by Daniel Stern
But, in her present elation, she could not imagine ever being so depressed again that she would want to use it, with trembling hand paste a stamp on it and drop it on its way to New York. She was no longer excluded from that world (although she had been expressly forbidden to go to New York while at school; her mother had promised to write the dean about it) and there was no need to move against it.
Something, however, made her blow out the match (tearing it up would not have been as final; it had to be by fire) without touching it to the letter. Perhaps the memory of past defeats, promises broken, hopes failing, the eternal treachery of the most loved, held her hand. Well, she would keep it but never use it. The possession of it stimulated her in an odd way. She tucked it in her bag and shut it. She was aroused, she could feel it in the insides of her thighs and her stomach. Probably the letter. After all it had been in this very room. She sat down on the edge of the bed and almost leaned back. But she jumped up, thinking. Not now. This is going to be a new life. None of that!
She had been wrong before. Happiness was not the remembrance of excitement. True happiness lay in the anticipation of it.
Whatever her dreams of life at Vernon had been, they had not encompassed the one factor which, it seemed to Elly on arrival, was central to it: multiplicity. There was so much. So many worlds within the confines of the small school that she was at first bewildered and then challenged by it.
“I haven’t felt so goddamned stimulated in years,” she told her cottage mate, Lois Harper. She rolled the goddamned slowly in her mouth, enjoying it. “What do you do first?”
“What do you mean?” asked Lois, a small girl with a little round face and a high piping voice.
“Oh, you know. Dramatics, modern dance, even fencing and—” she leaned forward dramatically—“love-making.”
“Oh, they don’t, Elly.”
“Yes, they do, yes, they do.”
“Oh, stop it for God’s sake!”
“All right! We’re going to be good friends, Lois.”
“I hope so, Elly.”
And it had developed so. They were good friends, but on Elly’s terms. Lois, she soon found, could be imposed on to an amazing degree, and Elly hesitated not at all. Now, two months after her arrival at Vernon, she thought of herself as a dancer. She dried her hot wet skin and changed into her skirt and peasant blouse, hanging her leotard up to dry. She was sitting on the cold radiator, gazing at the dangling garment, when Lois arrived.
“Hi, Elly. How’s the dance coming?”
“Beautiful. It’s going to be terrific. I wish I could have a real orchestra, though. The record is lousy.”
“Elly, guess what? Roy was talking to Miss Matthews—she comes to chamber music at his home sometimes—and she said you’re her best student and that you’re going to be the best at the concert. She said they don’t usually allow freshmen to dance in public. Isn’t that marvelous?”
“She really said that? Sometimes I’m amazed at how I took to it right away. Let’s get some lunch. Have you got any classes this afternoon? Neither have I. Let’s have lunch in town.”
Vernon College was a small, exclusive girls’ school of twelve hundred students about four miles outside of Vernon, Vermont. A bus ran by the Administration Building every half hour.
The bus dropped Elly and Lois off in the center of the small main street a few steps away from The Waffle, the school hangout.
“It’s really fantastic,” Elly was saying. “I used to hate lessons of any kind, because I couldn’t play the piano no matter what I did and you know how I love music. But I had this teacher, an older man, who tried to make love to me. Actually during a lesson he’d reach over and grab me—here.”
“No!” Lois squealed. “Did you tell your mother or father?”
“Oh, no,” Elly pronounced solemnly as she bit into a cheese sandwich, “I wouldn’t want to do that to an old man. It would have destroyed him. Ruined him.”
Lois nodded equally solemnly. Then she rustled around in her pocketbook and came up with two letters in her hand. “These came after you left the cottage this morning.”
One was from Elly’s father and one from her mother. She hesitated a moment, then opened Max’s letter first and read:
DEAREST ELLY:
Just a line to let you know all continues well here and hope the same for you.
I’m sending this so that it reaches you before Mother’s letter does. She has been pretty ill, although nothing so bad that you should worry about it. They are headaches, mostly, along with the flushes that women get at your mother’s time of life. It is a difficult time for her and I hope you’ll be considerate enough not to let yourself be upset if her letters are difficult sometimes and not to show it when you write to her if you are disturbed.
She feels, naturally, since you are gone, that she has very little purpose in life. We have a couple now, to take care of the house. Their names are Mimi and Justin.
Anyway, I am writing this mostly to tell you that I’m afraid Mother won’t be able to come to Vermont to see you dance at the concert. She’s really not well enough and the doctor agrees.
Wild horses couldn’t keep yours truly away, though, and you can count on me.
All my love,
YOUR LOVING DADDY
“What’s up?” Lois asked, seeing Elly’s frown as she folded the letter and tucked it in a pocket. “Not bad news, is it?”
“No,” Elly replied. “Good news.” She opened the second letter and read:
DEAR ELLY:
How are you? Your mother doesn’t wish to worry you but she has been deathly ill. The headaches have been at their worst. We miss you terribly, especially me, who needs you so. I won’t be able to come as five doctors have all agreed I shouldn’t make the trip now. But I don’t want you to worry. I’ll be all right. Especially after I see you at Christmas. Take care of yourself and don’t practice too hard for your concert. It’s too bad you never cared for piano playing because you can see now that I was right about your being talented. It’s too bad you have to use your body in what you do—in dancing—music is so much more pure, somehow. Your father is fine and will see you in a while.
Love,
MOTHER
P.S. Daddy is on the concert committee now and gets to know all the musical celebrities who come to town. It’s so exciting. I’ll bet you’d love it here now. By-by.
Why can’t I feel anything? she thought, digging her nails into her palms. It’s obvious the woman is suffering. I should feel something. But it’s all so far away from me. I don’t live there in mind or body any more. She remembered the poem they’d read in class the other day. Yeats, it had been: “I have drunk ale in the country of the young and I weep for I know all things.” I live in the country of the young. That’s what Vernon is, certainly. That’s why I couldn’t go to school at Crofts. You can’t mix the two of them, your family and this. All right, she thought, if I can’t feel her trouble, I can’t. I can feel lots of other things, God knows. She was so absorbed that she failed to notice that Danny and Roy had joined them.
“Hey,” Danny called, “snap out of it. Your cold tuna fish is getting cold.”
Danny was Lois’ boy friend, a tall, angular easygoing boy who towered above Lois when they walked together and who treated her solicitously, as if she were a fragile thing that might shatter if he weren’t careful with her. He and his friend Roy, and sometimes others with them, came up from Dartmouth almost every week end. Elly had sort of automatically paired off with Roy, but she was attracted by the intense care which Danny lavished on Lois. It reminded her of John Lang’s gentleness when speaking to her that other time.
“No pants today?” Roy asked, smiling.
“Are you referring to what I’m wearing, or the way I breathe?” Elly raised a sardonic eyebrow.
“You know,” Danny said, “I think you succeeded with Roy. When you wore pants every week end, not blue jeans or dungarees, like everybody else, but men’
s trousers, neatly creased down the middle, Roy thought sure you were a Lesbian.”
“Maybe I am,” Elly replied.
Roy’s smile was a little glassy. He had discarded his suspicions but had not been as completely convinced as he would like to be. She had been pretty cool to his advances; this was suspect.
On arriving at Vernon and finding so many girls surrounding her, Elly had become disturbed and gloomy. She would be lost, she felt, in this sea of girls. She had been reading The Well of Loneliness. Shortly afterward she began to comb her long, dark-blond hair back, behind her ears, starkly accentuating the perfect oval of her face. This made her normally wide eyes seem enormous in their steady gaze. Combined with the wearing of trousers on week ends, when even the trouser-wearing outdoor girls doffed jeans for dresses, it gave rise to whispers and giggles in the corridors.
One evening, as Elly returned to her cottage from town, a small dark girl named Rema, whom she knew, fell into step beside her and with very little preparation proposed that she and Elly sign out for the night and take a hotel room in town. Rema was explaining how no one would suspect them in town, when Elly burst into terrified flight. The hair came back around her ears and cheeks and the skirts and blouses were worn again. She did wonder that night what it would have been like, to go with Rema, but did not linger on this for long. In the event of her now benign environment becoming suddenly hostile (a hangover from home, when no possible weapon for the war could be discarded), she noted Rema’s name on a slip of paper which she carried in her wallet next to the letter to Mrs. Lang. You never know, she thought, you never know.
“No,” Danny said, “you’re no Lesbian.”
“I should hope not.” Lois laughed. “What would that make me? Hey, Elly, the boys want to go fishing next week end. How about it?”
“Yeah, before it gets too cold,” Roy said. “I’ve got all the tackle.”
“Well, I’ve never fished before, but I love the idea,” Elly said.
“Fine. We’ll teach you.”
“I’ve fished,” said Lois, “but Dad always put the worms on for me.”
“Elly do that for you,” Elly said in a deep booming voice.
“I don’t know if I should let you go home with her,” Danny told Lois.
“I’ll scream if I need help.”
“Okay, kids. So next week end then. We’ll pick you up at the cottage. Tell ’em you’re going to visit Lois’ aunt in Hanover. By the way, Allan and Vicki, Roy’s cousin, are coming too.”
“Fine.”
Lois and Elly returned home to study.
Elly raised her head from her book. “Have you and Danny made love?”
“I don’t know as it’s any of your business.”
“Oh, you haven’t, eh?”
“How do you know?”
“Well, if you had you’d tell me.”
“That’s ridiculous. As a matter of fact we haven’t.”
“I didn’t think you had.”
“Well, I agree with Schopenhauer that sex is destructive to women. Unless, of course, you’re in love.”
“Not in love with Danny?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s too soon to tell.”
“You’re not a virgin, are you?”
“Well … no. There was a boy in Elgin. But never again until I fall in love.”
“Well, to be honest, Lois darling, I probably agree with you.”
But she didn’t know whether she did or not. She was grateful that the activity at Vernon was so furious she hadn’t been able to think too much about it. There had been no one since Lang.
That night her thoughts were whirling about long after Lois’ breathing had evened out with sleep. Her dance, Daddy in the audience watching, Danny and the fishing trip. It seemed to her that before coming to Vernon she had lived wrapped up tightly in a casing of her own flesh. Now she was alive to everything around her. She had read Walter Pater and had been a member of the cult of beauty for three days. There was Mr. Cooper, a lovely teacher, a lovely man she thought, who introduced her to bits and pieces of St. Thomas Aquinas. With him she was a neo-Thomist. Roy was a Catholic (Mother should know), who was conflicted about his duty to religion and his family. With him she was not quite sure whether there was or was not a supreme being. They got along fine. Danny was concerned about the twentieth-century dilemma and regretted bitterly that he had been too young to fight in the Spanish Civil War. With him she bemoaned Russia’s betrayal of the revolution. There was, to her mind, nothing inconsistent about this behavior. She lived in this new world of ideas the same way in which she had lived in the world of sensation, as an opportunist.
Her mind was quick, retentive of facts, smooth at organizing them to a purpose, although not capable of concentrating on a set of data for too long. The concept of allegiance to one or another set of principles was quite alien to her. Nothing she did or thought excluded anything else. She was all-inclusive.
She was remembering how Danny had held Lois’ arm protectively when they’d left The Waffle. She liked that quality in him. She hadn’t been attracted as much to any boy since arriving at Vernon. In this unexpected onslaught of feeling she was betrayed into the arms of an old habit which she’d hoped she’d left behind. She waited a few moments, however, to make sure Lois was quite asleep.
The sky was a slate blue, the September afternoon clear and cool. Everywhere Elly looked the horizon was rimmed with hills. They crossed under a barbed-wire fence, Roy and Allan holding the wire high so the girls could pass under, squealing but safe. Danny with the bulging knapsack in which reposed their lunch and possibly dinner (no one at the lodge outside of Hanover expected them back before dark) strapped to his back ranged on ahead, anxious, as always, to plan which way to turn next. Roy and Allan carried the bait. Elly wore slacks (there had been several jokes) and a polo shirt, and had a creel suspended at her right side from a strap over her left shoulder. Vicki wore the blue jeans that Elly had shunned as too unfeminine, and Lois the impractical skirt.
“You sure there are fish in this-here stream you know?” Roy called out to Danny.
“Thousands,” Danny flung over his shoulder. “Millions!”
“We mean fish, not guppies,” Elly shouted.
“Whales” was the reply.
They crossed a small stream. A log, all but stripped of its bark, served as a bridge. The stream ran fast and below the crystal-bluish surface there were hundreds of small pebbles packed closely together.
“This it?”
“Wise guy!”
It was, however, past the next field and across a dirt road into a patch of trees. Under a large rock they spread their paraphernalia. They broke up into pairs. Elly, on the pretext of needing a teacher, latched onto Danny. They went far up the stream to a place where the water had quieted and the only sound was of flies buzzing near the water’s surface. Danny caught a small pickerel almost immediately. Elly caught nothing. He had to caution her to be quiet so often that they took a break, Danny satisfied for the while that he had proved his fishing prowess. They lay on the grass smoking cigarettes and talking.
“How’s Dartmouth?” Elly asked, blowing clouds of smoke over her head.
“It’s okay. I’m a local boy. Grew up in Hanover.”
“Oh, I’m not. I’m just the opposite. Colchester, Indiana. It’s so dry and flat up there compared to here. So many hills. I love it.”
She showed him some snapshots of the house. He nodded appreciatively.
“They built it to keep me there.”
“So you were a captive princess, eh? How does it feel to be free?”
“It’s more than that. It’s like somebody suddenly took me out from under a great big snail’s shell and showed me what it was like outside. I don’t know, but I seem to be so much more aware of what’s going on around me, not only classes and all, but people are more real. Maybe it’s my dancing, because that’s like discovering how to walk. I studied at home, but it was so different. People shoul
d always dance.”
“Easier said than done. Maybe you’re describing what’s known as growing up.”
“Maybe you’re right. Anyway it’s had such a powerful effect on me that even dancing isn’t enough to express it. I’ve even taken to writing.”
“Really? What kind of stuff?”
“Oh, prose, you know. I have a couple of pages with me, if you want to read some.”
“Sure. Love to.”
She pulled a few folded sheets from her back pocket. The night before she had laboriously copied a section from a novel by Koestler, one of the more lyrical portions. She was anxious to impress Danny, hoping desperately that he hadn’t read this particular book. If he had she could always pass it off as a joke and, laughing, snatch the papers from him and tear them up. But, as he read, he shook his head admiringly, so she knew she was safe.
“Hey,” he said, “this stuff is good. What’s it going to be, a novel?”
She nodded. “There’s so much to do,” she sighed. Writing, dancing, besides just living. Nothing’s enough by itself.”
“That’s the idea. They’re all supposed to add up to something which the parts don’t make by themselves. That’s Gestalt, you know.”
“Yes.” She had the uneasy feeling that they were not really communicating. She stretched her long legs before her and one arm behind her and with the other arm indicated with a wide sweep the grass on which they lay, the running stream and the encircling hills.
“It seems to me, sometimes though, that this is all we have.”
