“Do you like the country?” Carol asked as they turned into a
smaller road.
They had just driven into a little town and out of it. Now on
the driveway that made a great semicircular curve, they
approached a white two-story house that had projecting side
wings like the paws of a resting lion.
There was a metal door mat, a big shining brass mailbox, a
dog barking hollowly from around the side of the house, where a
white garage showed beyond some trees. The house smelled of
some spice, Therese thought, mingled with a separate sweetness
that was not Carol’s perfume either.
Behind her, the door closed with a light, firm double report.
Therese turned around and found Carol looking at her puzzledly,
her lips parted a little as if in surprise, and Therese felt that in the
next second Carol would ask, “What are you doing here?” as if she
had forgotten, or had not meant to bring her here at all.
“There’s no one here but the maid. And she’s far away,” Carol
said, as if in reply to some question of Therese’s.
“It’s a lovely house,” Therese said, and saw Carol’s little smile
that was tinged with impatience.

“Come with me,” Carol said.
She went with Carol upstairs again. Therese pulled herself up
by the banister and was reminded suddenly of Mrs. Robichek.
“I think a nap wouldn’t hurt you,” Carol said, turning down
the flowered cotton bedspread and the top blanket.
“Thanks, I’m not really—”
“Slip your shoes off,” Carol said softly, but in a tone that
commanded obedience.
Therese looked at the bed. She had hardly slept the night
before. “I don’t think I shall sleep, but if I do—”
“I’ll wake you in half an hour.” Carol pulled the blanket over
her when she lay down. Carol sat down on the edge of the bed.
“How old are you, Therese?”
Therese looked up at her, unable to bear her eyes now but
bearing them nevertheless, not caring if she died that instant, if
Carol strangled her, prostrate and vulnerable in her bed, the
intruder. “Nineteen.” How old it sounded. Older than ninety-one.
Carol’s eyebrows frowned, though she smiled a little.
Therese felt that she thought of something so intensely, one
might have touched the thought in the air between them. Then
Carol slipped her hands under her shoulders, and bent her head
down to Therese’s throat, and Therese felt the tension go out of
Carol’s body with the sigh that made her neck warm, that carried
the perfume that was in Carol’s hair.
“You’re a child,” Carol said, like a reproach. She lifted her
head. “What would you like?”
Therese remembered what she had thought of in the
restaurant, and she set her teeth in shame.
“What would you like?” Carol repeated.
“Nothing, thanks.”
Carol got up and went to her dressing table and lighted a
cigarette.
Therese watched her through half-closed lids, worried by
Carol’s restlessness, though she loved the cigarette, loved to see
her smoke.
“What would you like, a drink?”
Therese knew she meant water. She knew from the
tenderness and the concern in her voice, as if she were a child sick
with fever. Then Therese said it: “I think I’d like some hot milk.”
The corner of Carol’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Some hot
milk,” she mocked. Then she left the room.
And Therese lay in a limbo of anxiety and sleepiness all the
while until Carol reappeared with the milk in a straight-sided
white cup with a saucer under it, holding the saucer and the cup
handle, and closing the door with her foot.
“I let it boil and it’s got a scum on it,” Carol said annoyedly.
“I’m sorry.”
But Therese loved it, because she knew this was exactly what
Carol would always do, be thinking of something else and let the
milk boil.
“Is that the way you like it? Plain like that?”
Therese nodded.
“Ug,” Carol said, and sat down on the arm of the chair and
watched her.

“Shouldn’t I leave?” Therese asked.
Carol looked at her in the same way she had when they first
entered the house. “Not unless you want to. No. We’ll take a
drive later, if you want to.”
She knew Carol did not want to take another drive. Therese
started to straighten the bed.
“Leave the bed.” Carol was watching her from the hall. “Just
close the door.”
“Who is it that’s coming?”
Carol turned and went into the green room. “My husband,”
she said. “Hargess.”
Then the doorbell chimed downstairs, and the latch clicked at
the same time.
“No end prompt today,” Carol murmured. “Come down,
Therese.”
Therese felt sick with dread suddenly, not of the man but of
Carol’s annoyance at his coming.
He was coming up the stairs. When he saw Therese, he
slowed, and a faint surprise crossed his face, and then he looked at
Carol.
“Harge, this is Miss Belivet,” Carol said. “Mr. Aird.”
“How do you do?” Therese said.
Harge only glanced at Therese, but his nervous blue eyes
inspected her from head to toe. He was a heavily built man with a
rather pink face. One eyebrow was set higher than the other,
rising in an alert peak in the center, as if it might have been
distorted by a scar. “How do you do?”
Then to Carol, “I’m sorry to disturb you. I only wanted to get
one or two things.” He went past her and opened the door to a
room Therese had not seen. “Things for Rindy,” he added.
“Pictures on the wall?” Carol asked.
The man was silent.

Carol and Therese went downstairs. In the living room Carol
sat down, but Therese did not.
“Play some more, if you like,” Carol said.
Therese shook her head.
“Play some,” Carol said firmly.
Therese was frightened by the sudden white anger in her eyes.
“I can’t,” Therese said, stubborn as a mule.
And Carol subsided. Carol even smiled.
They heard Harge’s quick steps cross the hall and stop, then
descend the stairs slowly. Therese saw his dark-clad figure and
then his pinkish-blond head appear.
“I can’t find that watercolor set. I thought it was in my room,”
he said complainingly.
“I know where it is.” Carol got up and started toward the stars
“I suppose you want me to take her something for
Christmas,” Harge said.
“Thanks, I’ll just give the things to her.” Carol went up the
stairs.
They are just divorced, Therese thought, or about to be
divorced.
Harge looked at Therese, almost offered her his cigarette
case, and didn’t. He had an intense expression that curiously
mingled anxiety and boredom. The flesh around his mouth was
firm and heavy, rounding into the line of his mouth so that he
seemed lipless. He lighted a cigarette for himself. “Are you from
New York?” he asked.
Therese felt the disdain and incivility in the question, like the
sting of a slap in the face. “Yes, from New York,” she answered.
He was on the brink of another question to her, when Carol
came down the stairs. Therese had steeled herself to be alone with
him for minutes. Now she shuddered as she relaxed, and she knew
that he saw it.
“Thanks,” Harge said as he took the box from Carol. He
walked to his overcoat that Therese had noticed on the loveseat,
sprawled open with its black arms spread as if it were fighting and
would take possession of the house. “Good-by,” Harge said to
her. He put the overcoat on as he walked to the door. “Friend of
Abby’s?” he murmured to Carol.
“A friend of mine,” Carol answered.
“Are you going to take the presents to Rindy? When?”
“What if I gave her nothing, Harge?”
“Carol—” He stopped on the porch, and Therese barely heard
him say something about making things unpleasant. Then, “I’m
going to see Cynthia now. Can I stop by on the way back? It’ll be
before eight.”
“Harge, what’s the purpose?” Carol said wearily. “Especially
when you’re so disagreeable.”
“Because it concerns Rindy.” Then his voice faded
unintelligibly.

Chapter Seven
The man looked at it, holding it carelessly between thumb and
forefinger.
He was bald except for long strands of black hair that grew
from a former brow line, plastered sweatily down over the naked
scalp. His underlip was thrust out with the contempt and
negation that had fixed itself on his face as soon as Therese had
come to the counter and spoken her first words.
“No,” he said at last.
“Can’t you give me anything for it?” Therese asked.
The lip came out farther. “Maybe fifty cents.” And he tossed
it back across the counter.
Therese’s fingers crept over it possessively. “Well, what about
this?”
From her coat pocket she dragged up the silver chain with the
St. Christopher medallion.
Again the thumb and forefinger were eloquent of scorn,
turning the coin like filth. “Two fifty.”
But it cost at least twenty dollars, Therese started to say, but
she didn’t because that was what everybody said. “Thanks.” She
picked up the chain and went out.
Who were all the lucky people, she wondered, who had
managed to sell their old pocketknives, broken wrist watches, and
carpenters’ planes that hung in clumps in the front window? She
could not resist looking back through the window, finding the
man’s face again under the row of hanging hunting knives. The
man was looking at her, too, smiling at her. She felt he
understood every move she made. Therese hurried down the
sidewalk.
In ten minutes, Therese was back. She pawned the silver
medallion for two dollars and fifty cents.
She hurried westward, ran across Lexington Avenue, then
Park, and turned down Madison. She clutched the little box in
her pocket until its sharp edges cut her fingers. Sister Beatrice
had given it to her. It was inlaid brown wood and mother-of-pearl,
in a checked pattern. She didn’t know what it was worth in
money, but she had assumed it was rather precious.
Well, now she knew it wasn’t. She went into a leather goods
shop.
“I’d like to see the black one in the window—the one with the
strap and the gold buckles,” Therese said to the salesgirl.
It was the handbag she had noticed last Saturday morning on
the way to meet Carol for lunch. It had looked like Carol, just at
a glance. She had thought, even if Carol didn’t keep the
appointment that day, if she could never see Carol again, she
must buy the bag and send it to her anyway.
“I’ll take it,” Therese said.
“That’s seventy-one eighteen with the tax,” the salesgirl said.
“Do you want that gift-wrapped?”
“Yes, please.” Therese counted six crisp ten-dollar bills across
the counter and the rest in singles. “Can I leave it here until about
six-thirty tonight?”

“Take two,” she said to Therese. “Candy department sent ’em
up.”
“I don’t mind if I do.” Imagine, she thought, biting into a
nougat, the Christmas spirit had struck the candy department.
There was a strange atmosphere in the store today. It was
unusually quiet, first of all.
There were plenty of customers, but they didn’t seem in a
hurry, even though it was Christmas Eve. Therese glanced at the
elevators, looking for Carol. If Carol didn’t come in, and she
probably wouldn’t, Therese was going to telephone her at sixthirty,
just to wish her a happy Christmas. Therese knew her
telephone number. She had seen it on the telephone at the house.
“Miss Belivet!” Mrs. Hendrickson’s voice called, and Therese
jumped to attention. But Mrs. Hendrickson only waved her hand
for the benefit of the Western Union messenger who laid a
telegram in front of Therese.

Therese signed for it in a scribble, and tore it open. It said:
MEET YOU DOWNSTAIRS AT 5PM. CAROL.
Therese crushed it in her hand. She pressed it hard with her
thumb into her palm, and watched the messenger boy who was
really an old man walk back toward the elevators. He walked
ploddingly, with a stoop that thrust his knees far ahead of him,
and his puttees were loose and wobbly.
“You look happy,” Mrs. Zabriskie said dismally to her as she
went by.
Therese smiled. “I am.” Mrs. Zabriskie had a two months’ old
baby, she had told Therese, and her husband was out of work
now. Therese wondered if Mrs. Zabriskie and her husband were
in love with each other, and really happy. Perhaps they were, but
there was nothing in Mrs. Zabriskie’s blank face and her plodding
walk that would suggest it.
Perhaps once Mrs. Zabriskie had been as happy as she.
Perhaps it had gone away. She remembered reading—even
Richard once saying—that love usually dies after two years of
marriage. That was a cruel thing, a trick. She tried to imagine
Carol’s face, the smell of her perfume, becoming meaningless.
But in the first place could she say she was in love with Carol?
She had come to a question she could not answer.
At a quarter to five, Therese went to Mrs. Hendrickson and
asked permission to leave a half hour early. Mrs. Hendrickson
might have thought the telegram had something to do with it,
but she let Therese go without even a complaining look, and that
was another thing that made the day a strange one.

Carol was waiting for her in the foyer where they had met
before.
“Hello!” Therese said. “I’m through.”
“Through what?”
“Through with working. Here.” But Carol seemed depressed,
and it dampened Therese instantly. She said anyway, “I was
awfully happy to get the telegram.”
“I didn’t know if you’d be free. Are you free tonight?”
“Of course.”
And they walked on, slowly, amid the jostling crowd, Carol in
her delicate-looking suede pumps that made her a couple of
inches taller than Therese. It had begun to snow about an hour
before, but it was stopping already. The snow was no more than a
film underfoot, like thin white wool drawn across the street and
sidewalk.
“We might have seen Abby tonight, but she’s busy,” Carol
said. “Anyway, we can take a drive, if you’d like. It’s good to see
you. You’re an angel to be free tonight. Do you know what?”
“No,” Therese said, still happy in spite of herself, though
Carol’s mood was disquieting. Therese felt something had
happened.
“Do you suppose there’s a place to get a cup of coffee around
here?”
“Yes. A little farther east.”
Therese was thinking of one of the sandwich shops between
Fifth and Madison, but Carol chose a small bar with an awning in
front. The waiter was reluctant at first, and said it was the
cocktail hour, but when Carol started to leave, he went away and
got the coffee. Therese was anxious about picking up the
handbag. She didn’t want to do it when Carol was with her, even
though the package would be wrapped.
“Did something happen?” Therese asked.
“Something too long to explain.” Carol smiled at her but the
smile was tired, and a silence followed, an empty silence as if they
traveled through space away from each other.
Probably Carol had had to break an engagement she had
looked forward to, Therese thought. Carol would of course be
busy on Christmas Eve.
“I’m not keeping you from doing anything now?” Carol asked.
Therese felt herself growing tense, helplessly. “I’m supposed
to pick up a package on Madison Avenue. It’s not far. I can do it
now, if you’ll wait for me.”
“All right.”
Therese stood up. “I can do it in three minutes with a taxi.
But I don’t think you will wait for me, will you?”
Carol smiled and reached for her hand. Indifferently, Carol
squeezed her hand and dropped it. “Yes, I’ll wait.”
The bored tone of Carol’s voice was in her ears as she sat on
the edge of the taxi seat. On the way back, the traffic was so slow,
she got out and ran the last block.
Carol was still there, her coffee only half finished.
“I don’t want my coffee,” Therese said, because Carol seemed
ready to go.
“My car’s downtown. Let’s get a taxi down.”
They went down into the business section not far from the
Battery.
Carol’s car was brought up from an underground garage.
Carol drove west to the Westside Highway.
“This is better.” Carol shed her coat as she drove. “Throw it in
back, will you?”
And they were silent again. Carol drove faster, changing her
lane to pass cars, as if they had a destination. Therese set herself
to say something, anything at all, by the time they reached the
George Washington Bridge.
Suddenly it occurred to her that if Carol and her husband
were divorcing, Carol had been downtown to see a lawyer today.
The district there was full of law offices. And something had
gone wrong. Why were they divorcing? Because Harge was
having an affair with a woman called Cynthia? Therese was cold.
Carol had lowered the window beside her, and every time the car
sped, the wind burst through and wrapped its cold arms around
her.
“That’s where Abby lives,” Carol said, nodding across the
river.
Therese did not even see any special lights. “Who’s Abby?”
“Abby? My best friend.” Then Carol looked at her. “Aren’t
you cold with this window open?”
“No.”
“You must be.” They stopped for a red light, and Carol rolled
the window up. Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the
first time that evening, and under her eyes that went from her
face to her hands in her lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had
bought at a roadside kennel, that Carol had just remembered was
riding beside her.
“What happened, Carol? Are you getting a divorce now?”
Carol sighed. “Yes, a divorce,” she said quite calmly, and
started the car.
“And he has the child?”
“Just tonight.”

Therese was about to ask another question, when Carol said,
“Let’s talk about something else.”
A car went by with the radio playing Christmas carols and
everyone singing.
And she and Carol were silent. They drove past Yonkers, and
it seemed to Therese she had left every chance of talking further
to Carol somewhere behind on the road. Carol insisted suddenly
that she should eat something, because it was getting on to eight,
so they stopped at a little restaurant by the roadside, a place that
sold fried-clam sandwiches. They sat at the counter and ordered
sandwiches and coffee, but Carol did not eat. Carol asked her
questions about Richard, not in the concerned way she had
Sunday afternoon, but rather as if she talked to keep Therese
from asking more questions about her. They were personal
questions, yet Therese answered them mechanically and
impersonally.
Carol’s quiet voice went on and on, much quieter than the
voice of the counter boy talking with someone three yards away.
“Do you sleep with him?” Carol asked her.
“I did. Two or three times.” Therese told her about those
times, the first time and the three times afterward. She was not
embarrassed, talking about it. It had never seemed so dull and
unimportant before. She felt Carol could imagine every minute
of those evenings. She felt Carol’s objective, appraising glance
over her, and she knew Carol was about to say she did not look
particularly cold, or perhaps, emotionally starved.
But Carol was silent, and Therese stared uncomfortably at the
list of songs on the little music box in front of her. She
remembered someone telling her once she had a passionate
mouth, she couldn’t remember who.
“Sometimes it takes time,” Carol said. “Don’t you believe in
giving people another chance?”
“But why? It isn’t pleasant. And I’m not in love with him.”
“Don’t you think you might be, if you got this worked out?”
“Is that the way people fall in love?”
Carol looked up at the deer’s head on the wall behind the
counter. “No,” she said, smiling. “What do you like about
Richard?”
“Well, he has—” But she wasn’t sure if it really was sincerity.
He wasn’t sincere, she felt, about his ambition to be a painter. “I
like his attitude—more than most men’s. He does treat me like a
person instead of just a girl he can go so far with or not. And I
like his family—the fact that he has a family.”
“Lots of people have families.”
Therese tried again. “He’s flexible. He changes. He’s not like
most men that you can label doctor or—or insurance salesman.”
“I think you know him better than I knew Harge after
months of marriage. At least you’re not going to make the same
mistake I did, to marry because it was the thing to do when you
were about twenty, among the people I knew.”
“You mean you weren’t in love?”
“Yes, I was, very much. And so was Harge. And he was the
kind of man who could wrap your life up in a week and put it in
his pocket. Were you ever in love, Therese?”
She waited, until the word from nowhere, false, guilty, moved
her lips, “No.”
“But you’d like to be.” Carol was smiling.
“Is Harge still in love with you?”
Carol looked down at her lap, impatiently, and perhaps she
was shocked at her bluntness, Therese thought, but when Carol
spoke, her voice was the same as before. “Even I don’t know. In a
way, he’s the same emotionally as he’s always been. It’s just that
now I can see how he really is. He said I was the first woman he’d
ever been in love with. I think it’s true, but I don’t think he was in
love with me—in the usual sense of the word—for more than a
few months. He’s never been interested in anyone else, it’s true.
Maybe he’d be more human if he were. That I could understand
and forgive.”
“Does he like Rindy?”
“Dotes on her.” Carol glanced at her, smiling. “If he’s in love
with anyone, it’s Rindy.”
“What kind of a name is that?”
“Nerinda. Harge named her. He wanted a son, but I think
he’s even more pleased with a daughter. I wanted a girl. I wanted
two or three children.”
“And—Harge didn’t?”
“I didn’t.” She looked at Therese again. “Is this the right
conversation for Christmas Eve?” Carol reached for a cigarette
and accepted the one Therese offered her, a Philip Morris.
“I like to know all about you,” Therese said.
“I didn’t want any more children, because I was afraid our
marriage was going on the rocks anyway, even with Rindy. So you
want to fall in love? You probably will soon, and if you do, enjoy
it, it’s harder later on.”
“To love someone?”
“To fall in love. Or even to have the desire to make love. I
think sex flows more sluggishly in all of us than we care to
believe, especially men care to believe. The first adventures are
usually nothing but a satisfying of curiosity, and after that one
keeps repeating the same actions, trying to find—what?”
“What?” Therese asked.
“Is there a word? A friend, a companion, or maybe just a
sharer. What good are words? I mean, I think people often try to
find through sex things that are much easier to find in other
ways.”
What Carol said about curiosity, she knew was true. “What
other ways?” she asked.
Carol gave her a glance. “I think that’s for each person to find
out. I wonder if I can get a drink here.”
But the restaurant only served beer and wine, so they left.

Carol did not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back
toward New York. Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or
come out to her house for a while, and Therese said to Carol’s
house. She remembered the Kellys had asked her to drop in on
the wine and fruitcake party they were having tonight, and she
had promised to, but they wouldn’t miss her, she thought.
“What a rotten time I give you,” Carol said suddenly. “Sunday
and now this. I’m not the best company this evening. What
would you like to do? Would you like to go to a restaurant in
Newark where they have lights and Christmas music tonight? It’s
not a night club. We could have a decent dinner there, too.”
“I don’t really care about going anywhere—for myself.”
“You’ve been in that rotten store all day, and we haven’t done
a thing to celebrate your liberation.”
“I just like to be here with you,” Therese said, and hearing the
explanatory tone in her voice, she smiled.
Carol shook her head, not looking at her. “Child, child, where
do you wander—all by yourself?”
Then a moment later on the New Jersey highway, Carol said,
“I know what.”
And she turned the car into a graveled section off the road
and stopped.
“Come out with me.”
They were in front of a lighted stand piled high with
Christmas trees.
Carol told her to pick a tree, one not too big and not too
small. They put the tree in the back of the car, and Therese sat in
front beside Carol with her arms full of holly and fir branches.
Therese pressed her face into them and inhaled the dark-green
sharpness of their smell, their clean spice that was like a wild
forest and like all the artifices of Christmas—tree baubles, gifts,
snow, Christmas music, holidays. It was being through with the
store and being beside Carol now. It was the purr of the car’s
engine, and the needles of the fir branches that she could touch
with her fingers. I am happy, I am happy, Therese thought.

“Let’s do the tree now,” Carol said as soon as they entered the
house.
Carol turned the radio on in the living room, and fixed a
drink for both of them. There were Christmas songs on the radio,
bells breaking resonantly, as if they were inside a great church.
Carol brought a blanket of white cotton for the snow around the
tree, and Therese sprinkled it with sugar so it would glisten. Then
she cut an elongated angel out of some gold ribbon and fixed it to
the top of the tree, and folded tissue paper and cut a string of
angels to thread along the branches.
“You’re very good at that,” Carol said, surveying the tree from
the hearth. “It’s superb. Everything but presents.”
Carol’s present was on the sofa beside Therese’s coat. The
card she had made for it was at home, however, and she didn’t
want to give it without the card. Therese looked at the tree.
“What else do we need?”
“Nothing. Do you know what time it is?”
The radio had signed off. Therese saw the mantel clock. It
was after one.
“It’s Christmas,” she said.
“You’d better stay the night.”
“All right.”
“What do you have to do tomorrow?”
“Nothing.”
Carol got her drink from the radio top. “Don’t you have to
see Richard?”
She did have to see Richard, at twelve noon. She was to spend
the day at his house. But she could make some kind of excuse.
“No. I said I might see him. It’s not important.”
“I can drive you in early.”
“Are you busy tomorrow?”
Carol finished the last inch of her drink. “Yes,” she said.
Therese began to clean up the mess she had made, the scraps
of tissue and snippets of ribbon. She hated cleaning up after
making something.

“Your friend Richard sounds like the kind of man who needs a
woman around him to work for. Whether he marries her or not,”
Carol said. “Isn’t he like that?”
Why talk of Richard now, Therese thought irritably. She felt
that Carol liked Richard—which could only be her own fault—
and a distant jealousy prickled her, sharp as a pin.
“Actually, I admire that more than the men who live alone or
think they live alone, and end by making the stupidest blunders
with women.”
Therese stared at Carol’s pack of cigarettes on the coffee
table. She had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She could
find Carol’s perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of
evergreen, and she wanted to follow it, to put her arms around
Carol.
“It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?”
“What?” Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.
“Harge is the kind of man who doesn’t let a woman enter his
life. And on the other hand, your friend Richard might never
marry. But the pleasure Richard will get out of thinking he wants
to marry.” Carol looked at Therese from head to foot. “The
wrong girls,” she added. “Do you dance, Therese? Do you like to
dance?”
Carol seemed suddenly cool and bitter, and Therese could
have wept. “No,” she said. She should never have told her
anything about Richard, Therese thought, but now it was done.
“You’re tired. Come on to bed.”
Carol took her to the room that Harge had gone into
Sunday, and turned down the covers of one of the twin beds. It
might have been Harge’s room, Therese thought. There was
certainly nothing about it that suggested a child’s room. She
thought of Rindy’s possessions that Harge had taken from this
room, and imagined Harge moving first from the bedroom he
shared with Carol, then letting Rindy bring her things into this
room, keeping them here, closing himself and Rindy away from
Carol.
Carol laid some pajamas on the foot of the bed. “Good night,
then,” she said at the door. “Merry Christmas. What do you want
for Christmas?”
Therese smiled suddenly. “Nothing.”

That night she dreamed of birds, long, bright red birds like
flamingos, zipping through a black forest and making scallopy
patterns, arcs of red that curved like their cries. Then her eyes
opened and she heard it really, a soft whistle curving, rising and
coming down again with an extra note at the end, and behind it
the real, feebler twitter of birds.
The window was bright gray. The whistling began again, just
below the window, and Therese got out of bed. There was a long
open-topped car in the driveway, and a woman standing in it,
whistling. It was like a dream she looked out on, a scene without
color, misty at the edges.
Then she heard Carol’s whisper, as clearly as if all three of
them were in the same room together, “Are you going to bed or
getting up?”
The woman in the car with her foot on the seat said just as
softly, “Both,” and Therese heard the tremor of repressed laughter
in the word and liked her instantly. “Go for a ride?” the woman
asked. She was looking up at Carol’s window with a big smile
that Therese had just begun to see.
“You nitwit,” Carol whispered.
“You alone?”
“No.”
“Oh-oh.”
“It’s all right. Do you want to come in?”
The woman got out of the car.
Therese went to the door of her room and opened it. Carol
was just coming into the hall, tying the belt of her robe.
“Sorry I wakened you,” Carol said. “Go back to bed.”
“I don’t mind. Can I come down?”
“Well, of course!” Carol smiled suddenly. “Get a robe out of
the closet.”
Therese got a robe, probably a robe of Harge’s, she thought,
and went downstairs.
“Who made the Christmas tree?” the woman was asking.
They were in the living room.
“She did.” Carol turned to Therese. “This is Abby. Abby
Gerhard, Therese Belivet.”
“Hello,” Abby said.
“How do you do.” Therese had hoped it was Abby. Abby
looked at her now with the same bright, rather popeyed
expression of amusement that Therese had seen when she stood in
the car.
“You make a fine tree,” Abby told her.

“Will everybody stop whispering?” Carol asked.
Abby chafed her hands together and followed Carol into the
kitchen. “Got any coffee, Carol?”
Therese stood by the kitchen table, watching them, feeling at
ease because Abby paid no further attention to her, only took off
her coat and started helping Carol with the coffee. Her waist and
hips looked perfectly cylindrical, without any front or back, under
her purple knitted suit. Her hands were a little clumsy, Therese
noticed, and her feet had none of the grace of Carol’s. She looked
older than Carol, and there were two wrinkles across her forehead
that cut deep when she laughed and her strong arched eyebrows
rose higher. And she and Carol kept laughing now, while they
fixed coffee and squeezed orange juice, talking in short phrases
about nothing, or nothing that was important enough to be
followed.
Except Abby’s sudden, “Well”—fishing a seed out of the last
glass of orange juice and wiping her finger carelessly on her own
dress—“how’s old Harge?”
“The same,” Carol said. Carol was looking for something in
the refrigerator, and watching her, Therese failed to hear all of
what Abby said next, or maybe it was another of the fragmentary
sentences that Carol alone understood, but it made Carol
straighten up and laugh, suddenly and hard, made her whole face
change, and Therese thought with sudden envy, she could not
make Carol laugh like that, but Abby could.
“I’m going to tell him that,” Carol said. “I can’t resist.”
It was something about a Boy Scout pocket gadget for
Harge.
“And tell him where it came from,” Abby said, looking at
Therese and smiling broadly, as if she should share in the joke,
too. “Where’re you from?” she asked Therese as they sat down in
the table alcove at one side of the kitchen.
“She’s from New York,” Carol answered for her, and Therese
thought Abby was going to say, Why how unusual, or something
silly, but Abby said nothing at all, only looked at Therese with the
same expectant smile, as if she awaited the next cue from her.
For all their fussing about breakfast, there was only orange
juice and coffee and some unbuttered toast that nobody wanted.
Abby lighted a cigarette before she touched anything.

“Are you old enough to smoke?” she asked Therese, offering
her a red box that said Craven A’s.
Carol put her spoon down. “Abby, what is this?” she asked
with an air of embarrassment that Therese had never seen before.
“Thanks, I’d like one,” Therese said, taking a cigarette.
Abby settled her elbows on the table. “Well, what’s what?” she
asked Carol.
“I suspect you’re a little tight,” Carol said.
“Driving for hours in the open air? I left New Rochelle at
two, got home and found your message, and here I am.”
She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought,
probably did nothing all day except what she felt like doing.
“Well?” Abby said.
“Well—I didn’t win the first round,” Carol said.
Abby drew on her cigarette, showing no surprise at all. “For
how long?”
“For three months.”
“Starting when?”
“Starting now. Starting last night, in fact.” Carol glanced at
Therese, then looked down at her coffee cup, and Therese knew
Carol could not say any more with her sitting there.
“That’s not set already, is it?” Abby asked.
“I’m afraid it is,” Carol answered casually, with a shrug in her
tone. “Just verbally, but it’ll hold. What’re you doing tonight?
Late.”
“I’m not doing anything early. Dinner’s at two today.”
“Call me sometime.”
“Sure.”
Carol kept her eyes down, looking down at the orange juice
glass in her hand, and Therese saw a downward slant of sadness in
her mouth now, a sadness not of wisdom but of defeat.
“I’d take a trip,” Abby said. “Take a little trip away
somewhere.” Then Abby looked at Therese, another of the
bright, irrelevant, friendly glances, as if to include her in
something it was impossible she could be included in, and
anyway, Therese had gone stiff with the thought that Carol
might take a trip away from her.
“I’m not much in the mood,” Carol said, but Therese heard
the play of possibility in it nevertheless.
Abby squirmed a little and looked around her. “This place is
gloomy as a coalpit in the mornings, isn’t it?”
Therese smiled a little. A coalpit, with the sun beginning to
yellow the window sill, and the evergreen tree beyond it?
Carol was looking at Abby fondly, lighting one of Abby’s
cigarettes. How well they must know each other, Therese
thought, so well that nothing either of them said or did to the
other could ever surprise, ever be misunderstood.
“Was it a good party?” Carol asked.
“Mm,” Abby said indifferently. “Do you know someone
called Bob Haversham?”
“No.”
“He was there tonight. I met him somewhere before in New
York. Funnily enough, he said he was going to work for Rattner
and Aird in the brokerage department.”
“Really.”
“I didn’t tell him I knew one of the bosses.”
“What time is it?” Carol asked after a moment.
Abby looked at her wrist watch, a small watch set in a
pyramid of gold panels. “Seven-thirty. About. Do you care?”
“Want to sleep some more, Therese?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“I’ll drive you in whenever you have to go,” Carol said.