There Are Doors

“His name was Billy?” He was astonished.

She smiled. “It was William, actually. Everyone called him Billy, of course not to his face: Blaze-Away Billy Hurst.” Her hands had been in the purse in her lap; they appeared above the edge of the table clasping a black- bordered handkerchief. “I wish I could cry for him,” she said. “He deserved it. He was brave, and gentle even when he wasn’t sober. But I can’t, not really. I hadn’t thought about Billy for years.”

He snapped the locket shut and dropped it back into his pocket.

Her fingers touched his, then fled. “Would you do me a great favor? Please?”

“Anything,” he said.

“You have Billy’s old desk now? You own it?”

He nodded. “I suppose it must have been his.”

“Then you’ll keep things in it—your papers and so forth. I want you to keep that locket where he kept it. Will you do that for me?”

He nodded again. “If you’ll tell me how he got you to marry him.”

“There isn’t much to tell. We met on shipboard; he was the captain, I was a passenger. If we had merely done what you and I did, it would have been the gossip of the fo’c’sle in an hour. Billy would have done it—he was mad about me—but things would have been very difficult for both of us afterward. There was a parson aboard, so we got him to marry us—a big social wedding, as shipboard weddings go, with the first mate as Billy’s best man and more than half the women as my attendants. It was our celebration of rounding the Cape, too.”

“I see,” he said. “Did one of the passengers paint the picture in this locket?”

Lara shook her head. “It was done in Bombay by the British governor’s wife, after we docked. She was an amateur but really very good.”

“How long did you stay with him?”

“Until he sailed. By that time I had fallen ill and had to be left behind.”

“And I don’t imagine you were still there when he returned. Tina, you’d better go back. Too many people are admiring you.” He picked her up and replaced her in the breast pocket of his jacket.

“No,” Lara said. “What is it you want of me? That I love you? I do already, as much as I’m capable of love; if I hadn’t loved you, I would have stayed with you far longer. That I stay with you for the rest of your life? I can’t do that.”

He told her, “I’ve been thinking about why you picked us—the captain and me; it was because we wouldn’t be believed. If we went through a door and came back to tell about it, nobody would pay any attention to us. Nobody believes sailor’s yarns, and Hurst was a drinker and a hell-raiser from what you’ve said about him. I’m a mental patient, and that’s why you took your job, and why you went back. What is it you want from us?”

“Your love. I want to be loved by a man who doesn’t die because he made love to me. Is that so terrible?”

He shook his head. After a moment he said, “I think you like Billy—like the name. Anyway another Billy told me once that you had a lover called Attis. After I got back, I saw a thing on TV about people down at the library who’d look things up for you. I talked to a woman there, and after she told me about Attis, I asked about books on antiques. I’ve read all of them now, and a few of them three or four times. So I owe you something.”

Lara waved the debt aside.

“Anyway, Attis cut—cut himself for you, because that was what you wanted.”

“No,” she said.

“All right, because he thought that was what you wanted.”

“I wanted him not to die!”

“All right,” he said softly.

“But what is it you want from me? I’ve told you what you can’t have, and I’ve told you that you have my love already. I love you as much as I can—as much as I can afford. As much as the old woman at the next table loves some little dog, possibly. What more?”

He knew that she was trying to insult him, but he was not insulted; instead he was happier than he had ever been before. “I want what that dog wants,” he said. “I want to follow you, when I can, I want to help you, whenever I can be of any help, and I want to hear your voice.”

Her fingers drummed the table.

He waited in patient silence; and at last she said, “We’ll have a test, as such things were tested long ago.” She picked up her wineglass and offered it to him, grasping it between her thumb and forefinger at the rim. “Hold the stem with your left hand.”

He did so.

“Now tear off a crumb of that bread. Not a tiny crumb—a piece as big as a crouton. Don’t squeeze it.”

He pulled a small piece from the soft loaf in the basket by the ashtray.

“Now drop it into the wine. If it sinks, you’re free to follow me as long as you wish. But if it floats—”

“If it floats,” he told her, “I will die.”

She nodded. “You will anyway.”

For a moment it seemed the bit of bread scarcely lay upon the wine. Lara murmured something—a prayer, perhaps, or a curse, that he did not understand. Red as blood, wine raced up the snowy sides of the bread, and it