The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel (12 page)

“Not in love with Danny?”

“
I
don’t know. Maybe. It’s too soon to tell.”

“You’re not a virgin, are you?”

“Well … no. There was a boy in Elgin. But never again until I fall in love.”

“Well, to be honest, Lois darling, I probably agree with you.”

But she didn’t know whether she did or not. She was grateful that the activity at Vernon was so furious she hadn’t been able to think too much about it. There had been no one since Lang.

That night her thoughts were whirling about long after Lois’ breathing had evened out with sleep. Her dance, Daddy in the audience watching, Danny and the fishing trip. It seemed to her that before coming to Vernon she had lived wrapped up tightly in a casing of her own flesh. Now she was alive to everything around her. She had read Walter Pater and had been a member of the cult of beauty for three days. There was Mr. Cooper, a lovely teacher, a lovely man she thought, who introduced her to bits and pieces of St. Thomas Aquinas. With him she was a neo-Thomist. Roy was a Catholic (Mother should know), who was conflicted about his duty to religion and his family. With him she was not quite sure whether there was or was not a supreme being. They got along fine. Danny was concerned about the twentieth-century dilemma and regretted bitterly that he had been too young to fight in the Spanish Civil War. With him she bemoaned Russia’s betrayal of the revolution. There was, to her mind, nothing inconsistent about this behavior. She lived in this new world of ideas the same way in which she had lived in the world of sensation, as an opportunist.

Her mind was quick, retentive of facts, smooth at organizing them to a purpose, although not capable of concentrating on a set of data for too long. The concept of allegiance to one or another set of principles was quite alien to her. Nothing she did or thought excluded anything else. She was all-inclusive.

She was remembering how Danny had held Lois’ arm protectively when they’d left The Waffle. She liked that quality in him. She hadn’t been attracted as much to any boy since arriving at Vernon. In this unexpected onslaught of feeling she was betrayed into the arms of an old habit which she’d hoped she’d left behind. She waited a few moments, however, to make sure Lois was quite asleep.

The sky was a slate blue, the September afternoon clear and cool. Everywhere Elly looked the horizon was rimmed with hills. They crossed under a barbed-wire fence, Roy and Allan holding the wire high so the girls could pass under, squealing but safe. Danny with the bulging knapsack in which reposed their lunch and possibly dinner (no one at the lodge outside of Hanover expected them back before dark) strapped to his back ranged on ahead, anxious, as always, to plan which way to turn next. Roy and Allan carried the bait. Elly wore slacks (there had been several jokes) and a polo shirt, and had a creel suspended at her right side from a strap over her left shoulder. Vicki wore the blue jeans that Elly had shunned as
too
unfeminine, and Lois the impractical skirt.

“You sure there are fish in this-here stream you know?” Roy called out to Danny.

“Thousands,” Danny flung over his shoulder. “Millions!”

“We mean fish, not guppies,” Elly shouted.

“Whales” was the reply.

They crossed a small stream. A log, all but stripped of its bark, served as a bridge. The stream ran fast and below the crystal-bluish surface there were hundreds of small pebbles packed closely together.

“This it?”

“Wise guy!”

It was, however, past the next field and across a dirt road into a patch of trees. Under a large rock they spread their paraphernalia. They broke up into pairs. Elly, on the pretext of needing a teacher, latched onto Danny. They went far up the stream to a place where the water had quieted and the only sound was of flies buzzing near the water’s surface. Danny caught a small pickerel almost immediately. Elly caught nothing. He had to caution her to be quiet so often that they took a break, Danny satisfied for the while that he had proved his fishing prowess. They lay on the grass smoking cigarettes and talking.

“How’s Dartmouth?” Elly asked, blowing clouds of smoke over her head.

“It’s okay. I’m a local boy. Grew up in Hanover.”

“Oh, I’m not. I’m just the opposite. Colchester, Indiana. It’s so dry and flat up there compared to here. So many hills. I love it.”

She showed him some snapshots of the house. He nodded appreciatively.

“They built it to keep me there.”

“So you were a captive princess, eh? How does it feel to be free?”

“It’s more than that. It’s like somebody suddenly took me out from under a great big snail’s shell and showed me what it was like outside. I don’t know, but I seem to be so much more aware of what’s going on around me, not only classes and all, but people are more real. Maybe it’s my dancing, because that’s like discovering how to walk. I studied at home, but it was so different. People should always dance.”

“Easier said than done. Maybe you’re describing what’s known as growing up.”

“Maybe you’re right. Anyway it’s had such a powerful effect on me that even dancing isn’t enough to express it. I’ve even taken to writing.”

“Really? What kind of stuff?”

“Oh, prose, you know. I have a couple of pages with me, if you want to read some.”

“Sure. Love to.”

She pulled a few folded sheets from her back pocket. The night before she had laboriously copied a section from a novel by Koestler, one of the more lyrical portions. She was anxious to impress Danny, hoping desperately that he hadn’t read this particular book. If he had she could always pass it off as a joke and, laughing, snatch the papers from him and tear them up. But, as he read, he shook his head admiringly, so she knew she was safe.

“Hey,” he said, “this stuff is good. What’s it going to be, a novel?”

She nodded. “There’s so much to do,” she sighed. Writing, dancing, besides just living. Nothing’s enough by itself.”

“That’s the idea. They’re all supposed to add up to something which the parts don’t make by themselves. That’s Gestalt, you know.”

“Yes.” She had the uneasy feeling that they were not really communicating. She stretched her long legs before her and one arm behind her and with the other arm indicated with a wide sweep the grass on which they lay, the running stream and the encircling hills.

“It seems to me, sometimes though, that this is all we have.”

“This?”

“Yes. Only the things you can experience directly. The grass you’re lying on and you can feel how damp it is, the hills over there—you can see how green they are and then how they get to be purpled after a while. The water you can hear, so you know it’s there even if you don’t see it. That’s all we have.”

“I don’t know if I understand exactly what you mean. You mean sensory experience?”

“You’re so academic. Yes, I guess that’s what I meant.”

She rolled her head close to his blond hair. She stared at him with the wide-open, steady gaze that had so unnerved John Lang. With the strange feeling small children have, of being able magically to control the world by their thoughts, she saw his face close in upon her and cover her eyes (which she then closed) and press hard on her lips. Now they were communicating.

They separated and she took a cigarette, tapped it four times on her thumb nail, then reversed it, tapped it four times again and lighted it. The day, she noticed, was no longer as fine as it had been. The sky was clouding over and the air was growing chilly. She shivered, rolled close to Danny, put her arms around him. Then she pulled away suddenly and, laughing, sprang to her feet and began to run, jumped across the smaller stream and toward the woods that began at the edge of the field.

“Look,” she called out, “I’m the booby prize. If you catch me you can have me.”

Danny leaped up, something within him responding to the ridiculous promise. His lips were dry after the kiss, and he began to run after Elly.

As she ran, Elly felt a drop of rain on her cheek and then one on her hand. She ran even faster. She lost him for a few moments and he was bewildered. Then she had her arms suddenly around his chest from the back for an instant and then ran off again. This time he caught her. She fell to the ground. The rain was still light, but a few minutes later it was drumming a ferocious tattoo against the leaves and was already moistening the two of them as they lay in the beginning of an embrace.

The wild sound of the rain was exciting to Elly. Danny made one convulsive movement of withdrawal when the wind blew the semiprotective covering of leaves aside and drenched them both with a stinging sheet of water, but she held him tightly and said, “No. Please.”

They found the others, just as soaked as they were by the sudden storm. Somehow Elly had expected them to be dry although there was no conceivable place to take shelter within running distance. The rain had steadied to a
pat-pat-pat
now and they all half ran, half walked back to the lodge outside of Hanover.

That evening they played checkers and parcheesi and Vicki read poetry aloud.

“Read us that thing you wrote, Elly,” Danny suggested. “The one you showed me.”

“I lost it in the storm,” she said, hastily adding, “along with my compact. I’ll have to borrow yours, Lois.” Later that night, when the girls in their room were preparing for bed, Elly remembered that she had expected Danny to be as gentle and solicitous with her as he seemed to be with Lois. But he had been ferocious, uncontrolled. Well, perhaps the rain had helped. Lois asked no questions and Elly was surprised and relieved and, thinking about it, she realized there were no questions to ask. The others assumed they had run to take shelter from the storm the way they had, that was all.

“Isn’t that your compact, Elly?” Vicki asked, wiping her lipstick off with a Kleenex.

“Oh, that one? Yes, I’d forgotten I had two with me.”

The incident was not mentioned when Lois returned to the room.

Elly had no desire to see Danny, and in the few encounters they had on week ends, when Lois saw him, they were cordial but nothing more. As in other matters Elly could not sustain interest once she had gone to what was, to her, the heart of the situation. To assuage whatever guilt she felt she asked Lois several times if she was in love with Danny and was gratified to receive a negative answer.

Her dance proceeded beautifully and her studies suffered commensurately. She named the piece “The Fire without Flame,” a title which her dancing instructor approved, although not quite sure of what significance it might hold for her pupil. A month passed—of practicing, unimpressive dates, letters from home and more practicing. Miss Matthews ventured the opinion that she might someday become a professional dancer, setting off a train of visions that haunted her for hours at a time.

One cold morning, when the frost could be traced clearly on the window for the first time, Elly paused in her series of
pliés
for which she used the window sill as a practice bar and realized the curse was three days overdue. She refused to let fright grasp her and remembered hearing that the first encounter after long abstinence could cause such a delay, and continued practicing. Three days later she lost her calm and confided in Lois, saying she couldn’t tell her who it had been.

Lois accepted this as honorable and said, “Let me tell Danny. Danny’ll know what to do.”

Elly agreed, happy to use Lois as her go-between, certain that Danny would not confess to
her
. After Lois left the room, she lay on the bed and laughed for a few moments. Then she lay quietly, touching her breasts gingerly now and then, and trying to quiet a rising panic.

The first visit to the doctor in Vernon was comparatively simple. The questions, the filled bottle, the second visit arranged for. When she returned, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, the doctor, a bachelor about fifty years old, informed her that the test was positive. She was pregnant. She was all cried out and just sat there rigidly.

“It is still early enough, Mrs. Kaufman—” he used the term for form’s sake; she wasn’t fooling
him
one bit: she wasn’t a day over nineteen—“to try some quinine tablets. They’re not infallible, but they do work sometimes. I think it’s early enough—if you’re lucky—”

“I tried to throw myself down the stairs,” Elly said slowly, “but I couldn’t do it.”

“Now,” he said, twirling a pencil nervously in his hands, “there’s no need for that or anything like it. You come back to see me in a week.”

Elly nodded. “I’ll try the pills,” she said hopelessly, knowing this was the end of the freedom, of the endless worlds, of everything.

When she had left, the doctor called in his nurse and said, “Make out a report on the girl and I’ll send it to the dean of Vernon and the dean of Larchville College. Those are the only two around here, aren’t they? I’ll wait and see how she is when she comes back next week, before I send it.”

“Yes, they’re the only colleges, Doctor, but do you have to—”

“Are you serious? Do you know how old that kid is? Not more than eighteen or nineteen. She needs her family more than anything right now. The school will see to it that they’re notified. You can’t let the kid wander around alone, and I don’t do abortions. Type the report up and we’ll hold it. If she ever mentioned my name—well …”

Lois found Elly sitting on the bathtub, her face ashen, her hands clutching at her stomach. In the bathtub was a filthy mess. Lois helped her to bed and then, sickened, she cleaned up the thing in the bathtub, returned and was violently ill herself. Later she interrupted her care of Elly to report her ill to the cottage superintendent.

When her stomach and what felt like her entire insides quieted down and was less painful, Elly was joyful and exuberant. Lois was horrified but pleased the trouble was over.

“You’re a lucky girl,” Lois told her.

“I know. I know. Isn’t it fantastic? I thought sure everything was over for me. I can’t thank you enough, Lois.” She really felt quite tender toward her roommate who had stood by her so well, completely forgetting for the moment that it was her own betrayal that had initiated the entire situation.