Nancy’s head was bowed low over the table and she appeared to be crying, but when she looked up again her eyes were narrow and dry. “And I’ll tell you something else, Lucy,” she said. “A lot of people feel sorry for Harold and me because our boy is handicapped, you know? Well, but do you know the first thing I thought when we found out about his handicap? I thought Oh, thank God. Thank God. Now they can never take him into the Army.”
Ann Blake sat hunched on one of the tall stools in her kitchen, hugging herself and seeming to shiver slightly as she stared into a cup of coffee. She got up promptly to open the door, but she could barely achieve a little smile when Lucy came in to deliver her check for the month’s rent.
“Well,” she said. “And how are you faring, Lucy?”
“How am I what?”
“Holding up. Managing to survive.”
“Oh, we’re doing pretty well, thanks,” Lucy said.
“Ah, yes, ‘we.’ You’ll always be able to say ‘we,’ won’t you, because you have your daughter. Some of us are less fortunate. Well, I don’t mean to sound – here; come and sit down, if you have a minute.”
And it didn’t take long, then, for Ann to confide that Greg Atwood had left her. He had signed up for a six-week tour with a dance troupe, and when the tour was over he’d telephoned her to say he wouldn’t be coming home. He’d decided to join a new troupe being formed from the nucleus of the old one, with plans for a much more extended tour that might keep him on the road for what he called an indefinite period of time. “He’s flown away, you see,” Ann explained.
“Flown away?”
“Well, of course. With all the other fairies. Listen. Promise me something, Lucy. Never fall in love with a man who’s essentially – essentially homosexual.”
“Well,” Lucy said, “that’s not very likely.”
Ann gave her a slow, frowning, appraising look. “No, I don’t suppose it is. You’re still young, and you’re pretty – I love the way you’ve been fixing your hair lately – and there’ll be any number of men in your life. It’ll be years before your luck starts to change, if it ever does.” Then she got off her stool and stepped back two or three paces, straightening her clothes. “How old do you think I am?” she asked.
Lucy couldn’t guess. Forty-five? Forty-eight? But Ann didn’t wait long for an answer.
“I’m fifty-six,” she said, and came back to sit at the counter again. “It’s been more than thirty years since my husband and I built this place. Oh, and you can’t imagine what high hopes we had. I wish you could have known my husband, Lucy. He was a foolish man in many ways – is a foolish man – but he loved the theater. We wanted a summer-stock company that might be the envy of the whole Northeast, and we almost had it. A few of our people really did go straight from here to Broadway, though I don’t think I’ll tell you their names because you’d only say you never heard of them. Oh, but I can tell you this place was alive with wonderful young people in those years – wonderful boys and girls destined for things they never quite achieved. Well. I won’t keep you. And I’m sorry I spilled my troubles all over you, Lucy. It’s just that you’re the first person I’ve seen since Gregsince that ugly little phone call, and I—” Her lips began to tremble out of control.
“No, really, Ann, that’s okay,” Lucy said quickly. “You’re not keeping me from anything. Let me stay with you for a while, if you’d like, until you feel better.”
Lucy had never been invited beyond the kitchen of this house, and she felt oddly privileged as Ann made her welcome in the living room. It was surprisingly small – the whole house was on a smaller scale than it appeared to be from the outside – and the staircase probably led up to a single luxurious bedroom for two. It was the kind of house that certain songwriters of the nineteen twenties must have had in mind with the phrase “a love nest.”
“Well, you see the fireplace is bigger than necessary,” Ann was saying. “That was my husband’s idea. I think he liked to picture the two of us cuddled up here on the sofa, watching the flames and getting all toasty-warm before bedtime. He was a terrible sentimentalist. I’ve never seen the house he built for the little airline girl, of course, but I’d be willing to bet it has a fireplace at least as big as this.” She fell silent for a while; then she said “Greg always liked it, too. He’d sit here staring into the fire for hours, mesmerized by it, and sometimes I’d go upstairs alone and lie there thinking Well, but what about me? What about me?” And she looked desolate again. “So the hell with it. I suppose I’ll live here for years without ever building a fire.”
“Why don’t we build one now?”
“Oh, no, dear. That’s very sweet, but I’m sure you must have better things to—”
Out in the late February wind again Lucy knocked the snow off three or four logs that lay in a pile beside the kitchen door and gathered up enough kindling to get them started, and when she carried her load back into the living room she found that Ann had broken out a bottle of scotch.
“It’s much too early in the day,” Ann said, “but I don’t think anybody’s going to care. Do you?”
Soon, when the first steady flames were beginning to climb around the hissing logs, there was a sense of well-earned peace in the room: Ann Blake had curled herself girlishly into the sofa and her guest was settled in an easy chair. Lucy had never liked scotch, but she was discovering now that once you got past the taste it wasn’t really much worse than bourbon. It did the job. It took the harshness out of the day.
“You’re sort of – rich, aren’t you, Lucy?”
“Well, I’m – yes; but how did you know?”
“Oh, it’s just a thing I can smell on people. Michael never gave off that particular smell, but you do; you always have. Well, ‘smell’ is probably the wrong word; I hope I’m not offending you.”
“No.”
“And besides, I’ve caught a glimpse or two of your parents. They’ve got money written all over them. Old money.”
“Yes, I suppose they do. There’s always been quite a lot of-quite a lot of money in my family.”
“Then I don’t understand why you go on living here. Why don’t you take your daughter away someplace where you can be with your own kind?”
“Well,” Lucy said, “I suppose it’s because I don’t really know what kind my own kind is.”
And that didn’t sound like much of an answer at first, but the more she thought it over the better it became. It was certainly closer to the truth than saying “I have friends here”; it was closer even than saying “It wouldn’t be fair to Laura to make some big impulsive move.” Oh, she was getting closer to the truth all the time – or maybe she needn’t even try to get closer; maybe all she had to do now was give in to what she’d known in her heart all along. The truth – and what if it did take Ann Blake’s whiskey in her veins to make it come clear? – was that she didn’t want to leave Dr. Fine.
Twice now she had severed relations with the man, driving home from his office on each of those afternoons with her head held high in defiance and pride – and both times, after a few weeks, she had gone humbly back. Did other people feel this bondage to their psychiatrists? Did other people find themselves savoring the events of each day in order to have something to say, something to tell about at their next damned psychiatric session?
Well, on Wednesday I got drunk with my landlady, she began to rehearse in her mind, knowing it would come out almost exactly this way in Dr. Fine’s consulting room. She’s fifty-six and she’s just been abandoned by a much younger man, and I guess she’s about the most pitiable person I know. I think I hoped that being there and drinking with her might help take me out of myself a little, do you see? Sort of in the same way that Nancy Smith’s telling about her brother helped take me out of myself that other time? Because I mean nobody can live, Doctor, nobody can breathe and be nourished on self, self, self.…
“Well, I can’t imagine having a great deal of money,” Ann Blake was saying as the flames crackl
ed. “I’ve never even given it much thought, because all I ever wanted was a great deal of talent – and I’d gladly have settled for even a modest amount of that. Still, I suppose the two things are sort of alike. Having either one sets you apart. Being born with either one can bring you more than most people allow themselves to dream of, but they both require an unfailing sense of responsibility. If you ignore them, or neglect them, all the good of them slides away into idleness and waste. And the terrible thing, Lucy, is how easily idleness and waste can become a way of life.”
… Then all at once she startled me, Doctor. She said ‘The terrible thing, Lucy, is how easily idleness and waste can become a way of life’ – and it was like a prophecy. Because that’s what my life here is becoming, don’t you see? This neurotic preoccupation with myself that you constantly encourage – oh, yes, you do encourage it, Doctor; don’t deny that – and this helpless sense of inertia. It’s all idleness. It’s all waste.…
“Lucy?” Ann said. “Would you awfully much mind closing the curtains, dear, so I won’t have to know what time it is? Oh, thank you.” And when the room was dimmed she said “That’s better. I want to have it be night. I want to have it be night and I don’t want the morning ever to come.”
The whiskey bottle was still almost a quarter fall – Lucy could tell by holding it up to the firelight – and she poured herself another deep, authoritative drink to make sure she would remember all the things she planned to say to Dr. Fine.
“I think I’ll just sort of stretch out here for a while, Lucy, if you don’t mind,” Ann said. “I haven’t been – haven’t been sleeping at all well.”
“Sure,” Lucy told her. “That’s okay, Ann.” And the silence in the room seemed wholly appropriate to her own need for solitude and contemplation.
On her way to the door she collided softly with a wall and had to stand leaning against it for a few seconds to regain her balance; she was lucky, though, in finding that her winter coat was still where she’d left it.
The expanse of snow and ice between Ann Blake’s kitchen door and Lucy’s house couldn’t have been more than fifty yards, but it seemed to go on forever; then even after making the distance she stood for a long time, with the wind cutting her face, in order to stare with revulsion at the ice-encrusted spiral staircase. It was no damned conversation piece and never would be, unless you wanted to have the dumbest and most pointless conversation in the world.
When she’d flung her coat over a living room chair she went swiftly into the kitchen because it was time for the sandwich and the milk. She got out the peanut-butter jar and fumbled around for the jelly jar, but that was as far as she could go because she had to lean heavily on the counter with both hands, hanging her head.
It was all right, though; Laura was old enough to make her own sandwich. Everything would be all right now if she could only get up to the bedroom. She did it slowly, using the wall of the staircase for guidance; then she turned back the covers and got into bed with her clothes on. For just a moment she wanted Michael there to take her in his arms (“Oh, Christ, you’re a lovely girl”) but that passed quickly in the peace that came from knowing she was alone.
In another breath or two she would be too sound asleep to hear Laura coming home and calling “Mom? Mom?” – and there might be an edge of fright in the child’s voice when she called again and got no answer – but that was all right, too. If Laura wanted to know where her mother was, she could come upstairs and find out.
“This fear of ‘bondage,’ ” Dr. Fine said, “is by no means unusual. A patient will often come to feel dependent on a therapist, and the sense of dependency may then seem constricting. But it’s an illusion, Mrs. Davenport. You’re not ‘bound’ to me, or to the work we’ve done here, in any way at all.”
“Well, you’ve got an answer for everything, haven’t you?” Lucy said. “You guys run a pretty slick racket, don’t you?”
And he looked as if he thought she was kidding. “Oh?” he said.
“Well, certainly. Your whole profession is a slippery, irresponsible business. You suck people in when they don’t know where else to turn; then you seduce them into telling you all their secrets until they’re utterly naked – yes, and so utterly absorbed in their own nakedness that nothing else in the world seems real. And if anybody ever does say ‘Wait – stop – let me out of this,’ then you shrug it all off and say it’s an illusion.”
She was almost ready to get up and walk out of the office again. There might not be a very pure sense of defiance and pride in it this time – she might even feel a little foolish, having done the same thing twice before – but there would almost certainly be a slow gathering of strength, all the way home, in her knowledge that this time was the last.
It was embarrassment, more than anything else, that kept her in her chair. She didn’t like the shrill and reckless way her voice had risen just now, and those high, broken notes of near-crying still hung in the silent consulting room. If she couldn’t leave with some measure of dignity, it might be better to stay.
“Suppose we go back a little, Mrs. Davenport,” Dr. Fine said, looking at her steadily over his softly clasped hands. It had often struck her that there was something wormlike about this small, bald, pale and quiet man, and now that impression made her outburst seem all the more unworthy. How could anybody be in bondage to a worm?
“Sometimes it can be helpful just to summarize and clarify,” he said. “The central problem we’ve discussed here, since the end of your marriage, is how best to take full advantage of your wealth and of the personal freedom it provides.”
“Yes.”
“There have been two persistent uncertainties – where to go and what to do – and while we’ve discussed both questions at length we’ve recognized from the start that the two are interdependent: finding a satisfactory answer to one would resolve the other.”
“Right.”
And so much for summary; so much for clarification. Now it was time for Dr. Fine to get down to business. Lately, he said, Lucy seemed no longer to be “dealing” with the central problem. She was apparently allowing her attention to drift, letting herself be distracted by various inadequacies or elements of dissatisfaction in her present circumstances. And while these matters might indeed be distasteful, they were only transitory; only temporary. Wouldn’t it be more profitable to look ahead?
“Well, of course,” she told him. “And I do, or at least I try to. I know this is just a transitional period; I know it’s only a time for taking stock; for sorting out my ideas; for trying to make plans …” and she remembered that these were the same three tidy activities she had reported to her mother, last fall.
“Good,” Dr. Fine said. “Now perhaps we’re moving in the right direction again.”
But he had begun to look tired and even a little bored, as though he might be allowing his own attention to drift, and Lucy couldn’t blame him for that. Even a small-town psychiatrist would have more interesting things on his mind than assessing the emotional balance of a rich, rich girl who didn’t know where to go and didn’t know what to do.
Nothing worth remembering took place in what little was left of the winter, or in March or April or early May. Then, one bright and fragrant day, she answered a knock on the kitchen door and found a strikingly handsome young man standing there with both thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jeans.
“Mrs. Davenport?” he inquired. “Be okay if I use your phone for a minute?”
He said his name was Jack Halloran, and that he was the director of a new theater group that would soon begin rehearsals at the Playhouse. Then he called the telephone company, in a tone of crisp, businesslike impatience, and arranged for phones to be installed “at once” in the theater, the dormitory, and the annex.
“Can I – get you a cup of coffee?” she asked when he was finished. “Or a beer or something?”
“Well, if you’ve got enough beer,” he said, “I’d love one. Thanks.” And when he was set
tled across from her in the living room he said “It’s hard to believe, but whoever’s been running this theater’s been trying to do it without phones. Can you imagine that? Doesn’t that sound like amateur night in Dixie?”
She had never heard that expression before, and wondered if he’d made it up. “Well,” she said, “I think things have been a little on the sleazy side here for quite a few summers now. But the place did have a very good reputation once, years ago.”
“Be pretty nice then, wouldn’t it, if somebody could bring it back?” He took a deep swig of beer, making his prominent Adam’s apple rise and fall. “And it might even happen this summer,” he said when he’d wiped his mouth. “Can’t promise anything, but I’ve spent more than a year getting this company together, and we’re not just fooling around. We’ve got some fine young talent and we’ll be putting on some good shows.”
“Good,” Lucy said. “That certainly sounds – certainly sounds good.”
Jack Halloran had pale-blue eyes and black hair, and the kind of tough, sensitive face she had admired in the movies ever since she was a child. She already knew she wanted him; the only question now was how best and most gracefully it could be brought about. And the first thing to do was keep him talking.
He told her he was from Chicago, and that he’d been raised there by “well-meaning strangers” – first in a Catholic orphanage and later in a succession of foster homes – until he was old enough to join the Marine Corps. And it was on a three-day pass in San Francisco, shortly before his discharge from the service, that he’d walked into a theater for the first time in his life and seen a touring Shakespeare company’s production of Hamlet.
“I don’t think I understood more than about half of it,” he said, “but I knew I’d never be the same again. I started reading all the playwrights I could get my hands on, Shakespeare and all the others, and seeing plays – any kind of plays – and one way or another I’ve managed to keep hanging around the theater ever since. Hell, it may turn out that I’ll never make it, either as an actor or a director, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever quit. This is the only world I understand.”
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