Desperate Asylum

Section 1

The snow came down fiercely over the northern part of the state, and in Midland City, the state’s metropolis, it started falling shortly after dark and continued most of the night. The temperature fell slowly but steadily all that time. Between eight and midnight, the traffic squad of the city police had reports of twenty-three minor accidents, and an alcoholic who was hardly aware of the snow, or of anything else, lay down in a doorway on the lower south side and was found dead in the morning.

In the living room of a small apartment not far from the place where the alcoholic was dying, a young woman named Lisa Sheridan stood at a window and looked down into the narrow street below, and because she was lonely and depressed and felt that there was no security on earth, she was thinking of things that had happened to her in the past, not because there was anything particularly comforting in these things but simply because they were over and done with and not presently threatening. Many of the things that had happened to her were not really so much different, in fact, from the things that had happened to many other girls, but they had had vastly different effects and had come, or were coming, to vastly different ends, and she wondered why this should be so. It was a problem she was in no way equipped to solve, and it was not so much in the expectation of coming to a solution as for the simple relief she found in keeping her mind busy that she concerned herself with it at all.

Behind her in the room, sitting sprawled in an overstaffed chair with her legs spread out in front of her and a cigarette hanging from her lips, was the woman who shared the apartment. Her name was Bella Cassidy, and she had lived most of her twenty-nine years in overt conformity with one world and in covert allegiance to another. She had black hair cut short and rather shaggy, and her face was thin and swarthy with long, narrow eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. There was a natural grace in her slender body, a kind of suggested muscular toughness that was not actually evident in weight or bulges, and there was now, besides that, a quality of wariness in her whole attitude that was oddly inconsistent with her posture. Without touching the cigarette with her fingers, she drew a cloud of smoke into her lungs and released it. Through the smoke, she stared at the back of the girl at the window.

“For God’s sake, sit down,” she said. “It wears me out to watch you.”

The imperative nature of her words did not affect the timber of the voice in which they were spoken. She sounded as if, in spite of what she said, it really made no difference whatever to her if Lisa sat down or not. Without turning, Lisa said, “I don’t want to sit down.”

“All right. Stand up, then. Be as childish as you like.”

“I’m not being childish.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you do anything but make denials? Denying a thing doesn’t alter the truth, you know. The truth is, you’ve decided that everything is over between us, that I’ve spoiled everything, and nothing I can say will make any difference.”

“How do you expect me to feel?”

“I expect you to be sensible, but I see that you won’t.” Lisa turned and stood with her back to the window, looking at Bella with eyes that betrayed her depression and fright. She was somewhat under average height, eyen for a woman, but her body was so slim and straight that she did not seem to be. Her hair was soft and fine and a very pale gold, almost silver, parted in the middle and drawn back behind her ears into a knot. There was about her, in her face and the rest of her, an effect of cold delicacy that approached frailty, and she was, in fact, within the limits imposed by the coldness and fragility, very lovely. Pale gold against the dark glass, thought Bella, and the words came into her mind simultaneously with a kind-of catch in her heart that was for a moment ecstatic pain, and for the duration of the moment she regretted the choice she had made and the line of action she was now following.

“Is it sensible to blackmail my own family?” Lisa said.

“Why not? They’re wealthy and can afford it, and it’s certainly the only way you’re ever going to get anything out of them.”

“I don’t want anything from them. It’s you who wants it.”

“I want it for both of us. I told you that. It’s entirely unnecessary for you to make an issue of it.”

“But when it comes to a choice between me and the money, you choose the money.”

“That’s your fault. There is no necessity, as I said, to make a choice at all. Since you’re determined that I must, however, it has now become a matter of principle. I don’t choose to be a fool just because you’re one.”

It was not the first time Lisa had been called a fool. Another girl had called her that once, but it had been a long time ago, and it was something she did not now want to remember or to think about.

“Perhaps I’m a fool,” she said, “and perhaps I am many things worse, but at least I’m not a blackmailer.”

Bella shrugged and sucked her cigarette. “If it makes you feel better to call me names, go ahead.”

“It doesn’t make me feel better. Nothing in the world will ever make me feel better again. I’m sick and frightened, and I wish I had never met you.”

“Now you’re simply being dramatic.”

“Blackmail is a crime. You can be sent to prison for it.”

“There’s no danger. Your family are cowards, like all people who think the world will end if their precious respectability is compromised. They won’t risk any publicity, darling.”

“Suppose they don’t pay. Would you do as you threatened?”

“Tell their friends about you? I’m afraid I’d have to.” Bella removed the cigarette from her mouth and crushed it in a tray and laughed shortly. “Let me tell you something, darling. You had better quit being so concerned about your family, for all they wish for you in their hearts is that you had never been born or had died before you became what you are. They hate you and can’t understand you and will consider you a menace as long as you are alive, and the only hope for you and me on earth is to be found in one another and in others like us.”

“Did you talk with my brother?”

“Yes. He was quite indignant.”

“Carl can be very hard when he wants to be. He may go to the police.”

“I tell you that he won’t. The risk is too great. He said he would come here tonight with the money, and he will.”

“I don’t want to see him.”

“Well, you’ll have to reconcile yourself to it. It was part of the agreement. Apparently he wants to talk with you, and I had to promise that you would be here in order to get him to come.”

“You had no right to do it.”

“So you have told me at least a dozen times. You even concealed your family’s wealth from me for a long time, didn’t you, darling, in fear that I would be tempted do do something like this? I’m still a little angry about it. And now you have threatened to leave me and you’re afraid that you must do it, even though you don’t want to. Well, I will tell you something that you may not know. I will tell you that you are making me a little sick to my stomach, and perhaps I would be better off without you.”

Lisa turned and looked down again into the narrow street. Her depression was now so complete and unqualified that it afforded her a kind of sickly immunity, and Bella’s words, deliberately cruel, were no more than a sequence of sounds with no particular significance or effect. The snow had accumulated, she noticed, on the sill outside, and had drifted in places across the street. Looking down, aware of details with a peculiar detachment that was part of her depression, she saw a man cross under the light at the corner, leaving behind him in the snow the prints of his passing. Shoulders hunched into his overcoat collar upturned against the wind and falling snow, he came on at an angle across the street and was swallowed by the shadow of the building in which Lisa stood.

It was her brother Carl. She had not seen him or heard from him for a very long while, and now, seeing him from above against the cold white earth, she thought that he looked small and pitiable and somehow vulnerable. And she was sorry that she had brought him trouble and was now, though she didn’t wish it, bringing him trouble again. A sudden nostalgia stirred in the gray stillness of her depression, an intense longing for a status long lost in a time long past, and she wondered if it would be possible to regain, not physically but mentally and emotionally, the particular point and condition in time when she had started becoming what she was instead of what she might have been. If this were possible, she thought, the person that she was might be rejected and left dead in a very real way, and the person she might have been could at last start becoming. This thought appealed to her; it was something to support her in the tense waiting for her brother’s approach, and she did not release it until she heard his footsteps on the stairs outside.

Turning, she said, “It’s Carl. I saw him under the light in the street.”

Bella leaned forward in her chair, listening to the footsteps ascend the stairs and approach in the lull, sitting fixed through a hiatus of silence until there was a sudden knocking at the door. Then, with a sigh, she stood up. There was a surety, a fluid ease of motion in her hard body.

“Perhaps I was wrong,” she said. “Perhaps he wants to save you after all.”

Her voice was colored by a curious mixture of irony and anger, and she stared at Lisa intently, as if she thought Lisa’s reaction might be tremendously significant. But Lisa was still supported by the despair that is acquired in the ruins of the last sanctuary, and there was no discernible reaction at all. Bella shrugged, her thin lips shaping in her dark face a smile that was decisive and cruel.

“You can go to hell,” she said. “You can bloody well go to hell.”

The knocking was repeated, and she went quickly to the door and opened it. Carl Sheridan, across the threshold, looked at Bella and beyond her, his eyes probing the room. He was wearing a navy blue overcoat, the shoulders frosted with snow, and he was holding a gray homburg squarely before him, much in the manner of a man standing uncovered in respect or reverence. His face was drawn stiffly over its bones. His blond hair was thinning and receding and lay limply on his skull. Lisa, seeing him from her place by the window, thought that he looked as if he had been very ill and was at this moment very tired.

Bella retreated and said, “Come in. You see that I’ve kept my word. Lisa is here to meet you.”

Carl stepped into the room two precise paces and stopped, his eyes finding Lisa. Still holding his homburg, he stood for a moment watching her, and then he made the kind of formal little bow from the waist that he might have made in acknowledging an introduction to someone he had never seen before.

“Hello, Lisa.”

“Hello, Carl,” she said.

His lips worked, and she thought at first that he was trying to speak again and couldn’t, but apparently it was only a kind of nervous reaction, for he turned abruptly to Bella and spoke without difficulty.

“I’ve brought the money. Five thousand dollars.”

She walked across to a small table beside the chair in which she had been sitting and picked up a pack of cigarettes. She extracted a cigarette and dropped the pack and began tapping the cigarette on a thumb nail.

“It’s what we agreed on,” she said.

“Yes. Exactly. Before I give it to you, however, I want to warn you against trying this again. It won’t work. You are a blackmailer, guilty of a crime, and next time I’ll see that you are sent to prison. I’m prepared to accept whatever publicity you can give to this affair, and if it means trouble for Lisa, she must be prepared to accept it too.”

“All right. A lecture is not necessary. I’ve already told you that I don’t believe in making a bad thing out of a good one.”

“I see. Well, then...” He released the homburg with one hand and removed a thin sheaf of bills from an inside pocket of his coat. Extending the bills, he said, “Probably you will want to count it.”

“No.” She shrugged her indifference. “You would hardly try to cheat me in a transaction like this. Just put it down somewhere.”

He tossed the money at the chair by which she stood, and it struck the overstuffed cushion and bounced off onto the floor. Bella did not stoop to pick it up but struck a match and lit her cigarette and drew smoke into her lungs deeply. Expelling the smoke, she watched it rise and thin, and appeared to have lost all interest in what went on in the room.

“So it has come to this,” Carl said. “To blackmail. To crime. Is this what you wanted, Lisa?”

He was not looking in her direction when he began talking, and Lisa was a little startled to discover that he was talking to her. She was conscious of the heaviness of his words, their almost comic ponderousness, as if he were reading lines from a bad melodrama, but she was not impelled to laugh.

“I didn’t want it, Carl. The blackmail. I tried to stop it.”

“But you couldn’t. You’ve started much that you can’t stop, Lisa. Is that true?”

“I guess so. I guess I’ve started it. Anyhow, one way or another, it has got started.”

“What do you intend to do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you stay here? With this woman?”

“No. I’ve only stayed this long because she said you wanted me here when you came.”

“Yes. I made that stipulation. Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you any money?”

“A little. I’ve been working. I had a job in a shop, tut I’ve quit.”

“Do you think you could give this up? This kind of life?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“It’s impossible to know. I suppose there is no way to make you understand that, but it’s true.”

“It’s difficult. I admit it. To understand this kind of thing, I mean. But I’ve tried. If you think I was ever able to dismiss you from my mind and forget you entirely, you’re mistaken. I...I’ve been reading about it, books about it, and perhaps I’ve learned a little.”

His confession touched her. She had a picture of him reading at night when he was tired and would have preferred to sleep or do something for pleasure, heavy books that actually only confused and frightened him all the more, the light of the reading lamp showing his scalp through his fine, thin hair. She wanted very badly to approach him and to touch him, but she was afraid he would be offended. Revolted, even. In her fingertips she actually had the sensation of his skin crawling away from her touch.

“Thank you,” she said. “It was kind of you to do that.”

“Not at all. It was not a question of kindness. I have wished more than once that you would die.”

“I have wished it more than once myself.”

“In that case, why haven’t you tried to change?”

“It’s not so simple. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Perhaps it’s a matter of reaching the time for it. Just the right time. I don’t know why I couldn’t change, any more than I know why I couldn’t die. Dying would have been easier.”

“Tell me. Will you leave with me tonight?”

“If you ask me. You will have to ask me.”

“All right. I ask you to leave with me.”

“Will you take me home?”

“No. If you have any idea of ever going home again, you had better give it up.”

“Do they hate me so much?”

“Hate? I don’t think it’s that. They pretend that you are dead. No. More than that, really. They pretend that you never lived at all.”

“Where will you take me, then?”

“That’s something we’ll talk about. Now you had better get ready to go. Do you have much to pack?”

“Not much that I want to take. Excuse me, please.” She went into the bedroom, and got a bag from the closet and began to put things into it. During the time that she and Carl had talked, Bella had stood smoking her cigarette with obvious indifference, blowing out clouds of smoke and watching each one disperse before she blew out another. From her position, she could see through the door into the bedroom, and now she watched Lisa packing with the same air of indifference, the cigarette acquiring a long ash in her fingers. She paid no attention whatever to Carl, as if he had removed himself from the earth with the payment of the five thousand dollars, which still lay on the floor by the chair, and she said nothing until Lisa returned from the bedroom after a few minutes, wearing a coat and hat and carrying the bag. Then she spoke.

“Go, then,” she said. “Go, God-damn you. I’ll come spit on your grave, when you’re dead.”

Her attitude of indifference had seemed so genuine that the vitriolic fury in her voice was a physical shock. Not to Lisa, who had experienced it before, but to Carl. He felt cold and withered inside, and a little frightened, and immediately ashamed of the fear. Stepping forward, he took the bag from Lisa’s hand and put a hand on her arm. It was the first time he had touched her for years, and it did not disturb him, though the thought of ever touching her again had disturbed him many times.

They went downstairs and outside into the street. She was acutely conscious of his hand on her arm and was exorbitantly grateful for it. The wind in the street was quite strong and very cold. She was grateful for the wind too. It cut through her coat and inner clothing and was like an astringent on her skin. She lifted her face into the wet snow.

“I left the car a block over,” Carl said. “The grade to this street is rather slick, so I didn’t try it.”

They walked to the corner and turned right across the intersection and under the light which had first shown him to her as she looked down from the window. In the car at the foot of the grade, he turned on the heater at once. The air sucked in by the fan was still warm, and she regretted this and wished that he had left the heater off, because the cold acted upon her as a kind of scourge, as the whip is a scourge to the flagellant, lifting her depression a little and easing the burden of her guilt.

“Where are we going?” she said.

“To a hotel. I’ll leave you there for a day or two and come back for you later.”

“What then?”

“I’ve been ill with pneumonia. The doctor has recommended a few weeks in the sun, and I’ve decided to go to Miami. Would you like to come with me?”

“If you want me to.”

“That’s settled, then. You needn’t make any preparations. I’ll take care of reservations, and you can buy clothing there.”

She was overwhelmed by his kindness. She had thought that he would surely never speak to her again, or recognize her in any way, and now he had come out into the cold and snowy night to help her and was offering to take her with him to Miami. Her eyes felt hot and her throat constricted, and she was on the verge of crying, which would have been a good thing, but it had been so long since she had cried that she seemed to have lost the capacity for it.

“Thank you,” she said, and could find nothing to add. Exercising excessive caution on the snow-covered streets, he drove slowly to a small hotel in a quiet section of town, and they went together into the warm, drab lobby where an old man sat facing the window and the night, and another dozed in a chair beside a rubber plant, an evening newspaper unfolded across his lap. Carrying Lisa’s bag, Carl went ahead to the desk and arranged for the room, paying in advance, and then turned and came back to her, and she thought again, seeing his face in the harsh blue light of the lobby, that he looked very ill and tired.

“It’s all arranged,” he said. “Are you sure you have enough money to last you a couple of days?”

“Yes, thank you. I have plenty.”

“Is there anything you need now?”

“I would like some cigarettes.”

“Of course. I still don’t smoke, you know, so I would never have thought of them.”

The way he said it, the way he used the word still, it sounded as if he were deliberately recalling old times, trying to get them reestablished on old terms, and she watched him walk over to the tobacco counter for the cigarettes with her intense and oppressive sense of guilt in conflict with her gratitude. The truth was, she had never liked him much even in the old days, even in the good days before the bad days. She had considered him dull and stuffy, possessed even in adolescence of an abortive maturity, and she wondered why she had never suspected his capacity for kindness, that he would be the one, of all she had known, whose compassion would rise in the end above fear and indignation.

He returned with the cigarettes and handed them to her and, taking her arm again, guided her to the elevator. A bellhop had appeared at last and had assumed control of her bag and was waiting with it in the car. At the door, Carl stopped.

“I won’t go up with you,” he said. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes. Perfectly.”

“I’ll call you to let you know just when we will leave. It will be soon. Within two or three days, if possible. If I were you, I would stay in the hotel.”

“I’ll not leave.”

“Well — good night, then.”

“Good night.”

He turned abruptly and walked away through the lobby, and she went up in the elevator and down to her room with the bellhop, and after the bellhop was gone, she sat down and lit one of the cigarettes and began to think again about going back in her mind to a certain time and place, the point of deviance, and though it was probably impossible to isolate it so neatly from all other times and places, since everything is a growth and a result of many causes, there was, nevertheless, the apparent time, the time of understanding, and so she reached it and began to think naturally of Alison.

Section 2

Hardly ever, when she remembered, did she go beyond Alison in time, even though Alison was comparatively recent, and this was because Alison was the first beauty and the first trauma and was therefore the beginning of everything that counted later. Even the name had contributed to the sum of factors assuring a certain growth, for the name of Alison was to Lisa altogether beautiful, the kind of name she would have chosen for herself if the choosing had been hers. But she was glad, of course, that the name was not hers after all, but really Alison’s, because it is a pleasure, a kind of mild masochism, to have all the beautiful things belong to someone you love and none to yourself.

The truth was, though Lisa had never realized it and still didn’t, that Alison was not exceptional at all. At the time she started attending Lisa’s school she was sixteen years old, one year older than Lisa herself, and she was a tall, slim girl with brown hair and eyes who was very good at games, especially tennis. Lisa also liked to play tennis, and it was at the courts behind the school that she and Alison met. Lisa was sitting on a bench in the sunlight beside a court, watching a pair of boys finish a set that had gone from deuce to advantage and back to deuce, and she was wishing for someone to come along looking for an opponent, and all of a sudden here was this very attractive girl she had only seen a few times around the school recently, and she was saying hello in the most ordinary sort of way, just exactly as if it were something perfectly routine and not an end and a beginning and something that could never be forgotten.

“My name is Alison Hall,” the girl said. “Are you waiting for a game?”

Lisa stood up and smiled and said that she was.

“I’m Lisa Sheridan,” she said. “Would you like to play?”

“Are you very good?”

“No. I guess I’m pretty bad, really. I only started playing a few months ago.”

“That’s all right, then. I’m pretty bad myself.”

This was not true, as Lisa soon discovered; it was so great a deviation from the truth, as a matter of fact, that it couldn’t be explained or justified as simple modesty or honest self-deprecation. It was Alison’s practice to belittle her ability in anything competitive for the dual purpose of minimizing her opponent’s accomplishment if she lost and exaggerating her own if she won. This might have been considered a character fault by some, but Lisa would never acknowledge it or think about, it or listen to anyone who suggested it. Not then, that first day she was subjected to it, or ever afterward.

They sat down on the bench together, waiting for the boys to finish their set, and Alison stretched her legs out in front of her and flexed the muscles in them. It was still September, still very warm, and she was wearing white twill shorts that were very brief, like the shorts the boys wore rather than the longer kind worn by most of the girls, and her legs were long and deeply tanned and quite lovely. Lisa considered her own legs much too thin and was secretly rather ashamed of them. Moreover, her skin was very fair and did not tan properly. Now, her eyes following the lines of Alison’s flanks and calves, she thought they were the loveliest legs she had ever seen and wished that hers were even half so good. Lifting her eyes, she saw that Alison was watching her with a strange little smile on her lips, and she was certain, all at once, that the other girl was aware of her thoughts and was waiting for her to express them.

She did, though she had not intended to.

“You have lovely legs,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Yes. They’re very lovely.”

“Well, yours are nice too.”

“No. You’re just saying that. They’re much too thin.”

“I think they’re nice. And you shouldn’t be so modest. You’re really a pretty girl. I’ve noticed you before, and I don’t mind admitting I’ve been planning to meet you. Boys always like that pale kind of hair you’ve got. Almost silver. I’ll bet you have plenty of boy friends.”

“No, I haven’t. I don’t know many boys at all. Not well, I mean.”

“Why not?”

Actually, Lisa had simply never developed an interest in boys, but she only said, “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it much.”

“Do you ever go out with them?”

“Hardly ever.”

“Do you like them?”

“Well, I guess I like them all right.”

“I don’t. I think boys are the most terrific bores.”

She sat on the bench and frowned at the two on the court as if they were the most terrific bores of all. Lisa could not understand her, and she could not understand how it had happened that they were sitting on this bench and talking the way they were, so sort of intimately, when they had only just met. She was not disturbed by it, however, nor in the slightest embarrassed. It was rather exciting, really, not exactly in itself but because it seemed to suggest in a strange way the possibility of excitements that would have to be discovered. What she was most keenly aware of was an intense desire, sudden and consuming, to make a favorable impression, and she regretted, having learned Alison’s feeling toward boys, that she had not been more critical herself. She was trying to think of a way to correct her mistake when Alison turned her head and looked at her.

“Girls are much more interesting,” Alison said.

“That’s right, come to think of it. They are.”

“I’d much rather have a girl friend than a boy friend. Wouldn’t you?”

Was this a subtle offer of friendship? Lisa’s sense of excitement increased even more, and it was extremely pleasant. She had never felt anything quite like it before. She wanted to tell Alison that she would rather have her for a friend than any old boy, but it was too soon, after all, and she wasn’t prepared to do it. Not yet.

“Girls are more interesting,” she said, repeating Alison’s dictum.

“Do you have a girl friend?”

“Oh, yes. Several.”

“I don’t mean like that. I mean a special girl friend. Someone you like to be with and to think about and to do all sorts of interesting things with.”

Lisa thought about it, and it seemed to her that maybe there were a couple of girls who qualified by Alison’s definition, but she had an idea that she thought so only because she did not quite grasp the full significance of Alison’s expression, and so she shook her head and replied that she guessed she didn’t have any friend exactly like that.

“Do you?” she said.

“Not right now. I’m new in town. Didn’t you know that?”

“I thought so. I’ve only seen you around school a few times.”

“You mean you really noticed me?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Why?”

Alison was now looking at her closely, the little scowl on her face that gave her a kind of dramatic intensity, implying that a great deal more than Lisa supposed might depend upon the answer, and Lisa was suddenly shy and dumb, unable to respond, color creeping up under the clear, pale skin of her face.

“You’re blushing,” Alison said.

“Am I? I didn’t know it.”

“Why are you blushing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you want to tell me why you noticed me?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Tell me, then.”

“Well, because you’re so attractive and everything.”

“Oh, go on. You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not. It’s perfectly true.”

The declaration came out much more fiercely than Lisa had intended, and this seemed to please Alison immensely. Her scowl was replaced by a small smile that was at once satisfied and secretive, and she stood up abruptly.

“Those stupid boys are finally finished,” she said. “Now we can play tennis.”

They went out onto the court and started to play, and it was soon apparent that Lisa was no match. Alison moved swiftly on her strong brown legs, her reflexes functioning with the speed that is essential to excellence in physical games, and there was a masculine power in the flat trajectory of her drives. After four games, Lisa had not won a single point, but Alison did not for this reason relax her game in the slightest. There was a deadly, almost vicious purposeness in the way she scored her points, as if she took a savage pleasure in humiliating her opponent. Strangely enough, though, Lisa did not feel humiliated, or even angry. Ordinarily she was not a particularly good loser and would have quit playing when it became obvious that she had no chance to win. But now she found a pleasure in submitting to her beating that was as strange in its own way as Alison’s in giving it to her.

After the final point of the fourth game, more because she was exhausted than because of her inability to score, she left her side of the court and came around the net to Alison.

“You’re much too good for me,” she said.

“Do you want to quit?”

“Yes. I’m very tired.”

“Are you? I’m not. I’m not tired at all.”

“You’re stronger than I am.”

“That’s true. I’m really quite strong.”

“Besides, I have to be getting home. I enjoyed playing with you, but I’m afraid I didn’t give you much opposition.”

Alison laughed suddenly, her teeth flashing white in her brown face, and put an arm around Lisa’s waist. Lisa could feel the strength in the arm and the heat of Alison’s body, was aware intensely of Alison’s smooth flank against her own.

“That’s all right. I’ll teach you.”

“Really? I shouldn’t think anyone as good as you would want to be bothered.”

“Oh, nonsense. The truth is, I like you. I’ve had a feeling right along that we could be very good friends. Would you like to be friends?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s settled, then. Will you play tennis with me tomorrow afternoon?”

“If you really want me to.”

“Of course I want you to. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t ask. I’m quite sweaty, aren’t you?”

“Yes. It’s still very hot playing in the sun.”

“Do you suppose we could go inside and have a shower?”

“In the school?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know about that. I don’t think we’re supposed to use the showers except after gym classes.”

“Oh, come on. What could be the harm in it? You have a locker in the dressing room, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. Everyone has a locker.”

“I don’t. I haven’t been assigned one yet. Come on. I’ll just share your towel, if you don’t mind.”

“I ought to be getting home.”

“That’s all right. I have my father’s car. I’ll drive you home afterward, and you’ll be there just as soon.”

The arm around Lisa’s waist was imperative, directing her in the way it wanted her to go, and they walked up from the tennis court to a rear entrance to the school and up on the inside to the dressing room on the girls’ side of the gymnasium. Miss Mackson, the physical education teacher, was not in the dressing room when they entered, nor was anyone else. Lisa’s excitement was out of proportion to the circumstances, but she was also a little uneasy, for she had an idea that there would be trouble if she and Alison were discovered showering after class hours. Her mother and father would be very angry with her if she got into trouble at school, and it would, besides, be very humiliating to have to go before the principal or something. Wishing to get finished and away, she began to undress quickly, sitting on the bench in front of her locker to remove her tennis shoes and socks. Then, standing to complete the undressing, she was conscious all at once of a strange inner conflict, reluctance and eagerness at odds over taking off everything in front of this rather confusing and compelling girl she had only just met and could not quite understand.

Hesitating, she looked at Alison and saw that the other girl was already naked and was watching her with the small smile on her lips that seemed to be the emotional antithesis of the intent smile that expressed her dislike. Stripped, its smooth brown broken in two places by bands of white the sun had not reached, Alison’s body had a hard clean look of grace that even her thin shirt and brief shorts had not completely shown, her hips assuming in nakedness a boyish narrowness, her shoulders an added breadth.“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“I’m not waiting for anything. I’ll be ready in just a minute.”

She finished undressing in a hurry, and they went back to the shower stalls and stood for quite a while under the hot water and for a few seconds under the cold, and then Alison shut off the water and turned to Lisa, and it was perfectly plain all of a sudden that they had come to the time for some kind of decision, but afterward, when Lisa thought back to it, there didn’t really seem to have been any decision or choice at all, but only something that had to begin and did. At first, for some time after the first time, there was a fear that sometimes assumed the dimensions of terror, and there was a feeling of guilt that was based less on a conviction of transgression than on the certainty that her mother and father and brother and practically everyone else would consider it so. But against the burden of fear and guilt, which gradually lightened, there was the compensation of Alison and Alison’s special friendship. They were together almost all the time, and spent nights at each other’s house and all things like that, and everyone thought how inseparable they were and that it was really quite sweet and charming; and everything was fine, except for the sickness of fear and guilt, all through the fall and the winter and right up into the spring, which was the time Miss Mackson found the note.

Lisa had written the note to Alison and was going to pass it to her when she got the chance, and this was nothing new or different, because she wrote a note every once in a while to tell Alison again how wonderful it was to be her friend and just how she felt about everything, but perhaps it was foolish to put it down on paper that way when you couldn’t possibly expect anyone else to understand about it if it became known. It wasn’t really necessary to write the notes, of course, because all that was in them could have been spoken, but somehow it seemed easier to find just the right words for it when there was time to select them carefully and write them down. Anyhow, the note was written, and it was in her jacket pocket when she went in to gym, and later, when she came out, it was gone. She was very frightened and went back to the dressing room to look for it, but it wasn’t there. After that she didn’t know what to do, and though she didn’t know it yet, there was nothing to be done at all, because Miss Mackson had found it.

What followed was something she tried afterward to repress, and she had no clear recollection of it, the natural sequence of events, but of only an incoherent kaleidoscope of ugly and terrifying scenes. She found herself trapped inside a hard perimeter of danger, a circle of cold faces set in lines of revulsion — her father’s, her mother’s, her brother Carl’s. Beyond them, in the darkness beyond the perimeter, were all the vicariously aggrieved and violated, and she knew for the first time in her life the loneliness and terror of the one who was different in a way that was unacceptable, the person apart. Her isolation, for a while, was actually physical. In her room, quarantined, she watched from her window the assumption of spring by earth, the progress of green growth and the early rain and the assaults of gusty wind, and she thought of Alison and wanted Alison and wondered when, if ever, she would see Alison again.

In time, of course, she was restored to the forms of normalcy, to the associations and relative freedom of school, but she was now disturbed and uncertain in relationships she had formerly sustained with ease, and though she was aware that the secret of her transgression was guarded by a few, she could not lose her sense of separation, of acceptance irrevocably repudiated, and she felt rejection in every contact. This feeling did not begin and end at the door of her home. She felt it most of all in her own family, in inverse ratio to their stiff efforts to conceal it, and after a while she actually began to pity them in their confusion and shock, their utter inability to understand or accept what had happened. Not so much to her, really, as to them. The terrible threat to their respectability.

She saw Alison, and there was nothing altered, in spite of disaster and disgrace, in the way she felt about the other girl, or in the degree of her longing. She wanted to speak to her and to touch her and to receive the assuring commitment of the small smile, but this was now impossible. She wondered if Alison had suffered and was unhappy and above all if she was angry because of the note. She could not bear the thought of Alison’s being angry. Of the multitude of threats in the strange and transformed world, this was the one that caused her, when she considered it, the greatest despair. Looking to Alison for reassurance, for the slightest sign in passing, she received nothing, no smile, no gesture, no word dropped softly. The truth was, Alison seemed entirely unaware of her, as if there had never been between them a discovery or a dedication or any feeling whatever.

The year aged and spring passed and school closed, and after the closing of school, with even the brief sight of Alison in passing now denied her, Lisa could bear the separation no longer. She began to walk by herself, when she could get away, along the streets near Alison’s home, and once she saw the other girl with her father, and several times with her mother, and at last, as she had been hoping, alone. They were on opposite sides of the street at the time, and Lisa, crossing over, felt in the space of the crossing a mounting and hurting happiness that reduced to insignificance all that had happened because of Alison or might ever happen because of her later. “Alison,” she said.

Alison stopped and turned. It was not the small smile she displayed, however, but the antithetic scowl. “What do you want?-”

“I just want to talk with you, Alison. I’ve been so lonely for you.”

“Have you? Well, you’d better get used to it, I guess, because you’ll be lonely for me for a long time as far as I’m concerned.”

“Haven’t you missed me? Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“No. I wish I wasn’t seeing you now, and I hope I never see you again.”

“Why? Why, Alison?”

“Because you’re a fool, that’s why.”

“Because of the note?”

“Yes, because of the note. Only a fool would have been so careless.”

“I’m sorry. I admit it was careless.”

“Well, I should think sol You damn near ruined me.”

“I said I was sorry, Alison. Please don’t be angry.”

“Of course I’m angry. Do you understand what I’ve been through? Do you think I like being looked at as if I were filthy or something? Do you think I enjoy being watched all the time and hardly ever allowed to go anywhere alone? If I were even seen talking with you, I’d be in trouble all over again.”

“Does it matter so much? It doesn’t to me. I’d be in trouble too, but it doesn’t matter at all if only you won’t be angry and we can be friends again.”

“Are you crazy? It’s impossible.”

“Please, Alison. It’s all been so terrible, and no one understands anything about it. How it really was, I mean. I’ll kill myself if you won’t be friends.”

“Oh, don’t be so stupid.”

“I will. I swear I will.”

“Well, go ahead and kill yourself, then. I’m sure I’d be better off if you did.”

“Don’t talk like that. Please don’t.”

In the urgency of her supplication, Lisa moved forward and lifted a hand, and Alison backed away. Lisa’s intensity frightened her a little, and she wondered uneasily if the crazy little fool were actually capable of killing herself after all. She hadn’t really thought so, and that’s why she had spoken so brutally, but she wouldn’t actually want anything like that to happen, because she would surely be implicated herself, under the circumstances, and would have to suffer for it one way or another.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“I won’t hurt you, Alison. I only want you to be kind to me again.”

“Go away.”

“Please, Alison.”

“Go away, I tell you. If you don’t go away and leave me alone, I’ll tell my father that you molested me. Then you’ll really be in trouble.”

Turning abruptly, Alison walked back the way she hid come, the long legs that had been strong and brown in the late summer sun carrying her away swiftly. For a moment Lisa was on the point of running after her, but the desperate moment passed and was gone, the moment and Alison gone together and for good, and she stood there fixed and trembling, the incredibly beautiful name dying in her throat with an ugly strangled sound.

So it ended. So it died on a sidewalk with a whimper. Lisa carried the corpse of it home inside her and sat over it in her room. She considered dying herself, how it might best be done, but what she wanted was merely to die and not to kill herself, which are different things, and so she continued to live and entered a long armistice, precariously balanced between this way to go and that way, the way before Alison and the way Alison had shown her, and it could have been in that time, depending upon circumstances, either of the ways.

Then there was one summer, a short while one summer, when she was at a certain lake resort on vacation with her family, and there was a girl there she had come to know, and something had started and grown between them and had eventually ended in the way things end that are a part of a summer and are not expected to survive it. Afterward it had not been thought of much or remembered long, except as an infrequent associate of some subsequent incident, and even yet, even after the second overt time, there was still the other way available, though it had become, because of the summer at the lake, just so much less likely.

Depression became an uncontrollable factor in her life. Whereas it had previously come infrequently with a discernible logic, the specific result of causes that could be isolated and examined, it now came without apparent reason, just came and remained for longer and longer periods, was often just there waiting for her when she awoke in the morning, or came to her in the middle of the night, or while she was going about her affairs in the course of the day. Because of this, she deliberately took an overdose of barbiturates when she was twenty-one, but she did not die and was sent by her frightened parents to a psychiatrist who learned a great deal about her but did very little for her. This happened in her third year in Midland City College, and in her fourth and last year there was an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages. The associate professor was a young woman named Jeanne Marot who spoke with a French accent and had actually been born and educated in France. She was quite attractive in a sleek, angular way, like a clothes model in an expensive fashion magazine, and she was, besides, as it developed, quite aggressive when she was reasonably certain of the response to her aggression, and it seemed for a while that she was the answer to everything, but of course she was not. This was perfectly apparent after a few months, and, anyhow, the affair had become by then extremely precarious and threatening.

The summer after the last year in college was the worst in her life, a period of chronic melancholia that made the performance of the simplest act, a monstrous burden and a terrifying threat, as if any change in condition at all might destroy her precarious balance and place her in incomprehensible peril, and when she thought back to the summer afterward she could never understand how she survived it and sometimes wished that she hadn’t. Because the summer was so bad, because it was necessary to survival to do something, almost anything, it was quite simple in the end to make the decision about Bella. They met in a park where Lisa had gone because home had long since become intolerable and because the park was simply a place to go that was not home, and their common denominator was something not difficult to establish by simple techniques of approach and response. They met the next day in the same place, seemingly by accident, and the next day after that openly by appointment; and a week later Lisa moved into the apartment on the south side of the city, and Bella was someone to adhere to, an object to give allegiance, the symbol to Lisa of what she considered a definitive decision. She left home after an icy scene with her family in which horror was disguised as anger and everything was understood but not mentioned.

And now, in a strange room in a strange hotel, she realized that the deviate way was a way that had cured no ill and established no peace, and that she would have to return after all to the other way, the way she had thought rejected forever, and she would not return because she wanted to do so for any reason that was essential to her real needs and hungers, but simply because she did not possess whatever qualities were necessary to survival among the perils and oppressions of aberrance.

Rising from the chair, she went to a window and looked out and saw that neither the snow nor the wind had diminished. And at that moment in Corinth, three hundred miles away, Emerson and Ed Page were lying asleep in their bed, each in the arms of the other; and Avery Lawes, in the brick house on High Street, was also lying in bed but was not asleep and in no one’s arms.