Fright

I

Marjorie was modish again, as she had been in ’14, that first year that Press had met her. She was in a coat very similar to one that he’d seen her wear at that time, even allowing for the changes a year and a half might have been expected to produce in the fashions. The dark green of bottle glass, with a chin-tight little collar of red-gold kit fox. On her head a toque of bottlegreen velour, a black aigrette standing up straight from the front of it, as from an Oriental sultan’s turban. A tiny barrel muff hung from one hand, scarcely seeming to offer room enough for two to be inserted. The bottoms of her shoes were glistening patent, the gaiter part was champagne kid, studded all down the sides with jet buttons.

She was New York again. Using it as a descriptive noun. It stood out all over her, that vague yet so distinct cachet that only two places in the world have ever been able to give women, that patina, that reflection; so that one can say “She is Paris” or “She is New York,” but one cannot explain why.

She was in the drawing room of the Seventy-ninth Street house, and the doors at the end of it had been closed to afford privacy. She was walking back and forth laterally, the short way — the room was longer than it was wide — as one does when engrossed, measuring one’s own share in a discussion, thinking over carefully each answer given to each question, both before making it, and while making it, and even in retrospect, after having made it.

He was seated, grave of mein. Sometimes looking at her. Tapping with the rim of his eyeglasses, lightly, troubledly, against the arm of the chair he sat in.

The conversation had been going on for some time. It had started as a brief passing salutation, a look-in at the doors, on her way out. But now whatever expedition she had originally been on had been lost sight of, and the conversation had become the pressing thing, and not the sortie. As such things sometimes develop, reversing their own ratios.

“Then this is more or less of a separation?”

“I don’t know how to answer that. Father. He’s not here with me. Isn’t every visit home that a wife makes without her husband, more or less of a separation; can’t it be called that?”

“It can,” he said shrewdly, “when she calls it ‘home,’ where she has come without him, and calls it merely ‘that place,’ where he has remained without her. As you’ve been doing, in nearly all our conversations.”

She sighed wearily. “Oh, Father, you’re in one of your lawyer moods.”

“I’m in one of my being-a-father moods,” he said ruefully.

The eyeglass rims tapped, the patent shoes twinkled restlessly across the floor.

“Marjorie, what is it you’re keeping from me?”

This time she sighed without the spoken protest, as if to utter that further were merely a waste of time.

“I raised you. You grew up under this roof with me. I know that broken-doll look on your face. I know that I-fell-down-on-my-roller-skates-and-barked-my-knees trembling to your chin. I know that wounded oh-there-was-the-most-wonderful-boy-at-the-party-last-night, all-of-nineteen, and-some-older-girl-of-eighteen-came-and-took-him-away-from-me-all-because-he-thought-I-was-too-young expression deep in your eyes. I can’t buy you a new doll as I used to, or give you a shiny fifty-cent piece to make your knees stop smarting, or buy you a new dress, so you can go back to the next party and win him back — and find out you don’t want him after all. Time won’t let me any more. Time is the enemy of fathers who have little girls. But I can do this — always this — to the end.” His eyeglasses had dropped to the rug. His arms were open wide, straining to accept, to hold her close, in remembrance of past consolations. “Time won’t take this away from me.”

Her lips trembled, and with a melting motion, she started toward him, toward the sanctuary he offered; then checked herself, and turned her head aside, to avoid meeting the light of sympathy in his eyes, drawing her like a beacon.

“No,” she murmured stifledly. “I know that place inside your arms too well. Don’t make me weaken. I’m trying not to make a fool of myself. Help me.”

“Is it foolish to open your heart to your father?” he coaxed.

Slowly, unwillingly, step by tremulous step, she came nearer. Everyone has to go to someone, at certain moments. No one can stand all alone.

“You wouldn’t be Marjorie if you weren’t loyal. Be loyal, among strangers, in the face of the world. Are you among strangers now?”

She was in them now. His arms closed tenderly, understandingly.

“What has he done to you?”

“Nothing, nothing...”

Then the sobs came, as she had foreseen, in that place of tenderness; the melting away of resolution and of bravery. They came in an anguished torrent, and she hid her face upon his breast, and he stroked her softly and held her for awhile, and didn’t speak till they’d ebbed again.

“Tell me, and I’ll understand. Not for you alone, I’ll understand for the two of you. Tell me, and I’ll try to help. Not you alone, I’ll try to help the two of you. I’m older than you are, than he is. Tell me, and I’ll make the skinned knee stop stinging, as I used to long ago, remember? Remember how it was?”

“Father,” she moaned feverishly, threshing her head from side to side against the pillow of his chest, “you don’t know what you’re saying at all! You can’t. This is something you can’t. You can’t understand him — in this. You can’t help him...”

“Something so terrible, so new,” he murmured drily. “The boy and the girl; so different from the boy I was, the girl your mother was, not too many years ago. The same sobs and the same soft hair against my hand and the same bobbing head — and the same words that were said a thousand years ago. ‘Don’t cry any more’ — but of course so different, so utterly different, from the boy I once was and the girl your mother once was.” And in tender irony he touched his lips to the top of her head.

“Well, what is it, did he drink?”

“No. I’ve never seen him drunk. Never yet.”

“Well, was it another woman, other women?”

“No, no. He never looked at another woman. He never looked at anyone but me.”

His caressing hand stopped, as a pendulum stops, as a clock stops, bated.

“Instead of reassuring me,” he said slowly, “you’ve made me doubly anxious. I know you too well, it’s more than just a trifle. In other words, instead of being something less serious than those things I’ve suggested, it must be something even more serious. But what can be, what is?”

She tried to escape from his arms now, in realization that her last defense was down; threshing a little, trying to turn away.

“I had someplace to go. I think I was to meet Caroline—”

He held her insistently. “Marjorie, you’re not leaving this room until you tell me why you left your husband like this.”

She crumpled in his arms, as though all worn out suddenly, with the effort she had made trying not to tell him; went limp. Her voice was low, now, when it came, suffocating with its own horror.

“Father, he’s a murderer. He killed a woman, right here in New York, the very day we were married. Less than... less than an hour before the ceremony. Father, for almost two years now I’ve been living with a man who’s — wanted by the police. Who’s a hunted criminal, in every sense of the word. I only found out the day before I came away...”

He’d drawn a single sharp breath, a breath that he never seemed to release again; no sound of its issuing from him, after the icy rustle of its taking in.

“You’re sure?” he said batedly. “You’re sure of what you’re saying?”

“He told me so himself, in the dark, in our bedroom, that last night before I left him. He forced himself to gulp down some whiskey, and then he told me. He wouldn’t have the light on, he wouldn’t let me look at him. What else could it have been but the truth?”

“And they know?”

“Not his name, no. They know it was done.”

“God of Heaven,” he said bitterly. “And if you’d had a child by him—”

“He stopped that,” she said exhaustedly, shoulders limp against him. “It nearly happened. But he stopped that. He took me to a—”

“Marjorie, don’t!” He was holding his own head now. “I can’t stand much more. Not all at one time. The little girl that I wanted so to be happy. The shining, clean little girl. It’s like seeing you crawl out of a sewer, before my eyes, and stand up all covered with filth...”

“What’s to become of me?” she moaned. “Oh, Father, please, you’ve always been so wise, you’ve always known more than I ever could; what’s to become of me?”

“I could have forgiven—” he said bleakly, “no, not forgiven; I could have tried to understand, if it had happened after: once you were already his wife. Such a tragedy does strike occasionally, and when it does there’s no foreseeing it, it’s the will of Providence. But it happened before; he’d already committed it, and he knew he had, he must have. There was blood on his hands, and yet he cold-bloodedly, criminally, bestially, went to you, and stood beside you, and took you in marriage; less than an hour afterwards.”

She sought to cover her ears with her own hands.

“Ah, no, my dear, the murder was not of this other unknown woman; the murder was of you, all your hopes and all your happiness. You’re the one he killed. You.”

“Help me. Help me.”

“No, you were right, before. I can’t help him. But I can help you. It’s still not too late. I can help you. He must pay. For his two murders. The murder of an unknown young woman, and the murder of my daughter’s whole life.”

And stifling her sobs against his breast, and stroking her throbbing head with one hand while he held her thus, with the other he reached for the telephone and drew it toward him and said with a stony, inflexible determination:

“Give me the police, please... This is Barclay Worth, Nineteen East Seventy-ninth Street. Yes, yes, that Mr. Worth. I have a confidential matter to impart. Will you send someone here to my house, please?... Nature? Homicide—”

“No!” Marshall yelled wildly. “Marjorie, stop him! Don’t you hear what he’s doing? Don’t let him! No! — NO!”

And rising full-height, he flung the entire bottle across the room at his father-in-law, trying to stun him, so that he would drop the telephone. Trying to reach him — from that faraway town to New York.

The bottle smashed, and like corrosive acid, its contents seemed to wash away, to eat away, the whole fabric of the scene before his eyes. The canvas it had been on peeled back on all sides, in a great spreading circle, into its implicit frame. And behind it was revealed another, waiting there all the while and only coming to life now, at his signal. Just as one fresco covers up another. But in this case of fresco with movement, that suddenly begins to quicken with latent motion, held arrested until now, only after its full surface-area has been revealed, and not while the exposure was still going on. A still life suddenly thawing, fluxing at every line.

“That’s enough of that, now!” a barman shouted, and came running toward him full tilt, sawdust spraying at his feet, apron flapping at his thighs.

A man jumped up from the table, and came for him from the other side. “Give you a hand here, with this,” he panted. Another man sprang up somewhere in back of him, and closed in on him from there.

He was manhandled, violently flung this way and that, in a sort of rolling casklike progress toward the door.

A man was standing there, erect in his seat, against the opposite wall, still shaken and white in the face, eyes popping, crusts of broken glass glinting on both his shoulders, like a sort of crystallized dandruff. Up the wall a space, not too high aloft over his shoulder, a dark stain was sweating downward-trickling tendrils of varying lengths. Like a huge spider crushed and oozing against the plaster.

There was a hubbub of excited voices on all sides.

“Did you see that? Barely missed him!”

“And for no reason at all. Out of a clear blue sky.”

“Go on, get him out of here, bartender. That’s the idea. There’s his hat, too.”

The two wings of a milkily opaque glass door slapped together, cutting the noise off short. There was sudden silence, and his chin struck the ground.

Just over his shoulder a dreary array of bulbs, some of them showing gaps like missing teeth, spelled out the letters “The Rocky Mountain Café.”

And prone there in the gutter, in the muck and in the rainpocked swill of the street, he still kept crying out “No! Marjorie, stop him! No! No!” and beating time to it with his hand against the ground.

2

On the intimate little dance floor at Churchill’s, a trifle below street level at Broadway and Forty-ninth, the undulating grass-skirted line of “Hawaiian” hula girls wriggled slowly off into the wings, describing imaginary loops with their limp wrists held aloft before their faces.

Everything was Hawaiian in the entertainment and nightlife world this year. That was the latest rage. In their wake the band struck up an explosive cacophony intended for general dancing.

Everyone got up, and the tiny space was inundated. Within a moment, nobody could move any more, but the way they danced now, they didn’t have to. The women just shook their shoulders and bosoms — the shimmy — and the men just stood still and held onto them.

He and she, however, stayed on at their little table, with its intimate shaded electric lamp glowing upward into their faces. Dancing was for when you were happy. And though her eyes were bright — too sparkling bright, in the lamplight — that didn’t come from happiness.

He shifted his chair a little closer, so that she could hear him above the clattering cowbells and heehawing trumpets over there across the room. He poured her more champagne.

“Then I do have a chance? I must, or you wouldn’t be here in New York. I must, or you wouldn’t be here at this table with me.”

“I have to be someplace, so it might as well be here,” she said pensively.

“I do have a chance.”

“Don’t ask me that now.”

“I will ask you it, but don’t answer it now. Don’t answer it. I can wait. Time is on my side.” He poured some more champagne.

“I shouldn’t drink so much. I never have before.”

“You’re not drinking too much. And if you do? You’re among friends.”

She said it over. “I am among friends. Among friends at last. You don’t know how good that sounds. To be among friends. There’s no more worry, there’s no more fear. I am safe now. It was like a nightmare. But the bad dream is over. I am awake now.” She raised her goblet. “And I hear music. And I hear laughter. And I see a friend, across the table from me.”

She drained it, and seemed about to shiver, but she didn’t.

“Oh, it’s so good to be with a friend. So good.”

He swallowed some of his own, but with an asperity.

“What did he do to you? What was it? You have that year stamped all over you. Oh, not in your looks, but I can see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice. What went on, all that time, out in that place where he had you?”

“Don’t ask me to tell you anything. If I did, it would be the champagne telling you, and not I. And you wouldn’t want to hear it from the champagne, you’d want to hear it from me.”

“I’d kill him if he hurt a... a hair of your head!”

She gulped her champagne down almost voraciously, this time using both hands to the goblet stem. “Oh, my God. My God. Don’t use that word. That’s the one word you shouldn’t use. Don’t let me hear it. Just when I was beginning to forget a little.”

“So you don’t like that word,” he brooded. “Who does? I don’t either.” He tilted his glass. “I never have. For a year now, I haven’t. Your year and mine.”

She was suddenly staring at him transfixed, her lips afraid to ask what her eyes so plainly did ask.

“Maybe this is the champagne telling you, now. My champagne telling you, instead of yours telling me. Telling you there’s nothing for you to tell. No need.” He turned his head briefly aside toward the jangled clatter. “Yes, play louder, louder still. But she’s going to hear it just the same. I can’t keep it in any longer. Maybe I know, Marjorie. Maybe I understand. Maybe there are three in on the secret, and not just two.”

Even the lamp couldn’t tint her face now, nor the champagne flush it any more; its whiteness overcame both of them. “What are you saying? I don’t know what you’re trying to say!”

“I know. I’ve always known. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’ve known ever since an hour afterward.”

“And yet—”

“Yes, ‘and yet,’ ” he agreed sorrowfully. “Those ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘and yets.’ Short little words, but they cover so much ground. Would I stick a knife in your heart? Is that what I felt for you then, and what I feel for you now? No, I was the chum, the pal, the game loser. The little gentleman. That’s me all over, Marjorie. The loyal friend who kept his mouth shut.” His fist banged down in heavy contradiction. “The God-damned fool, you mean. Who could have had you a year sooner, but wouldn’t hit below the belt.”

She couldn’t say anything. She wasn’t looking at him now any more, she was looking at the past. Down at the bottom of her goblet where the champagne froth was. Not the past that had been, perhaps, but an alternate past, that might have been.

“For what?” he went on. “For who? To see you as you are now? To miss you as I have, to want you as I do, to be lonely as I am? Does one man do that for another? God didn’t make us that way, and God was right. Why shouldn’t I have my happiness, when it’s right out there in front of my arms, and all I have to do is reach? What am I, an angel or a saint? No, I’m what I said before; a fool, a Goddamned fool.”

“And I am too, I guess,” she sighed.

“But your eyes were closed, and mine were open.”

“How did you come to...?” It wavered, and it stopped; as though she weren’t really interested any more, at this late day; it was just a reflex question.

“I was the best man at your wedding. I went back to his room that day. I’d seen something I didn’t like, when I’d been there the first time, to pick him up. I didn’t know what it was myself, just something in the atmosphere. The way he took a drink with me, the way a burning cigarette on the edge of a table nearly sent him into convulsions. A cigarette that had lip rouge on it. I didn’t know why myself, but I went back. I found her there. And I helped him. Or was it you? I... saw to it that no one else would find her there. Don’t ask me what I did, it doesn’t matter now any more.”

“And I don’t want to know it anyway. My heart has too much to carry already, it’s heavy as lead. He told me the part before, in that faraway town one night. And every hour since, I’ve wished he never had.”

“And now I’m here, and now you’re here. With it. But he isn’t. We make a peculiar threesome.”

“What’ll I do? Oh, Lance, what’ll I do? I’m afraid to go back to him. And even if I don’t — I’m still not free of him.”

“Don’t do anything. Just be you, be Marjorie.” And low so that she scarcely heard, “Let others — do it for you.”

They were somnolently silent for awhile, and then she said, “I’m drinking too much. What have we been talking about? It’s gone now, but — I’m afraid I’ll remember.”

“I’m drinking too much too,” he said, draining his glass. “And I’m afraid I’ll forget.”

She saw him push back his chair and stand.

“Will you sit here for a moment? I want to get some cigarettes.”

“But you have some right there before you.”

“Another kind of cigarettes. A much better kind. Just sit here. And remember — always remember — you’re with friends. And no one will ever hurt you again.”

He closed himself into the booth.

He could still see her sitting there across the room from him. Still see her in all her lovely, downcast, heart-quickening desirableness. It made him want to cry out in anguish, he wanted her so. It was important to keep looking at her. It was important to keep her like that before his eyes, the whole time, and not turn them to what he was doing.

The coin chinked home.

“Spring three, one hundred,” he said quietly above the glass-dimmed roar of the jazz band, worshiping her with his eyes there where she sat, lonely, lost, waiting to be claimed, across the room. A Madonna in an evening gown, an angel baffled with champagne. His hope of heaven, his religion...

Marshall swung a random, spindly bar stool by its long legs and the glass door of the booth shattered, and it pelted all over the man inside, so that he had to throw his arm across his face to ward it off. The jazz squawked off-key, as though every instrument were a chicken and their necks had all been wrung at once, then floundered in its death throes, and beat the air a little with crazed wings, and expired. The dancers thinned to isinglass cutouts — you could see right through their bodies — and then even that thinned, and they were gone. The little table lamps went out all over the room, as though he’d inadvertently damaged a master switch and the current was slowly failing.

“No you won’t!” he panted. “You won’t say a word! I’ll see that you don’t! I’ll kill you first, myself, if I have to!” And he went for Lansing’s throat with both his hands, and seized it, and tried to pull him away, out of there.

Then he was torn loose, and pinned back against the wall, by the shoulders, by the arms, held there flat against it and all spread out.

Only his head inclined away from it a little. Then a fist swung, and crashed into it, and it ricocheted back and smote the wall, and for a minute he would have dropped, but they still held him up.

“Get a cop in here,” a voice ordered. “Are you all right, sir? Are you all right?”

Lansing came out of the booth still with an arm shielding his face. Then as he took it down, it seemed to wipe his whole face off with it, like some sort of curdling magic. And in its place was another face, older, and ashen with fright, lined, and rather flabby, and balding at the temples.

And when he looked at her, through the blood that was coming down over one eye, she was gone too. She and the little table, the little lamp, the goblets of champagne.

A policeman came in and stood there before him, listening to them tell it. Nodding, head inclined judiciously.

“I’ll pay for it,” Marshall blurted out terrifiedly. “I’ll pay for it. I’ll pay double for it. Only, for God’s sake, let me go free. Don’t let him take me with him. Don’t let them lock me up, put me in jail.” And he tried to take the policeman’s coat-sleeve and pluck at it pleadingly.

“That’s up to you, are you the owner here?” the policeman said to one of the men. “It’s whatever you say; do you want to press charges?”

The owner squeezed his chin to a thoughtful, graduating point.

Marshall fumbled, brought out money, all the money he had on him, held it in palsied readiness in his hands.

“How much does one of them booth windows come to, about?” the policeman asked dubiously.

“Twenty dollars, say,” the owner estimated. “He said double, though.”

“And what about you, mister?” the policeman said to the man who’d been in the booth. “Did he hurt you in any way?”

“No,” the man stammered confusedly. “No. Just gave me a bad fright for a minute. I saw him swing it and I threw up my arm in time. I... I was just about to call my wife, tell her I was kept over. I’d be a little late. But I think maybe I’ll change my mind, go home after all...” And he turned and scuttled off.

“Give him twenty-five dollars,” the policeman growled to Marshall. And he did it for him, took it out of his hand and handed it over to the owner. “And get the hell out of here, and don’t let me catch you around again, here or anywhere else!”

Outside, the flanges on the corner lamppost said “Pine Street” and “Third Street.” But he could still hear the ghostly music from Churchill’s, all the way at Forty-ninth Street and Broadway.

3

The biggest, the heaviest hand in the whole world was on his shoulder. Bearing down, clutching him. An earthquake of a hand, shaking him. Shaking the whole world with him. Making the room he was in, the place, wherever it was, vibrate and throb and jiggle; clatter loosely and strain at the seams.

He’d always known that some day such a hand would find him out, descend upon him. For years he’d dreaded it in anticipation. He’d always known how it would feel. And now it felt just as he’d known that it would feel. The feeling of sick helplessness that it gave, he’d lived that a thousand times before.

The hand of Nemesis, it must be. The hand of reprisal, at long last. The hand of the punishing law. What else could be that heavy, that insistent in its claim?

His eyelids fluttered, and he instinctively tightened the double-armed overlapping clutch in which he held his coat, hugging the bottle that nestled upright on the inside of it, slanted against the pit of his arm.

“No,” he rebelled automatically. “No. I haven’t done anything. Let me alone. Go away.”

His eyes darted about, and he saw that he was surrounded, that he was in some sort of a police trap. They were on both sides of him. For, outside the window, a man, slowly going by, was pointing directly in at him, with an extended centrally focused forefinger that slowly moved along as he, Marshall, moved along. Grim-eyed, lantern-jawed, elderly, with whiskers and wearing a tall hat with stars around its band. “I want you!” he scowled, and his speech, strangely enough, instead of being audible took the visible form of lettering.

“All right, son. All right, son. Now how about it?” This time the speech was audible, and no lettering appeared. Marshall swung his face to that side, and looked up the forbidding blue serge uniform to the face that topped it. This was elderly too, and whiskered like the first, but it was less grim than the other, there was something more humane about it. The headgear was different too, instead of the starred top hat it had a rather slouchy kepi with a visor to it.

“How about what?” Marshall quailed.

“Have you got a ticket or haven’t you?”

Marshall shook his head; not in negation, but trying to clear it, to get the word in and absorb its meaning. “What kind?” he mumbled. “Ticket for what?”

“This is a train, boy. You’ve got to have a ticket to be on here. I don’t know what you’re doing here, I don’t know how you got on — I must have missed you the first time I came through — but if you haven’t got a ticket, you’re coming with me.”

“Train!” said Marshall, terrified, shooting his eyes this way and that. “What train? What train is this?”

And he saw that though the hand wasn’t shaking him any more, just resting heavy and inflexible on his shoulder, the creaking and the throbbing and the shuddering still kept up. The man with the starred hatband outside the window had long ago lost pace, fallen behind. There was, now, a capped figure in wooden shoes wielding a stick, with the legend “Chases dirt.”

The conductor was looking at him half in compassion, half in complete disgust.

“This is the train for New York, son.”

And he spaced each word and said it again, slow, as though he realized himself what a terrible, what a shattering thing he was saying; although he couldn’t have.

“This, is, the, train — that, takes, you, to, New York, son. Now, do you get it? All, the, way, to, New York.”

Marshall’s neck jerked abruptly, almost as though a noose had lighted about it and a trap had sprung under his feet, as if he had been hanged while sitting down; and his face went down toward his chest, and he heeled his hands to his eyes.

“New York,” he winced, like a man who has just incautiously caught a glimpse of hell and seared his eyes with it. “New York.”

“How’d you happen to get on here, if you didn’t know that?” the conductor asked him curiously.

Marshall uncovered his eyes again, and looked at him helplessly. “I’ve been wanting to do it. I guess I went ahead and did do it, without knowing it.” And scouring his hair with his hand, he mumbled to himself, “Been having so many of these bad dreams, lately. But every time one ends, I’m back in that faraway town again.”

“Well, we carried you this far without payment; I’m afraid you’ll have to come back rear with me, hear what they’re going to say about it.” And the restraining hand, which had relented for the time being and quitted his shoulder, poised itself to descend once more.

He kept watching it askance, with a sort of horror, his neck acutely twisted to do so. As if that in itself, the return of that hand, would be the sum total of calamity.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t. Can’t I... can’t you sell me a ticket?”

“Can if you’ve got the money to pay for it,” said the conductor drily.

“How much will it take?”

“All the way to New York, day coach all the way.” The conductor was looking it up, to make sure. “Forty-four seventy-five.”

He fumbled with his money so hectically that it seemed to sprout up loose between his two hands, and several bills jumped to the floor between his feet, and over the seat to the aisle.

The conductor helped him retrieve them, helped him count a part of it. “Take your time. Don’t want you to lose any of it now. I’ve got twenty-two here.”

“And I’ve got thirty here!” Marshall discovered ecstatically.

“You’ve got a ticket, son,” the conductor nodded magnanimously.

Marshall exhaled deeply and went limp against the seat back.

The two wings of his coat had come apart, and the bottle lay semirevealed, coddled against his shirt.

“Reckon I understand how it all came about,” the conductor remarked shrewdly, without appearing to lift his eyes at all. “Here’s your ticket, son. I’ll have the change for you next time through. Sure you want to go there, now?”

“I have to do this till the dream ends,” Marshall told him with the utmost simplicity. “Just follow it through, sort of.”

“Better let me have that. I’ll get rid of it for you,” the conductor whispered, and winked, and smuggled the empty bottle up under his own jacket.

“Can I get another?” Marshall asked him with desperate urgency. “Where can I get another? I can’t make it — I’ll never make it — without another bottle.”

“Probably get yourself one in K. C., we’ll be in there in another hour and there’s a forty-minute layover in the station.”

“I don’t want to get off. I’m afraid I’d never get back on again. Can’t you get it for me? Here, I’ll give you this. You keep what’s over.” He crushed a bill into his hand.

“Well, we ain’t supposed to. It’s against the regulations. But you seem to be in some kind of mix-up. And you don’t ’pear to be the loud kind. Stay out in the vestibule, where nobody’ll notice you, and where I can keep on eye on you. Don’t go into none of the cars where there are women and children. When you take a swig, take it from under your coat, like you’ve been doing. I’ll try to slip you one while we’re standing still in K. C.”

“Thanks,” Marshall whispered fervently. “Thanks.”

“I don’t aim to preach,” the conductor told him half sorrowfully, “but it’s a shame, a young fellow your age. Better think it over, when you get to New York.”

“When will the dream end, this time?” Marshall asked him, with a sort of pleading concern.

“What dream, son?”

“The dream that I’m on the train, the train to New York.”

“Grand Central, son. Lower level. ’Leven ’clock tomorrow night.”

4

The train had died. Every train dies at the end of every journey. The train was dead now, and lying in its coffin: the station.

Its passengers were gone. The platform was empty, and the cars were drained of all life, and their lights were for the most part already turned off. Just here and there, for safety’s sake, one had been left on. Wanly revealing empty seats and ghostly passageways.

The friendly conductor knocked on the door. “Better come out of there now, son. Have to be getting off.”

The door opened and Marshall came out, looking very pale.

“Everybody’s off already,” the conductor said. “Thought maybe you might have fallen asleep, or something.”

“I’ve been awake since Harmon,” Marshall said.

“What’d you do with the bottles?” the conductor asked him.

“I slipped them under the leather seat there.”

“I’ll have to get them out of the way,” the conductor said. Then he looked at him. “Can you walk?” he said.

“I’m not drunk,” Marshall said. “I tried hard enough, but I’m not drunk.”

He started down the empty aisle, pawing the seat tops one by one.

“Here, let me give you a hand,” the conductor said. “You’re my responsibility until I can get you off of here. That’s the last time I ever—”

“Thanks for everything,” Marshall said.

When they came to the lip of the vestibule, just before the top step, Marshall drew back involuntarily, and bunched his shoulders together as if he were cold, and defensively turned up his collar in back.

“This is it,” he said.

“This is it, all right,” the conductor agreed.

“It smells sort of cold,” Marshall said. “It smells like a tomb.”

“Go ’head, it won’t bite you,” the conductor chuckled. “Don’t take so long; I’ve got to be on my way too, you know. If you didn’t want to come here, why did you come here?”

“I thought it was just another dream,” Marshall said. “But the joke’s on me.”

“No, you ain’t drunk,” the conductor said caustically. “In a different kind of way, maybe.”

Yes, I’m drunk, Marshall thought. Drunk with fear.

The conductor armed him down the steps of the narrow, chutelike car exit. “Up that way,” he indicated.

“I know,” Marshall agreed. “Up that way. New York.”

The conductor watched him straighten himself, get the feel of the ground.

“You all right, now? Think you’ll be able to make it, now?”

“I’m all right,” Marshall said. “Sure, I’m all right.”

The conductor watched him take the first steps, like a father anxiously watching a child just beginning to learn to walk.

“Know where you want to go?”

“Yes,” said Marshall. “I know where I’m going.”

“Well, good luck,” the conductor said, with a downward slice of his arm, as though he were a dispatcher sending the train off.

“Wish it to me over again,” Marshall said, without turning his head. “You can never have enough of that.”

He went up the long platform, all alone. As you go through life — all alone. Without any baggage, without even any outer coat, with nothing, just a long shadow spilling out behind him. As you go through life — without any baggage, with nothing. Looking so small, so lost, between the long rows of empty, blinded cars. As you go through life — so small, so lost.

He went up the ramp — to meet New York.

5

It was nighttime in New York when he came out of the station. He looked up and the sky was black over the town, like a lid crammed down on a smoking cauldron. No stars, no anything like that. Stars over New York? They knew better than to waste their time over such a place. It had its own, crawling like gilded lice all over its serrated scalp.

It was too late to go to her tonight, too late to go to her house right now, from the station. He was her husband, and she was his wife, but it was too late to go to her house, to seek her out tonight. He’d only frighten, shock, or maybe alienate her. And then the way he looked, sleepless from the train, clothes unchanged, liquor still in his bloodstream if not in his brain. Tomorrow, the first thing tomorrow; tonight, a bed some place. Any bed, any place.

It was so big, so cavernous. It gave you vertigo. Shoals of lighted taxis went by, like regimented fireflies executing precision maneuvers. And their horns went squawk, squonk, squonk, squa-a-awk. An El train flashed across the air like a flaming concertina, the next block down, at Third, with a sound like somebody playing the kettledrums.

He didn’t even know how to walk any more in crowds; he’d lost the New York knack. He kept trying to give way, as you did in other places. But as he did that on one side, he kept colliding on the other. He was buffeted along.

He shivered. It was so big, it was so dangerous. He couldn’t stay here very long. He’d have to get out again as quickly as he could. Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow he could persuade her to start back with him. Take the night train back with him to... to... to where it wasn’t New York.

Just this one night. He’d have to shave first, he’d have to do something about his clothes. He’d make himself look good, then he’d go to her...

There was one right across the street, the Belmont, but he couldn’t go there. He walked east a block, and then up a couple, and found one there, on Third Avenue, and bought a room for a dollar. The kind of place where they gave you a key and let you find the room yourself.

“Davis,” he put down for a name, in their book.

He locked the door on the inside first, before he even put on the light. He struck a match, and found the tap, and found a tumbler, and filled it and drank from it, without caring whether it was foul or not. (It’s not half so foul as my insides, it occurred to him.)

Every few minutes, regularly, the whole room seemed to burst into flame, as an El train roared by right on the other side of the windowpane. And then the fire went out, and the room was still uncharred.

He took off his coat and his shoes, for the first time since leaving that faraway town.

Then he pulled down the shade, and he sat there peeping out at the side of it. Peeping out at New York.

The enemy, the bad place, the trap.

The mouse was within the trap, but it wasn’t caught yet. The way out was still open behind it.

6

How strange, he thought, to deck yourself out like this for a wife of two years’ standing. As though she were a strange sweetheart you were courting.

Some people, he realized, might have thought it pathetic, pitiful. He didn’t. He thought of it as good strategy. He was, he intended, using the only weapon he really had, her love for him. And to help that along all he could, he had to make its object, himself, as attractive to her as possible. She had to see him as she first had seen him, not as she last had seen him.

He kept feeling his newly razored cheeks, as if to make sure they were smooth enough for her. He traced the back of his neck, to make sure the man had trimmed it just right.

He took out his handkerchief, and though he had only just had his shoes shined, he dusted their tops off all over again.

He bought a new shirt. He even bought a new tie.

“No,” he said to the salesman’s preferred selection, “no stripes. My wife likes solid colors, in a man’s tie. And I’m wearing it for her.”

He put on the new shirt right there in the haberdashery, behind a mirrored partition. He put on the new tie. He came out with it left loose and had the salesman knot it for him. “I never was very good at that,” he said. “She used to do it for me. Give me a good one, that’ll stay in place.”

He bought her flowers; two dozen fresh young roses, just beginning to open.

There wasn’t anything else he could think of, to make her love him more.

Then, outwardly confident, inwardly trembling and agonized, he hailed a taxi and got in.

“Seventy-ninth, just west of Madison,” he said. “I’ll show you the house when we get there.”

7

They still had the same servants, apparently, as during his courtship days. He recognized the man who came to open the door, Cochrane, but if the man recognized him, he made it difficult to determine.

“Good afternoon,” he said neutrally.

“Is Mrs. Marshall in?” Marshall asked. He couldn’t move past him as unhesitatingly as he’d intended to, because the man wasn’t adroit enough in getting out of his way.

“Mrs. Marshall?” Cochrane acted surprised.

“My wife,” said Marshall, a trifle impatiently. “You remember me, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course, sir,” the man said drily. “But Miss— Mrs. Marshall isn’t staying here at the house with us.”

The roses went down like a flag about to be lowered in defeat.

“She isn’t? Well, where can I find her? Where is she staying?” As a suspicious afterthought flitted through his mind, he gave it voice. “Are you quite sure of that? Or were you just told to say that?”

The man took no umbrage. “I’m quite sure, sir. She visits here quite regularly, but she has an apartment somewhere downtown.”

“Could you tell me where it is?” said Marshall, choking down a rising resentment at what he took to be a premeditated evasiveness.

“Mr. Worth would know, of course, sir...” the man said uncertainly.

“Well, is he in?”

“You missed him by half an hour. He’s gone to his club. I could ring him there for you, sir, and find out. Shall I do that?”

“No,” said Marshall with asperity, “don’t ring him. Don’t ring anybody at all. There must be somebody in this house that knows my wife’s address. Or is it just because you’re not sure she’d approve your giving it out to me? I happen to be her husband, after all.”

“No, sir,” said the man guilelessly, “it isn’t a question of that at all. It’s just that I don’t happen to know it myself, and Mr. Worth isn’t here at the moment. I’ll see if Mrs. Davis knows, or one of the others. Would you care to step inside and wait?”

“I’ll wait out here where I am,” said Marshall stonily.

He didn’t want anything to do with her house. He only wanted her.

Cochrane reopened the heavy iron-grilled glass door after several moments and offered him a card.

“Mrs. Davis found it for you, sir. It’s on Fifty-fourth Street, she has the exact house number on here. The telephone is—”

“I don’t need that,” said Marshall, curtly turning away. “I’m not a stranger.”

8

There was a myopic moment in which the whole world was a blind, white-painted wooden panel. Nothing more than that, before his eyes. And his heartbeats seemed to swell and throb against it, playing the part his hand and the knocker should have played between them. While he held his hat in one hand, the paper cone of flowers poignantly head-down in the other. Suppliant. Abject.

Knowing that this was the turning point of his whole life. That nothing that had gone before had counted as this did, that nothing that would come after would count as this did. Praying. Give her back to me. Let me have her back. I can’t go on without her.

Then he heard her step draw near. Then the knob turned. Then the blind wood panel fell away. Then the whole world was her face, there close before him. The most beautiful world any man could see. The complete world: the sun, the moon, the stars, all in one. The shield against loneliness. The buffer against weariness. The balm against pain. The face that in every man’s life is a little glimpse of God, perhaps the only one he’ll ever be given. The face of the girl that is his wife.

So familiar, yet so strange.

The soft lips he’d kissed a thousand times, but parted taut as he’d never seen them before. The eyes that had wept for him, smiled for him, planned with him, hoped with him, but startled now as he had never seen them before, too much of their whites showing.

Her breath faltered and she couldn’t find full voice. She whispered. “You’re in—?”

“I’m here in New York.”

“Oh, Press,” she breathed. And yet it could almost have been taken for a crushed remonstrance.

“Won’t you open your door?” he pleaded. “Won’t you let me come in?”

She swept it instantly to its full width; but that came after his plea, not before. “Of course I’ll let you come in,” she said. “When wouldn’t I want you to?” But it was said half sadly, he thought, rather than happily.

She closed it.

“Let me look at you,” he said tenderly.

She stood there to let him look.

“You haven’t changed,” he said yearningly. “You couldn’t; you were so perfect already. Have I?”

She dropped her eyes, then raised them. “No,” she said. She didn’t smile with it. Was that a victory? He wondered.

“Why did you do this?” He gestured. “Come down here.”

“I didn’t have to hear the questions that — they didn’t ask,” she said reticently.

So she hadn’t told them.

“It’s not bad, at that,” he said. He hated it.

“Sheila Abbott was giving it up. I don’t know if you remember her or not. She was one of the bridesma—” She stopped a second, then said, “I took it from her the way it was.”

He went over to put his hat down, on a sort of Louis XVI commode she had there, light-blue lacquer and gilt. He picked a piece of paper up, then put it down again. “Lansing, Rector—,” it said, and then some numerals, in her writing.

He tried to make himself sound casual about it. “Have you been seeing much of him since you’re here?”

“Not much of anyone,” she said tonelessly. “He called once, and I promised to call him back, and — that’s been there ever since.” Then she said with a sort of wearied gratitude, “He’s a tactful sort of person. Doesn’t make himself obtrusive. I’ve always liked that about him.”

But the paper shouldn’t have stayed there that long, he thought. Well, in San Francisco, it won’t make any difference.

“Here,” he said diffidently. “I brought you these.”

She unrolled the paper from the flowers, and they flushed out, umbrellalike, spreading in her hands.

Then she took them rather quickly to a table and put them down on that, without offering, he saw, to put her face close to them and smell them.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.

She didn’t answer. But then he knew without her telling him. The color. He hadn’t thought of that. They were red.

He closed his eyes in the pain she’d just given him.

She seemed, when next he looked at her, at a loss, oddly restrained, even awkward; a thing he’d never yet known her to be, with him, with anyone.

“I’d like to — I don’t know what to offer—” she said. “I don’t keep any liquor here, as Father does at home. As a matter of fact, there aren’t even any facilities for making tea. I’ve been having to take my meals out. But wait, I think there may be some of Sheila’s left-over cigarettes in one of these boxes. She’s been taking up smoking, you know, lately...”

He shook his head, not in negation, but harassedly, almost distractedly, giving it full swings from side to side.

“How can we sit here like this! How can we! Like two strangers in a room, offering each other tea and cigarettes, and a hundred thousand miles away! What’s happened?”

He jumped up and darted over to her, and caught her two hands in his two, from where they had lain, at her sides.

“Marjorie, take me back into your heart. Open the door. Oh, not that door of wood. The door, the door between us. I’m outside. I’m in the rain...”

And on his knees before her, like a worshipper at a shrine, he sent up his appeal.

“I’m cold, I’m hungry. Look at me; I’m the boy you loved, I’m the boy you picked. Look into my face, and tell me that I can’t come in—!”

“Oh, I was afraid of this,” she said, half to herself, “I’ve been dreading it, I knew it was going to come sooner or later. Don’t,” she begged him. “Don’t. You have my pity already. Pity for you, and pity for me. Get up. I haven’t anything else left to give you.”

She strove until she’d drawn her hands away and freed them. And deftly moved herself away from him, withdrew.

He was left there stranded, with nothing to kneel to any more, nothing near enough, ludicrousness added to his abasement.

He rose at last, lamely.

“What am I going to do?” he asked her. “Without you? What?”

“Can’t you see? Why must I tell you? You’ve come this far. You’re here now. Go the rest of the way. Go to them.”

“To them?” he said aghast.

“What other way is there to end it? What other way can it end? Isn’t it better than going on like this? Why didn’t you do it in time, why didn’t you do it long ago, while you still had my— Press, there is only one right in this and only one wrong. It has to be paid for, it can’t be kept hidden. Tell them the story as it happened. As you’ve told it to me. That this girl hounded you, up to the very day of your marriage, threatened your whole happiness. They’re only men, they’re only human, they’ll be lenient. They may agree to a — to a second-degree count. It was unpremeditated, it was in a fit of passion. And even if they punish you a little for it, Press, that punishment ends, this kind never does. You’ve asked me what to do, and now I’ve told you. We’ll help you. We’ll stand by you. Father will get you a good lawyer. We won’t turn our backs on you. I can’t promise you love any more, Press. But I can promise you not to make any final decision until you’re freed of this terrible thing, until it’s out of the way. And I can promise to respect you.” And very low she amended, “Which is something I don’t do now.”

He kept staring at her with something akin to horror.

“A second-degree count?” he whispered. “You don’t know what you’re saying at all. I can’t hope for that, I can’t, don’t you understand? I didn’t tell you all of it that night.” And he groaned abysmally. “Do I have to tell you everything? Do I have to stand here naked before you? The girl wasn’t the only one. There were two more after her. That’s why we left so quickly. A man in a boat, I never knew his name. Wise — that was me...”

She seemed about to double up momentarily, as though a violent pang had assailed her in the stomach. And her hand, pasted palm-out across her forehead, added credibility to the illusion.

She took a staggering, nauseated step or two that brought her to the commode, and held her hands clamped tight to the forward edge of it. She looked down intently.

Instantly he saw his mistake. Instantly he saw what it had done. Instantly he saw that he had lost her irrevocably now, pushed himself beyond the pale. That if there had been a chance before this, now there was none, no chance at all. And frightened — he had always been so quick to take fright — he tried to hold her to him, where she was and as she was, to keep from losing her. And she in turn, taking fright from his fright, abandoned him even quicker, receded all the more and with an added haste. As a frantic beating of the water, in attempt to reach an unmanned boat, sends the boat even further off.

Not physical as yet, this play and counterplay, still of the reason; still spiritual, the bonds that he tried to reaffirm while she severed and escaped them.

“Don’t come to me now with flowers,” she cried out in a hurried frightened voice. “Don’t come to me now with kisses. I didn’t marry you. You’re not the man I was married to. He died in the dark, in our bedroom that night, in the faraway town. Or else he never lived at all, only in my own imagination. I was married to a ghost, an illusion. How can I go back to you? There never was a you, as I thought you were. You kill people.”

“It isn’t true, it isn’t true. Now is the lie, then wasn’t. You knew my arms, I knew your kisses and you knew mine, I knew your body and you knew mine. You can’t tear yourself away from me now, you’re tearing the living flesh apart.”

And went to her and took her in his arms and turned her to him.

“Words can’t change it, can’t change us. There aren’t words in the whole world strong enough. Give me a chance. Look, I’ll show you.” And with throbbing lips, found hers, and tried to hold them. And failed, and tried again. “Was our love a he? Was our love an illusion?”

“No, don’t. For two years you drugged me that way, with those lips. The drug’s worn off, I can see what they’re bringing me now. They’re not bringing me kisses. They’re bringing me the smell of death.”

And then he sealed the kiss. And with it sealed his own fate.

It was the spark to the tinder of her hysteria. He had pushed her too much. He had frightened her beyond recovery. In a moment he didn’t know her. She was rabid. There was nothing there to reason with any longer.

“Murderer,” she panted, straining to tear her face away. “Don’t come near me. You’re all covered with... I’ll call the police!”

And now it was his fright that kindled itself from hers, and they were both lost.

He sought to seal her mouth with his hand.

“Stop, Marjorie. Marjorie, stop. I’m your husband. Look at me. Don’t say those things...”

And now she had reached the point of screams, he could feel them blasting hot against his hand, and if he took his hand away they would wing out. He couldn’t hold them much longer, couldn’t hold them much longer.

There was a better, an easier place, to stop them, further down.

His hand shifted.

His love story came to an end.

9

Lying there now, side by side upon the floor, like lovers in a vain embrace. Speaking to her, pleading to her, making his love to her, without avail. One-sided love to a sudden indifference, where there had never been indifference before. Her face had an absent-minded expression; drowsy, dull-witted, dead.

“Let me hear your voice again. Just say one word, just say my name. ‘Press.’ I can almost hear the echo of it now. Ah, call me ‘Press’ again, call me ‘Press.’ ” And putting his ear close to her recalcitrant lips, seemed to drink it up privately from there. “Louder. Louder than that. So that I can be quite sure. I know you said it just then, I heard it in my heart, but say it beyond all dispute. Say ‘Press, you didn’t hurt me.’ Say ‘Press, you should be ashamed, now help me up.’ Louder, louder than that. I can’t hear it well yet.

“Let me see your eyes again. Look this way. Look at me, look at me. What do you see over there? Turn them, turn them to me. Make them warm again. Make them dance again with those little specks of sunny stuff that used to be in them. Oh, I can’t stand it without your eyes, Marjorie.”

And taking her hand, as if teaching it, as if reminding it, caused it to caress him, drawing it lightly, lingeringly down the side of his face. And put it to his lips and held them to it, on this side, on that, now back again. But his kiss didn’t warm it any, nor cause it to stir in response.

Indifference; indifference for all time, for all eternity now. Never again to change.

He stopped and looked at it, her hand.

“You took it off,” he said in tender accusation. “You shouldn’t have, you shouldn’t.”

And rising, left her for a moment and went to look for it. And found it soon, almost as though he’d known, in a little trinket box within a bureau drawer. Came back with it, and knelt beside her, and in a ghastly repetition of their wedding vows, the living marrying the dead, replaced the wedding band upon her finger. Where it once had rested in such bright hope and promise, such trust and faith and selfless devotion. And tears of the irreparable streaming from his eyes, repeated once again the words that made them one.

“I, Prescott, take thee, Marjorie, to my lawful wedded wife... To have and to hold... To love and to cherish... In sickness and in health... Until death do us part...

“And beyond— And beyond— And beyond—”

And as his voice swelled toward agonized screams, he had to stifle it with the back of his hand, until blood had joined the tears that coursed down it.

Then he had to leave her at last. For there was nothing there. Nothing that heard nor heeded, nor cared nor loved. He’d been trying to marry himself to empty space.

Alone. Alone now, in the dark. Forever alone, forever in the dark.

Never again Marjorie.

And staggering, swimming through mazes of pain and fear, like someone breasting a tide while he treads erect on his feet underwater, his after-life began.

To the telephone. Remembering another time, long ago. Someone who had helped him. Memory is long.

Took the piece of paper. Spoke from it to the telephone.

And then Lansing’s voice, out somewhere in the world of light.

“Hello. Who’s this?”

“Prescott... Marshall.”

“Press! When did you get in town?”

Trying to come up through the layers of fog and darkness, to reality, to the upper world, where that voice was; like a drowned man’s body trying to come up to the surface of the water from its smothered depths. Looking at that empty place over there. At that empty face that he knew wasn’t there. Warning himself, craftily, ‘I must not tell him, or he may not come. He may not come alone, and to help me he must come alone.’

He said with slow care: “I... have to... see you.” And took a breath between each word or two, to see the next pair through.

“Why sure. I’m working right now. But look, how about us having dinner tonight?”

The fool. He thought it was just a plea for sociability.

He looked at her and closed his eyes in woe. She shouldn’t look so clear, so plainly seen, in a place where she wasn’t any more. It was like a decalcomania pattern left on the carpet, in her own exact image. Too exact. It had to be erased.

“It can’t wait... until tonight. I have to see you... now. I have to see you... quickly.”

“You sound... Are you in trouble?”

No answer, so the stupid voice tried to provide one, out of its own scant fund of knowledge.

“Look, Press, if it’s money— Why don’t you let me know now about how much you could use; that way I won’t have to come out, and then make an extra trip back to the office again to get it for you. I’ll bring something right with me, if you’ll—”

“Don’t stop to bring any money. Just come to me.”

“All right, I’ll go down and jump in a cab, that’d be the quickest. Now, where do you want to make it? Where’ll I meet you?”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” said Marshall with haunted simplicity, “outside the door of Marjorie’s apartment. You’ll find me there. All by myself.”

10

Afraid to go back inside again, and yet afraid to go away and leave the place, he stood leaning there against the outside of the closed door, in a state of erect collapse. A hand desperately pressing against the doorframe on each side of him, as though to ward off intrusion, discovery, just by being there.

He was like that when the top of Lansing’s head slowly came up above floor level, over by the stairwell. He greeted it with an infantile whimper of delight. The way a lost child greets someone who has come to retrieve him. He’d never been so glad to see anything before, as the top of that other man’s head. No sight of Marjorie, in all the years he’d loved her, had ever been as precious, been as dear. The instinct to live is greater than the instinct to love.

And then Lansing’s shoulders, and then Lansing’s back. Marshall was panting with eagerness, the way a puppy does when its owner has returned within its confused, limited ken.

A cartoonist would have drawn, for his eye sockets, brief circumflex accent marks, they were so creased, so elevated, in delight. They could have stood for crying, they could have stood for laughing; they stood for rapture.

Lansing made the turn of the banister and then saw him.

“Press,” he said in surprise, but no more than casual, conversational surprise, as when any two meet unexpectedly, anywhere at any time. And went on over toward him, hand extended. Reached down and found Marshall’s, and clasped it in one-sided greeting. “Press,” he said again.

Marshall’s lips opened and closed, twice, over idiot silence.

“What is it, can’t you get in? Does Marjorie know you’re out here?”

All Marshall could do at that was give his head a mute, shuddering shake and let it dangle over remorsefully, chin to chest.

Lansing edged him a little out of the way, to gain clearance.

Then suddenly he’d done a horrible thing. A simple thing. A thing that was both at once: simply horrible.

He knocked on the door. Knocked on the door of the dead.

Marshall’s features shriveled, as though a needle had gone into him somewhere.

He put his hands up and found his ears with them, to keep the sound out. Lansing had already repeated it just then.

“Don’t,” Marshall pleaded, in a broken whisper. “She can’t hear you.” He spiraled around and pressed his brow against the wall, arms hanging down now at loose ends beside him.

Lansing shot him a look, his hands went for the knob. The door crunched and he’d gone in.

Marshall rolled back again, the other way around, face outward to the stairs, and stayed that way. All loose in the joints, and yet remaining upright.

His mouth was shaped into a curious wizened scowl; the grimace just preceding tears, but the tears never came.

He couldn’t look in. He couldn’t seem to turn his head and look in, to see what Lansing was doing in there, although the opening was just at his shoulder.

Finally Lansing was beside him again. Had come out to the threshold again. Marshall didn’t look to see what his face was like. He only knew that it was there, somewhere a little rearward of his own.

“Who did it?”

Marshall’s lower lip bubbled. The wizened grimace continued. The tears never came.

“You?”

The lip kept flickering. Like a loosened lip borne down by the weight of the words on it. But no words came.

No words were needed.

A hot, windy little gust, as from an unheard sob, fanned past Marshall’s deadened cheek. From a sob that hadn’t been his.

“I don’t know what to do,” somebody whispered forlornly, close by. “I don’t know what to do.” And it must have been Lansing, for it hadn’t been he.

Then, blurredly, a figure moved out past him, turned to go toward the stairs. His eyes followed it inanely for a second or two, as though not understanding what it was, or why it moved, or where to.

Then, as if at least the first of these had been recalled to him if not the others, he spoke to it.

“Lance,” he said, benumbed. “Where you going?”

“Downstairs, to the street,” Lansing said. “See if I can find someone. A policeman.”

“Don’t,” Marshall cried out sharply. That at least had penetrated, that word. “Let me get out of here first, at least.”

He made a sudden bolt, came up against Lansing’s arms, flounderingly. Lansing’s arms were suddenly a rigid, inflexible bar across the passage, from wall to stair rail. He recoiled from them.

“There’s no way out, this way.”

“The street! The street’s down there!”

“There’s no way out, this way.”

Marshall took a faltering, rearward step.

Suddenly he turned and plunged the other way, toward the ascending arm at the other end.

He wasn’t quick enough. Fear is quick, but there must be some things that are quicker. Again Lansing was before him, breast to breast, again his arms were locked like steel from side to side.

“Nor this way either.”

“The roof! The roofs up there! I can go over it—”

“Nor this way either.”

“But what other way is there? W-what are you doing to me?”

“There’s only one way out, for you.” His eyes flicked to the door, beyond which no one lived now. “In there.”

Marshall turned and saw it, and then he turned again, and tried to cling to Lansing’s coat revers.

“Lance, let me get out, let me get out! In Christ’s name, let me get out!”

“I am. I’m trying to. But you won’t.”

“But that’s just a room, in there. All closed up. It has no—”

“That’s the only way out, for you. The only way there is.”

“I don’t know what you want me to—”

Then suddenly he understood. And all his fears of years and years came to a head on his face and burst like a great white pustule, and he was nothing but a mass of rotten, tainted fright.

“I don’t know how... I don’t know how to go about it...”

“She didn’t either. You showed her.”

“I was your friend...” He had instinct enough to use the past tense, at least. “Don’t you remember, I was your friend—”

“You looked like a man. How was I to know? You would have fooled anyone. You even fooled her.” He was past the point of even raising his voice, Lansing.

“I can’t — cold like this. Oh, give me an hour more. An hour to... to get used to the idea. Until tonight, at least. Tonight, only until tonight.”

“It’s night already. You’ve made it night for all of us. For her. For you.” And almost inaudibly he added, “And for me.”

“I don’t know how,” Marshall moaned. He shrank away from him, sidling his back along the wall.

“It’s easy. So easy.” Lansing moved toward him. His hands went out. Marshall shrank still farther, but their reach overtook him. But Lansing didn’t strike, or throttle, or offer to assail him with them. Instead, like a friend trying to help someone with the details of his appearance, he did something with the knot of Marshall’s necktie. Slid it downward, until suddenly it had disintegrated, there was no knot any more. Then drew the tie out from under its ensconcing collar, until it had fallen, in a woolen puddle, into the hollow of his own hand, held below to catch it. And then he pressed it, coiled like that, into Marshall’s hand. And taking the boneless fingers, closed them over it, so that they had to hold it, had to keep it, whether they wanted to or not.

Then he gave him a parting salute, gave him for gesture what was his due; said farewell to him in the way that he esteemed him. He wiped his own hand slowly down his side, as if to cleanse it of the soilure of the touch it had just been forced to meet.

Marshall was looking down at the tie now in horror, as though he held a snake there in his grasp, and couldn’t let it go.

“I’ll be down at the door,” Lansing promised him in a leaden voice. “I’ll stand there, and I won’t go away. I’ll never leave that door. And in five or ten minutes, I’ll come back up here again. I’ll come back up here, with a policeman. You can meet him — any way you want. That’s up to you.”

“Five or ten minutes is such a short time — to live—” Marshall whispered brokenly. “Such a little time...”

“It’s five or ten minutes more than she had,” Lansing reminded him. And then he added, with a contempt that was both lethal and yet at the same time almost detached, “What do you want to live for, anyway? I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

He walked away from him. He made the turn of the rail. He started down the stairs.

Marshall never moved.

Heavy, broken, dull of heart and of purpose, Lansing went down, step by slow succeeding step. Like a man going nowhere, like a man going to meet the empty years of the rest of his life.

“God forgive me,” Marshall breathed with a shudder.

“No man ever would,” Lansing answered bitterly.

Their eyes met for the last time; from below to above, from above to below.

Marshall never moved. The stray end of his own necktie dangled lifeless from his frozen fist.

Sight was exchanged between them for the last time. And then each died, for the other, and was gone.

Lansing’s head disappeared below the floor level.

Somewhere up above him, unseen, a door closed with a sudden fling of finality. As if it were never going to open again. Like the door of a life, suddenly closing on it, ending it.

Lansing went on down, step by lifeless step, into the barren, bottomless future that awaited him. Without love, without hope, without Marjorie.

11

The policeman came down to the street door for a moment, afterwards, and looked out at him, while he was waiting for his superiors to arrive and take charge.

“You were right,” the policeman said to him. “I didn’t believe you, but you were right. There’s two of them up there, both dead. A woman lying on the floor. A man hanging by his necktie from the clothes rod in the closet.”

And that’s what it boils down to, thought Lansing, nodding to himself. A woman lying on the floor. A man hanging in the closet. Just a woman. Just a man. Any woman. Any man. As though they never knew each other. As though they never loved. How can the dead love the dead, anyway?

“What a hell of a thing to do,” the policeman said.

Why call it that, wondered Lansing. What is hell, anyway? What an earthly thing to do, why not put it that way?

The policeman took out a pencil and a little notebook. “Did you know them both?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Lansing, “I knew them both...”

I loved her from the time she was fifteen. From the time there first was any love, I loved her. You don’t have to say “love” and “Marjorie,” use separate words. Both words were always she to me.

I loved her from the first few kid parties we went to together, the stiff little dances we danced in each other’s arms. She was so pretty then, a pink bow in her hair, a pink sash at her waist. How did she turn into that thing that’s lying upstairs there now? Is that what little girls become? Is that what the little boys who love them can look forward to?

I loved her too much. That’s the whole story. My story.

I just stood by. All her life, I just stood by. Waiting for her to turn my way. And she never turned. He came along. I just stood by. I saw him take her away from me. I just stood by. Now she’s dead upstairs. And I’m still just standing by.

Because I loved her too much. Too much to try to take her away from the happiness I thought she had found.

When you love a little, you can be brave, you can be selfish. You come first, the loved one second. But when you love too much, it makes you a coward. You’re afraid of hurting the thing you love.

He didn’t kill her, I did. I killed the one I loved.

“...Yes,” he said to the policeman, “I knew them both.”

“Stick around,” the policeman told him. “They’ll want to talk to you when they get here. I’ve got to go back upstairs.”

“Yes, I’ll stick around,” Lansing promised. I’ve stuck around all my life. That’s all I’ve ever done, is stick around. I guess I can stick around the little while longer there is.

He stood there alone, by the doorway, in the dusk. Dead already. As dead as they were upstairs. All three of them were dead now; the triangle had been solved. Only, his was the kind of death that doesn’t show. His was the kind of death that takes years, it is so slow. The death of the heart.

Far off somewhere, down on the next block, an organ-grinder was playing in the twilight. The wistful, lonely notes seemed to come from some other time, far away and long ago; as though they had been sounded years ago and only found their way to earshot now, lost all the while somewhere in between.

His head slowly drooped forward, and his buried heart in its grave seemed to say the words over to itself, echoing in its emptiness.