, but I cannot speak. “They are poplars,” she says gently.
“Poplars. I thought poplars were something quite different—a tall slender tree.”
“Those are Lombardy poplars, Yvonne.”
“Oh, yes. I have never taken much interest in nature. It repels me.”
“But you love flowers.”
“Oh, yes; I have a passion for flowers. But that is quite different, I think. I believe that flowers transcend nature, in the way that certain persons transcend humanity; and these deserve our admiration.” Her voice pauses, pursues its topic with a delicate allusiveness. “They somehow escape their nature by becoming consummate specimens of it. This is a theme of Bergson’s. Do you know him?”
They go on with their dreadful spurious sociability. I walk beside them in a state of stark and desperate despair, trying frantically, vainly to invent a solution of some kind before we have gone too far. I watch Field House approach, loom to our left for a moment, slide inexorably past. Then Bea’s cottage, then the shop, the bicycle shed, Doctors’ House, my mind all the while lurching numbly, spastically, at mad straws of hope: A rock; pick up a rock and crush her skull, like a horse’s; say it was an accident; she fell and injured herself; had to be destroyed. The lake; drown her in the lake; luminous, rotting, ragged face, fish-bitten; drenched, death-coated eyes. Drown both of them. Rot there in their warm, foul sea, their peeling fingers and floating hair entwined. O God, deliver me. We are on the open stretch of road that leads to Hillcrest. Beyond is the lake, with the barn behind it at the edge of the oak woods. Very little time. What will she do? How will she say it? What shall I reply? Then suddenly, from the sky, whose aspect I have been too preoccupied to notice, comes what for a moment I misconstrue as divine intervention: a drop of rain upon my wrist. I look up fervently. A great purple-black cloud has drifted across the fields, its edge devouring the disk of sun above us.
“It’s going to rain!” I exclaim with wretched exultation. “We’ll have to go back. We’ll get soaked!”
But this day’s gods are in league with her, of course, or she has conjured up the storm herself.
“Oh, no, it’s much too far! But we can make the barn, I think.”
She is right, of course. The barn is only one third of the distance that we have already come. It has a look of sinister isolation, standing at the edge of the forest; but there is nothing to do but run toward it. We hurry across the field where thistles bend in the gathering wind, along the embanked footpath that circles the darkening water of the lake, raindrops pattering about us in the dust. I am aware of a growing savage resignation. I hardly care, now—I care, that is; but I have almost lost all hope of forestalling it. Even nature has conspired against me. I feel my will to oppose her waning, my mind assuming a kind of desolate composure. What does it matter? It has been a strange enough adventure; let it be even stranger. Perhaps something will be salvaged. She says she loves me still. At least I will not lose her utterly.
We have reached the shelter of the eaves, which overhang broadly. Her white silk blouse is spattered with raindrops which make it stick to her skin. It clings moistly to her breasts, stippled with pink spots, swelling softly with her breath. Only two days ago she bared them to me. I close my eyes.
“We barely made it! Oh, look how hard it’s falling now!” She shakes out her moist hair, still panting with exertion. “Are you wet, Yvonne?”
“Only a little. I must confess I found it rather exhilarating.”
The woman’s eyes are glowing with a fresh, somber excitement. Her face, too, has a feverish flush which makes me realize suddenly and bitterly how handsome she really is. I note with a kind of revolted admiration the delicate modeling of her lips, the sensitive, sorrowful cast of features which many Latin women have. I turn away quickly, looking out at the rain-lashed fields. A pair of ragged crows go hobbling and flapping, their wings lifted, in a hasty comic scuttle into the shelter of the woods.
“Look, the barn is open,” Lilith says. I follow her eyes to the great dark door which breathes out its warm dry incense of hay and leather. Secret in there, dark and fragrant, with the soft seductive thunder of rain on the iron roof. A joy I was not to know.
“Vincent.” She touches my arm rather timidly. “Can we go in there—Yvonne and I? There’s something she’d like to talk to me about, privately. You won’t mind, will you?”
I stare at her in cold despair, saying hoarsely, “You know it’s forbidden. It’s very dangerous. If anyone should find out—”
“No one will find out. You must stay here and watch, in case anyone should come. It would be very kind of you. We would be very grateful, wouldn’t we, Yvonne?”
“Yes, very.” Mrs. Meaghan turns her eyes to me with a look of grave sardonic courtesy. “I’m sure you realize, Mr. Bruce, what a luxury it is for two women to have a quiet confidential talk together, without open doors, or bars, or monitors. We are such weak creatures. I’m sure we shall find some way of repaying you.”
“Yes, I know we shall,” Lilith murmurs.
“You mustn’t be too long,” I mutter in a ruined, ravenlike voice. “They’ll send a car for us if this rain keeps up.”
“We won’t. Oh, thank you, Vincent.” She turns back for a moment, as they move away, to take my hand in a quick tender clasp and to whisper,
“I love you.” I stare at her with horror. They walk along the barn wall to the open door, holding their shoulders obliquely to keep within the curtain of water from the streaming eaves. I watch with helpless torment while they disappear into the dim wide arch of darkness.
There is a moment when the hideous delight of which I have written in my journal touches my heart with little filthy elfin fingers, and I find myself standing with averted head, listening, in an attitude of tense voluptuous attention. Then I drop my head, and after a moment, lifting it, stare out beyond the streaming eaves at the wet fields, listening to the roar of rain on the iron roof and crying quietly, like a child, my face contorted, remembering for some reason a summer afternoon long ago, before the war, when Laura and I ran for shelter under the wistaria arbor in her mother’s garden in a sudden thunderstorm.