“Because I’m here. I make you aware of things. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“I can make you aware of many things you never knew about before. Are you glad I came?”
“Yes, I’m glad, and I’m glad you wanted to. Why did you want to?”
“I was lonely and wanted to be with you. I’d rather be with you than anyone else. I couldn’t sleep. I kept looking at the moon through my window and wanting to be with you, and so I had to come. Do you think your mother and father would be angry if they knew?”
“I don’t think so. Why should they?”
“Perhaps they wouldn’t think it right for us to love each other. We do love each other, don’t we, Ivy? Didn’t you feel it immediately? Haven’t you known it right along? We are the truest of lovers with the best of love.”
“Yes. It’s true. Our own true love.”
The words were spoken with a strange, instinctive ease and they were a prelude to a kind of delirious and sensuous excitement such as Ivy had never experienced. As if in a dream she shifted in the bed to permit Lila to slide in beside her. And in a continuing dream she felt herself enfolded in Lila’s arms, and the warmth and intoxicating softness of Lila’s body, the sweet pressure of her lips on her mouth and throat transported her into a world of dizzying sensation. For the first time her own body seemed to come fully alive. There was a wild singing in her blood, a delightful trembling in all her nerve ends and suddenly her arms and her lips and her whole body were as eager and demanding as Lila’s.
It was not until afterward that Ivy became aware that love had ceased to be one thing in a moment and had become another thing entirely, although what it had been was included in what it became, and neither was he aware until later that there was in her ecstasy the deep and grievous sadness of irreparable loss.
And so for Ivy there was the summer and the symbolic smile, the ecstasy and anguish of what was gained and lost and of learning to know and accept herself as someone quite different from the person she had thought she was, or had thought she could possibly be. There was also in the passing of days and weeks and months an accretion of guilt and unspecific fear that was something quite apart from, and far deadlier than, whatever specific fear of discovery she might have felt in relation to her mother and father. But guilt and fear were still, and would for a long time be, of less effect than love, and at the end of summer, when it was time for Lila to go away to her father and then to her school, everything was of no effect at all in the dreadful desolation and loneliness in which Ivy was left.
“You’ll never come back,” Ivy said the night before Lila departed. “I have the most terrible feeling that I’ll never see you again.”
“You’re wrong. Next summer I’ll come, if your parents will have me. I’m sure that Father will be most happy to dispose of me so conveniently. In the meanwhile, I’ll write to you. Does your father or mother ever open your mail?”
“I don’t get much mail, but I don’t remember that they’ve ever opened any.”
“Nevertheless, I’d better be careful what I write. You’ll understand me, however. I’ll make allusions to places and times, and you’ll know what I mean.”
“I wish I could go away with you.”
“One day you shall. I’ll become a model, and we’ll have an apartment together. Good models are paid quite well, and I’ll have some money from Father besides, when he dies. He’s lived so hard that it’s very likely he won’t live to old age. I think his liver’s gone bad.”
“One day. It seems so indefinite and far away. How long, do you think?”
“Maybe sooner than you imagine. You’ll be eighteen in a little over a year. I think I may leave school for good next spring. Maybe soon after that. Isn’t the moonlight lovely? It’s like the first night I came here to your room.”
“I can hear it. Can you? You must listen very intently. It makes me so drowsy. I feel as if I were floating away on the sound of the moonlight, right out of the window and away forever.”
“I wouldn’t want you to float away forever. Then you wouldn’t be here when I return next summer.”
“Let’s not talk about that. About your going away, I mean. I can’t bear to think of it.”
“Would you like to sleep for a while?”
“I think I would, but I don’t want you to go away. Will you stay here if I sleep?”
“I’ll stay for another hour and watch you. I love to watch you when you’re asleep. You look so incredibly innocent, like a small child.”
“Will you wake me before you go back to your room?”
“Yes. I promise. Go to sleep now. Listen to the sound of the moonlight.”
She lay quietly in the cradle of Lila’s arm and went to sleep to the sound, and all through the fall and winter and spring that followed, lying alone at night, she always listened for the sound and waited in the darkness for it to come, and at first it came quickly and clearly, without delay, but then it began to be more and more elusive and remote, and finally could not be heard at all. With Lila gone, with only an allusive letter now and then to assure her presence on earth, the domination of guilt by love became uncertain, and the unspecific fear, which her father might have simplified as the fear of God, assumed slowly a commanding place and became a constant threat. During the time of the three seasons, Ivy was balanced precariously between one thing and another, standing in the time of decision between two ways to go, either of which was possible. But she made no decision, and the seasons passed, and Lila returned in the fourth season, the summer, and then there was no longer a decision to be made, and no way to go but one. The quality of the secret smile was again in everything, and the sound of the moonlight could again be heard, but there was nevertheless a significant difference between the first summer and the second, and the difference lay in an increased consciousness of an enormous commitment and in the dangerous consequences the commitment might entail.
It is possible to hide from the senses forever something that can only be seen, but it is not possible to hide from the senses forever, or even for very long, something that can be felt. Awareness may come slowly, but it comes certainly, and it carries conviction even if there is no material evidence to support it. And so it happened in the second summer that even so insensitive an egoist as the Reverend Dr. Theodore Galvin became uneasily aware that the emotional climate surrounding his daughter and his niece did not satisfy his conception of the effect of a normal attachment. He reluctantly discussed it with his wife and found support for his suspicions, which were by the support immediately transformed into conviction. They decided between them that something would have to be done to prevent a consummation they did not know had already been accomplished, and their idea of what to do was to institute a kind of police action. They imposed such sudden and severe restrictions and engaged so palpably in surveillance that both Ivy and Lila knew almost at once that they were under unspoken indictment.
“They know,” Lila said.
They were sitting on the glider under the tree on the side lawn. To Ivy the familiar patterns of sun and shade were the shapes and signs of a corporate threat. It did not occur to her, however, that there was any escape from it by retreat, or any choice left to her except the one that had been set. There was Lila, or there was nothing. There was hope, or there was hopelessness.
“Yes,” she said. “What can we do?”
“There’s nothing we can do. Not now. They’ll surely send me away.”
“If they do, I’ll go with you.”
Although Ivy was not clearly conscious of it, the they was not used in simple reference to her father and mother, for already the specific had been absorbed by the general, the smaller overt threat no more than a sign of the greater and deadlier one of which it was a part. They were the enemy in an ancient conflict, the accusing host.