40
PARTISAN REVIEW
twenty years old, as if that figure were somehow evil. Now she was
speaking, making it simple and very clear. He felt strangled by the
purity of her face and kept his eyes down. It was three years ago when
she was taking care of two children in Millboro: their father, the
librarian, a much-loved citizen. She couldn't help it, she had simply
put up with it, and after six months she had enough money to become
a nurse. It didn't matter so much....
"I don't know what you mean."
"I wanted to tell you before.... "
The dark was all up around him, trapping him. He saw the
white line of her face and her lips parted a little, but he saw
in messy fragments, dreamlike, nothing was clear. And then he real–
ized that he had left her and without speaking again had come out on
to the road. He began walking, past his mother's house-dinner would
be ready- past the Aldingtons' where music drifted out in gusts under
the black trees, on through the dark. The picture teased him from
the greenish moon-shadows of the road- someone possessing her–
but soon he was not thinking of that, only of the tiredness that had
come on again, sucking him under. The stick he had been carrying
slipped from his fingers and his hands hung empty and loose, he had
no grasp even on a little twig of birch. Mark Bradley is nobody, the
night said,
is nothing.
He turned back languidly, the rising moon a
great orange tropical fruit behind him, and when a yoting owl
screamed from the woods he stiffened like someone leaving
his
first
crime. It seemed hours before he was down again among the village
lights, and by then the fatigue had risen over him entirely. His legs
shook and under the porch lamp
his
face was deep-hollowed and
vague, like the surface of the moon, free of the trees now and driving
up palely into nothing.
Everyone in the store was peeved at Mark. Especially old Jed,
because Mrs. Bradley had telephoned at midnight, when he was still
wearily going over the accounts, to ask if Mark were there, and
after that he had not been able to get back properly into the figures:
he had not even found anything wrong with the books. Jake had a
better reason. He had to get one of the other boys to help load the
truck and at eleven he set off on his rounds alone. It pricked him,
aside from being inconvenient on account of the steering-gear, to
have to get out himself at every house like an ordinary grocer's boy.
His shirt clung with sweat, he cursed Mark and told himself by God
a girl was no excuse for such behavior: he could not understand it:
himself, he had never stayed out past eleven for a girl except once
and then had come home with a rash around his mouth. But at noon
