It was time for a counter-offensive.
“Mother,” she said, “if you had told me this yesterday I wouldn’t have believed you. But now I know what you mean. I understand.”
“Did he—”
“Try anything? No, he didn’t. Can I start at the beginning, Mom?”
“Why, of course.”
She gathered her forces, her verbal soldiers. “I talked to Craig today,” she said. “After I spoke to you. I mentioned what you said, how you wanted to talk to me about something you heard about Craig.”
“I don’t know that you should have told him, April.”
“It was the right thing. Because he sat me down and he told me all about himself, Mom. It was quite a story.”
“Oh?”
“He used to be very wild,” she went on, inventing brilliantly, “when he was just a boy. Oh, you know how it is — his parents were rich and I guess they spoiled him something awful. He always had everything he wanted and he went to exclusive prep schools and he ran around with a wild crowd.”
“That’s what I heard.”
“That was because he didn’t have any responsibility,” April went on. “He was rich and he didn’t have to work and he was wild. But then his parents died. It was very sudden and all at once he was all alone.”
“How dreadful!”
“I guess the shock made him settle down. All at once he was all alone in the world, with no one to love him or take care of him, and he saw that his past life was wrong and that he couldn’t live that way any more.”
“The poor boy.”
She went on, elaborating on Craig’s reformation, telling how he had joined the church again, and how he was serious and sincere, how he was a prince among men. As she talked, she watched the play of expressions across her mother’s face. It was obvious that she was swallowing every last word.
Which, April thought, was fine. She felt pleased with herself. She was lying magnificently, playing to her mother skillfully, working every gambit in the book. Her mother’s weak points were church and family, and these points played predominant roles in April’s story.
“He told me he wouldn’t have had anything to do with me before,” she finished up. “Because he knows I’m a good girl from a good family, and that wasn’t the sort of girl he was interested in before — before his parents died. He wanted wild girls then. Girls who would — well, you know.”
“Of course, dear.”
“But now he needs a girl he can respect. And he respects me, Mother.”
Mrs. North beamed. “He well might,” she said. “You’re a girl deserving of respect.”
“Well, I come from a good family. And I know the difference between right and wrong.”
Mrs. North beamed more brightly. These were the key words, April thought. God, she should be an actress.
She finished and waited. Her mother sat silent for a moment or two, her head bobbing in thought. At last she raised her eyes.
“April,” she said, “I’ll tell you something, my dear. Quite often we tend to judge men and women differently, and this is as it ought to be. A man is different, April. A man is born with a certain amount of wanderlust in him, and a man often has to let loose and run free as the wind. A woman cannot do this. A woman must stay pure for the man she will someday marry.”
“I know, Mother.”
“But a man may sow wild oats, April. And I’d be the last to say that it’s better for a man to hold himself in during his youth. Perhaps it’s better for him to sow those wild oats then. The minister might not agree with me—”
“I know.”
“—but you see what I mean. For if a man sows his wild oats in his young days, he can get these improper desires out of his system. He can settle down. He knows what is right and what is wrong, and he knows the taste of forbidden fruit is not all it’s cracked up to be. So he learns to live life as it should be lived. Otherwise a man may run wild after marriage, and if that happens, may the Lord help his poor wife.”
She felt like saying something about her own father, who had quite obviously never gotten around to sowing wild oats. But she stayed silent
“Your Craig,” her mother said. “Now there’s a boy who ran wild when he was young and who grew out of this wildness into something good and gentle and upstanding. A boy like that could make a good husband, April. A husband you’d never need to worry about.”
Later, when her mother left the room, April laughed. She wondered if she would ever be able to talk to her mother again without laughing.
8
Saturday night April North was dressing for a party.
Saturday night was sometimes party night. Antrim was fairly short on parties, but occasionally a clutch of high school students gathered at the home of a girl or boy, knocked off a case of beer, danced close, necked with lights out and stopped breathlessly short of anything really satisfying. These doings generally took place on Saturday night, with church facing the party-goers in the morning.
But April was not dressing for a high school party.
She was going to a much more exciting party, a party at Craig’s house. She dressed again in the green silk-and-cotton affair she had worn on the night Craig took her to Kardaman’s and made love to her in his big brass bed. At first she hadn’t wanted to wear the same dress, but nothing else seemed appropriate.
“I don’t have anything to wear,” she had told Craig. And when he suggested the green dress, she voiced her objections.
“So what if I’ve seen you in it before?” he demanded. “I’ve seen you naked, and that doesn’t bore me either. My friends haven’t seen your dress. Wear it.”
So she was wearing it. And again she was wearing nothing under it. Maybe I’m being sluttish, she thought. I could wear a bra, and I could wear a slip, and I could sure as hell wear a pair of panties.
But she did not want to.
She compromised by wearing stockings and a garter belt. Craig said it was exciting to make love to a girl wearing stockings. Well, he would get his chance. Sometime in the early morning all the guests would go home and she and Craig would be left alone with each other and—
He picked her up at eight. She kissed her mother and father good night and ran to the car where he was waiting for her. He opened the door and she got in.
“Let’s go,” he said. “It wouldn’t do for us to be late. After all, I’m the host.”
“Am I the hostess?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” she said.
The days since Monday had been good days. Her schoolwork had slipped a little, maybe, but she could keep her head above water in Antrim High without half-trying. And, while she had not been with Craig every day, she had enjoyed herself, had seen him every other day and had been truly alive while they were together. And now, for the first time she would be meeting his friends.
She wondered what they were like. As far as she could determine, Craig managed the difficult task of belonging to a group while remaining somehow aloof from it. He ran with a certain set of people, people like himself — young and sophisticated, moneyed and wild — yet at the same time he maintained a great degree of independence from the group. He preferred to spend a great deal of his time alone, away from people, and she had the feeling that he was secretly glad he could not be with her all the time. He valued his freedom, even treasured his time to himself, and she accepted him as he was.
But what would his friends be like? Even though he was independent, surely he would want his friends to approve of her. Suppose they did not? Suppose they thought she was just a hick from Antrim, a young and silly little girl who was not worth their time?
She wondered if his friends’ reactions would alter Craig’s opinion of her. If they disapproved of her, he might think less of her as a result. She did not want this to happen.