THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
811
A mess of bottles, you know, and dirty dishes. And then she left him,
went off with some-"
"He was very unhappy in Hollywood, I was told."
"They didn't understand him. I cooked for him, cleaned and
he wrote a little on his own-a prophetic story I'll show you later.
But here, afterwards in the hospital, I could scarcely see him. And
he held pitifully (they must have scared him) his mother's arm the
whole time." She alluded to that gesture with subdued horror, a
scarcely mentionable apostasy. "He kept talking about Zionism, the
Jews, endlessly the Jews, whatever would divide us-"
"Did he know what was wrong with him?"
"No. I think not. Certainly not at first, even when he was being
treated. It started in the throat you know. We told him it was a fungus
infection."
"He must have had a terrible will to be deceived.
It
sounds so
phoney."
"Perhaps, but with a Doctor saying it-technical jargon. Then
it spread to his-" she faltered, indicating her genital region with
a slack gesture and said it after all, "his testicles, and then his brain-"
I thought of the allegorical, the almost theatrical progress of the
disease, from seat to seat of his special falls: the sin of rhetoric, the
sin of lust, the sin of fear-Oh Hal! But I said nothing.
"It was so fast-And he was so delighted with the job that was
waiting for him. In the young it is always fast, and he was very
young." She made a scarcely perceptible motion of despair, at the
impossibility, I guessed, of our grasping just how young. Her eyes
touched Vivian and stayed there, really noticing her for the first time.
"You're very young, too. He said so often that he would have liked
to see you, to see the 'unlucky girl.' " She smiled dimly, at the rem–
iniscent savor of the poor joke, as well as to remove its offense. "You
didn't know him?"
"Not really; but we've talked of him so often, I
feel
as if I'd
known him; and his name has always seemed somehow familiar-"
Vivian's voice seemed alien in that room, her words essentially false
in that context, and I was pleased that it was so, proud of her remote–
ness from our predicament, knowing that if I alone came forth from
that room to blitheness, it would be by her good grace, by virtue of
her immunity.
