“My poor little room,” Barbara said. Nothing remained but the iron bed, Company property, and the wood end table with its lamp. The painted floor showed an outline, where the rug had been. Not so much as a single spot of color had been left.
Barbara sat down on the bed. The springs creaked under her weight. She took a cigarette from her purse and lit it. For a time she sat smoking. But the barren room was too depressing. She got to her feet and walked restlessly back and forth.
“Christ.”
At last she went back downstairs. She passed out into the darkness, down the steps, onto the path. By lighting matches she managed to find her way to the place where the baggage had been collected and stacked, by the side of the road. Most of it was gone. The great mound had shrunk to a tiny stack, a few wood crates and three suitcases. She found her own suitcase and pulled it away from the others. It was damp with mildew. And heavy.
She carried it back along the path, all the way to the women’s dorm.
On the porch she stopped to catch her breath, resting the suitcase beside her. How dark the night was! Pitch black. Nothing stirred. They had all left, even the workmen. Cleared out as fast as they could. Everything was deserted, without sign of life.
It did not seem possible. The Company had always been alive with activity, all night long. The furnaces, the glowing slag, men working, trucks moving around. Gouges and scoops— But not now. There was only silence. Darkness and silence. Far up above her a few stars shone, faint and remote through the fog. A wind blew, moving among the trees by the side of the building.
She picked up her suitcase and carried it inside, into the gloomy hall, up the stairs to her own room. There, she lit another cigarette and sat down on the bed. Presently she unsnapped the suitcase. She took her clothing out, a robe, slippers, pajamas. Then her cold cream, deodorant, cologne, bottles and tubes. Nail polish. Soap. Her tooth brush. She laid them in a row on the table by the bed.
At the bottom of the suitcase she found her Silex coffee maker and a little brown paper package of coffee, tied with a rubber band. And some sugar and paper cups.
It was a damn good thing she had thought to pack the coffee and things in the suitcase, instead of letting the workmen crate them up. She plugged in the Silex and went down the hall to the bathroom to get water. She put the water and coffee into the Silex.
Then she changed, removing her clothing. She put on the bathrobe and slippers. She found a towel. A good warm bath and then to bed; that would help. Tomorrow things would seem brighter. At night, with all her things crated up, the world silent and deserted around her— No wonder she felt depressed.
Had she ever felt worse? The stained, bare walls reflected the stark light of the lamp bulb. No pictures. No rug. Just the iron bed, the dirty table, the long row of bottles and jars and tubes. And her underwear, lying at the end of the bed. God!
The coffee rushed up into the top. It would soon be ready. She unplugged it. What a way to live. Would it be like this for a whole week? Two weeks?
She poured a cup of coffee, adding a little sugar. Two weeks, perhaps. And with Verne. Of all the people in the world— It was a plot. Fate, as people used to call it.
Fate. She sipped the hot coffee, sitting on the bed in her bathrobe. What a hell of a situation! How was she going to stand it? Why did it have to be him, of all the people they might have picked!
It didn’t seem possible. She looked around at the room. Could things be worse? The room was cold, barren. The cold was seeping around her, past the wool of the robe, chilling her. But the coffee made her feel a little better. Presently she began to feel sleepy. Her head ached dully. Her eyes were dry, tired.
She put the cup down on the floor and lay back, her head resting against the plaster wall. The springs groaned protestingly under her. She loosened her robe.
She was tired, tired and miserable. A week or two, living like this. And with him around. She closed her eyes. Her thoughts began to wander. She relaxed, her head sinking down. The pressure of the wall against her neck faded. The scratchy feel of the robe next to her skin began to recede.
She thought back, to other times. Other places.
Presently her cigarette ceased to glow. She had stubbed it out. Her cup of coffee grew cold.
Lying on the little iron bed she thought back, her mind wandering. The barren room around her dissolved and grew dim. The heap of underwear, the bottles and jars, the bleak walls, everything wavered.
She relaxed into her memories.
It was Castle she remembered. They had gone into the bars barefoot, in dirty pants and shirts. The bars had wood chairs and there were wood mugs on the tables. With no shoes they could feel sand on the floor under their feet. Most of the bars served fish dinners. Those bars had a fish smell about them.
Nobody seemed to mind if they were all sloppy and dirty, laughing and holding onto each other. She, Penny, and Felix. When it was warm enough in the evening they swam in the ocean without any clothes on. Sometimes they swam almost all night, and lay in bed the next day, too lazy to get up.
Felix and Penny were engaged. It had been decided that after their vacation, before school started in the fall, the two of them would get married. They would live in Boston, of course. Felix would go on with his post-graduate work in engineering, and Penny would continue to work at the library, at least until he got his degree.
Felix was tall and blond, with a small mustache. His eyes were always bright and button-shiny, and he looked down at people, his hands in his pockets or wrapped around a load of books. His skin was sunny and healthy; he was very good natured. Barbara liked him, but he got on her nerves. He tripped on things; he swung his arms when he talked. She found it hard to take him seriously.
Penny, plump and wearing a heavy canvas shirt, smoking a cigarette, was warm and attractive. She laughed, with a hearty, man-style deep bellow. She never wore lipstick, and when they came to Castle she brought only two pairs of shoes, both low heeled. And men’s pants.
As for Barbara Mahler, at twenty, she found herself facing a world that was quite different from anything she had known in Boston. She faced it with a mixture of shyness and sullen reserve. When they were with people she sat off in a corner, holding a drink, impressing people as aloof and untouchable. If a man approached her she cut him down with a few well-chosen words. Actually, she was frightened. She was especially frightened of the very men she sent off, yet at the same time she wanted very much to talk to them.
At twenty, her hair was cut in a tight bob, even all the way around. It was brown and thick, with heavy wide strands. Like the Botticelli cherubs that one sees. Her nose was large and Roman, giving her face a strong hardness, but with a kind of young boy youthfulness. A combination of female austerity and masculine immaturity. To many she seemed more like an immature boy than a woman.
She was slender, then, with nice arms and legs. She wore a brass bracelet on her wrist; her only jewelry.
Sitting in the corner watching the group of people talking and laughing made her feel alone. She did not like to mix with them, and if she were forced to she spoke roughly and slowly, a few words at a time. Many years later she realized they all thought she was tough and hard. The men who tried to pick her up never repeated it.
She wrote to her family every week, especially to her younger brother, her favorite. Bobby was seventeen. He had dropped out of school to marry a silly, selfish girl who had been working as a secretary, and who had quit her job the same week that they were married. He had never returned to school, to the family’s bitter dismay. Of all of them, Barbara was perhaps the only one who still wrote kindly and personally to the boy. And he appreciated the warm letters from his older sister.