820
PARTISAN REVIEW
away. "Be still," I shouted, "you talk too much," and she bowed
and bowed, "I have insulted you. I have committed an offense!"
hissing pitifully through her gold teeth.
But the war took my resentment, my regret, my violence achieved
or rejected, and played them out as history. Unpurged and without
music, I returned to peace, to the States.
Vivian knew I was en route, but I had not wired her the exact
time of my arrival. It was no surprise I was planning, but once
ashore, I did not know how precisely I could come home to that
strangeness. I could foresee our house: disarrayed, hung with drying
diapers and small sodden clothes, cluttered with the paraphernalia
of purification, folding bathtubs, oils and unguents and powders, to
redeem for our finicky senses the lost stinking animal we bore; and
over all, the interwoven pink and blueness, the ribbons, the soft,
wooly covering that hoaxed no one, while at the center, the child,
my son, David, chafed in his two excrements, tried against the in–
commensurate his only device, yelled and yelled.
And it came to me at the heart of my discomfiture, that the
focus of distress was that unforgotten lie at Carrie's; that to set
straight the meanings of that encounter, the meaning of Hal, would
shrive me of pastness, give me, for what I now addressed, a needed
innocence. First, first, I must say to Carrie, "There is no ghost, no
haunting not ourselves," then I could achieve return.
It
was my last
self-deception.
I came without music to the street, the house, the door. Unsure,
I waited while the bell made its catarrhal squawk in the imagined
inner cube of dark and quiet. There was no footstep, no tremor, no
pulse of answer; and I noticed, then, the newspapers and the milk–
bottles at my feet. Three days, I figured, or four, but before the
thought could form "Carrie's gone away"-I smelled her.
I knew familiarly that smell by then, sweetish, turgid, its own
definition; it seemed odd only in that context, leaking, thin and sin–
gular, through the crack between door and frame. Another day or
two, I knew, and the milkman bent to his heedless routine would
pause and retch; the janitor, called, insert his passkey in the lock,
push open the door, holding his breath, to display darkness and the
abominable remnant of Carrie's
flesh.
I would not call him surely;
