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PARTISAN REVIEW
"Get up," he went on, "and I'll ring for the porter to fix it for you."
He spoke harshly: this was the drill sergeant, the voice of authority.
She sprang to attention, her lips quivering. Her nakedness, her long,
loose hair, which a moment hefore had seemed voluptuous to her, now
all at once became bold and disorderly, like an unbuttoned tunic at an
army inspection. This was the first wound he had dealt her, but how deep
the sword went in, back to the teachers who could smoke cigarettes and
&ossip with you in the late afternoon and then rebuke you in the morning
class, back to the relations who would talk with you as an equal and then
tell your aunt you were too young for silk stockings, back through all
the betrayers, the friendly enemies, the Janus-faced overseers, back to the
mother who could love you and then die.
"I don't want a bath," she asserted stubbornly. "I'm perfectly clean."
But she knew, of course, that ihe had not bathed since she left New York,
and, if she had been allowed to go her own way, would not have bathed
until she reached Portland-who would think of paying a dollar for a
bath on the train? In the ladies' room, where soot and spilt powder made
a film over the dressing-tables and the hair-receivers stared up, archaic as
cuspidors, one sponged oneself hastily under one's wrapper, and, looking
at one's neighbors jockeying for position at the mirror, with their dirty
kimonas, their elaborate make-up kits, and their uncombed permanents,
one felt that one had been fastidious enough, and hurried away, out of the
sweet, musty, unused smell of middle-aged women dressing. "I'm perfectly
clean," she repeated. The man merely pressed the bell, and when the
porter announced that the bath was ready, shoved her out into the corridor
in his Brooks Brothers dressing-gown with a cake of English toilet soap
in her hands.
In the ladies' lounge, the colored maid had drawn the bath and stood
just behind the half-drawn curtain, waiting to hand her soap and towels.
And though, ordinarily, the girl had no particular physical modesty, at
this moment it seemed to her insupportable that anyone should watch her
bathe. There was something terrible and familiar about the scene-herself
in the tub, washing, and a woman standing tall above her-something ter–
rible and familiar indeed about the whole episode of being forced to
cleanse herself. Slowly she remembered. The maid was, of course, her
aunt, standing over her tub on Saturday nights to see that she washed
every bit of herself, standing over her at the medicine cabinet to see that
she took the castor oil, standing over her bed in the mornings to see if
the sheets were wet. Not since she had been grown-up, had she felt this
peculiar weakness and shame. It seemed to her that she did not have the
courage to send the maid away, that the maid was somehow. the man's
representative, his spy, whom it would be impious to resist. Tears of
futile, self-pitying rage came into her eyes, and she told herself that she
would stay in the bath all day, rather than go back to the compartment.
But the bell rang in the dressing-room, and the maid rustled the curtain,
