408
PARTISAN REVIEW
Celia Hornby Harrick stood in the bare hall outside the door
which she had just closed and wondered if he had taken the pill.
She wondered how bad it would have to get before he would take a
pill in front of her. Everybody had a cracking point, she reckoned.
But she did not want to be around when Jack Harrick reached his
cracking point. Some people knew they had a cracking point and
they lived their whole lives knowing it and waiting for it; she sup–
posed that was one way to live. But it was not Jack Harrick's way,
and Jack Harrick was what she loved.
She leaned her forehead against the wall, where the wallpaper
was faded and the canvas sustaining it hung loose off the wood
wall to which it was tacked-the wallpaper put on for her, just after
she had married Jack Harrick-and knew that his now knowing he
had a cracking point was what had made her marry Jack Harrick.
It
had made her put her hand on his head in the dogwood dark and
rough his thick hair up, like roughing up the head of a dog or kid
that leans against you.
If
somebody does not know that he has a
cracking point, and you are the person who finds out he does not
know that, then you have got to be the person who is on hand to
hold his hand when he finds out. Somebody has to do that.
If
you
do not want to do certain things you should not find out certain
things.
She had married him for that strength-which-is-weakness, and
now, as a consequence, in that dim hall where the heat of summer
had not yet begun to penetrate, she leaned her head against the
wallpaper put up to make things worthy of her Haviland china and
sterling silver, put up in loving tenderness by the very hands of the
man who had led her down this hall to put her upon a bed and
legally, respectably, and with consideration deflower her; and with
her head against the wall, she now prayed. She prayed that her
weakness might become enough of that weakness-which-is-strength
to permit her to hold J ack Harrick's hand when the time came.
She did not think she could stand to be there when Jack Harrick
found Jack Harrick had a cracking point. But somebody had to be
there. So she prayed: "Dear God, I can't stand it, but when the time
comes I want to hold his hand."
She felt better, and lifted her head. As she moved down the
hall to the kitchen, she was whispering, not as a prayer now but
in some other way, the words, " I want to hold his hand." She was
