THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
795
"Sons-of-bitches," cried noble Carrie.
"'Whatever brute or blackguard made the world,''' quoted
gallant Hal.
And I lost myself in a phrase of Baudelaire, the real clue, I
knew in that instant, to everything:
«L'insolence de La nature."
But
the tenth time I tried to repeat it, it was suddenly gone; I had for–
gotten it and the terrible unfairness of it ,all brought me almost to
tears. But they stood by me, my understanders, my comrades-
We had all grown smaller, more distant in the expanding, un–
stable room; we could see each other only by propping our eyelids
open with our fingers, straining, straining. And above us our heads,
soft and swollen, bump-bumped the ceiling in a pulse of escape. They
were so little, so dearly little, so dear!
All the splendid things we would do, the astounding rapes, the
bright revenges, the dazzling explorations of sensibility, the poems,
the disorders, the sighs were there, palpable forever between us. "By
God!" Hal cried for us all, "By God By God By God!" And the
phone rang.
It was my mother; we could hear Carrie softly lying to her in
the foyer, and the greyness that had fogged until then only the room's
harsh, limiting corners closed in upon our central splendor. "Yes. Yes.
They've just left. It should be another fifteen minutes, I suppose.
Yes. Goodnight."
I imagined in her pauses my mother's worried voice, sleep–
blurred and querulous, and behind the voice the anguish of her
unreal possession (for only melancholy and pride enwombed me now
and forever), the obsessive picture of my broken body, fallen from
bridges, bruised by trucks, riven by lightning, open to the inner
alien lake of blood that she had fed and could drain now only in
the inverted wish of fear.
I did not understand then, splashed on the chair's plush, intoler–
ably bloated and weary, the contempt that Carrie must have felt,
nor her terrible joy in it, for the failure of real mothers, who give
neither the golden present nor release, but exact for warmth, for
animal nourishment and prose comforts our endless indulgence and a
ridiculous allegiance to childhood. But Carrie in return endured
the indignity of the lie, that absurd complicity with boys.
