Leslie A. Fiedler
THE FEAR OF INNOCENCE
I came without music to the street, the house, the auur;
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
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 had come through the city I hated to that remembered square,
pretending to falter at each turning as though I had forgotten the
way. There was no reason, after all, that I
should
have remembered
so long, so precisely, the circumstance, the setting of what had been
no more than a
minor
embarrassment.
It
offended me, but not deeply enough for forgetting, that
Carrie's apartment should in the logic of the case be just there: among
the kitschy jewelers and within sight of that other, the larger Square
where as a boy I had indulged my anguish among bootblacks and
a few uncertain trees. One could watch from Carrie's windows,
I knew, the far;ade of the School where I had fumbled inexpertly
with patience and rage; but no one watched. I had seen from the
street before entering the blinds pulled tight against the sun in the
windows I guessed were hers, and I knew I had only imagined their
trembling.
I would not accept the city, walking it in the blue and gold uni–
form I no longer had to wear, mark of my choice now and not the
regalia of the last choice but one; for accepting it, I would have
had to surrender my sense that at the moment of Discharge, between
two areas of allegiance, I was as I had never been, free.
It
was hard
for me to believe that soon, soon I would submit again to the ruinous
empire of work, habit and discontent; harder to believe that at
