Wake Up With a Stranger

1.

We have this young woman, this Donna Buchanan, who awakened one morning in a room in a house in Midland City, a certain kind of person with a certain kind of day ahead of her.

At first, immediately after opening her eyes, she had a feeling that it was very late and that she would have to get up at once and go down to the shop in which she worked. Then, with increasing awareness of which day it was, she remembered that it was Sunday and that it would not be necessary to get up until she chose, or to go anywhere at all. With this established — the day and the limits of its claims upon her — she was prepared to establish also in her mind the significant sequence of events which had determined that she should awaken here and now instead of somewhere else at another time.

To start with, she thought, there was the sale of the original peau de soie with the bouffant skirt. I designed it myself and made it myself and sold it myself to no one but Mrs. William Walter Tyler, Queen Harriet herself, the snotty bitch, but I’ll have to hand it to her that she’s got the body to wear it and get away with it, not all points and edges like some of them. It was the sheerest bit of good luck that the gown was available when she stopped in the shop, just finished and hanging on the rack in the back room as if it were made for her and meant for her from the beginning. But even so, even with such a beautiful chance to show it for the first time, I almost didn’t do it because I was afraid. I was afraid she wouldn’t like it — and if she hadn’t, if she’d rejected it, I’d have hated her guts, I swear to God I’d have scratched her eyes out. But I needn’t have been afraid at all as it turned out, because she liked it and bought it, and this is much more important than might at first be apparent. Quite apart from the price, which was four hundred dollars and therefore of considerable importance in itself, there is the matter of having the continuing patronage of Mrs. William Walter Tyler, Queen Harriet, beautiful Hattie, and the additional patronage of all the points and edges who try to look like Hattie and act like Hattie in all that Hattie does for public observation. What Hattie does that is not for public observation is no business or concern of mine, but just the same, in passing, I wonder who the hell she thinks she’s fooling with her sly caresses under the guise of feeling the material, and I wonder what the hell kind of life Mr. William Walter Tyler has in bed at home.

Let’s see, now. What happened next in the day that was yesterday and had everything to do with the day that is today? After Queen Hattie had gone, it was quite late, almost time to close the shop, and I went into the back room again, and the sewing machine was running, and because of the sale of the peau de soie, which was the best thing I have ever done and actually worth more than the four hundred dollars it brought, the sound of the sewing machine was like a song, a serenade, a singing in the blood. Gussie was waiting for me there, and I could tell from her excitement that she had been spying through the curtains and had followed the sale right from Queen Hattie in mink to her panties and back, and she asked me if I’d really sold it, the peau de soie, and I told her I had, casually, as if it were nothing unusual at all to have one of my little creations covering the velveteen tail of Mrs. William Walter Tyler, and just about then Aaron came back from wherever he’d been, and I told him about it.

He was happy. He was happy for me, and there’s that about Aaron. There was profit in it for him, because it’s his shop, but he was basically glad because it was my design and my gown and might be for me the beginning of acceptance and recognition and something truly big at last. He was happier for me than for himself, and there’s that about him.

“It’s marvelous, Donna,” he said. “I am so happy for you.”

“Maybe it won’t mean anything,” I said. “Maybe it’s a four-hundred-dollar sale and nothing more.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s a beautiful gown, and it will make Mrs. Tyler look beautiful, and everyone will tell her so, and she’ll surely be back for more Donna Buchanan originals. Make no mistake about that.”

“Well, I hope you’re right,” I said, and he said, “It’s absolutely true, and you’ll see, and we should do something to celebrate it.”

He was very sweet with his gray curly hair and soft smiling mouth, and I agreed that it was something that should be celebrated, and after Gussie and the seamstress were gone we talked about what would be a proper celebration and finally decided to go to dinner as a beginning, which we did. I didn’t want to go to my apartment even long enough to change clothes, so I changed into my dress shoes and borrowed from the racks the crimson sheath that fitted my mood, and changed in one of the dressing rooms, and we went out and had dinner and later went dancing and got a little drunk on too many brandies, and I could tell that he wanted me, and after a while I began to want him also, though not so much as he wanted me, and eventually we came here to his home, his wife having gone to Florida, and we undressed and went to bed, and so here I am, in bed still, but he is not, for some reason or other, and I wonder why everything is so exceptionally quiet.

Having thus reviewed her way to bed, she lay and listened to oppressive silence, and all at once, for no reason that she could isolate, she was uneasy and a little depressed and no longer so pleased by remembrance of the sale of the peau de soie. Lying quite still, hardly breathing so that her breath would not disturb the air, she listened intently for the sound of Aaron in the bathroom, but she heard no sound at all, and she began to wonder where he could possibly have gone to. It was certainly not reasonable that he would simply get up and go away under the circumstances, leaving her asleep and naked in bed with no word whatever. Unless, of course, he had been called away quite early and planned to return quickly, in which case he would surely have left a note explaining things.

Thinking that this was what he had done, she sat up suddenly and snapped on the small lamp on the table beside the bed. But there was no note on the table or pinned to his pillow, and neither, she learned by leaning to the side and peering over the edge of the bed, had it accidentally fallen to the floor. It was certainly peculiar, and she couldn’t understand it at all, and she began to feel a little angry, as well as lonely and depressed, and she would give Aaron hell for it when he returned, you could depend on that, and what made his absence even worse and absolutely inexcusable was that she was becoming increasingly conscious of her own body and wanted him to return for more reasons than one.

Then it occurred to her that he had probably gone downstairs to the kitchen to prepare them some breakfast. This was a perfectly rational and acceptable explanation, because it was just the kind of considerate thing he would do, and she lay and listened intently again, trying to detect the sounds of movement on the lower floor, but she still heard nothing and had really expected to hear nothing, for in so large a house the kitchen was much too far away for sounds to carry. Moving abruptly, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and reached for her glasses on the bedside table and put them on.

She did not do this because she needed them to see well, but because they had become to her the symbol of something she had never quite isolated and identified, and they gave her a feeling of strength and security and of being the kind of person she wanted to be. They were harlequin-shaped horn rims with plain glass lenses. The optometrist had reported she did not need glasses, but she had insisted so vehemently upon having them that he had finally shrugged and put the plain glass in the frames of her choice. She had thought then, and still thought, that the frames accentuated the natural slant of her eyes and the piquancy of her thin face, and what she thought was true. She was pretty enough without them, but with them she was much more than pretty, and it would have been difficult to determine precisely the substance of the difference.

Wearing the glasses and no more, she walked across the room to a bank of windows and pulled the heavy gray drapes a little apart and stood looking down across a side yard at an angle to the street. It was snowing thickly, great wet flakes, and that explained, in part, the oppressive silence. Houses always went silent, it seemed, in a snow, and even if there were talking and laughing and music, the silence was still there on the inside if the snow was outside.

She crossed to the bathroom and went through it and into the bedroom beyond, the room of Aaron’s wife. It gave her a feeling of aggressive pride to be there, a kind of arrogant and insolent sense of triumph to walk naked through the room — a woman wanted, and had, and essential, among the possessions of a woman unwanted and no longer worth having and essential to no one on earth. She sat on the bed, lay back and rolled over on it, got up and went over to the dressing table, and examined the articles on it. If the cosmetics were the right shade, she thought, she might use them to repair the composition of her own face, but they were, of course, much too pastel for her vividness, and she replaced them with an abrupt little gesture of contempt, as if there were necessarily something deficient in a woman who used pastel shades.

Leaning forward, she switched on a light beside the long mirror and studied her body in the shining glass, the high breasts and flat belly and hips that were perhaps a trifle narrow but swelling sufficiently, nevertheless into long clean flanks. Pivoting, she twisted her head arid looked around over her shoulder into the mirror at her backside; and she laughed suddenly and softly and spontaneously at the sight, as if she couldn’t help it in the warm, possessive pleasure she felt in herself. But in this warm reaction there was also an element of sadness, the knowledge not specifically recognized that even self-love and self-possession were not inviolable securities, and that she would in time as surely lose herself — at least herself as she was in the glass — as she had lost and would lose others. This understanding, though not clearly verbalized or accepted, took much of the pleasure from her narcissm, and she turned off the light and went back into the bathroom.

Above the lavatory was a large mirrored door, and she opened it and regarded the articles on the shelves. Most of them were masculine — Aaron’s possessions, a razor, a can of lather, talcum and lotion and styptic. There was also a bottle of aspirin tablets, and this reminded her that she didn’t even have a headache, after having drunk really quite a lot last night, and she felt a little proud that this was the case, as if it were some superiority in herself that made it possible.

Beside the aspirin bottle was a smaller clear cylinder, with cotton under the cork and some very tiny tablets under the cotton. Taking it in her hands, she turned it around and read the word NITROGLYCERIN on the small label that had been turned toward the back of the cabinet. She replaced the cylinder and closed the mirrored door and decided that she would take a shower.

From a drawer of a built-in cabinet she took a towel, and from another she took a rubber cap to keep her hair dry. In the tub, she kept increasing the hot water until it was very hot indeed, and after it was so hot that she thought she could stand it no hotter, she turned it off entirely, leaving only the cold water running, and it was then, for the seconds she stood under it, an excruciatingly delightful torture, like a thousand thin needles piercing her flesh. Out of the tub, she rubbed herself dry and went back into Aaron’s bedroom to get her clothes.

She found them in a pile on the floor at the foot of the bed, and she separated them and examined them now to see if she had done them any real harm, the crimson sheath and the wisps of nylon, and she was relieved to see that she hadn’t. The crimson sheath was rather ridiculous now at mid-morning, but it wouldn’t matter in the house or under her coat when she left, and she would stop by the shop and change back into her own dress on the way home. A more serious problem were her shoes, hardly more than thin soles with narrow strategic straps. They were not at all suitable for snow, and she had no galoshes, but since Aaron would deliver her to the shop, it would only be a matter of a few steps in approaching and leaving the car.

Fully dressed, she found her purse and removed her lipstick and went back into the bathroom to do her lips before the mirror, leaning forward and carefully extending and perfecting their natural outline with the vivid color. In doing this, she noticed for the first time that she had neglected to put her glasses back on again after the shower. They were still lying on the edge of the lavatory, and she put them on and studied her face for a moment in the glass and then returned to the bedroom. Now, having run out of things to do, she was forced to consider again the absence of Aaron.

She could not understand it, she simply could not, and the more she thought about it, the more furious she became. Well, if he thought she was going to sit and sit and wait and wait until he got goddamn good and ready to return, he was crazy. What she was going to do, thin shoes or no shoes at all, was go down and get her coat where she had left it below in the hall, call a taxi, and go to the shop and home by herself — and Aaron, the bastard, could go to hell.

Determined to follow this course of action, she went into the hall and began to descend the stairs, and she was halfway down when she understood at last why it was that he had left, and where he had gone, and why he would not return, not today or tomorrow or ever.

He was lying on the floor of the hall below her. He was obviously and incredibly and terrifyingly dead.

2.

Aaron Burns was born in a town downstate forty-eight years before he died in his home in St. Louis. His father was an old-fashioned orthodox Jew who operated a haberdashery and prospered at it. He was a stern man, adhering strictly to the tenets of his religion and the mores of his people, but he was also compassionate and just, with compassion tempering justice more often than otherwise. Aaron respected his father, and even loved him in a way, but he often could not understand him and later could not follow him.

The Jewish population of the town was quite small, but it supported one synagogue. Aaron went there to worship, and when he was old enough he started attending public school. It was then that his personality began to develop in a certain way and to acquire a particular quality, and the quality that it began to acquire was bitterness. This was not overt and offensive, as it might have been in a boy less naturally gentle; and instead of becoming the basis of aggression it showed in his eyes and attitude more as a kind of inexplicable sadness than anything else. This quality was not the result of persecution, for there was none, but of exclusion. To be sure, he had fully the acceptance of his own people, and even up to a point the acceptance of the non-Jews, but this was for him too narrow on the one hand and too qualified on the other, and on neither hand was it enough.

He was a bright boy and did well in school, and when he was seventeen he went away to the state university. His academic status there Was exceptionally good, but his social status was essentially the same as it had been at home, and while this was comfortable, it was not sufficient. He finished two years and began a third, and then one morning, without any warning, he quietly packed his things and went home. His father did not question the decision nor ever ask afterward why it had been made. He did not feel compelled or qualified to do the one, and it was unnecessary to do the other. He was certain that he knew without asking.

Aaron went to work in the haberdashery and did as well in the business as he had done in school. He worked there for five years, and in the third year his mother died, and at the end of the fifth his father died also. His father’s assets were far greater than Aaron had dreamed, and he inherited everything. After the will was probated, he never opened the haberdashery again. He liquidated the assets and moved north to St. Louis. After a while he opened an exclusive shop for women in an area of exclusive shops, but before doing this he married a woman three years his senior, a Methodist from a good family. And always thereafter, for as long as he lived, the apostate felt like a traitor and carried within himself an unrelieved burden of guilt and a quiet conviction of his irrevocable damnation.

The marriage was not successful. He bought a fine house in a restricted residential area where every property had enough ground to insure reasonable privacy, and he tried very hard in every way that he could; but in spite of all his efforts the marriage went sour, and the truth was that it had no chance from the beginning. It was honestly not his fault, but his wife’s.

A neurotic, she accumulated over a period of years an incredible number of psychosomatic ills; and it was not long before she decided that the state of her health made it imperative for her to deny her husband access to her body. She moved into a separate bedroom, and since she had never achieved a climax in her life, she was not aware of any personal loss in the discontinuance of a rather untidy function that she had always considered a disagreeable duty.

This was not true, however, with Aaron. His needs were normal and demanded satisfaction. He was a reasonably attractive man with more money than most men ever get; he could have had affairs, of course, or taken a permanent mistress, but he did not wish to risk emotional involvment or the possible development of an unfortunate situation. As an inadequate compromise, he went twice a month to a fashionable whorehouse on the south side of the city.

There was quite a bit of the moralist in him, and the biweekly trips to the south side disturbed his conscience some, adding to the burden of guilt that he already carried for other reasons. Because he was forced into them by his wife’s abstinence, he came to look upon her as a source of corruption as well as a kind of parasite, and he hated her covertly and quietly. There was a short time when he considered rather academically the possibility of killing her and getting away with it, but of course his considerations came to nothing because he was really far too gentle to resort to violence and far too tender to the probings of his conscience to survive indefinitely as a murderer even if he could evade the retribution prescribed by law. Compensation for the deficiency of his marriage he found to a degree in his shop, and eventually to a greater degree in the young woman who came to work in the shop.

The shop prospered, though his marriage did not. He planned it himself from the beginning, specifying his choice of colors and fabrics and carpeting, and he had a genius for devising combinations of qualities that gave the effect of luxury without losing the aesthetic values of simplicity. His sense of what women would like, or ought to like and could be persuaded to like, was uncannily delicate and accurate. He displayed nothing but fine gowns, and he built quite rapidly a reputation which enticed the patronage of women who could afford to pay for both the gowns and his judgment in selecting them. But what he wanted more than anything else, and what he could not for a long time find the means of securing, was a selection of originals, originals in his own shop, which would compare favorably with the originals of New York and Paris. With these he could seduce and retain the patronage of women like Harriet Tyler who now selected most of their more expensive gowns in the shops of New York, at least, if not Paris.

While he was thinking of this and wondering how he could accomplish it, at the age of forty-five, he had his first heart attack. He was in the shop, fortunately in the back room supervising personally an alteration by the seamstress; and all of a sudden, without the slightest recognizable warning, he was overcome by the most terrible pain that he had ever known. A doctor was called by Gussie Ingram, his chief saleslady, and an ambulance was called by the doctor. The ambulance came into the alley behind the shop, and Aaron was carried out the rear exit on a stretcher. Mrs. Alton Sturdevant, who was at the time buying a hundred-and-fifty dollar cocktail gown in front, was never aware that anything had happened; and Aaron did not return for nearly two months.

This occurred in January, a month which Aaron’s wife had begun to spend in Florida, and he did not find it necessary to inform her precisely what he had suffered. On her part, she did not find it any more necessary to return to find out. As a matter of fact, she was inclined to consider illness her special privilege, and she rather resented him as a trespasser. Not that he cared at all. He no longer wished to kill her, or even that she would die, for it would have been impossible for her to have been, really, any more dead to him than she already was.

He learned two things from his brush with death. The first was that his life to that point, in spite of the shop, had hardly been worth living. The second was that, nevertheless, he would rather go on living than die. For several months he exercised the excessive caution characteristic of heart-conscious persons; but as time passed and he suffered no new attack or any signs of one, he relaxed and lived more naturally, and began to think again about the originals. He even thought of trying to design them himself, but his talent was in judgment, not creation, and he knew that he would not be successful. Soon afterward, almost a year from the time of his attack, Donna Buchanan came to see him.

The first thing he noticed about her was that she was frightened and had adopted an air of excessive sophistication to disguise her fright. He noted this only briefly, however, because the second thing he noticed was that she was unusually attractive and had learned well the tricks of making herself look even more attractive than she naturally was. Her hair was black, but her skin was fair — and her lips were done boldly in vivid color. She was wearing a pair of harlequin glasses that increased the piquancy of her thin face. When she removed her heavy coat in response to his invitation, he saw that her body was fine and slim and good to look at; and he would have viewed it imaginatively in a number of his own gowns if he had not been so struck by the one she was wearing. It was a navy faille with the effective simplicity of fine design and the unmistakable clean lines of expensive tailoring.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where did you get that dress?”

“I made it,” she said.

“Where did you get the pattern?”

“I designed it myself.”

“Where did you learn to design?”

“I took a correspondence course, which helped, but mostly I’ve just worked at developing what I knew instinctively.”

This was an answer that pleased him, for he had a great belief in feeling as the primary element of excellence in design, a kind of natural awareness of what was right and not right.

“Why have you come to see me?” he asked.

“To ask if you might have a place for me in your shop.”

“As a designer?”

“I’d be willing to sell too, but I’d want to work part of the time on designing.”

He nodded at the portfolio she had brought in with her.

“Are those some of your designs?”

“Yes.”

“Show them to me.”

She did, and his excitement increased. He knew at once that he was going to give her a place in his shop — there was no question about that from the very first — but he examined all the sketches without comment, visualizing their execution in this or that fabric, brocades and velvets and Jacquarded silks. Afterward he closed the portfolio and began to talk with her about conditions and terms as if it were quite simply understood by both of them that it was no more than a matter of clarifying the details of an arrangement that was inevitable.

She turned out to be not only a fine designer but also a subtle and effective saleslady; and even these assets, important as they were to the shop and its increasing distinction, were of minor significance as compared with her total effect in the life that Aaron had been living, less because he really wanted to live it than because he did not want to explore the consequences of dying. He soon loved her and wanted to possess her. This he confessed to himself, because he was painfully honest in the presence of his id, but he confessed it to no one else, certainly not to her, because he was considerate and shy and had no faith in his capacity to incite in her a reciprocal desire.

After a while she had her own key to the shop and often returned at night to work at her sketches, and sometimes, at the beginning, he was there himself when she came. Afterward he made a point of being there every time instead of only sometimes. For quite a long while he made a pretense of having his own late business in the shop, but then, abruptly, he abandoned the pretense entirely and spent all his time in the room where she worked. It gave him genuine pleasure merely to sit and watch her, and to talk with her when she wanted to talk, and even to feel within himself the aching carnal appetite that was now specifically dedicated for the first time in much too long. Because it was dedicated, because it was a part of love, it was therefore purified and no disturbance to his tender conscience.

One night when she was finished working, she turned and met his bitter-sad eyes and held them levelly with hers for the length of three long breaths.

“Are you in love with me?” she said.

Rather strangely, or perhaps not, he wasn’t in the least disturbed by the question, and he answered that he was. “Would you like to have me?” she said. “Yes.”

“Well, I think I would like to have you too, so why don’t we try it and see how it works out?”

“Here? Now?”

“Do you object to here and now?”

“Oh, no. No.”

“Well, then.”

He was a little awkward the first time, and excessively gentle, but it worked out pleasantly for her, and wonderfully for him, and was repeated frequently afterward. She left home (she had been living with her mother and father) and rented an apartment, and he stayed with her there several nights a month. Or when his wife was out of town, they went to his house. He discontinued his trips to the south side. His life was suddenly warm and exciting, something it had never been before, and then, cataclysmically, in the midst of the warmth and excitement, about eight months after he took her the first time in the shop, he had his second heart attack.

He spent two months in the hospital and six weeks at home and was considered fortunate, by his doctor, to be alive. The shop in his absence was in Donna’s charge. She visited him in the hospital and reported how things were going, and they went well. While he was convalescing at home, she did not see him at all, although she talked to him daily over the telephone, because she did not wish to meet the wife of the man with whom she had committed adultery and with whom she expected to commit it again. This was a reticence he could understand and approve of, but the six weeks at home were the longest of his life. He eventually escaped to the shop, and Donna, with vast relief, but always afterward he carried, or was supposed to carry, a supply of nitroglycerine tablets in his pocket.

Everything was resumed. Business and Donna and life. And the warmth and excitement were still there, the strong desire to live and do and be. It was never in him in greater force than it was the morning he awakened early, arose quietly, and looked down at her nakedness with love, and then descended the stairs of his house to drop dead in the hall in an instant.

3.

Before she had walked from the house to the street, her feet were wet and very cold. She turned left at the street and walked directly down it for several blocks, looking right and left at each intersection for a drugstore or café or any establishment at all that might be open on a Sunday and have a telephone. At last she saw to her left, at an intersection, the unlighted neon identification of a drugstore.

While she felt for Aaron a genuine grief, it was not unmixed grief, and she felt also for herself a concern which had been expressed first in flight and would from this time on be expressed in a calculated effort to avoid implication. There was no real harm in this, of course — it was better for him as it was for her — but it entailed problems; and the most imperative of the problems was arranging that his body be found soon. This was a problem which could surely be solved simply, however, once she was in a position to think about it clearly, and, meanwhile, she wondered if anyone had seen her leave the house fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She doubted it, but even so, there were her footprints in the snow. She hoped the heavy snow would continue, and obliterate the prints.

She reached the drugstore and went to the telephone booth and dialed the number of a taxi company. When she started to give the address, she could not for a moment think of what it was, and she felt an odd, exorbitant panic out of all proportion to its cause, but then she remembered and provided with an equally disproportionate sense of relief the names of the two streets intersecting outside. Leaving the booth, she went up to the front entrance of the store to wait; and the taxi must have been cruising quite near when it received the radio message, for it was sounding its horn at the curb within four minutes. She went out and got in and gave the driver the address of the shop downtown.

Because of the heavily falling snow and the increasingly hazardous condition of the streets, it took an unusually long time to get there. Now that she was in the taxi, however, she lost much of her earlier sense of urgency and was acquiring in its place a feeling of apathy and a collateral inability to think of anything whatever constructively. Besides, she was becoming sleepy. She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes and longed and longed to go to sleep.

When the taxi eventually stopped, she paid the fare and went directly through the shop to her workroom in the rear. Removing her coat and shoes and stockings, she rubbed her feet with a towel from the lavatory until warmth was restored to them, and then she removed the crimson sheath and put on dry stockings and the shoes and dress she had worn to work the day before. This done, she began to think in spite of herself in a way that she did not wish to think. Here in the shop that had been Aaron’s, she was acutely susceptible to the sense of his presence, as if he were actually sitting and watching her with the bitter-sad light of his desire in his eyes; and her conviction of guilt and cowardice was intense and no longer evadable. She had come here and found first a friend and then a lover, if not complete love, and most of all she had found support in doing what she wanted most to do. Now the man who had received her and accepted her, the friend and lover, was lying dead beyond possible help, and she had run away from him when she might have stayed, had denied him when she might have given recognition and dignity to his body in death. Oh, she was a coward, she could not deny it, and perhaps she was even committing some crime, but still it was better, it was surely much better — if she could only achieve this conviction — to have done what she had done and would certainly continue doing.

She always came back to this. That it was better this way for him and for her. For herself, there was too much in precarious balance, too much to lose that had been gained, for there was no way of predicting the ramifications and effects of adultery and death in collusion. For him, there was little left to lose, but he would surely be grateful, if he could ever again be anything, that she had prevented the scandal. She knew that all this might be rationalization, but it worked to the point of leavening her guilt, and pretty soon she began to think about going home.

She did not want to go. She would have much preferred going to her own apartment, but it was necessary now to go home instead, not only because she felt committed to her mother for a part of each Sunday, but also because she needed her parents’ help. She wanted them to be prepared to swear she had been home last night in case it was necessary or desirable for some reason she could not foresee.

She always thought of it as home, though it had never been that to her in any significant sense of the word; she had hated it while she was there, and had left it with relief. She dreaded going back even for a visit to the ugly, narrow two-story house cramped darkly between houses as high and ugly and narrow on either side.

She dreaded also seeing her mother and father. For her mother, she felt pity and some respect and a nagging sense of responsibility. For her father, a querulous ineffectual person who persisted ridiculously in trying to exercise the prerogatives of his position, without ever having assumed adequately the obligations, she felt contempt only. She wished she had never known him, would have liked never to see him again, and would surely never have gone near him or permitted him to come near her if it had not been for her mother.

When she was given a place in Aaron’s shop, she began to plan immediately to move into an apartment, and she executed the plan a few days after the night Aaron took her in the back room. She still contributed money, however, to supplement her father’s irregular income, always handing it directly to her mother, for whom she intended it and without whom she would not have given it. She visited the narrow, ugly house almost every Sunday, again for the sake of her mother only. Now she had to leave the shop and visit it again, this time, though, for her own sake too. It would be well, she thought, to go at once.

She did not call a taxi by telephone. She went through the shop to the front door and pulled the blind away from the glass a few inches and stood peering up the street until a taxi came into view. Then she went out quickly to the curb and stopped it and got in.

She began to wonder what would be the best way to get from her mother and father the consent to the lie that might never become necessary at all, but she could formulate no particular strategy, and probably would need none, for her mother was weak and her father was vulnerable. In the end they would simply do as she told them to. The taxi moved slowly through cloudy streets, and for a long while she sat erect in the back seat, looking through the taxi window at the changing character of the city as the buildings diminished and admitted the sky and became residential in allotments of blanketed lawn between shopping-center breaks. Then, when they moved at last into the mean streets of her earliest remembrance, she leaned back and closed her eyes and quit looking at anything at all except the tenacious image — of Aaron dead — behind her lids.

The taxi stopped in front of the narrow and ugly house. She opened her eyes, got out and overpaid the driver, and then went quickly up the stairs and across the high porch and into a dark hall. She paused in the hall to hang her coat on a rack fastened to the wall, and wondered with mounting depression why the smell never changed, never, never changed — the thin perennial and faintly sour smell which apparently had nothing to do with ventilation, or the lack of it, and was perhaps the breath of the house itself or the scent of sour lives. She turned away from the rack and started across to the entrance to the living room, and the voice of her mother came out to meet her. “Is that you, Donna?”

She answered that it was and went on into the room. Her mother was sitting in an overstuffed chair around which were scattered the several sections of a Sunday newspaper. She had been on the point of rising, but now she sank back and folded her hands in her lap and automatically tilted her head and turned her cheek for the swift kiss routinely accorded by this sleek and sometimes disturbing young woman who was (rather incredibly, she often thought) her daughter.

“Did you have trouble getting here?” she said.

“Because of the snow? No. None at all.”

“I was worried. I thought you might have trouble, or might not be able to come at all.”

“Well, I didn’t, but I imagine it would be wise if I started back early.”

“That’s too bad. I see you so seldom.”

“Once a week isn’t so seldom, Mother.”

“I wish you would live at home. It isn’t right for a girl to be living alone in an apartment when she has a home to live in.”

“Now, Mother, for Christ’s sake, let’s not start that all over again the moment I get here.”

“I just can’t help thinking I must have failed you some way. Why would a girl want to leave her home if she was happy in it?”

“I wasn’t happy in it. I was damn miserable in it, as you know very well, but I’ve told you and told you that it wasn’t your fault. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have gone long before I did. We’ve been over and over this, Mother, and I absolutely won’t discuss it again, so let’s please drop it right now or I’ll leave.”

She looked at her mother’s face and quickly away, for she could never look at her long without ambivalence. It made her feel at once sad and contemptuous, and the reason was that her mother had been a beautiful woman and had not deserved to be. How in God’s name could a woman who had been beautiful and reasonably intelligent have made such a drab mess of her life? And the most depressing thing of all was that her mother was not actually aware of the mess. She had been beautiful and intelligent, and she had wasted all of what she had been on a ridiculous ineffective who should have been discarded ages ago, and this depressing and senseless waste had happened simply because she was totally incapable of facing the truth about anything, because she had no guts, and she damn well deserved the consequences of not having any.

“I wish you wouldn’t be so cross, dear,” her mother said. “And that reminds me. I’ve been wanting to speak to you about your father. I know he’s very irritating to you, but do you think you could just try a little harder to get along with him?”

“All Father has to do to get along with me is to mind his own damn business.”

“Well, that’s just what I mean. Don’t you see, dear, that Father considers that you are his business? He only tries to think of what is good for you.”

“Oh, hell. That kind of talk makes me sick. Whatever in my life has been done for my good has been done by you, or I have done it for myself. The truth is that Father has been a damn detriment to both of us, and you know it, and he has never done a thing that entitles him to any authority at all in my affairs. I tell you I don’t wish to talk about him any more, now or ever, and if you don’t stop dragging him up every time I’m here, I swear to God I’ll leave and never come back.”

“All right, dear, all right. I don’t want to make you angry.”

“Damn it to hell, I am not angry.”

“Do you have to swear so much?”

“I’m sorry. The truth is, something has happened that worries me.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“No. Not exactly. At least, I don’t think so. Where’s Father now?”

“Why, I was just going to tell you, dear. He’s not at home. Only last week he took this selling job that keeps him out of town part of the time.”

“You mean he wasn’t home last night?”

“No, dear. He’s been gone since last Thursday. He’ll be back tomorrow, I think, if you want to see him.”

“I don’t want to see him. I’m just glad he wasn’t here last night.”

“That’s a strange thing to say about your father, dear. Why are you glad?”

“Because I want you to promise to do something for me, and it will be better if he doesn’t know anything about it. If I ask you to do something for me that may seem rather strange, will you do it?”

“Of course, dear. If I can. You know I always try to do anything for you that I can.”

“I know, Mother. You’ve always been very good to me. It’s really not so much to ask, after all. I only want you to promise to say that I spent last night here if anyone should ask you.”

“To lie, dear? Why ever should you want me to do that?”

“Well, let’s not get heavy about the lying, Mother. Chances are you won’t have to say anything at all, but if you should, I want you to say that I was here. Will you do it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like to tell lies unless it’s absolutely necessary. You will have to tell me why you want me to say you were here when you really weren’t.”

Donna lit a cigarette and sat looking at her mother through the thin smoke between them. She had thought that it might be possible to arrange things without a confession, but now she saw that it wouldn’t. Besides, she felt suddenly a rather perverse desire to be perfectly honest, not so much for the sake of honesty as for the sake of honesty’s capacity to shock and disturb.

“Aaron’s dead,” she said.

“Aaron? Mr. Burns? The Aaron Burns you work for?”

“That’s right. He died in his home last night, or perhaps early this morning, and that’s why I want you to say I was here. It might ruin me if I were to become involved, and at the very least it would be unpleasant.”

“Involved? I don’t understand what you mean by becoming involved. For God’s sake, you didn’t have anything to do with his death, did you?”

“Oh God, Mother, will you please stop being so tragic? I already have enough to bear without this in addition. I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean, and I didn’t contribute to his death indirectly, either. He had a heart condition. He simply died some time while I was asleep. Sometime in the night or early morning.”

“You spent the night with him?”

“Yes. I have spent many nights with him.”

“Oh, Donna, Donna! So your father was right after all! Sleeping with a married man, living like a—”

“Stop it, Mother! Stop it immediately! And if you say anything against Aaron, one damn word, I’ll never speak to you again. Do you understand? He was kind and generous and gentle, which I am not and can never be, and we were good for each other. You needn’t expect me to be ashamed of anything I have done. Do you think I will feel like a criminal because I committed adultery? Well, there was something between us that was what we both needed, and whatever it was, it was good. And I will tell you that it was infinitely more moral, if you are concerned about my morals, than the sour cohabitation that you and Father have been engaged in for as long as I can remember.”

She had not intended to be so cruel, and she regretted at once that she had been. Sucking smoke into her lungs, she expelled it with a long exhalation and watched the slow crumbling and complete dissolution of the vestiges of beauty in her mother’s face.

“Don’t cry,” she said. “Damn it to hell, please don’t cry.”

Standing up abruptly, sickened by ambivalence, she walked out of the living room and through the dining room into the kitchen. On the range was an aluminum pot half full of cold coffee. Lighting the burner under the pot, she stood watching it while the coffee heated. As she stood and watched she began to think with clarity of her position and all that stood in the balance now that Aaron was dead. Here in the ugly house she loathed, in the smell and the shadow of the life she had escaped, she was morbidly aware of what she stood to lose, the shop and her job and all that they entailed and promised. It was not fair after she had schemed and worked so long and so hard, it was simply the rottenest piece of goddamn luck at just the time when everything was going so beautifully. Suddenly, to Aaron, wherever he was, her mind cried out a thin, irrational indictment of betrayal.

Why did you have to die? she thought. Oh, why in hell did you have to die?