He nodded.
"Because where could I go? I don't have anywhere to go."
"Okay!" he said. Once again, he could not talk to her as he wished: she was in control. "You can go out, but don't be gone too long." He was acting like a parent: he knew that she had put him in this role. It was ludicrous.
He watched her go out of the mean little room. Later, rolling over in bed, he dimly heard the door clicking shut and knew that she had, after all, come back. So she was his.
And that night he lay on his bed, fully dressed, watching her sleep. When his muscles began to ache from being held so long in the same position, he shifted his body on the bed; in this way, over a period of two hours, he went from lying on his side and supporting his head on his hand to sitting up with his knees raised and his hands crossed behind his head to leaning forward, elbows on knees, and finally back to lying on his side, cocked up on one elbow: as if all these postures were elements of a formal round. His eyes scarcely ever left the girl. She lay absolutely still-sleep had taken her somewhere else and left only her body behind. Simply lying there, both of them lying there, she had escaped him.
He rose, went to his suitcase and took out the rolled-up shirt and went back to stand beside his bed. He held the shirt by the collar and let gravity carry the hunting knife to the bed, unrolling the shirt as it fell. When it hit the bed it was too heavy to bounce. Wanderley picked it up and hefted it.
Holding the knife once again behind his back, he shook the girl's shoulder. Her features seemed to blur before she turned over and dug her face into the pillow. He grasped her shoulder again and felt the long thin bone, the prominent wing jutting out from her back. "Go 'way," she muttered into the pillow.
"No. We're going to talk."
"It's too late."
He shook her, and when she did not respond, tried to roll her over by force. Thin and small as she was, she was strong enough to resist. He could not make her face him.
Then she turned over by herself, as if in contempt. Lack of sleep showed in her face, but beneath the puffiness she looked adult.
"What's your name?"
"Angie." She smiled carelessly. "Angie Maule."
"Where do you come from?"
"You know."
He nodded.
"What were your parents' names?"
"I don't know."
"Who took care of you before I picked you up?"
"It doesn't matter."
"Why not?"
"They aren't important. They were just people."
"Was their name Maule?"
Her smile became more insolent. "Does it matter? You think you know everything anyhow."
"What do you mean, 'They were just people'?"
"They were just people named Mitchell. That's all."
"And you changed your name yourself?"
"So what?"
"I don't know." That was true.
So they looked at one another, he sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the knife behind him and knowing that whatever was going to happen, he would be unable to use it. He supposed that David too had been unable to take life-any life but his own, if he had done that. The girl probably knew he was holding the knife, he thought, and simply dismissed it as a threat. It was not a threat. He too was probably not a threat, she had never been even apprehensive of him.
"Okay, let's try again," he said. "What are you?"
For the first time since he had taken her into the car, she really smiled. It was a transformation, but not of a kind to make him feel easier: she did not look any less adult. "You know," she said.
He insisted. "What are you?"
She smiled all through her amazing response. "I am you."
"No. I am me. You are you."
"I am you."
"What are you?" It came out in despair, and it did not mean what he had meant the first time he asked it.
Then just for a second he was back on the street in New York, and the person before him was not the stylish suntanned anonymous woman, but his brother David, his face crumbled and his body dressed in the torn and rotting clothing of the grave.
… the most dreadful thing…
Part One: After Jaffrey's Party
Don't the moon look lonesome,
shinin' through the trees?
Don't the moon look lonesome,
shinin' through the trees?
-Blues
I - The Chowder Society: The
October Stories
America's first fictional heroes were old men.
-Robert Ferguson
Milburn Observed Through Nostalgia
1
One day early in October Frederick Hawthorne, a seventy-year-old lawyer who had lost very little to the years, left his house on Melrose Avenue in Milburn, New York, to walk across town to his offices on Wheat Row, just beside the square. The temperature was a little colder than Milburn expected so early in its autumn, but Ricky wore his winter uniform of tweed topcoat, cashmere muffler and gray, no-nonsense hat. He walked a little briskly down Melrose Avenue to warm up his blood, moving beneath huge oaks and smaller maples already colored heart-wrenching shades of orange and red-another unseasonal touch. He was susceptible to colds, and if the temperature dropped another five degrees, he'd have to drive.
But in the meantime, as long as he could keep the wind from his neck, he enjoyed the walk. After he had turned out of Melrose Avenue toward the square, he was warm enough to go at a more leisurely pace. Ricky had little reason to rush to his office: clients rarely appeared before noon. His partner and friend, Sears James, probably would not appear for another forty-five minutes, and that gave Ricky enough time to amble through Milburn, saying hello to people and observing the things he liked to observe.
What he chiefly liked to observe was Milburn itself- Milburn, the town in which all of his life except for his time in university, law school and the army had been spent. He had never wanted to live anywhere else, though in the early days of his marriage, his lovely and restless wife had often claimed that the town was boring. Stella had wanted New York-had wanted it resolutely. That had been one of the battles he had won. It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work. Ricky imagined that if you watched New York for the same period, what you saw would be mainly New York at work. Buildings went up and down too fast there for Ricky's taste, everything moved too quickly, wrapped in a self-absorbed cocoon of energy, whirling too fast to notice anything west of the Hudson but the Jersey lights. Also, New York had a couple of hundred thousand lawyers; Milburn had only five or six that counted, and he and Sears had been for forty years the most prominent of these. (Not that Stella had ever cared a whit about Milburn's notions of prominence.)
He entered the business district which lay along two blocks west of the square and continued for two blocks along the other side, passed Clark Mulligan's Rialto theater, and paused to look at the marquee. What he saw there made him wrinkle his nose. The posters on the front of the Rialto showed the blood-streaked face of a girl. The kind of movies Ricky liked could now be seen only on television: for Ricky, the film industry had lost its bearings about the time William Powell had retired. (He thought that Clark Mulligan probably agreed with him.) Too many modern films were like his dreams, which had become particularly vivid during the last year.