810
PARTISAN REVIEW
let us in, and would chiefly remain until we left. She seemed to glow
faintly in the unnecessarily darkened room. "Very little."
"I feel baffled," I said, "baffled, as if I had stretched out a hand
and there was no one there. No--I mean more; as if there were no
place for one to be, so that one felt beyond disappointment, shame
at an unjustifiable miscalculation.
If
he had simply
chosen
not to an–
swer, it would have been something meaningful at least, a snub, a-"
"He would have answered you, of course."
"Well, surely, but I meant-"
It
didn't seem worth bothering
with what I might have meant; I was afraid that I had offended
Carrie, let my voice's lapse serve as a retraction. I could hear Vivian's
chair creaking a little; uneasily, I thought. I did not look at her.
"He withdrew- I think really
they
drew him away from me
at the end, his family, and at the very-just before-you know, he
was almost a baby, clung like a very little child to his mother, those
sisters."
.
"You don't mean to say that his mother is alive, by God. I'd
always thought that she had cancer, was at the point every minute
of-"
"She had no cancer--only the fear of it. But he, without fear-"
She stopped for a while, short of the sob I had been expecting. "You
know his sister, the oldest one?"
"Rose?"
"Yes. She's, well, she's nothing but a-"
"Whore," I suggested and the word boomed between us, re–
vealing to me how hushed until then had been our voices, though
I had felt the whole subdued tone of our encounter as a function of
the muted light. There was a provoking hesitancy in Carrie's speech;
so many things seemed impossible for her to say: not only the gross–
nesses she had learned once for Hal's sake to tolerate and the blunt
name of death, but the names of Hal's sisters, his own name. For
him the simple pronoun, quite without special inflection, sufficed; he
was to her ideally the third person singular masculine and for the
others about him she had resolved to make do with the grammatical
gamut: "I" for herself, "you" for me, "they" for his family.
"He was living with her, that-you know, in Hollywood and
I had to fly out to save him. He could do no work, save no money.
