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So Monica Killdeering had crept back to Kilo, feeling soiled and betrayed and degraded. She had gone with such high anticipation that
this
would be the time. Certainly, from now on, a twice-burned child would shun the fire.

But the next summer was the Rocksport Music Festival. Where nothing happened. And she told herself she should feel proud and stanch that nothing happened. But as she had been given no opportunity to test the strength of the will power she had determined in advance to exert, it reminded her of those childhood days when she had swung mightily at a fat pitch … and missed. She had wanted a chance to prove her own ability to say
no
, to exert the dominance of the mind over the body’s insidious frailty, to prove that it had not really been the real Monica Killdeering who, at the first blunt, quizzical and knowing glance from Vincent Hurlberth’s small blue eyes, would go all swarmy and humid and buttery. That couldn’t be the real Monica.

Came next the Caribbean Camera Cruise, a rather squalid venture that took off from Miami in an elderly ship and made a twenty-day circuit of Caribbean ports of call, during which circuit she spent a humiliating number of days locked in her cabin with a lean, balding, very brown and thoroughly tattooed eccentric named Vasquez Mooney. She saw him in one of two conditions, either naked, or clothed and festooned with a dangle and jangle and clatter of light meters, lens cases, cameras, reflectors and flash bulbs.

During the winter that followed, while enduring the double curse of a Kansas winter with gym classes, she came to realize that she was the victim of a dreadful disease, an unwilling victim of her own unselective lust. Once the epidemic form of the disease was in progress, the mind and spirit of Monica Killdeering could do nought but stand aside, wringing its hands and moaning, like an embarrassed, idealistic and sorely troubled lady-in-waiting who is forced to watch her beloved queen in orgy and debauch. She had to admit to herself that she rationalized the pre-cruise trip to Miami shops where the body purchased for itself shipboard clothing designed to prevent a recurrence of the barrenness of Rocksport. And, in cruel honesty, she could not permit herself to forget that she had enticed Vasquez Mooney to her cabin to repair her camera on the second day out.

Yet the vagrant body had to be punished, and so she spent the following summer in Kilo, doing good works. And, in February, found the advertisement for the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop. And, after signing up, began to feel that first tingle of hope that
this
would be the time. Hope and anticipation had
reached a crescendo as the big aircraft turned into the landing pattern over Mexico City.

She did not know what she meant by
this
. This time, this place, this summer. If she had been forced to put it into words, she might have said that somewhere, somehow, she could find a situation which would combine the bright bursting delights of the body with a lack of consciousness of evil and shame. She wanted to be involved and used without being soiled and afraid and alone. She wanted a joy that would involve both the body and the soul, combining them in good purpose.

The lights were on when she came out of customs. She heard her name called. She turned and saw two men, both of them so attractive, as she hurried toward them, her nervousness was like a recurrent spasm. They introduced themselves. She shook their hands with fevered strength. She made sharp jolting sounds of delight and showed a wide expanse of the square, powerful teeth and adored both of them with her brown and helpless eyes.

The girls came over the mountain just before dusk in the cream-colored convertible Mercedes SL 190 that Mary Jane Elmore’s father had given her for her twentieth birthday two months before. Bitsy Babcock sat beside her with a half bottle of José Cuervo tequila pinched safely between her bare brown thighs. The girls came whizzing down the mountain and, in voices made husky by cigarettes and raw liquor and a conscious effort to pitch their voices lower, they sang “Jailhouse Rock.”

They were the girls of Texas, Mary Jane—twenty, Bitsy—nineteen, leggy and brown and arrogant and derisive of everything in the world including themselves, They wore very short shorts and very narrow halters and, at stops during the trip down, had come dangerously close to causing civil riot and insurrection.

They were the girls from Forth Worth, and from the moment they had learned to talk they had begun to ask for things, and they had gotten everything they had asked for, and it had been paid for out of the almost limitless funds that came from fat herds and deep wells. They were slim and they were beautifully constructed, and they had sun wrinkles and laugh wrinkles at the corners of their eyes. And they had been asked to leave two schools simultaneously, not for academic reasons. Mary
Jane was the blond one, the slightly taller one, her hair cut like a boy’s—a style which was not at all likely to lead to any confusion. Bitsy was just a little more solidly built, but equally slim of waist and long and sleek of leg—a coppery, curly redhead, the tight cropped curls like old coins in the late sun as they came down the mountain.

At twenty, Mary Jane Elmore had seen and done and knew well a great many things that, in a more orderly world, she would have neither seen nor done nor known. Daddy was a big man. He had the ranch and the duplex in the apartment hotel in town, and he had lawyers and tax accountants and a slew of corporations—little ones that sort of traded stuff back and forth, and he had his cars and his plane and his pilot, and when he wasn’t busy with business, or with the hunting crowd or the poker crowd, he was terribly busy with Prissy, who was wife three, a pretty little horse bum who wouldn’t hardly ever leave the ranch unless it was to go to a horse show with all that picnic off the tailgate stuff, and everybody half blind before it was over. Mommy had gone off on the religion bit, and she was in some kind of a retreat in California, and those long letters came from her, all full of God and Suffering and Inner Vision. There was a wife in the middle, between Mommy and Prissy, and her name was Caroline, and she was sure a drain on Daddy because in addition to the alimony thing he was all the time supporting her in one of those happy houses for the bottle babies. Soon as they let her out, pow, she was back in. Mary Jane hadn’t felt so alone in the whole mess while Brud was still around, but Brud had been queer on the road rally bit, and two years ago he had racked up the Porsche so bad you couldn’t even tell what it had been, and like they always said, he didn’t feel a thing. Mary Jane had just been stoned for months and months, crying at nothing and everything because Brud had been a really darling guy and when you thought about it it seemed like such a waste.

There wasn’t quite as much money behind Bitsy Babcock, almost twenty, but you’d never know it from the way ole Bits flang it around. Bitsy had been born in a tarpaper shack, first child of Pops and Maggie Babcock. Pops was one of the last of the shoestring wildcatters, a dry-hole specialist, a con man at getting his backing. When Bitsy was three Pops had spudded in right over the Chisholm dome, and for once his leases were in shape. When Bitsy was nine, and the little kids were two
and three, Pops had a perfectly timed coronary that hit him while he was standing in the men’s bar at the Waldorf in his big rich hat and his seven-stitch boots with a beaker of Jack Daniels in his big hard hand, while Maggie was on a looting expedition up and down Fifth Avenue. Pops was dead before he hit the floor. Had it happened six months earlier, the estate would have been all tangled up, and had it happened six months later, he would have been all committed on the Cuban deal. It happened when he was liquid, between deals, and it happened just thirty-two days after he’d made a will, made it because Doc Schmidt had scared him a little.

It set up a trust for Maggie and one for each of the kids, and it minimized the tax bite, and it made damn well certain that nobody was ever going back to a tarpaper shack. Maggie was a big-boned, vital, handsome, redhead, forthright woman, and you would have thought she could endure anything without falling off at the curves. But losing Pops cut the living heart out of her. Maggie spent a couple of months in black depression, then stuck the kids in private schools and took off to postwar Europe. When she came back she had gaunted herself by dieting off twenty pounds. She wore high-fashion clothes and a weird hairdo. She stuck French and Italian words here and there in her conversation. She was on a nickname basis with minor members of defunct royal houses. And she brought back a husband, a big, sleepy, twenty-five-year-old Swede named Lars, who had an accent, perfect manners, solid-gold accessories and a bottle-a-day habit. Maggie opened the house, got the kids back, staffed the house, and embarked on a lot of entertaining.

Lars lasted until Bitsy was twelve, and then the kids were plunked back into private schools until Maggie was ready to try again, this time with a hell of a big man named Pete Kitts she met in San Francisco. He was bigger than Lars. He was even bigger than Pops had been. Among other things he had been a wrestler, pro football player, carnival strong man, sports reporter, and bodyguard to a gangster.

He had lasted until Bitsy was nearly sixteen. The current one was Captain Walker-Smith, a man of such insignificant stature that Maggie had given up high heels entirely, and, when she walked beside him, tried to keep her knees slightly and inconspicuously bent. Captain Walker-Smith, one-time hero of the RAF, had a cold gray eye, an arrogant mustache and a
manner of speech so incomprehensible that one was led to wonder whether perhaps the mustache grew on the inside as well as the outside. Maggie had dominated Lars and Pete. And was now dominated by the Captain, as thoroughly as she had been by Pops. So Bitsy had a hunch this one might last.

These were the girls from Fort Worth, the leggedy young ones, with the hoarse voices and the wise and weary young eyes. They had learned precisely how to handle their own family situations, to appear before their elders with the right combination of sauciness and deference. They had learned that only casual conversations are possible. They had learned how to deal with a drunken adult of either sex, when to quietly disappear as a family scene began to shape up. When any organism is subjected to strain over a period of time, it forms adjustments. Mere survival is the primary motive. When there is no secondary drive, or conviction or involvement, the organism becomes a specialist in survival.

Both girls knew how to stay in school without work or strain, how to handle liquor, how to extract maximum pleasure with minimum risk. Each felt that one day she would be married, but it was a far-off thing. Neither girl considered herself amoral or immoral. They had agreed that they were not promiscuous. Mary Jane had gone steady four times, and Bitsy three. Each association on the going-steady basis had been an intense physical affair, with assignations occurring in automobiles, motels, horse barns, parents’ houses and the homes and apartments of friends. That was not promiscuous. It was all right if you were going steady. Everybody knew that. Only one time had a scary thing happened, and that was when Mary Jane had become pregnant at sixteen. She was in school in the East at the time and, after she got over her initial panic, she found out where she could get something done about it. She could have gotten the money from her very own checking account, but it was the code that Chuck should pay for it, and when he had scraped the money together he drove her to Philadelphia and it was done, and now sometimes she would think of how old the kid would be and how he might look and it would make her feel grim and odd, and like crying.

But the lesson was valuable, because after that you made dang well sure it wouldn’t happen again, and maybe the lesson saved Bits from having the same trouble.

Bitsy had been going steady with a boy for nearly a year,
and it had broken up in April. Mary Jane’s affair, of slightly longer duration, had broken up at about the same time, and so they had decided that they would spend the summer together and cheer each other up. They talked about taking a bicycle trip in Europe, or maybe getting waitress jobs at a resort for just kicks. Then they heard about the ball you could have at the summer session for American students at the University of Mexico. There was no trouble getting permission, but then they found out they had registered too late. It was a shame, because Scooter, who’d gone last summer, said the place was full of darling boys. Bitsy found the ad for the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop, and, through verbal sleight of hand, they had given their parents the impression that this was a part of the University program.

So the girls came down the mountain. Mary Jane slowed the car and reached again for the tequila bottle. Bitsy leaned over and steadied the wheel as Mary Jane unscrewed the cap and took two dainty swallows. They had come down through Mexico in a pleasant haze of tequila. There were a thousand things to talk about and laugh about, and it was a ball. It was going to be one of those summers.

To the obvious and sullen annoyance of the staff, Miles Drummond ordered that dinner should be delayed until Mr. Kemp and Mr. Barnum returned from Mexico City with Miss Killdeering. Seven tables for four had been pushed together in one corner of the huge and gloomy dining room so as to provide a makeshift banquet table for the thirteen students, the two faculty members, and the director.

Miles trotted out to the dining room many times after it was dark to look at the table and worry about the seating. Between each narrow tall window and the next, one of the big, dim, naked bulbs stood upright in a wall fixture, each with a small brown parchment clip-on shade. The light filled the room with eerie shadows and left the high ceiling in darkness. He got a chair and removed the shades and then stepped back to look it all over. It was worse without the shades. He replaced them. The place settings distressed him. He liked things to be very nice. He hoped that the light was so dim that they would not notice the dozen breeds and brands of glasses, silver and china, or the dim stains and mends and worn spots in the tablecloths. He took the place cards out of his shirt pocket and, with much thought, distributed them around the table. And then he went
out into the kitchen. The gloom there was much like the dining-room lighting, but there was also a stifling heat that came from the big wood range. Rosalinda and Felipe assured him that the food would have been of the most excellent quality had it been served on time. But now, of course, with each passing moment, it became less palatable. If one is to cook to a schedule, then, señor, it is obviously necessary to …