Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

  An uncomfortable thing happened: her father spoke and for a minute Natalie thought it was her mother. “Well, my dear,” he said and again the conversation between him and her mother while Natalie was getting her raincoat became suddenly explicit; he had not believed that his wife was letting Natalie go, had perhaps been surprised at the exertion necessary to keep Natalie, had wondered over and abandoned as unworthy the notion of himself asking her to stay, had been then incredulous that his wife should ever have expected Natalie not to go.

  “Did you have a nice time?” asked Natalie formally.

  Her father bowed ironically. “No better than I expected,” he said, “I believe we keep better company at home.”

  “We have been very quiet here,” Natalie said. She went over and put her arms around her mother; a little of this affection was surely not out of place at leave-taking, and did not commit Natalie to any certain course of action except going. Until this moment her going had been no more than a wanton impulse, but of course saluting her mother made it definite, and her father stirred, moving the car keys in his pocket.

  “Bus at four?” he asked.

  “Better get going,” Natalie said, disengaging herself easily from her mother and stepping back to nod at her brother, who nodded back and said, “See you sometime.”

  Natalie and her mother and father stood then uncertainly together in the middle of the room, each of them with something to say to the others (“Will it always be the same?” “Will we any of us change by the next time?” “Has it always been like this?”), and involved themselves in a sort of dance, maneuvering one another into the most favorable position for a gesture whose extreme simplicity, that of departure, had become a sudden awkward thing. Natalie, finally, moved first. She found that as she went toward the door she was saying, “Goodbye, goodbye,” as though to confirm her going, and that her father, following her, was still rattling the car keys in his pocket. “Goodbye,” Natalie said at last, actually hesitating again in the doorway, looking beyond the solid coated figure of her father, past the expectant figure of her mother, to her own spot by the fire, untenanted and probably of no interest to anyone save herself, to remain empty of her until the next time, still optimistic, that she came home. “Goodbye,” she said again, directly to her mother, and went outside into the rain.

  Once in the car with her father, but out in the rain nevertheless, she looked with interest on the street light at the corner, ornate and suburban, belonging undeniably to the home where her mother and father lived, and she saw with satisfaction the rain slanting brightly against the light; it was already dark on this rainy afternoon and this was the last outpost belonging to her father. Beyond here the people she might see were less familiar, less the exclusive property of her father, more the potential shining world of her own.

  “Seems like I hardly had a chance to say hello,” she said politely to her father, her voice warm with the excitement of leaving.

  “I expect you’ll be home again,” her father said. “In any case we have heard you say hello in the past.”

  “Has Mother really been well?” Natalie asked.

  “Very well, thank you. Very well indeed.”

  Once in the bus, cradled in the deep heavy seat, her father waved away through the thick window, the movement of great wheels under her, her family behind and the college ahead, Natalie leaned back comfortably; there was no time now for remorse over the perfunctory way she had treated her loving mother and father and even her brother—what was important at this moment was the quick control of muscles all up and down her leg, bent now, but potentially straight, the narrow solidity of her fingers, bare and still wet with the rain, the unity that began with her eyes and forehead and tied to her back and into her legs again, all of it bound together into a provocative whole that could be only barely contained within the skin and sense of Natalie Waite, individual.

  She wanted to sing and did so, soundlessly, her mouth against the fogged window of the bus, thinking as she sang, And when I first saw Natalie Waite, the most incredible personality of our time, the unbelievably talented, vivid, almost girlish creature—when I first saw her, she was sitting in a bus, exactly as I or you might be, and for a minute I noticed nothing of her richness . . . and then she turned and smiled at me. Now, knowing her for what she is, the most vividly talented actress (murderess? courtesan? dancer?) of our time or perhaps any time, I can see more clearly the enchanting contradictions within her—her humor, her vicious flashing temper, so easily aroused and so quickly controlled by her iron will; her world-weary cynicism (she has, after all, suffered more than perhaps any other from the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune), her magnificent mind, so full of information, of deep pockets never explored wherein lie glowing thoughts like jewels never seen . . .

  She thought too of worlds that lay ahead for Natalie Waite, and tried to estimate them by a secret formula of her own: one hundred, for instance—one hundred years, one hundred dollars—was a summit which had achieved and passed unachievable and unpassable reaches like fifty-nines and seventy-fours; seventy-four is, after all, a point so vastly beyond one, or two, and even beyond three; the month of May (reflecting further, Natalie thought that she had never in her life lived through the month of May; it was a fable, a month non-existing, a month for maying and greenswarding, not an ordinary month full of weeks and days and probably Tuesdays and Sundays like any other month) was something that might or might not happen long after the unthinkable barriers of January and March and Valentine’s Day and Lincoln’s Birthday had been gotten past somehow. Before her, then, lay a hundred years, each one gleefully passing without hesitation seventy-four and February, and perhaps a hundred Mays, each one to be welcomed and duly decked. A vague and voiceless yearning filled her, to take these days and force them to solid rich tangible form, to hammer at this foolishness of time and make it into . . . into . . . She fell asleep here, and slept until the bus stop before the college stop, when complimenting herself upon her unerring accuracy and supernatural sense of time, she awoke and recognized where she was.

  * * *

  In the regular and offensively straight line of windows across the third floor of the house where she lived at college, Natalie found the one dark one which was her own, and a little thrill of anticipation followed her up the absolutely even walk to the door; inside the dark window was her own sure place, and she had been away from it. She lingered going up the walk, prolonging the last few minutes before she entered.

  When she opened the door of the house and came into the hallway where the mail pigeon-holes dominated the graceful lines copied approximately from an eighteenth-century town house, the peculiar atmosphere she had somehow forgotten in two days swept down on her and left her almost breathless for a minute. First, and overpoweringly, there was the smell of the cheap dark wood used for the furniture, and the smell of the noon’s soup from the kitchen—it was a student joke that the furniture polish and the soup were made from the same basic substance—and then, strongly reminiscent of the furniture polish and a little of the soup, was the scent Old Nick, who had rooms on the first floor of the house, used on herself, her room, and her clothes. This scent swept up the hall from Old Nick’s apartment halfway to the dining room, trailing up the stairs and through the halls even of the third floor, identifying the transoms where Old Nick listened, clinging to the doorknobs she touched, a stronger and more pervasive influence than any of Old Nick’s advisory remarks.

  From where she stood in the eighteenth-century foyer Natalie could see, on her right, the hall that led to the dining room, past the half-open door to Old Nick’s rooms—this doorway, by the way, was subject, due to its nearness to the kitchen fires and the fact that it was inhabited by Old Nick and the additional fact that it was on the bottom floor, to a series of student jokes Old Nick had undoubtedly heard and probably fostered—and the long row of slim doorways on the eighteenth-century wallpaper, opening onto noth
ing. On Natalie’s left were the stairs, curving up and over her head and going past the rooms on the second floor and going past the rooms on the third floor—on the third floor was Natalie’s room, and it only took mounting the stairs to reach it. Beyond the stairs, farther down the hall to her left, lay the living room where she had been called upon to name herself her first night in college, a room she had entered perhaps twice since, although there were girls in the house who used it regularly, as though it were their own.

  There was no one in sight, but from beyond the door to Old Nick’s rooms came the sound of voices, in the tones of two old friends complimenting one another and drinking sherry before dinner. Natalie, her moccasins making no sound on the linoleum floor that duplicated the black-and-white tiles of an eighteenth-century entrance hall, went to her mailbox, but it was empty; without looking into any other, she turned abruptly and was about to start up the stairs when she was caught, helplessly and suddenly, by the sound of the dinner bell and the lunatic rush of the girls down the stairs. Rather than be trapped halfway up the stairs she retreated quickly, annoyed at herself for not having timed things better; she started down the hall but was cut off by the further opening of Old Nick’s door and Old Nick’s large voice urging her friend into the dining room. Natalie moved toward the front door and stood finally in the shadows under the stairs, listening to the pounding feet coming down over her head. Their voices were shrill and excited; you would have imagined, Natalie thought with disgust, that it was worthwhile getting to dinner, the way they ran. After a minute or so the footsteps began to slacken off, and the burden of the voices swelled from the dining room. There was a polite rattle of silverware and a constant urging questioning to the voices, as of three hundred girls together asking one another, “What’s for dinner?”

  When the last footsteps were gone from the stairs, Natalie came out of the shadows and went quickly past the open hall to the stairs. No one had noticed her, seemingly. The last time she had gone into the dining room she had been shy, and had come in alone and sat down at a table near the entrance; the three girls already sitting at the table had waited, watching her until she sat down, her napkin in her lap; then they had risen, all three, and had gone without gesture to another table. Dinner in itself was no temptation to Natalie—there was no food in the world could get her into that dining room again.

  She went upstairs quickly, her wet feet soundless on the linoleum steps. She did not hesitate, but went directly upstairs and ran down the hall to her own room; she always carried the key with her instead of leaving it in her mailbox as as she had been told to do, in case Old Nick wanted to come into her room, and had lost her passkey and could not find the maid’s and for some reason was not able to get one of the master keys from the main college office and could not locate any of the other girls—the ones who lived in seventeen, or thirty-seven, or seven—whose keys would open Natalie’s door. Inside, the room was hot and airless. Without turning on the lights, she dropped her raincoat on the floor and went over to the bed, which was pushed hard against the window. She sat on the bed, opened the window and, dropping her head onto the windowsill, rested quietly with her eyes closed.

  There were noises again in the hall before she felt refreshed and could lift her head; the girls were coming up from dinner and the dark night air had filled the room; she could see her desk and her typewriter in the dimness, the line of books all around the room next to the baseboard, the one straight chair next to the desk. One night, in a fury at not being able to turn freely in her own room, she had taken her clothes from the dresser and crushed them into the suitcases in her closet, and shoved and tugged the dresser out into the hall, along with the maple armchair and the bookcase the college provided. The college handy man had been petulant about the furniture in the hall, but eventually it had been taken away and now Natalie, with her bed under the window and her desk and chair crammed into a corner and her door eternally locked and—this was a month-old whim, which no longer surprised her by its convenience—her wastebasket hanging just outside the window by a string fastened to the head of the bed, was able to move about in her small square room undisturbed. It was necessary, of course, to keep the transom shut always, and the key securely in the keyhole while she was inside the room.

  She was very lonely here. So much so, in fact, that tonight after a few minutes when the sounds in the hall had quieted down, she found a cigarette in the pocket of her raincoat and holding it in her hand unlocked the door cautiously and went out into the hall. There were voices coming from lighted rooms farther down the hall; several doors were open, giving a sense of girls running in and out, from one room to another, so that Natalie slipped softly to the stairs and down them to the first floor, and along the hall to a doorway where, standing as much as possible in the shadows, she knocked as though her knock were distinguishable from all others, and waited. After a moment spent crushed against the doorway, staring into the panels on the door and wondering at them, she thought she heard, “Come in,” and she opened the door and slipped inside, shutting the door quickly behind her.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Yes?” said Rosalind. She was lying on her bed holding a movie magazine and she looked up in polite surprise. Natalie, looking at the bright-orange pajamas Rosalind was wearing, thought that these days Rosalind was gay in the center of a group, admired and appreciated, one of the girls whom other girls wanted to meet; so small a change, Natalie thought, so slight a variant; all she would ever remember someday of Rosalind, she knew, was the quick bright picture of Rosalind walking down a campus path with a girl on either side of her; “Yes?” said Rosalind.

  “May I borrow a match from you?” Natalie asked; she kept her voice light, as though the request were trivial.

  “Certainly,” Rosalind said. She tossed over the book of matches that lay on the table next to the bed, and added, “Keep them, I have plenty.” Without looking again at Natalie, she raised her magazine expectantly.

  “Mind if I stay and talk for a minute?” Natalie asked, as though this request, too, were trivial. “You busy?” she asked. “I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “Well, I was reading,” Rosalind said, and glanced down at her magazine.

  “Of course,” Natalie said. She was thinking, I know, I know, I’m the only one who knows, and she isn’t a bit afraid of me, and I could tell if I wanted to and she doesn’t believe anyone would listen, but I know. She tumbled in her hurry to be out of the room.

  With the door closed behind her, she thought soberly that it was two flights of stairs back to her room and so little space to cover before she was outside, and she knew where she was going even before—with a gesture of contempt she wished she had been able to do two minutes before—she tore Rosalind’s matchbook in two and threw it on the floor outside Rosalind’s door. The door of her room upstairs was locked, because she locked it even if she went ten paces out into the hall. She had cigarettes with her, and her own matches, although her raincoat was still in her room. Moving lightly, without sound, she ran swiftly down the stairs and out into the campus, stepping with gratitude onto the grass.

  The rain had stopped, but every sign of continuing after a breathing spell. Drops of water slid off the trees onto Natalie’s hair and although she wished she had brought her raincoat the thought of going after it, back into the lighted house, was untenable. Long before this hour late in November it was dark; Natalie knew by now how to find her way along the campus paths almost without looking, and the thought of the taut lighted square of her room behind her was disgusting, out here where she was able to take long steps and move as far as she wanted. Ahead of her she could see lights in the Langdons’ home, and there were voices coming indistinguishably from the houses she passed, and somewhere a radio; although she could not have identified the tune it was playing, she could have narrowed the possibilities down to half a dozen tunes she heard girls whistling in the hall or singing in harmony in their roo
ms.

  She was not the owner of this land, and as she turned to go along the narrow path that would take her behind the main lecture buildings and around again to the campus houses, she thought, I am walking around my country, I am telling its boundaries, describing its edges, enclosing it. The beautiful clarity of all marked outlines occurred to her—there would be a deep satisfaction in strengthening fences, for instance, going along on the inside of a strong fence enclosing a large land, leaning outward to push toward the extreme limit of property; too, what about the lovely definition of a sheet of white paper alone on her desk, oblong and complete, the tightness with which the sky fitted onto the earth at the horizon, the act of caressing the spine of a book? Irresistibly, she thought with a shiver of a razor-sharp edge slicing horizontally through her eyes, into her mouth, and then coming around the hard corner of a building, saw again the campus and its lights and heard its sounds. She stopped for a minute, surveying her country with interest and with tolerance; she was infinitely tall and these tiny buildings—although scaled to exact measurements: a tenth of an inch, perhaps, to a foot—had been set up by her own hands, furnished, and peopled with the small moveable dolls she had herself created, planning with care and perhaps not entirely wisely the numbers of their arms and legs and the location on their heads.

  Perhaps tomorrow, she thought, when it is light, I shall consider moving all the trees together to make a real forest at one end of the campus. It might on the whole be better to take the houses out of two straight lines facing one another and put them at random, so that no homunculus coming out of the doorway of one house could find the doorway to another house. Perhaps I shall move the Langdon dolls to the steeple of the Commons building, and leave them there for a week, while they sob and beg to be released and I look down, so large they cannot see me, and laugh at them.