She had changed, of course. Under her boy’s blue shirt, breasts that a tight brassière could not suppress rose and fell. The sleeves of her shirt were rolled up high, and there was something moving in her thin, brown arms alone. She was sitting on a log with her knees apart and her elbows planted on her knees and her chin thrust into her hands, and, still wearing dungarees, as we were, she looked in some ways like an angry boy, but her lips were parted like a woman’s, and her eyes were not a child’s. Her face was dark with brooding of a quality that was not suited to its puerile source, or to her language. “This morning she said I was a disgrace to what she calls my ‘sex’! Maybe I am. But why doesn’t she lay off? It’s her ‘sex,’ anyway, not mine.”
“Aw, mothers!” Freddie said.
“Stepmothers!” she corrected him with vicious emphasis, and her chin grew pointed in her anger.
“Well, fathers, for that matter!” I said.
She lifted her head and turned to me with a question on her lips, and the full sight of her face, her anger suddenly gone and interested sympathy there instead, made me suck in my breath. I forgot what I had meant to say.
“Fathers …” she said softly, half question, half reflection. For the first time, I knew that what I really wished was that the other boys were not there, that they would go away. I wanted her alone.
We were all together, spread out there on the bottom of a pit. It was an old quarry, abandoned years before we were born, and a place that we had always enjoyed. Dan had a real rifle now, a .22 single shot, and he lay on his stomach, arms and gun propped up on a log, shooting across the quarry at one of the small paper targets with which he seemed always to be supplied. Of the four of us, he was the best shot, and he took some pleasure in the precision of his aim for itself alone that the rest of us, who borrowed the gun to take a shot at a rabbit or a squirrel, did not feel. It was like the pleasure that a musician must enjoy, a violinist when his bow strikes the strings with absolute perfection, or a pianist when his hands come down in sharp and exact chordal unity, or the pleasure that anyone feels who finds his joy entirely in an act alone, and needs no consequences to round it out. We three, in our desultory talk, watched him idly in his concentration. The morning sunshine here was like a lazy prisoner and lay inert on ground and stagnant pools of rain water, rocks, weeds, daisies, scrub oak, and a clump of birch. On three sides, walls of naked, weathered yellow limestone stood up steeply for perhaps a hundred feet, and on the fourth side, a wooded, gravelly slope threaded with paths slanted down to us from the rolling fields above. On two of the walls, we had often climbed from top to bottom and from bottom to top. They were rough with broken rock that offered ample holds for hands and feet, and the sides had a mild slope that let us press against the rock. But the fourth side, the northern side, had almost no slope at all and it was less scarred. We had often lounged below it as we did now, and we had talked of climbing it, we had mapped imaginary climbs up its face and finally the one possible climb, but we had never gone more than a few feet up and never down it at all, and none of us had ever challenged any of the others to try. This day was to mark that difference, too.
“I don’t want my hair touched. I don’t need a manicure. The dress she bought is awful. I don’t want to go to that dance.” All this in a burst, bitterly spoken.
“But you are going, Milly?” I asked, studying her, and seeing again how little indeed she looked like all those other young girls who were mad to be allowed to go to dances and strove to appear as much as possible like their young mothers.
“No,” she said without conviction.
“Give in,” Freddie said, rolling over on his side and looking up at her. “Give in on stuff like that. It doesn’t matter. Why fight with them over what doesn’t matter? I’d like to go if I could.”
“You can!” she said indignantly.
“No.…”
“Of course! I’ve asked you. It’s our dance. It’s for me, really—though they don’t say so. To make me ladylike!”
“Your mother doesn’t want me to come. She hasn’t asked me.”
“She hasn’t asked Dan or Grant either. None of the young—only the grownups.”
“Well, are you going?” Freddie asked.
It was a way out. She said, “I won’t go if you don’t come.”
“I’ll come,” he said, and I saw the sudden brightness break across his broad features and light up his eyes, which had been sullen all that morning. For him, it did matter, and my momentary irritation with him on that account made me say the reckless thing that I then said and was presently to regret.
“Freddie, I dare you to climb the north end. But I bet you won’t!” There was malice in the challenge, I know, an emotion that was related in some way to that more childish rage that made me fight with him in the first summer we knew him.
He looked at me in surprise and I tried to look back coolly. “Or will you?”
“Gee, why should he?” Dan asked, and then, with his love of amity, quickly said, “Gee, remember Tom Swift in the Rockies? Remember when—”
“Will you?” Milly asked me, and her blue eyes took my measure with a kind of hostility.
“Yeah, will you?” Freddie asked at once.
“I put the dare,” I said as blithely as I could.
Milly leapt to her feet and said, “I will,” and she turned to study the steep north end of the quarry for a moment. Then she began to walk toward it.
I went after her and seized her arm. “Milly, don’t do it. That was a stupid thing for me to say.”
She turned and looked at me with the faintest contempt. We were standing very close to each other, looking straight into each other’s eyes, and then there was a pull between us, a sudden dancing, magnetic thing. I said, “Please, Milly, don’t do it,” and my hand trembled as it held her arm.
She smiled and said, “When I get up, you can do it, Grant,” and freed her arm from my hand. She walked on. I stood there awkwardly between her and the two boys until she came to the bottom of the quarry wall and put her hands on it, as if to test it; then I backed up and joined them. They said nothing to me, did not look at me.
Dan said apprehensively to the air, “She shouldn’t try it.”
Freddie said, “She’ll make it.”
We all watched her begin. And from where we stood, it did not seem hard. Her body looked small against the cliffside, but lithe and sure as an animal’s as it moved slowly up and to the right, perhaps six feet, then to the left and up, perhaps ten, then nearly straight up, one cautious arm stretching overhead to the next hold, one safe foot pulling slowly up to the ledge that the hand had just tried and abandoned. I saw that she was following, with perfect confidence, the possible path up that we had sketched in our minds. Now she was at a point nearly halfway up, where, for a considerable stretch that was almost horizontal, she could safely traverse by side-stepping, and there, for no reason but the challenge of it, she turned slowly and looked down at us and shouted, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
Dan groaned a little and Freddie said, “Jesus!” and I laughed with all the uneasiness that I felt. But already Milly was facing the cliff wall again and, once more, starting up, left, right, up, across, up again, slowly, slowly, and now I could not help wondering that she had never done it before. She was always the boldest of us—it was always she who climbed the highest trees, dived first from the highest board, just as it was she who ran fastest, who had made it almost a point to know most about snakes and birds and the life of the woods and water, who had the quickest judgment and the pluck at once to act on it—and I found myself remembering a time when Freddie’s clothes caught fire from the blaze of a pile of leaves we were burning, and, while Dan and I stood gaping, Milly hurled herself at him and in a minute had rolled his heavier body on the ground and put out the flame. Now that we were older, she was still the best in nearly everything—swiftest at tennis and with the deadliest serve; surest at the tiller; as accurate as two of us, at least, befor
e a target, even though with a borrowed gun; still boldest and best on a cliff.
She was almost at the top, moving cautiously across the last steep drop, and then, with a sudden scramble that sent a small shower of gravel bouncing down and off the face of stone, she was over the slope where the treacherous cliff became innocent field. She disappeared, and when she reappeared at a point where the guardrail came close to the edge, she waved down, cupped her hands to shout “Easy!” and stood there for a moment while the summer wind blew at her short, straight hair which, in that morning sun, was white.
Dan and Freddie turned simultaneously and raced up the gravel slope to meet her. Following them at a walk, I could only hate myself—and hate that feeling more. The three were halfway down again when I met them, and they were all laughing.
“Grant’s turn now,” Milly cried.
I laughed uncomfortably and said, “Oh, listen—”
She could not listen. “It’s easy as anything. You’ll see.”
When we stood together again in the bottom of the quarry, Dan and Freddie just looked at me—Dan with curiosity, Freddie with something more. Milly looked merely expectant, and when I hesitated, she said, “Come on, Grant. You’ll have to hurry, because I have to get back to keep those stupid appointments in the village.”
“I have to, too,” I said.
“Well, then, hurry.”
“All right,” I said, and I made my way through the brush and the pools to the naked wall. I stood where she had stood and looked up. The height was alarming, but I thought that I could see the way that she had taken, and I began the climb. At first it was easy, as easy as her climb had seemed to be. I went up even more slowly than she, even more cautiously, but now I had no doubt that I could do it, and when I came to the ledge halfway up, where Milly had turned, I felt safe, and it was at that point that I was sure of something else. I knew that in doing this thing that she had done and that Dan and Freddie would not do, I was separating myself from them in her feelings about us and that I could have her.
Now, perhaps with that thought, I miscalculated the wall that I was climbing. I went left, went right, and then went left again, and suddenly there was nowhere to go, neither up nor down, right nor left; I was caught. My hands clutched separate protrusions, my feet rested on separate, scanty ridges of rock, and I was at a point where I stood nearly straight—a hideous parodied crucifixion, nothing behind or below me but the violence of air.
Everything in me fell to pieces. My hands, clinging to rock, broke out in sweat, and I felt sweat drench my back, my loins. But this first physical sensation was followed by a sensation (I use the word advisedly) of another kind—a spread of inward terror, a kind of seepage through my being that carried on its currents an absolute fright, purest, I confess, cowardice. Then, through the abysses of cringing, depraved feeling into which I was sinking, voices reached me, the voices of Milly, Freddie, and Dan, a chorus of agitation, shouting directions, I suppose, but no words penetrated my muffling fear, only a long, shrill wailing that lent to that fear a touch of simple, stupid melancholy. My hands were gripping rock with the total strength of my fingers, and then all of my body except my rigid hands began gently to tremble. It was only when the wet skin of my neck and back began to register the heat of the sun with a maddening, relentless prickling that my brain seemed once more to swim up out of the black terror that had swamped me, and told me to consider some action. With that, the trembling slowly stopped and I was able to look down at my feet to see if they could really not find some place to move. The ledge of rock on which my right foot was planted was larger than the ledge on which my left was, and I saw that it was just possible that I could get both my feet where my right foot was, and still balance myself by pushing against the bulge of rock to which my left hand clung. It was that or nothing, for I knew that I would not be able to get through another such fit of utter fright as had first overtaken me, but would certainly lose my grip. Well, I did it. I don’t know, now, how I succeeded, how, once my two feet were together, I succeeded in pushing my hand away from the rock on the left, clutching the rock on my right, and getting my right foot back to the safe, wider ledge that I had left, and then the whole of myself. But I did, and once I was back there at the point from which I could move on up with reasonable safety, I stopped to rest, to recover.
I heard the excited voices below, but still there were no words. I had not yet escaped from that pit of abjectness, of shrill and total demoralization into which I had plunged. (I have never escaped from it; whenever I remember this experience, I am overcome first by the same awful fright, then by the sweating and trembling, and finally by the shuddering shame which had still to come.) Now my mind was active and, although the rest of the climb seemed like pure horror to me, I knew that I must attempt it and could manage if I must. So presently I began again, up, up, almost like scaling some perversely made ladder, across to the right again, then up again, and now so slowly, slowly that all my muscles began to ache with the strain. But my fear and my cowardice were supporting me in caution and calculated patience, and even now, when I could look up and see the top and the blue of heaven at the rim of the quarry like a prize I would win, I climbed with maniacal concentration, until I was at the last danger point, the narrow sloping brow of this brute of a wall. For a moment I put my cheek against the warm stone, as if to caress it into kindness, and let my tired, aching fingers stroke it, then wiped my sweaty hands on my pants legs and with tense, prayerful clutchings and pushings up, took the last six steps that brought me to the slope of the field. Like Milly’s, my final scramble to safety sent a shower of gravel down into the depths, and the thin, perilous sound the stones made as they bounced off stone brought back, for a moment, my earlier fright. But I fell forward under the guardrail, on my stomach, and lay for a moment with my face in the dusty weeds, and simply breathed. The wind blew over me and cooled me as it dried me, even as I was trembling again. Then I heard sounds, and looked up and saw that Milly was standing there, alone, and I got to my feet slowly and smiled at her.
“Now we’re equal,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” I answered, deep in the luxury of my relief, and for a moment, we were. She smiled at me, and she seemed to soften, to melt into a new kind of candor, a wholly different response from any she had been in the habit of giving.
We stood looking at each other, smiling, until she said in a voice soft with invitation, “Grant, come here.” But the moment was passing. Something else was taking the place of relief, a hot flood of shame.
“No, thanks,” I said, and then I was looking at her with the simplest distaste. After a long moment, I looked past her to where Dan and Freddie were climbing up to us. Then I walked jerkily away to them, and my back was turned to her when she called, “That was wonderful climbing, the way you got out of that spot!”
“Good boy!” Dan cried.
“Champ-een,” said Freddie with a friendly jeer.
And we started back to the lake. They babbled all the way, but I was hardly there, immersed in degradation.
At the lake, I left them and went home. My mother had reminded me that we were expecting a second cousin of mine from California, a girl named Margaret Linden who was a year older than I, and I was to be there early. She did not arrive until late in the afternoon, and I met her just before dinner. Because she was there, my father, at my mother’s suggestion, made cocktails for all of us, although they were not in the habit of asking me to drink with them. Margaret was a striking girl, with black hair and a white, rather long face, narrow, tipped eyes, and a large, voracious mouth, and whether it was her presence or the cocktails that braced me, I don’t know, but after dinner I felt marvelous, as though I had mastered my life and the world with it. Then I wanted to see Milly, feeling that I had left that day unfinished, and I excused myself for an hour.
Milly was alone with her stepmother and father. She looked very pretty, for her hair had been attended to in preparation for her dance the next evening, a
nd she was wearing a white tennis dress that showed her brown neck and arms, and her brown legs were bare, and she looked cool and composed. “Let’s walk,” I suggested when we were standing alone on the terrace.
We walked, as if from old habit, toward the orchard. All the way I could feel that new thing between us, dancing, pulling, and now and then our bare arms touched and set it quivering. I took her hand as we walked on the dark path, and when we entered the orchard, she said, “Why did you look at me that way this afternoon?”
“What way?” I asked, and put my arms around her and began to kiss her.
She pulled stiffly away. “No, no, no. Grant.”
But I pulled her back to me and said, “Remember, we’re equals,” and then I kissed her. There was still something in her to be overcome, I don’t know what kind of resistance it was beyond alarm, but it was there even when she no longer protested and let me, at last, have her.
When she stopped crying, I explained that I had promised my mother that I would be back early because of my cousin. Milly did not want to come with me, so I took her home.
My mother was winding the phonograph when I came in; Margaret was there, but my father was not, he had had to go to the village about her trunk. The phonograph played “I Want to Be Happy,” and Mother made us highballs, and I danced with both of them, Margaret and my mother.
Next night, at Milly’s dance, I had to be with Margaret a good deal of the time, since she was a stranger—seeing to her introductions, dancing with her when she was without a partner—and so it worked out that I had only one dance with Milly, and we went through that in difficult silence. She looked very pretty, although she was without interest in the party and therefore without animation. The dress that Miriam Moore had provided was too fluffy and feminine for Milly’s sense of herself, if not for her age; something, certainly, was wrong with it, as something was wrong with us.
The Wars of Love Page 5
