THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
803
memories of my complicity, the guilt of having abetted Carrie's
fantasies, without madness, out of something more cowardice than
pity.
I had last seen Carrie just before leaving the States, having been
able to find no way to avoid the meeting; for I had turned up in
New York with a month of leisure before departure in the guise of
an additional training course (we learned the names of obscure islands,
did push-ups on .a windy roof and adjourned to the bars and theaters)
and Carrie knew it.
"Carrie wants you to come see her." "Carrie would like to see
you. She's read your poem about Hal's death." Friends and half–
friends, moved by versions of tenderness or vicarious curiosity, would
return from their intrusions into the rooms where she abode her lone–
liness to badger me. "Why don't you drop in and see Carrie. She
lives right down in the Village now."
That much I knew; I had even been to visit her once with Hal
after her improbable transplanting. She had moved there from the
suburban apartment of my first drunkenness when she resigned her
job to become, in one of those extraordinary total commitments of
women, completely what was of use to Hal. I used to
try
to imagine
her sometimes
in
that anomalous setting, bending her worn blandness
to the new orthodoxies of the'
Nation,
enduring whatever chic camou–
flage of her love Hal might demand.
She had not given up the flat, even to make her hopeless adven–
ture in California; and when she had flown back to New York with
Hal, already full of
his
death though ignorant of it, to become, he
thought, assistant to that radio writer he had always admired, it was
ready. And she closed her life in upon its darkened center after he,
not believing it and in much pain, had died.
I did not want to go. What love Hal .and I had shared, what
redeemed for us our disparity, had dwindled from meeting to meeting,
from letter to letter. The goat-cry he had liked to fancy swelling to his
lips in New York or Chicago still swelled, he wrote and it did not sur–
prise me, in
Ann
Arbor and in Cambridge (for a moment his upward
career had been in danger when he flunked the Harvard entrance
exams, but he had got there finally, Carrie's check in hand, via two
years at Michigan, moving onward past the block to his breathless,
absurd ending); and from France or Germany, where he bicycled
