“Like that haiku about strawberries on the white plate.”
“Whiter. And without music.”
“The way you talk you’d think we had fought our way out of the deepest slum.”
“We have, but don’t ask me to explain or it will sound like the cheapest nonsense from an over-privileged bourgeois.”
“I know what you mean and I know that you’re thinking I can’t possibly know.”
She would reach him, he was certain. She would uncover him so he could begin to love her.
“The mansion is as much a part of the slum as your horrible sink. You want to live in a world where the light has just been switched on and everything has just jumped out of the black. That’s all right, Lawrence, and it may even be courageous, but you can’t live there all the time. I want to make the place you come back to and rest in.”
“You do a wonderful job of dignifying a spoiled child.”
It was not that things decay, that the works of men are ephemeral, he believed he saw deeper than that. The things themselves were decay, the works themselves were corruption, the monuments were made of worms. Perhaps she was his comrade in the vision, in the knowledge of strangerhood.
“You didn’t want to touch a thing when we came in here. You just wanted to clear a small corner to sleep in.”
“Love in,” Breavman corrected.
“And you hated me for remaking the bed and putting us where we could see the trees and hiding the ugly old table because all of that meant that we couldn’t simply endure the filth, we had to come to terms with it.”
“Yes.”
He found her hand.
“And you really hated me because I was dragging you into it and you would have been free if you’d been alone, with morning a few hours away and the car parked outside.…”
God, he thought as he turned to her and closed her eyes over all he remembered of her, she knows everything.
3
Miss McTavish was a tall, mannish Bryn Mawr graduate, ’21, who secretly believed that she was the only one in America who really understood the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
She also believed that the academic world was not worthy of the true Hopkins and was therefore reluctant to discuss her theories. The same superiority kept her out of the universities. She did not wish to participate in the donnish conspiracy against Life and Art.
The same superiority plus a grotesque nose kept her out of marriage. She knew that the man sufficiently intense, wild, and joyous for communion with her would be unavailable for domestic life, having in all probability already consecrated himself to the monastery or mountain climbing.
She saved her passion for the poems she read in class. Even the most cynical students knew that something very important was happening in those moments when she seemed to forget them most. Shell listened like a disciple, knowing that the poems were all the more beautiful because Miss McTavish had such a funny nose.
Miss McTavish liked to think of the Neo-Gothic library as her private home. On the way to the card index she floated over the bent heads, like a hostess presiding at a feast.
One evening, standing underneath the tall stained-glass windows, she said something very strange to Shell. The glass images could not be seen, only the bumpy lead separators. If mahogany wood could be made translucent and used as a filter, that was the colour of the light in the large quiet room. It was winter and Shell had the impression that snow was falling, she wasn’t sure, not having stepped out since late afternoon.
“I’ve been watching you, Shell. You’re the only aristocrat I have ever met.” Then her voice choked. “I love you because I wanted to be like you, that’s all I ever wanted.”
Shell reached out her hand as if she had just seen someone wounded in front of her. Miss McTavish recovered instantly from her state of exposure and seized Shell’s extended hand and shook it formally, as though they had just been introduced. Both of them bowed slightly several times, and it appeared to an observer that they might be just about to begin a minuet. The image they made occurred to both of them and they laughed in relief.
It was snowing. Without speaking they agreed on a walk. The pine trees beyond the Quadrangle were dark, lofty, and narrow as the windows in the library, shelves of snow on the limbs separating them from the night into rows of upright fish skeletons.
Shell felt that she was in a museum of bones. She had no sense of the outdoors at all, but imagined herself in a sinister extension of the library. And she was already summoning the resources of pity on which she knew she would have to draw.
Miss McTavish whistled a part from a quartet.
The quartet ended in a gasp.
“I’ve never done this before.”
Shell stood still as she was kissed on the mouth, and caught the man’s smell of alcohol on her teacher’s breath. She tried to think through the present, reach the real forest she drove through with her father, but she couldn’t.
“Ha ha,” cried Miss McTavish, flinging herself backwards in the snow. “I’m brave. I’m very brave.”
Shell believed her. She was a human tossed in the snow, humiliating herself. She must be brave, as nuns with whips are brave, and drunk sailors in a storm. People who walk into desolation, beggars, saints, call to those they leave behind, and these cries are nobler than the victory shouts of generals. She knew this from books and her house.
Not too far away there was a second-class road. The headlights of a single car sawed through the woods, disappeared, and left the woman and the girl with a renewed sense of the outside, regulating world, which Shell already knew was engineered against
