Miss McTavish had succeeded in immersing herself almost entirely in a drift of snow. Shell helped her out of it. They faced each other as they had in the library. Shell knew that her teacher would have preferred to be standing back there now, the declaration and kiss undone.
“You’re old enough for me to say nothing.”
Breavman was surprised to learn that Shell still corresponded with her.
“Once or twice a year,” said Shell.
“Why?”
“I spent the rest of my time at school trying to convince her that she hadn’t destroyed herself in my eyes and was still my ordinary and well-beloved English teacher.”
“I know that kind of tyranny.”
“Will you let me send your book to her?”
“If your idea of charity is to bore a Hopkins expert.”
“This isn’t for her.”
“You’ll wind up your debt —”
“Yes.”
“— by becoming what she wanted you to be.”
“In a way. I have a king.”
“Ummm.”
He was not convinced.
4
When Shell was nineteen she married Gordon Ritchie Sims. As the announcement in The New York Times specified, he was in the graduating class at Amherst and she was in her freshman year at Smith.
The best man was Gordon’s room-mate, a devout Episcopalian whose banking family was of Jewish origin. He was half in love with Shell himself and dreamed of just such a wife to guarantee and cement his assimilation.
Gordon wanted to be a writer and most of his courting was literary. He enjoyed the fat letters he sent her from Amherst. Every night, after he had done a respectable amount of work on his thesis, he filled his personalized writing sheets with promises, love, and expectation, the passion tempered by an imitation of the style of Henry James.
Mail became a part of Shell’s heart. She carefully chose the places to read these lengthy communications, which were far more exciting than the chapters of a novel because she was the major character in them.
Gordon summoned a world of honour and order and cultivation, and the return to a simpler, more exalting way of life which Americans had once experienced, and which he, by virtue of his name and love, intended to resurrect with her.
Shell loved his seriousness.
At the football weekends she practised being quiet beside him, indulging herself in the pleasures of responsible devotion.
He was tall and white-skinned. Horn-rimmed spectacles turned to pensive a face which without them would have been merely dreamy.
At dances their quiet behaviour and head-bending interest in just about everything gave the impression that they were chaperons rather than participants in the celebration. One almost expected them to say, “We like to spend some time with young people, it’s so easy to lose contact.”
With him Shell passed from the startling colt-like beauty of her adolescence directly into that kind of gracious senility typified by Queen Mothers and the widows of American presidents.
They announced their betrothal in the summer, after a session of mutual masturbation on the screened porch of the Sims house at Lake George.
They married and after his graduation he immediately began his military service. It occurred to her as she drove him to the railway station that he had never really seen her completely naked, there were places he hadn’t touched her. She attempted to conceive of this as a compliment.
She did not see very much of him in the next two years, weekends here and there, and generally he was exhausted. But his letters were regular and tireless, not to say disturbing. They seemed to threaten the serenity of a temporary widowhood she had been quite willing to assume.
She loved her clothes, which were dark and simple. She enjoyed the frequent extended visits at the houses of his family and hers. And she felt her place in the world: her lover was a soldier.
She would almost have preferred not to cut the envelopes. Intact, thick, lying on her dresser, they were part of the mirror in which she was brushing her long hair, part of the austere battered colonial furniture they had begun to collect.
Opened, they were not what he promised. They had become intricate invitations to physical love, filled with props, cold cream, lipstick, mirrors, feathers, games where the button is found in private places.
But on those weekends when he managed to get back to their small apartment, he was too tired to do anything but sleep and talk and go to small restaurants.
The letters were not mentioned.
5
Shell believed her breasts were stuffed with cancer.
The doctor told her to put her blouse back on.
“You’re a healthy woman. And lovely.” He allowed that he was old enough to say that.
“I feel so foolish. I don’t know where the bumps have gone.”
Meanwhile, back at the Montreal poem factory, Breavman is interning, training to become her Compleat Physician.
6
After Gordon got out of the service they decided to move to New York and took a fairly expensive apartment on Perry Street in the Village. He had a job with Newsweek, in the books section, and he also sold some pieces to the Saturday Review. Shell was Girl Friday to one of the editors of Harper’s Bazaar. She took some pleasure in refusing the many invitations to model.
According to their friends they had a cunning apartment. There was a tall handless clock with wooden works and roses painted on the face. There was a massive corner cabinet with many square glass windows in which they kept liqueurs and long-stemmed glasses. They had worked hard to remove the paint and stain it.
A child in severe clothes on a black background, painted by a journeyman portraitist, hung over a refectory table and insured the dignity of their frequent small dinner parties.
They were all good children eating up their frozen cream of shrimp soup, and they were about to assume control of the banks, the periodicals, the State Department, the Free World.
At one of these occasions, Roger, Gordon’s old room-mate, managed to have a few private words with Shell. He had been liberated by six cognacs.
“If this ever
