THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
787
tion over flesh, as if she had composed herself to the tailored pattern
of her role out of one of those bags of useful scraps women keep
for mending. From beneath the careful repose of her face, she surged
out magnificently to an undivided shelf of bosom, then dropped in
an unruilled, gentle slant to the brief bifurcation of the legs beneath
the discreet length of her skirt
i
one could imagine her only as homo–
geneous under the dark dresses, whalebone and silk and silk and
whalebone as deep as one could gcr-certainly not real breasts or the
legs cleft to the dark, living warmth of the crotch.
Carrie and Vergil are confused in my remembering
i
they
impugn each other, the poet's cool, tenebrous elegance squandered
on his incomprehensible allegiances (how could we who marched
past the bored hostility of cops with banners, "Frce Tom Mooney
and the Scottsboro Boys!" or wrote the leaflets against war and
fascism that they broke open our lockers to find, believe in the mys–
teries of a homeland discovered or the decorous sweetness of death
in battle), and the insult of the teacher's yellow smile, unbearably
tolerant of the boy's fumbled translation. "Not bad, but will you try
next time, please-to
prepare
your lesson."
Even the cool tolerance was, we soon learned, for boys only
i
the
tentative equilibrium of adolescent girls was always in peril under
Carrie's blue, ungenerous stare, that reduced all their gaiety, their
motives of rebellion, their crowding of maturity to the mere evidence
of an expected, gauche viciousness. She would bait the girl who
faltered or turned to the calling of her name a face still meshed
in
some soft, trivial reverie, gently smile that incredulous smile, wait
in
silence and with the offensive composure that no kid can attain
or outface, until there welled up
in
the victim, .after the start to
attention, the excuses- tears! Then while the door still swung gently
after the retreating girl, whose heels we could hear, distinct in the
empty corridors, running, running-Carrie would turn her bland
gaze back to the rollbook, to us. "Well-Miss Kaufman, are
you
with us? Line 23, please.
Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae."
Or sometimes when we looked up suddenly, while one of us was
turning into the unlanguage of recitation the quandary of the Hero,
his imperatives elsewhere and son and comrade to remind him, but
his flesh trapped in the cave with the hot Queen to whom he was
no more than what she fondled (Oh Lord, we could not know yet how
