520
PARTISAN REVIEW
house, the meaning pressed
in
on me with the night. What the woman
really wanted me to do was to declare her unfit to have a baby and to
recommend a legal abortion. She wanted to spite her husband, the child
that was to be, life itself. But why? I couldn't understand her. Was she
human or a specter of nightmare? She was real in the sense that
I
had
seen her, with her horrible handsome mauve dress and her shallow and
cruel eyes, and that
I
could not get her out of my head; but in the dream
there was somebody behind her, she emanated from somebody else--there
had been once when
I
had seen her in her bedroom just before she started
screaming, and the eyes had been bright green, full of intellect, and full
not of hypocritical agony but of fixed and unforgiving condemnation.
And now
I
saw it absolutely clearly: ·this apparition came from
Ellen.
It
was Ellen who had made of her mother this monster, who was
forcing her to get rid of her baby, who was destroying her own existence
before it had come out of the womb! And she was somehow forcing me
to abet her ...
I
got myself to sleep with a book just as the windows
were unblotting from night.
And when
I
woke up,
I
was no longer so sure. The sun was quite
brilliant and bracing: it sent a long pane of light across my breakfast and
brought out the whites and yellows of my eggs with their sparkling of
salt and pepper;
I
talked to the soft·spoken colored maid about the movie
she had seen the night before; and.
I
stood outside for a moment and
was delighted by the deep·orange zinnias, the pom·pom clusters of little
lemon marigolds, the scarlet big daisies of cosmos on high and spidery
stems that still were bright at the end of October.
I
decided that my
explanation of my visit of the day before had been simply a part of the
nightmare. What
I
had seen was not a woman of the eighties but a con·
temporary relation of Ellen's, completely insane no doubt but an actual
human being, and
I
must not allow myself to be led by her into getting
insane myself.
I
expelled the whole thing from my mind; read the papers,
wrote several letters, and contemplated a trip to the city.
I
needed the
city,
I
felt.
But when I went for a walk that afternoon, the sun had gone out for
the day and the whole thing came back on me again. I saw the situation
precisely as I had seen it
in
the middle of the night, and I could not
see
it
in
any other way-I could not get outside it. And I now felt not merely
an irrational pull toward the house where Ellen lived; I had a fear it
would come to find me--that the past might have its gangsters, too, who
could wait for you and meet you on the autumn roads where so little
traffic passed. And I presently turned and came home and lay on a couch
and brooded.
Yet I could not go to town, I now told myself: there was something
I could not leave unfinished. I had to see it finished, and I had to do my
best to see that it was finished as it should be. Precisely what this meant
I did not know-except that it imposed upon me a duty to stand up to the
Terhunes and their house. I must not be afraid to go out, I must not
be
