812
PARTISAN REVIEW
"This is he, and this, and this." Carrie indicated with her eyes
the walls from whose dimness now sprang a score of Hals, fixed in
the grimace of graduation, wet on the breathless beach, alone or be–
tween unknown faces. We were in a Hal Musem; in the hung pic–
tures, the sweater (unnoticed till then) flung as if in passing on a
chair, the fingered books, the incomplete manuscript on a table, he
persisted. One sensed that Carrie moved so little about the flat to
leave inviolate the cushion his weight had crushed, the imperceptible
print of his step on the carpet's nap. "He is here," she said. "I have
him."
"There
is
a real sense of him in this room." It was not so--only
a hysteria of reminiscence, a thin willful obsession, lived within those
walls, but I, shameless, played up to her last self-deceit.
"Yes," she said, "yes," and I should have marked her outrageous
excitement, been wary.
"I have felt
him
even in places less his than this, a kind of pres–
ence, a pressure."
"Yes," she said, "yes."
"That was why I wrote that poem, not willing it, almost under
compulsion." That was true in a way, and I resented Vivian's re–
proachful stir beside me.
"Oh yes,
yes.
I knew you understood. And he is different now
and happy." She felt safe; she could confess it at last, the whole intol–
er,able secret; her breath scarcely moved her. "He comes back; he
comes here. He has talked to me and he is through with insolence,
with (how did you say it in the poem?) 'all imposition of the will.' "
I writhed for my poor metaphor, the accomplice unredeemably
now of her self-haunting, "I merely meant a trope, a figure-"
"Yes, he comes; he talks to me." Her eyes moved toward the
bedroom, indicating ineffable intimacies. "You
must know;
you've
said it so truly. He told me he liked your poem-'beyond the fear
of innocence,' so apt, so musical."
"Not
really
a ghost," I tried hopelessly.
"No. No, ghost is a dreadful word. What comes is more than
that, no coldness. And I have him." She watched in the consequent
silence my embarrassment, and I her precarious triumph, and Vivian
our joint failure, and we could say nothing more.
I lied my way out at last, pleading an engagement, edging
