by John Crowley
“They’re yours,” she said, shocked. “They were for you.” But he only went on holding them until she came and took them.
“I want you to keep them,” he said. “Will be safer with you.”
She took them, and he opened his hands to her like a question; and unthinking, still holding the poncho in one hand and the sheaf of papers in the other, she embraced him. He held her a long time, kissed her cheek and her cool brow, her mouth, her tears. She knew—she knew by now—that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing, a thing that once upon a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together. And how could she know this unless he knew it too? It was part of the wholeness, that he must: and that too she knew. With her he was for a moment whole, they were whole: as whole as an egg, and as fragile.
6.
“Mad,” said George.
There was a toylike breakfast nook in the new apartment, where George and Kit sat; George buttered toast, for himself and for her too, as he had done when she was little. “M-a-d, mad. It’s the new concept. Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD.”
As usual Kit was uncertain how to understand what he said, whether he was teasing her or letting her in on a secret she’d better listen to. She only stared, and shook her head a little in incomprehension.
“Simple,” George said. “It means that if either side initiates an attack, the other side guarantees it will respond in kind and in toto. You make it certain that the response will come even if your command and control centers are knocked out and your leaders are dead and even most of your people are dead. You make it a standing order that can’t be countermanded: if they let fly, we let fly, automatically.”
“So if they…so if we bomb them, they have to bomb us back, even though that means the end of everything and there’s no winning?”
“That’s the concept,” George said. “I mean you can see the logic.”
“So that’s why we can’t protect ourselves?” That was where the talk had begun, why with computers or something we couldn’t know about attacks and prevent them.
“Right. It upsets the balance, queers the deal. If we, or they, started to build defenses against ICBM attacks, which is theoretically possible, and the other side got wind of it, they might feel they had to attack; because once your defense system is in place you can send off your missiles and destroy their country—you’ve got the capacity—without them being able to destroy you back.”
“Oh my God.”
He nodded, pleased, and held out his hands as though between them he held the perfect and irrefutable logic of it. “It’s like two guys standing up to their knees in kerosene, aiming flare guns at each other. No matter who fires first, they both go.”
“But they’re just people. We’re just people. What if somebody gets angry, or goes insane, or…”
George’s eyebrows rose and he nodded as though in sympathy with humankind in its dilemma. “Have to be careful,” he said. “Any little thing.”
“Is this now? They have this plan now?”
“Well,” George said. “If I know about it, probably it is now. Yes.”
“So it would be the end. They’ve made it so they can’t even help it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
MAD. It was like the game of chess in Alice: a game of unbreakable rules played by people who were all crazy.
“Dad,” she said. She looked down at the little yellow napkin she held, folded it, crushed it, smoothed it. “Do you think. I mean would it be possible. That what we were told about Ben isn’t true?”
“Isn’t true, hon?”
“I heard,” Kit said, and her throat was tight, “I heard that some Americans are fighting in Vietnam, or well Indochina in places, against the Communists. And we don’t want anybody to know. So, if a soldier there, you know, if he…” She moved her hand in the air to represent what she couldn’t say, and George nodded. “Then what they do is carry him someplace else, and pretend it was an accident.”
He didn’t answer, and didn’t look astonished; he only knit his fingers together as though he were going to crack his knuckles, and looked at her, and waited.
“And well do you think, I mean did you ever hear of this, or…”
“Where did you hear this?”
“Oh,” she said. “People on campus.”
“Not, say, in the New York Times.”
“No.”
He folded his hands now as though in prayer, and touched them to his lips, and looked away, or within. Kit felt helpless shame; shame for hurting him, helpless because she had to ask.
“Well,” he said. “Suppose it was so. That there was fighting going on, that those governments over there were getting our help. I hear the rumors too. The other side’s saying it. So. Naturally we would want to deny it. Like we just said, Kit. Any little thing.”
“Could you find out? I mean about Ben?”
“Well what would it matter? In a way. He’d still, it would still be the same.”
“But what if it’s so.”
He shook his head slowly. “They wouldn’t tell me. They’ve got their reasons. Anyway surely it’s not so. Surely. I mean people imagine a lot of things now, because there is so much that can’t be told. People get paranoid.”
She said nothing, folded the little rag of yellow again.
“What good would it do you, Kit? To know?”
“Because,” she said. “Then I’d know what world I live in.”
The door to the apartment opened then, and Marion came in; George ducked his head with a glance at Kit that she understood.
She was in a bathing suit with a flouncy skirt and mules, a flowered robe over her shoulders. “That pool is the best part,” she said. “Mm.” She had the mail in her hand, and distributed it. “Who’s this from?” she said, handing Kit one.
It was a long envelope addressed with care in pale ink, the name and address lines set out in steps down the envelope as she too had been taught to do and never did any more. A funny sweet warmth filled her that she hadn’t felt before but recognized immediately: a letter from my love. It felt as heavy as gold.
“One of my teachers,” she said, blushing or glowing for sure, she could feel it. “From last year.”
“Hm,” said Marion wisely, though without meaning anything by it; Kit knew the look. There were two sheets in the envelope. One had a few lines of verse, typed on the Undervud; the other was a sheet of typing paper written on in his strange hand, edge to edge, waste nothing.
My dearest Kit, I will send with this letter a piece for you to have and to study. Perhaps [But this word was crossed out.] I have read with great interest the books you have given me, about lost girls who find their way back. With especial interest the one of Alice in behind-the-mirror world, with dictionary also, and much pondering of many remarks. It is frightening, is it not. The poem of the walrus and carpenter is surely among the most terrible in all your language. How is this book given to children? Did it not make you have anxious dreams? When I read I believed I discovered a flaw in it: would it not be impossible for Alice to pass through the mirror? She would I thought only kiss herself there: face to face, hand to hand, breast to breast. How to pass through? Then I saw, no, this is supreme genius of the book: that if Alice passes through her mirror, then Alice from the other side must also pass through; and while we read interesting adventures of Alice in her mirror, at the same time there is another story not told, the adventures of mirror-Alice here, where she does not belong, strange world where clocks run only one way and you cannot always tell red kings from white. A poem could perhaps be written of her adventure?
Well we have kissed at that frontier, my love, haven’t we? We ourselves. I have come into a world where West is away, where freedom does not rhyme with fate, and where alone you can be found. So it is enough, and must be; for unlike Alice I know no way back.
She read it again, and then again
in her little room (anonymous, usable for “guests” when Kit wasn’t there, not hers at all in fact except insofar as she was a guest or ghost here). Freedom was volya and fate was dolya, not a word they taught in her classes but one in a poem of his, a comic poem. She thought that Alice didn’t know a way back either, not until her author gave her one.
For a time she studied the lines on the other, typewritten sheet, sounding out the words and recognizing some but unable to untangle their cases and moods and tenses; without a dictionary she soon had to give up. It was apparently about angels: if angel was the same in both languages. Were angels in his world what they were in hers? She couldn’t guess. She thought she could smell him in the paper, the smoke of his cigarettes, the musty room, the card table; she pressed the sheet to her face and breathed it in.
On Sunday they took her to church. Something in her mother’s face when she listed for Kit the times of Sunday Masses made it impossible to refuse or to fight. She went through her clothes to find something to wear and borrowed a hat from Marion, a navy straw that was at least not flowered or fruited. They parked in a big parking lot and went in and took blond pews in their brand-new church, an austerely modern one, raw concrete walls deformed out of any ordinary geometry and pierced irregularly by windows of abstract stained glass. It smelled of nothing, like a waiting room. Her own inward church, she knew, didn’t smell of nothing. Above the altar was suspended a vast bare cross of rusted steel, cruel enough for a sacrifice surely, crueler-seeming to Kit than any painted wooden corpus writhen and bleeding.
They were very early. Clusters of people knelt or sat with heads bowed in the low pews or looked upward as though trying to comprehend the space around them. Marion leaned close to her and nodded toward the side aisle: confessions were being heard. Kit chose to show no comprehension, and having looked that way, she looked away again.
“Hasn’t it been a long time?” Marion whispered to her. “We’d like you to go to Communion with us.” She touched Kit’s arm and, smiling, gently pressed her, go on.
Okay. All right. If she was going to do this.
She went to the pew nearest the minatory little box, blond wood too but unmistakable for anything else, and knelt to Examine her Conscience; and when it was her turn she went in through the purple drape as onto a tiny theater stage, actor with an audience of one.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she said. “It has been six months since my last confession. These are my sins.” She heard these formulae as though for the first time, odd as a child’s made-up game. The priest beyond the veil breathed with difficulty, asthmatic or a smoker. She listened for a moment; so did he.
“Actually there’s only one sin I’m aware of,” she said then, reluctantly or as though reluctantly. “I’ve. Well. I’m having an affair with a professor. At my college.”
Breath, altering. “How old are you, child.”
“I’m twenty years old, father.”
“And is this professor a married man?”
She thought. “He’s a widower.”
“And for how long has this affair gone on?”
“For a few months.”
“And has this affair included sexual intercourse? Do you know what’s meant by that?”
“Yes, Father. It did. It does.”
“Did he force himself on you, child? Against your will? Did he threaten you?”
“No, Father.”
“Did you lead him on?”
“Well. I was, you know, there.”
He breathed. She wondered if he would pry for details, and what her mood would lead her to say if he did. He said: “He has done you a great wrong.”
She said nothing.
“He was placed in a position of authority over you and has abused it. He should have nurtured and not done you harm.”
“Yes, Father.”
“He is very much at fault here.”
“Yes, Father. That’s what I think too.”
“And you are very much at fault for having allowed it.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Do you know that if this were to come out, he would be disgraced, maybe fired?”
“It won’t,” she said.
Breath. “You must,” he said, “break off this relationship.”
“Well I don’t think I can.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes. But not of him. I love him.”
“Then of what?”
“I’m afraid the world is going to end.”
He breathed so long and painfully that Kit wondered if he was afraid of it too. He said: “I cannot give you absolution for this sin until you feel repentance. You can repent in fear of God’s anger and judgment, or in sorrow at having offended Him. But you have to repent.”
A low bell sounded; people called to pray. Holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
“Okay,” she said. “Well.”
“Pray to the Virgin, child, for help. She can’t refuse.”
“Okay,” Kit said, with a shrug, moved by her own imaginary dilemma, no way out.
“Now,” the priest said. “For any other sins you may have committed. Make a good act of contrition.”
She did, saying the words with care and attention as she had been taught to do; through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. She left the booth, admitting the next sinner, a bent old man with his hat in his hand. She went to kneel again beside her mother, who had taken out her beads and held them loosely, the trembling stones catching the light of the windows; her face was calm, absorbed, alight even, and her eyes moist. It was four months since Ben had been brought home: exactly four, Kit thought, and realized why she had been taken here. The Mass began. She listened to the prayers and to the responses, changeless as nothing else ever would be, the ones Ben used to make, the bottoms of his sneakers showing as he knelt: Quare me repulisti, et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus? Why do you push me from you, why do I go on so sorrowfully? When it came time she went up to the rail with her father and mother, and in a tremor of shame and delight and wonder, cloven forever into inside and outside but not alone, not just now, she took the nearly nonexistent bit of food on her tongue, where it melted like snow.
As they went out after the Mass, Marion took her arm and leaned close to her, her face a scowl of disapproval.
“Listen,” she said. “Before you can go back to school. We have got to take you clothes shopping.”
7.
In Kit’s mailbox at the dormitory when she returned to the University there was a small envelope that had been waiting there for her return, stamped in gold with the address of the dean of students. It contained a small folded note.
Dear Miss Malone:
Welcome back! I hope you had a wonderful summer.
A matter of importance has come to our attention and I would like to talk with you about it. Will you please come to my office on this Thursday afternoon at 1 o’clock.
A kind of dread descended on Kit like a cold breastplate from her shoulders to her thighs. It seemed to her that every instrument of news, every sign of sudden revelation, could make her feel this now, and she wondered how long it would go on. Around her the students came and went and greeted and called out to one another. The day was Thursday; by the big clock above the mailboxes it was almost noon.
The office was in an older building in the campus center, high-ceilinged corridors and floors of worn stone. Dean of Students. Office of Student Affairs. The tall door was dark, and opened to a secretary’s office cluttered and cheerful.
“Oh yes,” the secretary said brightly. “Oh yes.” She pressed a button on her intercom with one hand while she pointed to a farther door with the other; but it was opened before Kit reached it, and the dean, smiling, stood aside to admit her.
“Thanks so much for coming!” she said, the same alarming brightness. She was Kit’s mother’s age, and carefully made up too as her mother always was. A face to meet the faces that I meet, Marion used t
o say. “You’ve met Mr. Bluhdorn, I think.”
He was there, in a broad side chair. She hadn’t seen him at first, the light of the windows making deep shadows in the room’s corners. He lifted himself to his feet with a sort of effortful wiggle, smiling his smile. Kit hadn’t moved from the carpet’s edge where she had come to a stop seeing him.
“Christa Malone,” he said. “Known as Kit. That’s right, isn’t it? Kit.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger, smart guy.
The dean took Kit’s arm and brought her within the room. Kit understood now that this story, whatever it was, had taken her up and was going to keep on till it was done. Her heart beat so hard she could hear its little cries in her ears.
“Sit, sit,” said the dean. “Would you like something, a cup of coffee?”
Kit shook her head.
“You know, I’m very glad to have the chance to meet you. You came here with some very impressive achievements. And you’ve taken a couple of advanced courses and done very well. Very very well.”
Milton Bluhdorn smiled more broadly, beamed even, as though he too were proud, or as though some credit were due him. Then he sat again and joined his hands across his belt.
“Now,” said the dean. “I don’t know how much Mr. Bluhdorn has told you about himself.” She still stood, leaning back against her wide glossy desk. “I think I can say that he’s here now as the representative of a joint committee of several government agencies concerned with our national security. I think…” She glanced at Milton Bluhdorn, and saw something in his smile or his face that made her stop. “Well. Mr. Bluhdorn asked me to invite you here to talk about a certain matter of importance, to you and to us and to our country, and I’d like you to listen carefully.”
Milton Bluhdorn opened his hands in an oh-gosh sort of gesture, waved them a little as though to dissipate the gravity of the dean’s remarks; he even chortled, deep in his throat. “No no,” he said. “Listen. Kit. First of all thanks for coming, and thanks for the help you gave the last time we met. You know. Now. What I’m doing here is just sort of a follow-up. Say, I see you aced that Russian course. That’s the stuff.”
