Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

  “Hello,” Natalie said.

  “Are you busy?” Rosalind said, leaning slightly to look over Natalie’s shoulder and into her room. “I mean, I just thought I’d come over and say hello, but if you’re busy . . .”

  “No,” said Natalie, surprised. “I’m not at all busy.” She stood away from the door, and Rosalind came into the room, looking around curiously, as though she had not left one just like it immediately before, although perhaps Rosalind’s bedspread was blue instead of patterned, and she had perhaps been reading different books, and the clothes in the closet would of course be different.

  “I wanted to talk to someone,” Rosalind offered; once in, she sat quickly on the bed and tucked her feet under her. “I saw your light on and thought that since we didn’t know each other very well it might be a good time to come and make friends with you.”

  “I’m glad,” Natalie said. She was happy at having been disturbed; her books would still be there after Rosalind left, and who knew what odd thoughts and notions Rosalind might have brought with her? Natalie sat uneasily on the desk chair, knowing it was her duty to speak, and able to think of nothing but the list of irregular French verbs she would not be able to remember half so clearly tomorrow. “I was just trying to do my French,” she said, with an embarrassed laugh that she deplored.

  “French,” Rosalind said, and shuddered. “I’m glad I took Spanish.”

  “Is Spanish terribly hard?” Natalie asked politely.

  “Listen,” Rosalind said, obviously feeling that the amenities were over and it was time to get down to business, “do you know any of the girls around here?”

  “No,” said Natalie, “not very many.” Not that I want to know them, she longed to add, I’m very careful about my friends, I dislike knowing lots of people, I don’t make friends easily because I keep them for a long time, I make friends slowly and with discrimination, I devote myself to my studies . . . “Not any of them, really,” Natalie said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Rosalind said. “Did you ever see anything like them? I mean, they certainly aren’t very friendly.”

  “I haven’t really tried—” Natalie said.

  “Peggy Spencer and her friends,” Rosalind said disdainfully. “Helen Burton and her friends . . . and such a noise going on all night. I can’t even sleep.”

  “I’ve never had any trouble getting to sleep,” Natalie said eagerly.

  “We ought to show them they’re not so very special,” Rosalind said. She lifted her chin and shrugged. “You go into one of their rooms and they’re all there and they stop talking and say, ‘Yes?’ as though you were a beggar until you turn around and go and then you can hear them laughing after you shut the door. I don’t think they’re that important, I must say.”

  “I’ve never gone into any of their rooms,” Natalie said, feeling that she had an end of this conversation to keep up.

  “Well, you know what they say about you,” Rosalind said. She looked at Natalie as though for the first time aware of the particular person she was addressing, calling to mind this person’s special liabilities. “They say you’re crazy. You sit here in your room all day and all night and never go out and they say you’re crazy.”

  “I go out to class,” Natalie said quickly.

  “They say you’re spooky.” Rosalind said. “That’s what they call you, Spooky, I heard them.”

  “Who?” Natalie said. “Who knows what I do?”

  “Well, I think it’s your own business,” said Rosalind critically. “I mean, everyone has the right to live the way they want, and naturally none of them has any right to call a person names just because a person wants to live their own way.”

  Feeling a sudden quick warmth toward Rosalind for not having watched her, Natalie said, “All I want them to do is leave me alone.”

  “Well, that’s what I say,” Rosalind said, “but if you really don’t belong to their little crowd, naturally they think you’re crazy, and they never even stop to think that maybe you and I don’t want to run around with people like that, and what I’d like to know is how does anyone get to belong with them if they look at you like you were a beggar and then laugh when you go out? Does it really seem fair?”

  “What they think is actually not at all important,” Natalie said with dignity.

  Even as she spoke she knew her position, and her mind, racing ahead of her, was counting over its special private blessings: there was her father, of course, although he seemed, right now, far away and helpless against laughing girls, there was Arthur Langdon and the fact that she seemed, more than any other, to be comprehending and alert in his class, and had received a sort of recognition, as though they were kindred, from him—but then perhaps, she thought, frightened, perhaps not everyone thought of Arthur Langdon’s regard as special. Perhaps he was not so valuable to these watching, laughing girls as other things Natalie had never heard of. But then, of course, there was always and beyond all laughter and beyond all scrutiny her own sweet dear home of a mind, where she was safe, protected, priceless . . . “They’re trivial people, really. Mediocre.”

  “Try and get anywhere without them,” Rosalind said cynically. “They’re everything.”

  Not everything, Natalie thought hastily, not quite everything. Not the place ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, the place of pure honor and glory, from which one perhaps looked down and said, “Who? What was the name, please? Did I ever meet you before? In college? Dear heaven, so long ago . . .”

  “They get away with murder,” Rosalind said. “Think any of them has to do what we do?” She put out her lip sullenly and began to swing one foot back and forth. Looking at her, Natalie saw clearly what had not seemed important before now: that Rosalind was squat and ugly, and had a drab dull face and a faint growth of hair on her upper lip. “Listen,” Rosalind said, “you know that girl, the skinny one who’s such a good friend of Peggy Burton’s? The one they call Max, because her name’s Maxine? Well, the reason she went away last weekend was because she had an abortion.”

  “Oh,” said Natalie.

  “Heard them talking about it through the door,” Rosalind said. “And Peggy Burton—she’s only been lucky. You know that guy of hers, the football player?” She nodded emphatically, and glanced slyly at Natalie. “I mean,” she said, “not that I want to repeat scandal, but they’re all like that. We ought to be thankful we don’t have more to do with them. I mean, I’m sure the college people know all about them, and if you hang around with them, first thing you know they think the same about you.”

  “About me?” said Natalie. Far off, in the untouched, lonely places of her mind, an echo came: It isn’t true, it didn’t happen . . .

  “Not that either of us,” Rosalind said, and laughed lightly. “I mean,” she said, looking again at Natalie, “I know about me, and I guess about you.”

  Pride caught at Natalie; here was this hideous girl attempting an alliance on the grounds that Natalie was—what? was there a word? (Innocent? Who was innocent—this girl with her nasty eyes? Chaste? Chaste meant no impure thoughts; virginal meant clear and clean and could not include this Rosalind with her low coarse face; untouched? Spotless? Pure?) Could I, Natalie thought, in the second when her eyes met Rosalind’s, could I possibly associate on any grounds with this girl? Whichever way I speak, she will follow me. “It isn’t true,” she said.

  “Of course it’s true,” Rosalind said indignantly. “Don’t I hear them talking every night through the wall? Some nights they’re in there giggling until I think I’ll go crazy, things you and I don’t even think about, much less talk about, and then when I pound on the wall you’d think I was the one, the way they yell back.”

  “I mean,” Natalie said apologetically, “if we don’t meddle with them . . .”

  Rosalind shrugged. “I just think it’s terrible,” she said, “them thinking they’re so good, and the thi
ngs they do. What they don’t realize is that no one wants to be in their crowd, for fear of having people think things about them.”

  Suddenly (and it gave a sudden clear picture of her decision to come here in the first place; suddenly, on a phrase, perhaps not even considered, so that she knocked on Natalie’s door at random, because it was the third from the end of the hall, or because the door somehow resembled, in some mystic, impossible way, the door to her own room, far away at home) she rose, pushed her hair back with an unattractive gesture, and said wearily, “Anyway, I wouldn’t want anyone knowing I had anything to do with them.”

  “Of course not,” said Natalie helplessly; she answered the girl’s leaving as she had answered her coming, without volition, without desire, without conviction.

  “Listen,” said Rosalind, as though it were a sudden idea, “let’s go to breakfast together tomorrow. OK?”

  “I have an early class,” said Natalie hastily.

  “So do I,” said Rosalind. “I’ll come and knock on your door about seven-thirty. You be ready.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll have breakfast before class,” Natalie said. “I always wake up so late—”

  “I’ll see that you’re up,” Rosalind said. “We’ll show them they’re not the only people in the world. OK?”

  From Natalie’s secret journal:

  Dearest dearest darling most important dearest darling Natalie—this is me talking, your own priceless own Natalie, and I just wanted to tell you one single small thing: you are the best, and they will know it someday, and someday no one will ever dare laugh again when you are near, and no one will dare even speak to you without bowing first. And they will be afraid of you. And all you have to do is wait, my darling, wait and it will come, I promise you. Because that’s the fair part of it—they have it now, and you have it later. Don’t worry, please, please don’t, because worrying might spoil it, because if you worry it might not come true.

  Somewhere there is something waiting for you, and you can smile a little perhaps now when you are so unhappy, because how well we both know that you will be happy very very very very soon. Somewhere someone is waiting for you, and loves you, and thinks you are beautiful, and it will be so wonderful and so fine, and if you can be patient and wait and never never never never despair, because despair might spoil it, you will come there, someday, and the gates will open and you will pass through, and no one will be able to come in unless you let them, and no one can even see you. Someday, someone, somewhere. Natalie, please

  In the class named philosophy, Natalie appeared two mornings a week, although it was not proven that Mr. (Doctor by ambition, although his thesis—“The Probable Intention of the Subjunctive in Plato”—had not yet found a completion) Desmond noticed, particularly, whether or not Miss Waite had chosen to attend any given morning. Under her father’s tender care, Natalie had been formally introduced to both Plato and Aristotle, but had never, until now, been required to digest such ideas reduced to the probable, or diagram, level of the schoolgirl mind. The man—that would be Mr. (to be Doctor) Desmond—who taught this class, and who had named it philosophy, obviously felt that anyone who had spent years studying his subject should by rights end up as something rather better than a man trying to teach ideas to girls, or at least as something more reconciled; he was bitter and impatient, and made his own intimate friend Plato as disagreeable as possible, perhaps to keep the uneager girls from intruding unwarily into some secret philosophical circle, where bitter men who taught philosophy drank deeply of clear wine with the Platos and Berkeleys, the Descartes and the Hegels, and commiserated with one another over the fate of philosophers: philo: love; sophia: wisdom.

  “Nothing,” the philosopher might remark at sometime after nine in the morning, fingering his gray tie, or touching with uncertain fingers his pockets, or merely eying unenthusiastically the penciling girls in the front rows, “nothing,” he would say thoughtfully and with some relish, “nothing in the world exists in a perfect form.”

  Nothing in the world exists in a perfect form, Natalie wrote in her notebook, feeling as she wrote that there just might be something.

  “How about a vacuum?” the girl next to her said unexpectedly.

  There was a silence. The professor (so soon to be Doctor Desmond) stared, repeated to himself: What about a vacuum? and raised his eyebrows slightly.

  “Well,” he said, his surprise not yet demonstrated to his own satisfaction, “what about a vacuum?” One heard—or rather, perhaps, only Natalie heard—the faint murmur as Plato leant to Descartes, Dewey asked Berkeley, “What did she say? What was it?” the learned teachers of philosophy all raising their eyebrows and smiling at one another, telling one another perhaps, “Science . . . science.”

  “Well,” said the girl next to Natalie, who was suddenly discovered by both Natalie and the girl on the other side of her to be a clumsy creature, given to raw blushing, and undoubtedly not finely drawn in mind, “I mean, when you say there’s nothing perfect?”

  “Nothing in the world exists in a perfect form,” the professor murmured, watchfully. “Yes, I said it.”

  “Well,” the girl said; she stared straight at the professor; to confound a professor of philosophy midway through the first month of the first semester of your first year . . . “Well,” she repeated, “I mean—what about a vacuum? I mean, that’s perfect, isn’t it?”

  Natalie perceived that one of the junior members of the philosopher’s circle (William James?), overeager, anxious to establish himself among the select, hurried with his joke, and was hushed by the others, and drew even a shade of a frown from the Bishop himself; would these impetuous young fellows never learn their equivocal standing?—and the professor, at whom the student was staring entranced, looked quickly, once, around the class, opened his mouth, and smiled.

  * * *

  There was, on alternate mornings, the class named history of music, and here the professor was a man equally thwarted, but happy about it nevertheless; he was ridden by a sort of genius, and felt strongly that it was far more valuable for college freshmen to participate two mornings in the week in the intricate, subtle, unendingly lovely convolutions of a genius mind than to concern themselves tidily with dates and composers, the whole-tone scale, the castrati.

  “Listen,” he told them one morning, too soon after breakfast, and he held up one finger of one long hand in a graceful eloquent gesture, “this morning I shall play for you . . . ”

  He selected, with the quick decisive motions of a man captivated by a thought he cannot elude, a volume from the stack on the desk; although his air was one of unpremeditated desire, he had nevertheless remembered to procure in advance copies of the music to pass among the girls in the front row. Natalie, who sat at the end of the front row nearest the piano, was thus able to follow the music and the professor’s playing together, and found it perhaps as little instructive as anything she had ever heard; she was accustomed to listen to music rarely, and then in strict solitude, with her eyes shut and various odd glories in her head; she could read barely enough music to perceive that the professor consistently played a sharp where a double-sharp was written. To confound a professor of music midway through the first month of the first semester of the first year . . .

  At the end of the class Natalie stopped at the desk where the professor was modestly disclaiming the shrill feminine compliments on his playing; when he turned to Natalie with his smile ready, she said meekly, “Please, may I ask you something?”

  Where did you study? Is it a natural talent? Why do you not compose? The continuing smile on the professor’s face showed Natalie that she had not made her question quite clear. “I mean,” she said, “here—” she had the book open, her finger on the spot, all ready “—you always played a sharp and isn’t this a double-sharp? I mean,” she added, in the face of his uncomprehending smile, “I just wondered, while you were playing.”

&n
bsp; “Playing very badly, by the way,” he said, still smiling, and raising one hand gracefully against the low voice of protest, in which Natalie, to her eternal recognized cowardice, found herself joining. “No,” he said, “I really did play badly. One knows.”

  “But—” Natalie said, her finger on the book.

  “This girl,” he said, his hand on Natalie’s arm, his face turned toward the other girls, “this girl listens to music, as—how shall I say it?—as an artist. Perhaps music has a meaning for her beyond what it has for the rest of us.”

  Perhaps it has, Natalie thought; I am fairly beaten. Desiring to retire with an understanding grin and a knowledgeable look, she turned when the professor spoke to someone else and went softly away, no one turning to look after her.

  * * *

  At the beginning of her second month at college, one day Natalie turned a corner suddenly (where was she going? what was she running from? She was never able to remember afterwards, since at the moment the incoherence of her life dissolved and she became again a functioning person, somewhat later than the red-haired Peggy Spencer, perhaps, but still much sooner than many of the girls around her) and crashed into someone who, picking her up, said, in the voice of one who was not confused but knew these many corners perfectly, “I’m terribly sorry; I should have looked where I was going.”

  “My fault,” Natalie said. She had not dropped anything, otherwise she could have hidden her face searching for it on the ground. As it was, she was forced to observe that she had run into a woman, who was a woman as surely as Natalie was a girl, since where Natalie was unconnected and vague, this other was purposeful and compact. “You all right?” the woman asked the girl. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  Natalie, blessing her for avoiding the hateful word frosh, nodded and looked up. A pretty woman. “New,” Natalie confessed, “and confused. And frightened, I guess.”