He did not go the creek, the mornings of that week. He was afraid to risk the gate’s being closed. He did not trust himself. Why had he been so stupid, going on across the threshold that had not been there, pushing on and on when he knew the way led nowhere? If, as soon as he saw the gateway was not open, he had headed straight back to Mountain Town and asked the girl to help him, he would have saved himself that nightmare, the endless walking, telling himself that if he just kept straight on he would “come out all right,” and the panic that had taken him over when he thought he had lost his path, and the terror, and the hunger. It had all been stupid and unnecessary, and had left him not only so tired that he found workdays long and hard all week, but also distrustful of himself, or of the place.
“This is where I’m not afraid,” he had said to the girl (in Allia’s house, in the long room with the windows full of the clear twilight), but that was now no longer true. He knew now a little of the risk he might run in returning there. He knew also that he knew only a little of the risk. There was danger there; and he could not count on himself to act rationally. Given that, and the unreliability of the gateway, it seemed right to assess his chances of coming back as no more than equal. He saw this as part of the balance of the two places, and accepted it. It was the chance, the service he craved. But all the same, so long as he was here in the commonplace world, with the usual delusory options and nothing larger than life size to cope with, he would enjoy the light of day.
Towards his mother he felt the compunction, the grieving patience of potential disloyalty, strained only by her relentless crossness. She forgave him nothing. His coming back a couple of hours later than he had said he would on Sunday afternoon had brought bitter accusations of unreliability down on him. He understood that but did not understand why his unconcealable exhaustion (lamely explained by “getting lost on a shortcut”) had aroused her antagonism and contempt. “You got lost in the woods? Why were you in the woods? If you don’t know how to look after yourself it’s a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to do. People like you should do their exercising in a gym. You haven’t got the build for boy scouting. What are you trying to prove?” And so on: speaking from an uncontrollable irritation, it seemed, which made him think that it was not his coming back in such a state that enraged her, so much as his coming back at all. But that made no sense.
Lately she had been staying out three or four evenings a week, sometimes till midnight, at her séances with Durbina. Several other people with spiritualist interests had joined them. Mrs. Rogers had proved to have talent as a medium: she could do automatic writing without going into trance. Thanks to her gift, they were now carrying on a lively conversation, or correspondence, with one of Durbina’s past incarnations, a priestess of Isis. The coffee table in the Rogers’s living room was piled with books about ancient Egypt, borrowed from Durbina or, expensive as they were, bought new. When the priestess of Isis contradicted a statement in one of the books, or corrected an erroneous translation of a hieroglyph, Mrs. Rogers was triumphant. Sometimes when she got home she would talk excitedly about what had happened at the séance; but as soon as Hugh tried to respond she would come down from her high. “Of course, this sort of thing doesn’t interest you,” she said, no matter what he had said or asked. He saw that she was happy with these people who admired and valued her spiritualist talent, that she flourished among them. But she could not bring her ease or happiness home with her. Her new interests only increased her distrust and discontent. Hugh was unable to do anything to please her. If she did the laundry she complained savagely about odd socks, shirts with dirty collars and grass stains, T-shirts not turned right side out; but if he put the wash through she did it all over again because he hadn’t done it right. If he brought something from the supermarket because it was on sale or a good buy, she said it was “day-old stuff,” and let it molder in the refrigerator till he threw it out. When they were both in the apartment she made him feel that he was forever in her way, yet she said nothing to change her demand that he be there whenever she got home. If she stayed out half the evenings of the week, resented his presence yet insisted upon it, how were they going to manage, when he came back?…But the fact was, he was going. Against that fact his mother’s non-negotiable demands became, at last, insignificant. Her rudeness and impatience hurt him, but not deeply; his will was turned aside from her. No knife’s edge could reach him where he walked thinking of Allia.
It was hot, he said to himself, everybody got cross in weather this hot.
He moved through the long days of that week in silence, mostly. At night he had no sound sleep, but many dreams and wakings, and more than once in the small hours would get up to stand a while at the window to look up at the stars or the first high glory of the dawn.
On Friday Donna, who got Saturdays off, asked him what he was going to do over the holiday, and he answered, as he had planned, “Go hiking with some people I know.” Donna gave him that sidelong flick of a glance that somehow implied that, in loving a woman, he had merited the approval of all womanhood as represented by Donna—or was it approval? But then she looked at him straight on, and her face changed. She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t let anything happen to you, Buck,” she said.
“What’s going to happen to me hiking?”
“I don’t know!” she said as if surprised at herself, and laughed it off.
But her look and words and the touch of her plump, hard hand with red-lacquered nails served him, in need, as a talisman, an assurance that in fact there was one person concerned about him, however ineffectually, through a mere intuition that he was in trouble or at risk.
If his mother’s gift as a spiritualist led her to see the same thing she held it against him, as evidence of disloyalty, and did not forgive him for it.
On Friday evening he told her that he planned to be gone all Sunday night. This was what he had dreaded all week. He mumbled through the routine he had prepared about going hiking with some friends in the state park north of the city, taking the early bus on Sunday morning, sleeping out Sunday night, getting back on Monday afternoon. She said nothing. She kept her eyes on the television all the time he spoke, so that he could not be sure she heard. Though the live weight of guilt made it hard to breathe, he finished his statement, and then was silent, not asking, not permitting himself to ask, for confirmation, for permission, for the approval he craved, had always craved, had never got and would not get. But he would not permit himself anger either, and a while later, when her program was over and she had got up to turn the television off, he asked her as naturally as he could how her séance last night had gone. She did not answer. She took up a book on Akhenaton, and sat down with it, not looking at him or speaking to him. He tried to tell her himself that her silence was easier to take than one of her tirades would have been; but as he sat in the room with her, trying to read Time, he found that he was beginning to shake, as if with cold. He got up and went to his room. She did not reply to his “Good night.”
Usually she stayed abed on Saturday morning, but this day she was up and off in the car before Hugh got up. He went to work as usual. It was a heavy day, coming before the two-day holiday. She was not home when he got home. He ate supper alone. She came in at ten-thirty, looking thin, grim, a little disheveled in her cotton print dress. She did not answer his greeting but started straight down the hall to her bedroom.
“Mother,” he said, and there was some authority of passion in his voice, for she stopped, though she did not turn to face him. The silence stood between them like a substance.