THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
813
toward the door as Carrie pressed upon me the little magazine with
Hal's "prophetic" story (I read it later, the prevision of death com–
promised by a prose whose falsity no coincidence of fact could re–
deem), one of the books Hal had owned ("Take one-anyone. He
wants you to have it." I chose a copy of Yeats's poems that seemed
scarcely read, marked only with his pencilled name), a last look at
the pictures; at the very threshold she touched my shoulder, tenta–
tively as if she were not sure that we inhabited the same dimension.
Standing, she seemed not thin exactly but somehow weightless. "You
have no-" she hesitated intolerably, searching for the precise nuance
of gentleness, "children?"
"No. Not yet." It had been six months since the miscarriage,
but I winced a little, offered the lying implication of the "not yet" in
apology, and Vivian, sensing it, pressed my hand in secret solidarity.
"It
would have been- Hal would so have liked it, if-A son
of yours, you know, would have seemed-" We stood there about
our mutual discomfort, Carrie incapable of leaving off, we unable to
depart until she had.
And then, quite suddenly, Vivian and I were in the unmitigated
glare of the street, trying to guess in the outer wall of the house
Carrie's window, but we were hopelessly turned around.
When we hailed a cab, the driver looked us over disconsolately.
"Not Brooklyn," he said, "anyplace but Brooklyn. I always get lost
there and wind up in a cemetery, and cemeteries make me melan–
choly." We laughed all the way uptown in the rear seat, while the
cabbie examined us furtively in his mirror, wondering, I suppose, why
the hell we looked like that
if
we didn't live in Brooklyn.
Back in our hotel-room, I kicked off my shoes, stretched out
on the bed, regarding through the defining cube of space on whose
floor I lay the otherness of the ceiling. Twenty-eight times I had waked
to that ceiling, to the too-squareness of the room, the nudity of the
walls (we had taken down the hotel pictures the first day, improb–
able flowers obscenely pink, stacked them in the rear of the closet),
the unconquerable impersonal odor that denied the permanence of
our tenure.
"Not a noble adventure, I'm afraid," I said to Vivian who stood
