THE WORLD IS A WEDDING
since no one but Rudyard was doing what he wanted to be doing,
marriage was as distant as a foreign country. Disdainful from the
beginning of the conventional modes of behavior, their enjoyment
of the life of the circle fortified and heightened their disdain.
When Laura began to doubt that she was going to get a hus–
band, she began to drink, hiding the
gin
in the pantry when Rudyard
tried to stop her. She drank on Saturday nights, the nights when the
circle came to her house and was most itself, so that some of the
boys spoke of "our Saturday nights." When she was really drunk,
she became quarrelsome and voluble, and what she said was an
incoherent but blunt utterance of the naked truth. The boys tried
to seem indifferent to what she said, but the reason for her drunken–
ness was clear and painful. When the marriage of a boy or girl who
had come to evenings of the circle was discussed, and when the news
of an engagement became known, Laura cried out from the kitchen
like Cassandra:
"What does she have that I don't have?" Laura uttered this
question again and again during the evening, amid other and like
remarks.
Laura insisted in vain that her question be answered, and some–
times she placed her hands on her breasts lightly, as if in estimation,
although when sober she was ashamed of any mention of sexual
desire. Each newcomer or visitor renewed her hope, and Laura invited
him
to come to dinner. Laura was full of great goodness and kind–
ness, a goodness hardly concealed by her disgruntled and grudging
remarks. She was unable to understand what was wrong. She lent
the boys money and helped them in whatever they attempted, know–
ing that she was used by them and used most of all by Rudyard. She
made petulant remarks, she said that she was a fool, but she always
pressed herself forward to be helpful, typing Rudyard's manuscripts
which she declared more and more often to be just trash and which
she could understand less and less as Rudyard's indulgence in lyrical
philosophizing grew.
Thus on a Saturday night when the circle had long been in full
being, Laura spoke loudly, crying out from the kitchen or uttering her
sentences in the midst of a conversation.
"Tick, tick, tick," she said as she carried a dish to the table for
the midnight supper.
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