Upstairs in her room, she put the call through to Carol, and
bathed and got into pajamas. Then the telephone rang.
“Hel-lo,” Carol said, as if she had been waiting a long while.
“What’s the name of that hotel?”
“The Warrior. But I’m not going to stay here.”
“You didn’t pick up any strangers on the road, did you?”
Therese laughed.
Carol’s slow voice went through her as if she touched her.
“What’s the news?” Therese asked.
“Tonight? Nothing. The house is freezing and Florence can’t
get here till day after tomorrow. Abby’s here. Do you want to say
hello to her?”
“Not right there with you.”
“No-o. Upstairs in the green room with the door shut.”
“I don’t really want to talk to her now.”
Carol wanted to know everything she had done, how the
roads were, and whether she had on the yellow pajamas or the
blue ones. “I’ll have a hard time getting to sleep tonight without
you.”
“Yes.” Immediately, out of nowhere, Therese felt tears
pressing behind her eyes.
“Can’t you say anything but yes?”
“I love you.”
Carol whistled. Then silence. “Abby got the check, darling,
but no letter. She missed my wire, but there isn’t any letter
anyway.”
“Did you find the book?”
“We found the book, but there’s nothing in it.”
Therese wondered if the letter could be in her own apartment
after all. But she had a picture of the letter in the book, marking
a place. “Do you think anybody’s been through the house?”
“No. I can tell by various things. Don’t worry about that. Will
you?”

A moment later, Therese slid down into bed and pulled her
light out.
Carol had asked her to call tomorrow night, too. For a while
the sound of Carol’s voice was in her ears. Then a melancholy
began to seep into her. She lay on her back with her arms straight
at her sides, with a sense of empty space all around her, as if she
were laid out ready for the grave, and then she fell asleep.

The next morning, Therese found a room she liked in a house
on one of the streets that ran uphill, a large front room with a bay
window full of plants and white curtains. There was a four-poster
bed and an oval hooked rug on the floor. The woman said it was
seven dollars a week, but Therese said she was not sure if she
would be here a week, so she had better take it by the day.
“That’ll be the same thing,” the woman said. “Where’re you
from?”
“New York.”
“Are you going to live here?”
“No. I’m just waiting for my friend to join me.”
“Man or a woman?”
Therese smiled. “A woman,” she said. “Is there any space in
those garages in back? I’ve got a car with me.”
The woman said there were two garages empty, and that she
didn’t charge for the garages, if people lived here. She was not
old, but she stooped a little and her figure was frail. Her name
was Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper. She had been keeping roomers for
fifteen years, she said, and two of the three she had started with
were still here.
The same day, she made the acquaintance of Dutch Huber
and his wife who ran the diner near the public library. He was a
skinny man of about fifty with small curious blue eyes. His wife
Edna was fat and did the cooking, and talked a great deal less
than he. Dutch had worked in New York for a while years ago.
He asked her questions about sections of the city she happened
not to know at all, while she mentioned places Dutch had never
heard of or had forgotten, and somehow the slow, dragging
conversation made them both laugh. Dutch asked her if she
would like to go with him and his wife to the motorcycle races
that were to be held a few miles out of town on Saturday, and
Therese said yes.

She bought cardboard and glue and worked on the first of the
models she meant to show Harkevy when she got back to New
York. She had it nearly done when she went out at eleven-thirty
to call Carol from the Warrior.
Carol was not in and no one answered. Therese tried until one
o’clock, then went back to Mrs. Cooper’s house.

Therese reached her the next morning around ten-thirty.
Carol said she had talked over everything with her lawyerthe day
before, but there was nothing she or her lawyer could dountil
they knew Harge’s next move.
Carol was a little short with her, because she had aluncheon
appointment in New York and a letter to write first. Sheseemed
anxious for the first time about what Harge was doing.She had
tried to call him twice without being able to reach him.But it
was her brusqueness that disturbed Therese most of all.
“You haven’t changed your mind about anything?” Therese
said.
“Of course not, darling. I’m giving a party tomorrownight.
I’ll miss you.”

Therese tripped on the hotel threshold as she went out, and
she felt the first hollow wave of loneliness break over her. What
would she be doing tomorrow night? Reading in the library until
it closed at nine? Working on another set? She went over the
names of the people Carol had said were coming to the party—
Max and Clara Tibbett, the couple who had a greenhouse on
some highway near Carol’s house and whom Therese had met
once, Carol’s friend Tessie she had never met, and Stanley
McVeigh, the man Carol had been with the evening they went to
Chinatown. Carol hadn’t mentioned Abby.
And Carol hadn’t said to call tomorrow.
She walked on, and the last moment she had seen Carol come
back as if it were happening in front of her eyes again. Carol
waving from the door of the plane at the Des Moines airport,
Carol already small and far away, because Therese had had to
stand back of the wire fence across the field.
The ramp had been moved away, but Therese had thought,
there were still a few seconds of time before they closed the door,
and then Carol had appeared again, just long enough to stand still
in the doorway for a second, to find her again, and make the
gesture of blowing her a kiss.
But it meant an absurd lot that she had come back.

Therese drove out to the motorcycle races on Saturday, and
took Dutch and Edna with her, because Carol’s car was bigger.
Afterward, they invited her to supper at their house, but she did
not accept. There hadn’t been a letter from Carol that day, and
she had expected a note at least. Sunday depressed her, and even
the drive she took up the Big Sioux River to Dell Rapids in the
afternoon did not change the scene inside her mind.
Monday morning, she sat in the library reading plays. Then
around two, when the noonday rush was slacking off in Dutch’s
diner, she went in and had some tea, and talked with Dutch while
she played the songs on the juke box that she and Carol had used
to play. She had told Dutch that the car belonged to the friend
for whom she was waiting. And gradually, Dutch’s intermittent
questions led her to tell him that Carol lived in New Jersey, that
she would probably fly out, that Carol wanted to go to New
Mexico.
“Carol does?” Dutch said, turning to her as he polished a
glass.
Then a strange resentment rose in Therese because he had
said her name, and she made a resolution not to speak of Carol
again at all, not to anyone in the city.

Tuesday the letter came from Carol, nothing but a short
note, but it said Fred was more optimistic about everything, and
it looked as if there would be nothing but the divorce to worry
about and she could probably leave the twenty-fourth of
February. Therese began to smile as she read it. She wanted to go
out and celebrate with someone, but there was no one, so there
was nothing to do but take a walk, have a lonely drink at the bar
of the Warrior, and think of Carol five days away. There was no
one she would have wanted to be with, except perhaps Dannie.
Or Stella Overton. Stella was jolly, and though she couldn’t have
told Stella anything about Carol—whom could she tell?—it
would have been good to see her now. She had meant to write
Stella a card days ago, but she hadn’t yet.
She wrote to Carol late that night.
The news is wonderful. I celebrated with a singledaiquiri at the
Warrior. Not that I am conservative, but did you knowthat one
drink has the kick of three when you are alone? … I lovethis town
because it all reminds me of you. I know you don’t like itany more
than any other town, but that isn’t the point. I mean youare here as
much as I can bear you to be, not being here …

Carol wrote: I never liked Florence. I say this as a prelude. It
seems Florence found the note you wrote to me and sold itto
Harge—at a price. She is also responsible for Harge’sknowing where
we (or at least I) were going, I’ve no doubt. I don’tknow what I left
around the house or what she might have overheard, Ithought I was
pretty silent, but if Harge took the trouble to bribe herand I’m sure
he did, there’s no telling. They picked us up in Chicago,anyway.
Darling, I had no idea how far this thing had gone. Togive you the
atmosphere—nobody tells me anything, things are justsuddenly
discovered. If anyone is in possession of the facts, itis Harge. I spoke
with him on the phone, and he refuses to tell meanything, which of
course is calculated to terrorize me into giving all myground before
the fight has even begun. They don’t know me, any ofthem, if they
think I will. The fight of course is over Rindy, and yes,darling, I’m
afraid there will be one, and I can’t leave the 24th.That much Harge
did tell me when he sprang the letter this morning on thephone. I
think the letter may be his strongest weapon (thedictaphone business
only went on in Colorado S. so far as I can possiblyimagine) hence
his letting me know about it. But I can imagine the kindof letter it
is, written even before we took off, and there’ll be alimit to what
even Harge can read into it. Harge is merelythreatening—in the
peculiar form of silence—hoping I will back outcompletely as far as
Rindy is concerned. I won’t, so there will come some kindof a
showdown, I hope not in court. Fred is prepared foranything
however. He is wonderful, the only person who talksstraight to me,
but unfortunately he knows least of all too.
You ask if I miss you. I think of your voice, your hands,and your
eyes when you look straight into mine. I remember yourcourage that
I hadn’t suspected, and it gives me courage. Will youcall me,
darling? I don’t want to call you if your phone is in thehall. Call me
collect around 7 P.M. preferably, which is 6 your time.
And Therese was about to call her that day when a telegram
came: DON’T TELEPHONE FOR A WHILE, EXPLAIN LATER, ALL
MY LOVE, DARLING CAROL.

Mrs. Cooper watched her reading it in the hall. “That from
your friend?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Hope nothing’s the matter.” Mrs. Cooper had a way of
peering at people, and Therese lifted her head deliberately.
“No, she’s coming,” Therese said. “She’s been delayed.”

Chapter Twenty-One
Albert Kennedy, Bert to people he liked, lived in a room at the
back of the house, and was one of Mrs. Cooper’s original lodgers.
He was forty-five, a native of San Francisco, and more like a
New Yorker than anyone Therese had met in the town, and this
fact alone inclined her to avoid him. Often he asked Therese to
go to the movies with him, but she had gone only once. She was
restless and she preferred to wander about by herself, mostly just
looking and thinking, because the days were too cold and windy
for any outdoor sketching. And the scenes she had liked at first
had grown too stale to sketch, from too much looking, too much
waiting. Therese went to the library almost every evening, sat at
one of the long tables looking over half a dozen books, and then
took a meandering course homeward.
She came back to the house only to wander out again after a
while, stiffening herself against the erratic wind, or letting it turn
her down streets she would not otherwise have followed. In the
lighted windows she would see a girl seated at a piano, in another
a man laughing, in another a woman sewing. Then she
remembered she could not even call Carol, admitted to herself
she did not even know what Carol was doing at this moment, and
she felt emptier than the wind. Carol did not tell her everything
in her letters, she felt, did not tell her the worst.
In the library, she looked at books with photographs of
Europe in them, marble fountains in Sicily, ruins of Greece in
sunlight, and she wondered if she and Carol would really ever go
there. There was still so much they had not done. There was the
first voyage across the Atlantic. There were simply the mornings,
mornings anywhere, when she could lift her head from a pillow
and see Carol’s face, and know that the day was theirs and that
nothing would separate them.
And there was the beautiful thing, transfixing the heart and
the eyes at once, in the dark window of an antique shop in a street
where she had never been. Therese stared at it, feeling it quench
some forgotten and nameless thirst inside her. Most of its
porcelain surface was painted with small bright lozenges of
colored enamel, royal blue and deep red and green, outlined with
coin gold as shiny as silk embroidery, even under its film of dust.
There was a gold ring at the rim for the finger. It was a tiny
candlestick holder. Who had made it, she wondered, and for
whom?
She came back the next morning and bought it to give to
Carol.

A letter from Richard had come that morning, forwarded
from Colorado Springs. Therese sat down on one of the stone
benches in the street where the library was, and opened it. It was
on business stationery: The Semco Bottled Gas Company. Cooks—
Heats—Makes Ice. Richard’s name was at the top asGeneral
Manager of the Port Jefferson Branch.
Dear Therese,
I have Dannie to thank for telling me where you are. Youmay
think this letter unnecessary and perhaps it is to you.Perhaps you are
still in that fog you were, when we talked that eveningin the
cafeteria. But I feel it is necessary to make one thingclear, and that is
that I no longer feel the way I did even two weeks ago,and the letter
I wrote you last was nothing but a last spasmodic effort,and I knew
it was hopeless when I wrote it, and I knew you wouldn’tanswer
and I didn’t want you to.
I know I had stopped loving you then, and now theuppermost
emotion I feel toward you is one that was present fromthe first—
disgust. It is your hanging onto this woman to theexclusion of
everyone else, this relationship which I am sure hasbecome sordid
and pathological by now, that disgusts me. I know that itwill not
last, as I said from the first.
It is only regrettable that you will be disgusted lateryourself, in
proportion to how much of your life you waste now withit. It is
rootless and infantile, like living on lotus blossoms orsome sickening
candy instead of the bread and meat of life. I have oftenthought of
those questions you asked me the day we were flying thekite. I wish I
had acted then before it was too late, because I lovedyou enough then
to try to rescue you. Now I don’t. People still ask meabout you.
What do you expect me to tell them? I intend to tell themthe truth.
Only that way can I get it out of myself—and I can nolonger bear to
carry it around with me. I have sent a few things you hadat the
house back to your apartment. The slightest memory orcontact with
you depresses me, makes me not want to touch you oranything
concerned with you. But I am talking sense and verylikely you are
not understanding a word of it. Except maybe this: I wantnothing
to do with you.
Richard
She saw Richard’s thin soft lips tensed in a straight line as they
must have looked when he wrote the letter, a line that still did not
keep the tiny, taut curl in the upper lip from showing—she saw
his face clearly for a moment, and then it vanished with a little
jolt that seemed as muffled and remote from her as the clamor of
Richard’s letter. She stood up, put the letter back in the envelope,
and walked on. She hoped he succeeded in purging himself of
her. But she could only imagine him telling other people about
her with that curious attitude of passionate participation she had
seen in New York before she left. She imagined Richard telling
Phil as they stood some evening at the Palermo bar, imagined
him telling the Kellys. She wouldn’t care at all, whatever he said.
She wondered what Carol was doing now, at ten o’clock, at
eleven in New Jersey. Listening to some stranger’s accusations?
Thinking of her, or was there time for that?

It was a fine day, cold and almost windless, bright with sun.
She could take the car and drive somewhere. She had not used
the car for three days. Suddenly she realized she did not want to
use it. The day she had taken it out and driven it up to ninety on
the straight road to Dell Rapids, exultant after a letter from
Carol, seemed very long ago.
Mr. Bowen, another of the roomers, was on the front porch
when she came back to Mrs. Cooper’s house. He was sitting in
the sun with his legs wrapped in a blanket and his cap pulled
down over his eyes as if he were asleep, but he called out, “Hi,
there! How’s my girl?”
She stopped and chatted with him for a while, asked him
about his arthritis, trying to be as courteous as Carol had always
been with Mrs. French. They found something to laugh at, and
she was still smiling when she went to her room. Then the sight
of the geranium ended it.
She watered the geranium and set it at the end of the window
sill, where it would get the sun for the longest time. There was
even brown at the tips of the smallest leaves at the top. Carol had
bought it for her in Des Moines just before she took the plane.
The pot of ivy had died already—the man in the shop had warned
them it was delicate, but Carol had wanted it anyway—and
Therese doubted that the geranium would live. But Mrs.
Cooper’s motley collection of plants flourished in the bay
window.
I walk and walk around the town, she wrote to Carol, butI
wish I could keep walking in one direction—east—andfinally come
to you. When can you come, Carol? Or shall I come to you?I really
cannot stand being away from you so long. …
She had her answer the next morning. A check fluttered out
of Carol’s letter onto Mrs. Cooper’s hall floor. The check was for
two hundred and fifty dollars. Carol’s letter—the long loops
looser and lighter, the t-bars stretching the length of the word—
said that it was impossible for her to come out within the next
two weeks, if then. The check was for her to fly back to New
York and have the car driven East.
I’d feel better if you took the plane. Come now and don’twait,
was the last paragraph.
Carol had written the letter in haste, had probably snatched a
moment to write it, but there was a coldness in it, too, that
shocked Therese. She went out and walked dazedly to the corner
and dropped the letter she had written the night before into the
mailbox anyway, a heavy letter with three airmail stamps on it.
She might see Carol within twelve hours. The thought did not
bring any reassurance. Should she leave this morning? This
afternoon? What had they done to Carol? She wondered if Carol
would be furious if she telephoned her, if it would precipitate
some crisis into a total defeat if she did?
She was sitting at a table somewhere with coffee and orange
juice in front of her, before she looked at the other letter in her
hand. In the upper left corner she could just make out the scrawly
handwriting. It was from Mrs. R. Robichek.
Dear Therese,
Thank you very much for the delicious sausage that camelast
month. You are a nice sweet girl and I am glad to havethe
opportunity to thank you many times. It was nice of youto think of
me making such a long trip. I enjoy the pretty postcards, specially
the big one from Sioux Falls. How is in South Dakota? Are
mountains and cowboys? I have never had chance to travelexcept
Pennsylvania. You are a lucky girl, so young and prettyand kind.
Myself I still work. The store is just the same.Everything is the
same but it is colder. Please visit me when you comeback. I cook a
nice dinner for you not from delicatessen. Thank you forthe sausage
again. I lived from it for many days, really somethingspecial and
nice.
With best regards and yours truly.
Ruby Robichek
Therese slid off the stool, left some money on the counter and
ran out.

She ran all the way to the Warrior Hotel, put the call in and
waited with the receiver against her ear until she heard the
telephone ringing in Carol’s house. No one answered. It rang
twenty times and no one answered.
She thought of calling Carol’s lawyer, Fred Haymes. She
decided she shouldn’t. Neither did she want to call Abby.
That day it rained, and Therese lay on her bed in her room,
staring up at the ceiling, waiting for three o’clock, when she
intended to telephone again. Mrs. Cooper brought her a tray of
lunch around midday. Mrs. Cooper thought she was sick. Therese
could not eat the food, however, and she did not know what to do
with it.
She was still trying to reach Carol at five o’clock. Finally the
ringing stopped and there was confusion on the wire, a couple of
operators questioning each other about the call, and the first
words Therese heard from Carol were “Yes, damn it!” Therese
smiled and the ache went out of her arms.
“Hello?” Carol said brusquely.
“Hello?” The connection was bad. “I got the letter—the one
with the check. What happened, Carol? … What?”
Carol’s harassed-sounding voice repeated through the
crackling interference, “This wire I think is tapped, Therese. …
Are you all right? Are you coming home? I can’t talk very long
now.”
Therese frowned, wordless. “Yes, I suppose I can leave today.”
Then she blurted, “What is it, Carol? I really can’t stand this, not
knowing anything!”
“Therese!” Carol drew the word all across Therese’s words,
like a deletion. “Will you come home so I can talk to you?”
Therese thought she heard Carol sigh impatiently. “But I’ve
got to know now. Can you see me at all when I come back?”
“Hang onto yourself, Therese.”
Was this the way they talked together? Were these the words
they used?
“But can you?”
“I don’t know,” Carol said.
A chill ran up her arm, into the fingers that held the
telephone. She felt Carol hated her. Because it was her fault, her
stupid blunder about the letter Florence had found. Something
had happened and perhaps Carol couldn’t and wouldn’t even want
to see her again. “Has the court thing started yet?”
“It’s finished. I wrote you about that. I can’t talk any longer.
Good-by, Therese.” Carol waited for her to reply. “I’ve got to say
good-by.”
Therese put the receiver slowly back on the hook.
She stood in the hotel lobby, staring at the blurred figures
around the front desk. She pulled Carol’s letter out of her pocket
and read it again, but Carol’s voice was closer, saying impatiently,
“Will you come home so I can talk to you?” She pulled the check
out and looked at it again, upside down, and slowly tore it up.
She dropped the pieces into a brass spittoon.