THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
801
found her eyes curiously unpleasant. "You never knew Hal, at least!"
I was still capable of feeling that it was an abrupt opening, but it
seemed a point worth making somehow.
"What Hal?"
"Any of them. Me, for instance-"
"Knock it off! Your name's not Hal."
I agreed; it was not a question on which I was prepared to take
a firm stand. We were moving through that part of Pennsylvania
where the obvious flowering of fire from the blast furnaces is anyone's
spectacle, and Kitty's face turned toward it, from me to the orange
lambency and the high, dark air in which it was lost.
"I had a theory once that Hal had sold himself to the Devil.
Wrote
.a
story about it, a sort of a Faust story. It made sense, of a
kind. Given the transaction, at least the cancer was not, you know,
idiotic, but Hell's taking up of its options-"
"Oh, are you a Catholic?" She fingered the chain about her
neck, the links dipping toward the hidden cross, uneasy symbol for
me; when I was a kid, I used to dream of having a woman, naked
except for that sign between her breasts-all pogroms revenged!
"I don't know."
It must have seemed a sappy answer to her, but she was still
staying; she looked hopefully at her empty glass, and, in answer, I
rolled mine off on to the floor where it didn't even break on the soft
carpeting.
"Now, it seems to me to have been chiefly a question of value,
of the confusion of value and price. When Carrie proved to Hal so
neatly that money could buy the things he really wanted; I don't
mean merely Things, but real satisfactions in the outward shapes of
Things: books and music and drunkenness-that mean pathetic
ancient bitch (The eyes of the girl flickered and slipped from focus;
she was drunk too and I had not realized it; the dark sheathed us
both in its indifferency) who had everything less than Hal, except–
money, how could he keep from believing that the measure of all
he might do, of all anyone did ever was that, and that, the only
undeniable reward, the redemption of the outsider. Money. But the
joke was (I leaned toward her oily lost face for the last confidence,
the cream of the jest) we thought we were Communists. Communists!
Revolt! Rebel! Throw the bosses off your backs!"
