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PARTISAN REVIEW
for giving herself away to Margaret's pity. But also she was frightened
of, and trying to fight off the beginning of a perception that she and
Margaret had entered a blind street: she rushed forward. "It was such
awful poetry, full of spring and robins!" That this was at the same
time literally the truth and an outrage to her intensity of effort made
her laugh sharply.
"Oh," Margaret said, very obviously summoning her capable
manner, smiling, "but perhaps you couldn't tell? Poets so often can't!"
Though she knew exactly what value Margaret attached to this,
Sally, because her dread mounted now as she wanted passionately to
speak with the full weight of the things she had to tell, recklessly
forced a deception on herself, forced herself to believe Margaret was
not being polite but was acknowledging faith. Gratitude for Marga–
ret's faith might help her to get on to the other things. She looked up,
meeting Margaret's eyes, and said explosively, "I married John
d'Acosta, you remember him?-the boy I used to talk about so
much?"
"Oh?" Margaret said, occupied with the distressing fact that
Sally still wrote poetry; and then as she realized who John d'Acosta
had been, concealing her horror.
"Yes," Sally said, "it was absurd ... " (because she had made
him marry her, but the words would not come out). "It was obviously
all wrong from the beginning . . . " (not because, as she knew Mar–
garet was thinking, John was wrong, but because she had loved him
all the wrong ways ... and these words would not come out either).
"He drank, and wouldn't get a job, and within the first week he was
seen downtown with another girl. I had to give it up, I divorced
him
after eight months. It was awful."
Awful? Margaret repeated to herself, dismayed to find Sally still
theatrical, even about this, still the wrong side. of honesty-and why?
why, when below the bright surface of her eyes lay enough pain to
make an old friend cry out for her?
"And Father died, of cancer, in terrible pain, and Alicia was
killed soon after, in an automobile accident."
"Oh," Margaret wailed softly, appalled-the older sister dead,
in an automobile. accident? "Oh, tell me.... "
Sally thought of the incredible number of months when she and
Alicia had visited her father
in
the hospital twice a day, the ghastly
optimism, the horror of seeing her father gradually sink into a queru–
lous demand for more and more optimism; the black smash that had
been the end of Alicia; the enormous guilt she had slowly expiated
day by day-it seemed she would never come to the end of things
