Hangsaman (23 page)

The porch was actually only a miserable excuse for a place to sit; it was no more than a step up or a step down, so that sitting on the porch steps at the Langdons' house meant the knees under the chin and the feet awkwardly placed and the back twisted, but the same trees were outside, living in the ground without curiosity about the insides of houses, and growing toward death as surely as Natalie. When one tree demonstrated that it was not rooted and perhaps not completely indifferent by disengaging itself from the others and coming toward Natalie where she sat on the porch step, she was not surprised—it was an odd night, anyway, and the day after tomorrow she should be going home for a while—and said only, with some crossness, “I don't want to talk.”

“All right.”

It was almost companionable, and Natalie without intention moved over on the narrow step to leave room. “It's so cool out here,” she said.

“Then you
do
want to talk?” said the girl Tony.

“They're all talking, inside,” Natalie said.

The girl Tony had not been invited within, Natalie knew wisely, and thought, She doesn't care whether she sits on the steps of people who don't invite her or whether she stands around with trees or whether she talks to me or not. She knew she ought not to talk because she had said she was not going to and because she knew this calm girl Tony calmly expected her to do what she said she was going to, but she said anyway, “You weren't invited?”

“No.”

“Would you go if you were invited?” Natalie asked.

“That depends,” said Tony carefully, “on where I was invited to go.”

“This damn place,” Natalie said, “it always turns out not to have the things I want, after all. I get up inside and I knock over an ashtray and everyone looks at me and here I come rushing outdoors because I think it's where I want to be, and then when I get out here it turns out to be the same old place I passed coming in.”

“That's because you came out the same door,” suggested Tony.

She stood up, and Natalie thought quickly, She's bored with me, and said, “You going away?”

“I'll see you again,” Tony said. “Good night.”

It was not pleasant sitting on the porch after Tony had gone; a spot where two people have been talking, however briefly, is not after that a spot for one person to sit alone. Natalie got awkwardly to her feet and turned to go inside.

In the brief foyer she met Elizabeth Langdon; the space was so small that they almost touched standing together, and Natalie crushed herself back against the door.

“I came to look for you,” Elizabeth said. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

How she would love to help her fallen sisters, Natalie thought. “I was all right,” she said.

“I saw you with someone,” Elizabeth said.

For a minute Natalie was surprised at Elizabeth's tone; does she think I made an appointment with the girl Tony to meet her during Elizabeth's party? Natalie wondered; does she think I intended to invite her inside? or does she think we meet outside in the darkness, as though we had been outlawed from meeting in the light? For a minute Natalie wanted poignantly to ask Elizabeth what she thought she had seen through the eyes which for Elizabeth registered what Elizabeth's brain recorded, and then she said instead, “Let's go back inside.”

Arthur seemed hardly to have stopped for breath, although his glass had been refilled, and he was saying, “It is not impossible to imagine a situation in which . . .”

Saturday morning

Dear Dad,

I'm terribly sorry that I can't come home, and I'm sorry too that this letter won't reach you in time. I would have called you except I didn't know until a little while ago that I couldn't make it. You see, Arthur Langdon has given us this paper to do, and I've simply
got
to get it in by Monday, so of course I can't come home, because the paper has to be very long and detailed and I'll probably spend all weekend working on it. And even if I did come home, of course, I'd have to work all the time. So I'm really terribly sorry.

By the way, you remember Tony? The girl I wrote you about? Well, I finally met her and I like her a lot. She lives in a house on the other side of the campus and yesterday afternoon we walked about four miles through the country just beyond the campus. I think she's terribly interesting. Well, I'm sorry about not being able to come home. I'll keep enough money from the check for my train fare home at Thanksgiving. I'm sure I can make it then. Hope Mother's not disappointed. Give her my love.

Natalie.

Perhaps—and this was her most persistent thought, the thought that stayed with her and came suddenly to trouble her at odd moments, and to comfort her—suppose, actually, she were
not
Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold Waite, a creature of deep lovely destiny; suppose she were someone else?

Suppose, for instance, that all of this, from the day she could first remember (running through the grass, calling, “Daddy? Daddy?”), suppose it had all been no more than a split second of time, as in a dream, perhaps under an anesthetic; suppose that after this split second when her wandering mind fancied she was someone named Natalie Waite, that then she should wake up, bemused at first, and speaking thickly, and not really quite sure of her surroundings and the nurse bending over her and the voices saying, “There now, it wasn't so bad, was it?” and suppose, waking, she should turn out to be someone else, someone real as Natalie was not? An old woman, perhaps, with a year or so to live, or a child having its tonsils removed, or a woman with twelve children having a charity operation, or a man. And, waking, looking around the white room and at the clean nurse, she could say, “I had the funniest dream all this time; I dreamed I was Waitalie Nat”—the dream already fading, and not complete—and the nurse could easily say, “
Everyone
has dreams under ether,” moving capably forward with a thermometer.

Or even suppose, imagine, could it be true? that she was confined, locked away, pounding wildly against the bars on the window, attacking the keepers, biting at the doctors, screaming down the corridors that she was someone named Watalie Naite . . . suppose, during the time she thought she was eating in the dining room and going unwillingly to classes and sitting in her room reading . . . suppose these things were not real? Could it be that some sudden lucid horrible moment (a new treatment, perhaps? An inevitable return to actuality?) should show her brutally that the dining room and the professors were not at all there, but existed far away in her mind, provoked into life only by her mania? “I'm not prepared today,” she could be saying to her music professor, and the doctor, turning back her eyelid to look at her cornea, would murmur, “How long has she been in this particular stage?”

But then, perhaps she was not dreaming, not mad, but alive and sound—living in this caught second of life only in the musing mind of some salesgirl or waitress or prostitute or some drab creature to whom the life of a girl in college named Naitalie Wat seemed romantic; suppose somewhere a murderess slept lightly, dreaming for a minute that she was young again and had a life to live; suppose that some minute, any minute, she should suddenly turn, move her head, speak strangely, and find herself not at all real?

It was this that made her write her name crazily on everything, knowing and yet forgetting that her books and her clothes and her written sheets of paper would be gone with Natalie Waite, were only part of a larger dream; it was this which gave her the sudden sense, in conversation perhaps, that this particular portion of her dream might be condensed, only a fleeting shorthand scrap of words to be remembered later as a whole conversation; it was this which brought her abruptly to a perception that if she were dreaming her room and her words, she might well be dreaming her world, and so when she awoke she might say, amused, to the nurse, to the girl in the room next door, to the police, “Listen to what I dreamed; I dreamed there was a war; I dreamed there was a thing called television; I dreamed—listen to this—that there was something called an atom bomb. An
atom
bomb—
I
don't know; I tell you I
dreamed
it.”

Beyond this sense, however, of swift transient passage, was the worse, the frightful, conviction, of perhaps being in reality no more than Natalie Waite, college girl, daughter to Arnold, and unable to brush away the solidity of this world but forced to deal with it as actual and dreary. Yet then—why, if this were true, the sudden sharp sympathetic picture of the white walls and the nurse coming closer? Why the graphically remembered room with the iron bedstead, the sure knowledge of the moment to slip the poison into the cup, the remembered pain? Why, above all, the constant unusual shock of the sound of her own name said aloud?

It must be assumed that at one point, to be known as
there
, was the college, dark and drowsy under Natalie's absence, and that at another point, known as
here
, was the home where her mother and father and brother lived, and to which she had been brought during a passage of time that in retrospect seemed nothing, so that her transition from there to here seemed no more than a fading in of one place upon another, a travel between points in time rather than in space.

When her father met her at the bus stop late on Wednesday night Natalie was embarrassed, thinking of the seventy-five days, the ten and a half weeks, the two and a third months, since she had seen him or her mother or her brother or her home; he did not look different in that he still as always resembled the various pictures of him in so many different places, but before he had a chance to speak to her, Natalie said quickly, “I've got to go back on Friday—” before he had a chance, that is, to spoil everything by expecting too much of her, and he, after a long and surprised look, nodded and said, “It's nice to see you again.”

Once in the car, she asked, “How is Mother?”

“Fine,” he said.

“And Bud?”

“Fine.”

“
You
look well.”

“I am, thanks, quite well.”

Natalie thought then, He expects some embarrassment; he expects to even it off when we can sit and talk as usual. “How is everything?” she asked.

“Much the same.”

“I'm sorry I couldn't come home before.”

This was such an extraordinary statement that he obviously felt it impossible to answer. It was strange being close to him again in the car, just as they had been many times before, when for so long (seventy-five days, for instance) he had been a signature on a letter, a name she had used speaking to people, no more than the absent father of Natalie Waite.

“Have you been well?” she asked to console him.

“Very well, thank you,” he said.

On the bus, in the hour and a half it took her to reach the bus stop where he met her, Natalie had conscientiously tried to plan out a suitable greeting for him. A theatrical “Daddy!” shouted while throwing herself into his arms was probably undesirable, considering that Mr. Waite could most likely not be counted on to stand agreeably and catch daughters hurling themselves at his head; no more could she consider seriously a brief handshake and a meaningful look, a caught breath, and a murmured “Father”; her favorite greeting, which she saw vaguely as taking up and carrying on a conversation as though they had just left it off, was impossible because she could not think how to start a conversation which might not have been finished; not, at least, a conversation with her father, who might leave many things undone but never a word unsaid. Because she had not quite made up her mind by the time she alighted from the bus, what had happened was what she had never stopped to consider, which is that her father—perhaps phrasing impossible greetings in his own plan of action and had with wisdom apparently decided to pass over the whole question of greeting as a useless civility and one only to be regretted later, and had decided to do his real receiving of Natalie at some more appropriate time. When Natalie stepped down from the bus and recognized her father, with an unfilial shock of dismay, she stood and he stood, and then she said, not at all truthfully until she heard herself saying it, “I have to go back on Friday.”

“I'm sorry I have to go back on Friday,” she said again in the car.

“Your mother will be disappointed,” he said dryly.

“How
is
Mother?”

“Very well, thank you.”

The driveway to her own house came as a surprise, and for a minute she was comfortable in recognizing, with a satisfactory feeling of difference, the old landmarks, and looking with the pride of new places on the stay-at-home grass and trees and flowers, and regarding with contempt the former narrow boundaries of her world.

“It's good to be home,” she said inadequately;
unbelievable
would perhaps have been a better word, or
stupefying
.

Greeting her mother was no problem at all; for a minute the air was so full of Natalie's appearance, her probable health, her shocking clothes, that there was no need for anyone to answer until her mother, accustomed again to Natalie after three minutes, subsided into her usual civil silence; Natalie and her brother greeted one another with false cordiality and endeavored heartily not to speak again to one another past necessity.

It was by then ten o'clock in the evening, and all four of them realized at once that they had from then on an evening of sorts to get through; they traditionally stayed up late, and tonight was a kind of gala evening, since everyone had been persuaded to give up other plans because Natalie was coming home, and Natalie herself had avoided appointments in order to come, and then, once Natalie had come and had turned out to be very little more entertaining or novel than the Natalie who had left seventy-five days before, there was nothing left to do except carry on the sort of formal conversation suited to the formal sort of guest Natalie had become. Seventy-five days before not one of them would have thought it necessary to address her unless they wanted to, but now it was almost obligatory to assure her warmly of the fact that she was always welcome in her own home—always welcome, with the clear implication that she was thus always a visitor there.

As a result Mrs. Waite exerted herself to say, “I have a twenty-pound turkey for tomorrow, Natalie.” All such remarks as this were, too, directed pointedly and almost accusingly at Natalie by the addition of her name. “Biggest turkey I could get.”

“Fine,” Natalie said, with an enthusiasm she had not ever before shown toward turkeys. “It's been a long time since I've had a good meal.”

“How
are
the college meals?” Mrs. Waite asked eagerly.

“Terrible,” Natalie said, trying to remember the college meals.

“How do you like it there?” her brother asked, making a supreme effort.

“Fine,” Natalie assured him earnestly. “I think it's fine. How is
your
school?”

“Oh, fine,” he said. “Fine.”

“Well,” Mrs. Waite said fondly, and sighed, surveying her family circle. “All home again at last, and all together.”

“Studying hard?” Natalie asked her brother hastily.

“No harder than I have to,” he said, and everyone smiled.

“And Arthur Langdon?” asked Mr. Waite, who was not immune to the general convulsive emotional quality of the hour. “How is he?”

Natalie, who had been full of things to tell her father about Arthur Langdon, said, “Well, I haven't seen much of him lately.”

“Been working pretty hard, I guess,” her father said. Too late, because she was out of practice, Natalie found the irony in his voice, but she had already answered too carefully, “Well, not as hard as I
should
.”

“
How
about we all have some coffee and cake?” Mrs. Waite asked, looking brightly around at all of them.

“Thank you,” Natalie said politely.

They filed out into the kitchen, using their tenuous family relationship as an excuse for not having cake brought to them in the living room, but each one waiting civilly for the others to go through doors first.

“It is
so
good to have my little girl back home again,” Mrs. Waite whispered when she said good night to Natalie.

*   *   *

At the college on Thanksgiving Day they had turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and peas and mince pie and small candies in paper baskets; at the Waites' on Thanksgiving Day they had turkey and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and peas and mince pie and small candies in Mrs. Waite's best silver candy dishes. Except for the fact that if she had been at the college she would not have eaten at all, Natalie found being at home not much better. The Thanksgiving dinner was one prepared solely and lovingly by Mrs. Waite, tended and planned and rich in delicate touches, and was eaten by her family in ill humor and weariness; as though, in fact, it were an ordinary meal. It was served at three on Thursday afternoon, a time when no one was ordinarily hungry, and was preceded by cocktails, a ceremony which made Natalie and her brother stare at one another, since neither of them was quite prepared for the immoral spectacle of the other's drinking in the bosom of the family.

“Taken up liquor in your old age, Nat?” Bud asked Natalie, and she answered him childishly, “What about you? Keep a bottle under your pillow?”

Mr. Waite glanced away, and Mrs. Waite beamed at them, pleased to see her two children talking together as though, she seemed to think, they were not brother and sister at all. The two children, suddenly aware of this, fell immediately silent, and Mrs. Waite said brightly, “Well, all together again. We must drink a toast to our own little family.”

Mr. Waite regarded his wife without expression for a minute, and then lifted his glass and said solemnly, “To our own little family.”

Looking around, at her tall daughter and her masculine son, at her husband, at her full dinner table, Mrs. Waite said meltingly, “Where will we all be next year?”

“Dead, perhaps?” Mr. Waite suggested helpfully.

“Don't
say
that,” Mrs. Waite told him, “I don't even like to
talk
about it.”

“Let us flatter ourselves,” Mr. Waite said into his glass, “that
I
may be the survivor.”

*   *   *

On Friday morning Natalie came to her father, as usual; not knowing until the last minute that he awaited her in the study, she was only reminded of it by her mother's fearful grimaces and gestures. As a result, when she knocked at the door and heard him say, pleased, “Come in,” she felt that she had an unworthy advantage of him in that he would be humiliated if he knew that she had forgotten when he remembered. She grinned at him when she closed the door behind her and said, “
This
is what I've been waiting for.”

“Natalie, my dear,” he said, and smiled back at her across the desk. This was his real greeting; neither the encounter at the bus nor the toast before the Thanksgiving dinner were communications to Natalie from her father; it was when he looked at her across his desk and saw the door shut behind her that he recognized her at last.

“Well,” she said, and sat down.

“Well, Natalie,” he said.

They sat without speaking for a minute, her father looking down at his hands on the desk, and Natalie knowing with pleasure the feeling of the study, of the books, of her father, and hearing faintly an echo which made her almost smile (“What if I told you that you were seen?”); after a minute she said, “Did I write you about Arthur Langdon?”

“No,” he said, his voice quiet so as not to disturb her possible revelations, “what about him?”

“I keep thinking of the time I went to see him in his office and it reminded me of coming in here to talk to you, and he made such a fool of himself.”

“And I?”

Natalie laughed. “I'm really glad to be back,” she said. “It's hard to say it, though.”

“Is everything going well?”

“No,” Natalie said, considering. “Not at all well, I guess. I'm doing very badly.”

“How?”

“In everything.”

“Anything you need from me?”

“No, not right now. Later, perhaps.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

This
is not going right, Natalie thought; how much he wants to know, and what shall I tell him? Daddy dear, I am a failure, I hate college and I hate everybody? Or is that just what he expects? Does he have an answer for that, even?

“I'll tell you when I can,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “Working?”

Funny, Natalie thought, when anyone else says, “Working?” it means are you getting anything done, really—are you going to classes, passing your exams, finishing your biology notebook, have you got a job, is the plumbing business picking up any, is there a spot for you in a new Broadway production, are you earning any money? When my father and Arthur Langdon say, “Working?” they mean is anything happening inside you that might possibly interest them, like yeast working in bread. “Sure,” she said.

There was a short pause, and then her father said gracefully, “I am not so great a fool myself, Natalie, but what I can recognize foolishness in others. I can still remember the almost irresistible impulses toward melodrama which strike one at your age. Please forgive me if I say that I never expected you to be immune to ordinary impulses, although I expect equally that you will be receptive to extraordinary ones. I do, however, feel that you might reserve your sardonic impulses for your mother, perhaps, or for your friends at college, without trying them out on me. I have—please understand me, my dear—too much trouble with my own adolescent hangovers, to feel
yours
very deeply. This attitude of yours is one requiring only a slight, although basic, change in viewpoint to become a valuable and constructive state of mind, and the sooner you adopt this change in viewpoint, the sooner you may become a profitable member of society. There is—and
please
believe me—no vital change in personality involved. There is, as a matter of fact, not even any pain. You have only to shift perhaps a quarter turn to the northeast, and your problems are gone. Perhaps nothing more is required than one clear view of your situation and your present actions; it is very possible, you know, to be doing the right things and thinking the perfect thoughts for one's position, and yet seem entirely wrong because that one faint shading of understanding is missing; perhaps you feel that you are doing badly these days because you do not perceive that you are, in fact, doing very well indeed, and only lack the perception of your own worth to know exactly how well. Perhaps, Natalie, if I remind you what a very worthwhile person you
are
, it will give you the quarter turn you need.”