copper.
One day in July he took the small gray strongbox from his closet. Unlocking it on his desk, he took out the newspaper clippings about Dorothy's murder. He tore them into small pieces and dropped them into the wastebasket. He did the same with the clippings on Ellen and Powell. Then he took out the Kingship Copper pamphlets; he had written away for them a second time when he started to go with Ellen. As his hands gripped them, ready to tear, he smiled ruefully. Dorothy, Ellen...
It was like thinking 'Faith, Hope...'
'Charity' pops into the mind to fulfill the sequence.
Dorothy, Ellen... Marion.
He smiled at himself and gripped the pamphlets again.
But he found that he couldn't tear them. Slowly he put them down on the desk, mechanically smoothing the creases his hands had made.
He pushed the strongbox and the pamphlets to the back of the desk and sat down. He headed a sheet of paper Marion and divided it into two columns with a vertical line. He headed one column Pro; the other Con.
There were so many things to list under Pro: months of conversations with Dorothy, months of conversations with Ellen; all studded with passing references to Marion; her likes, her dislikes, her opinions, her past. He knew her like a book without even having met her; lonely, bitter, living alone... A perfect set-up.
Emotion was on the Pro side too. Another chance. Hit a home run and the two strikes that preceded it are washed away. And three was the lucky number... third time lucky... all the childhood fairy tales with the third try and the third wish and the third suitor...
He couldn't think of a thing to list under Con.
That night he tore up the Pro and Con list and began another one, of Marion Kingship's characteristics, opinions, likes and dislikes. He made several notations and, in the weeks that followed, added regularly to the list. In every spare moment he pushed his mind back to conversations with Dorothy and Ellen; conversations in luncheonettes, between classes, while walking, while dancing; dredging words, phrases and sentences up from the pool of his memory. Sometimes he spent entire evenings flat on his back, remembering, a small part of his mind probing the larger, less conscious part like a Geiger counter that clicked on Marion.
As the list grew, Ms spirits swelled. Sometimes he would take the paper from the strongbox even when he had nothing to add,-just to admire it; the keenness, the planning, the potence displayed. It was almost as good as having the clippings on Dorothy and Ellen.
'You're crazy,' he told himself aloud one day, looking at the list. 'You're a crazy nut,' he said affectionately. He didn't really think that; he thought he was daring, audacious, brilliant, intrepid and bold.
'I'm not going back to school,' he told his mother one day in August.
'What?' She stood small and thin in the doorway of his room, one hand frozen in mid-passage over her straggly gray hair.
'I'm going to New York in a few weeks.'
'You got to finish school' she said plaintively. He was silent. 'What is it, you got a job in New York?'
'I don't but I'm going to get one. I've got an idea I want to work on. A-a project, sort of.'
'But you got to finish school, Bud,' she said hesitantly.
'I don't 'got to' do anything!' he snapped. There was silence. 'If mis idea flops, which I don't think it will, I can always finish school next year.'
Her hands wiped the front of her housedress nervously. 'But, you're past twenty-five. You got to- have to finish school and get yourself started someplace. You can't keep-'
'Look, will you just let me live my own life?'
She stared at him. 'That's what your father used to give me,' she said quietly, and went away.
He stood by his desk for a few moments, hearing the angry clanking of cutlery in the kitchen sink. He picked up a magazine and looked at it, pretending he didn't care.
A few minutes later he went into the kitchen. His mother was at the sink, her back towards him. 'Mom,' he said pleadingly, 'you know I'm as anxious as you are to see myself get someplace.' She didn't turn around. 'You know I wouldn't quit school if this idea wasn't something important' He went over and sat down at the table, facing her back. 'If it doesn't work, I'll finish school next year. I promise I will, Mom.'
Reluctantly, she turned. 'What kind of idea is it?' she asked slowly. 'An invention?'
'No. I can't tell you,' he said regretfully. 'It's only in the-the planning stage. I'm sorry...'
She sighed and wiped her hands on a towel. 'Can't it wait till next year? When you'd be through with school?'
'Next year might be too late, Mom.'
She put down the towel. 'Well I wish you could tell me what it is.'
'I'm sorry, Mom. I wish I could too. But it's one of those things that you just can't explain.' She went around behind him and laid her hands on his shoulders. She stood there for a moment, looking down at his anxiously upturned face. 'Well,' she said, pressing his shoulders, 'I guess it must be a good idea.' He smiled up at her happily.
Part Three
MARION
When Marion Kingship was graduated from college (Columbia University, an institution demanding long hours of earnest study; unlike that Midwestern Twentieth Century-Fox playground that Ellen was entering), her father offhandedly mentioned the fact to the head of the advertising agency which handled the Kingship Copper account, and Marion was offered a job as a copy writer. Although she wanted very much to write advertising copy, she refused the offer. Eventually she managed to find a position with a small agency where Kingship was a name stamped in the washroom plumbing and where Marion was assured that in the not-too-distant future she would be permitted to submit copy for some of the smaller accounts, provided that the writing of the copy did not interfere with her secretarial duties.
A year later, when Dorothy inevitably followed Ellen's lead and went off to football cheers and campus kisses, Marion found herself alone in an eight-room apartment with her father, the two of them like charged metal pellets that drift and pass but never touch. She decided, against her father's obvious though unvoiced disapproval, to find a place of her own.
She rented a two-room apartment on the top floor of a converted brownstone in the East Fifties. She furnished it with a great deal of care. Because the two rooms were smaller than those she had occupied in her father's home, she could not take all her possessions with her. Those that she did take, therefore, were the fruit of a thoughtful selection. She told herself she was choosing the things she liked best, the things that meant the most to her, which was true; but as she hung each picture and placed each book upon the shelf, she saw it not only through her own eyes but also through the eyes of a visitor who would some day come to her apartment, a visitor as yet unidentified except as to his sex. Every article was invested with significance, an index to her self; the furniture and the lamps and the ashtrays (modern but not modernistic), the reproduction of her favorite painting (Charles Demuth's My Egypt; not quite realistic; its planes accentuated and enriched by the eye of the artist), the records (some of the jazz and some of the Stravinsky and Bartok, but mostly the melodic listen-in-the-dark themes of Grieg and Brahms and Rachmaninoff), and the books-especially the books, for what better index of the personality is there?-(the novels and plays, the non-fiction and verse, all chosen in proportion and representation of her tastes). It was like the concentrated abbreviation of a Help Wanted ad. The egocentricity which motivated it was not that of the spoiled, but of the too little spoiled; the lonely. Had she been an artist she would have painted a self-portrait; instead she decorated two rooms, charging them with objects which some visitor, some day, would recognize and understand. And through that understanding he would divine all the capacities and longings she had found in herself and was unable to communicate.
The map of her week was centered about two landmarks; on Wednesday evenings she had dinner with her father, and on Saturdays she thorough-cleaned her two rooms. The first was a labor of duty; the second, of love.
