“Doing what?”
“Going to dances.”
“Sure.” It was this that threw him off, her having to aim to be what she was.
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“How to do right.”
“Do right?” How to tell the sweet Georgia air to be itself?
“Do you love me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The storm crashed around them. Kitty drew him down to the lower bunk, which was like the long couch in an old-style Pullman drawing room. “Hold me tight,” she whispered.
He held her tight.
“What is it?” she asked presently.
“I was thinking of something my father told me.”
“What?”
“When my father reached his sixteenth birthday, my grandfather said to him: now, Ed, I’m not going to have you worrying about certain things — and he took him to a whorehouse in Memphis. He asked the madame to call all the girls in and line them up. O.K., Ed, he told my father. Take your pick.”
“Did her
“I guess so.”
“Did your father do the same for you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t know until this minute that it was hore. I thought it was whore.”
“No.”
“My poor darling,” said Kitty, coming so close that her two eyes fused into one. “I think I understand what you mean. You’ve been brought up to think it is an ugly thing whereas it should be the most beautiful thing in the world.”
“Ah.”
“Rita says that anything two people do together is beautiful if the people themselves are beautiful and reverent and unself-conscious in what they do. Like the ancient Greeks who lived in the childhood of the race.”
“Is that right?”
“Rita believes in reverence for life.”
“She does?”
“She says—”
“What does Sutter say?”
“Oh, Sutter. Nothing I can repeat. Sutter is an immature person. In a way it is not his fault, but nevertheless he did something dreadful to her. He managed to kill something in her, maybe even her capacity to love.”
“Doesn’t she love you?”
“She is terrified if I get close to her. Last night I was cutting my fingernails and I gave her my right hand to cut because I can’t cut with my left. She gave me the most terrible look and went out. Can you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. I’ll be your whore.”
“Hore.”
“Hore.”
“I know,” said the engineer gloomily.
“Then you think I’m a whore?”
“No.” That was the trouble. She wasn’t. There was a lumpish playfulness, a sort of literary gap in her whorishness.
“Very well. I’ll be a lady.”
“All right.”
“No, truthfully. Love me like a lady.”
“Very well.”
He lay with her, more or less miserably, kissed her lips and eyes and uttered sweet love-murmurings into her ear, telling her what a lovely girl she was. But what am I, he wondered: neither Christian nor pagan nor proper lusty gentleman, for I’ve never really got the straight of this lady-and-whore business. And that is all I want and it does not seem too much to ask: for once and all to get the straight of it.
“I love you, Kitty,” he told her. “I dream of loving you in the morning. When we have our house and you are in the kitchen in the morning, in a bright brand-new kitchen with the morning sun streaming in the window, I will come and love you then. I dream of loving you in the morning.”
“Why, that’s the sweetest thing I ever heard in my life,” she said, dropping a full octave to her old unbuttoned Tallulah-Alabama voice. “Tell me some more.”
He laughed dolefully and would have but at that moment, in the storm’s lull, a knock rattled the louvers of the rear door.
It was Rita, looking portentous and solemn and self-coinciding. She had a serious piece of news. “I’m afraid something has come up,” she said.
They sat at the dinette, caressing the Formica with their fingertips and gazing at the queer yellow light outside. The wind had died and the round leaves of the sea grapes hung still. Fiddler crabs ventured forth, fingered the yellow decompressed air, and scooted back to their burrows. The engineer made some coffee. Rita waited, her eyes dry and unblinking, until he came back and she had her first swallow. He watched as the muscles of her throat sent the liquid streaming along.
“I’m afraid we’re in for it, kids,” she told them.
“Why is that?” the engineer asked since Kitty sat silent and sullen.
“Jamie has telephoned Sutter,” Rita told Kitty.
Kitty shrugged.
The engineer screwed up an eye. “He told me he was going to call his sister Val.”
“He couldn’t reach Val,” said Rita flatly.
“Excuse me,” said the engineer, “but what is so alarming about Jamie calling his brother?”
“You don’t know his brother,” said Rita trying to exchange an ironic glance with Kitty. “Anyhow it was what was said and agreed upon that was alarming.”
“How do you know what was said?” asked Kitty, so disagreeably that the engineer frowned.
“Oh, Jamie makes no bones about it,” Rita cried. “He’s going to move in with Sutter.”
“You mean downtown?” Kitty asked quickly.
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand,” said the engineer.
“Let me explain, Bill,” said Rita. “Sutter, my ex, and Kitty and Jamie’s brother, lives in a dark little hole next to the hospital. The plan of course had been for you and Jamie to take the garage apartment out in the valley.”
The engineer shrugged. “I can’t see that it’s anybody’s loss but mine if Jamie would rather live with his brother. In fact, it sounds quite reasonable.”
Again Rita tried to enlist Kitty in some kind of exchange but the girl was hulkish and dull and sat gazing at the sea grapes.
“It’s like this, Lance Corporal,” said Rita heavily. “Kitty here can tell you how it was. I saved the man once. I loved him and pulled him out of the gutter and put him back together. And I still think he’s the greatest diagnostician since Libman. Do you know what I saw him do? Kitty was there. I saw him meet a man in Santa Fe, at a party, speak with him five minutes — a physicist — ask him two questions, then turn to me and say: that man will be dead of malignant hypertension inside a year.”
“Was he?” asked the engineer curiously. “Dead, I mean?”
“Yes, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“How did Sutter, Dr. Vaught, know that?”
“I have no idea, but that’s not what concerns us now.”
“What were the two questions?”
“Ask him yourself. What is important now is what’s in store for Jamie.”
“Yes.”
“Here again Kitty will bear me out. If not, I shall be glad to be corrected. It is not that Sutter is an alcoholic. It’s not that he is a pornographer. These traits, charming as they are, do not in themselves menace Jamie, or you or me — no matter what some people may say. I flatter myself that all of us are sufficiently mature. No, what concerns me is Sutter’s deep ambivalence toward Jamie himself.”
“What do you mean?” asked the engineer, straining his good ear. The storm had begun banging away again.
“He has every right to make away with himself but he can damn well leave Jamie alone.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Kitty. “I mean, I don’t believe he tried to harm Jamie.”
“It is not a question of belief,” said Rita. “It is a question of facts. Do you deny the facts?”
Kitty was silent.
“It was an experiment,” she said presently.
“Some experiment. What do you think of this as an experiment, Lance Corporal. Last summer, shortly after Sutter learned of Jamie’s illness, he took him camping in the desert. They were lost for four days. Even so, it was not serious because they had plenty of water. On the fourth day the canteens were found mysteriously emptied.”