Hangsaman (24 page)

“Nothing will help,” Natalie said; even after her father's mention of melodrama, she could not help saying it, although she did not look at him as she spoke.

“Well,” he said, after a minute, “I had not intended saying these things to you so soon, certainly not on your first visit home. It is of course necessary to achieve a certain solidity in one's way before taking a shift in perspective to see it clearly. I daresay that by the time I see you again—since, as you say so emphatically, you
must
go back today—you may be readier to listen to me. I should hate to deprive you prematurely of the glories of the suicidal frame of mind, since I am fairly certain that depriving yourself of the ability to feel this way would be more cruel than any sort of physical torture you might inflict upon yourself, so that I can use ‘suicidal' as a descriptive adjective without really feeling that it implies any action.”

“You're trying to make me say that I want to kill myself,” Natalie said.

“You need hardly say anything quite so meaningless,” he said tartly, “and I would vastly prefer that you confine your statements to pure descriptions of fact. I think better of your vanity, Natalie, than to believe that two months out of seventeen years could destroy you.”

She was almost irresistibly tempted to tell him all about herself, to justify somehow the facts of herself that he did not seem to understand, and which, so horribly acute to her, seemed to him only to point up a statement about general personalities; she wanted to pound on the desk before him and shout, “What do
you
know?” walk wildly up and down the room, pulling words from the very air to tell him about herself, and she wanted to shout, and to stamp, and to cry, and yet before she had time to do any of these things she heard ahead of her his calm voice saying, when she had done, “Precisely, my dear Natalie, precisely what I was . . .” And so instead she said, “No one likes me.”

“I hardly blame them,” he said briefly.

When she saw that he was laughing she laughed too, and as he stood up to show her it was time to go, that he had no more, really, to say to her, he added, “I think we understand one another, Natalie, you and I.”

*   *   *

She had come home on Wednesday night, bringing with her a certain sense of romance, as one who could bring heartbreaking stories of haunted lands, who had seen and heard and touched and known the improbable, the unbelievable (“and in that country I saw as well an image, made of a virgin pearl, and its eyes were diamonds and its hair was beaten gold, and it was set on a block of marble and no one might worship it face to face . . .”) and brought back perhaps small odd things, dug from the bottom of a trunk and mused over, held in two hands lovingly . . . (“
This
I found at the bottom of a well, and they said it would bring death to any who touched it . . . and
this
, there's a story goes with
this
one—I was lost, and wandering in the jungle, and it had been three days since I had eaten, and six weeks since I had seen a human being, and when I awakened, raging with fever, I saw bending over me . . . and, then, look at
this
, observe the intricate carving the cipher scratched on the handle—I bought it from an old . . .”) . . . who had seen and heard and touched and known more than might ever be found at home. Who had seen, perhaps, beasts walking like men and jewels shining like stars, and who smiled at certain remembered scenes a million miles away, and stared bewildered at old familiar sights and found the faces of mother and father and brother more strange than the face on a carving made in pearl.

Natalie had not been at home for more than twenty-four hours before she felt that her visit was complete and her purposes served; she had slept once more in the bed politely called hers, she had kissed her mother and father and been mildly surprised by the actuality of her brother, she had tried out the familiar things and found that she remembered them well enough, then it was time for her to be off again. It had rained steadily since she first set out for the bus stop at college, and the damp unkind weather filled the rooms at home with gray cold; she had worn her raincoat home from college and although she had not gone out of the house since, the raincoat still lay across a chair in the back hall crumpled and wet, the floor beneath it muddy where it had dripped all night.

Two days before the living-room fire had dried Natalie out, but even the memory of the rain to be waded through, like a dark impenetrable barrier, before she could be again at college, would not dampen her urgent excitement or soothe her. “So you're not staying for dinner tonight?” her mother asked her softly on Friday afternoon, and the question was a statement about Natalie's unquiet eyes, her spot before the fire, her hands moving beside her on the rug. And the question was as well a continuation of her mother's welcome to Natalie on Wednesday evening, meaningless and full of incoherent dread; if her mother had said, “Will you stay on, then, for dinner tonight?” Natalie would have turned quickly and perhaps answered without the constant fearful check she had been keeping upon herself at home, would perhaps have answered, an answer being required, with the sublime impatience which had possessed her while she was with her family these days. If her mother had asked her any question at all, anything to make Natalie speak, the whole quiet forward movement of the day could easily have been impeded, the extra moments consumed might have made Natalie later at the college, and so in some way deprived of something, her mother might have had her answer and not have been the better for it.

Stirring uneasily before the fire, Natalie said, as softly as her mother had spoken, “I'd better get on back.” She knew that behind her, her mother had set her needle down soundlessly in the cloth and was resting her hands on the arms of the chair, staring over Natalie's head into the fire; Natalie felt rather than heard her mother draw breath to speak, and then resign it. No point in speaking, no reasonable thing to say. It had all been debated endlessly in the second between her mother's drawn-in breath and Natalie's involuntary movement that checked it. Her mother had almost said, “Natalie, are you happy?” and Natalie had almost said, “No”; her mother had almost said, “Everything seems somehow to go badly,” and Natalie had almost said, “I know it and I can't help it”; her mother had almost said, “Let me help you,” and Natalie had almost said, “What can
you
do?” and that had been the nervous movement of her head that her mother had recognized and which had silenced her before she ever spoke.

After a while, at work with her needle again, Mrs. Waite said, as though they had been discussing lesser matters all the afternoon, “Dear, are you trying to settle down to work?”

“Sure,” said Natalie, because this kind of spoken conversation could be carried on easily without thinking, or truth.

“I've told you this before,” her mother said, and her voice added,
so
many, many times
, “I've said it before, Natalie, and you know I hate to keep dwelling on it—but you
do
know that the money sending you to college is really more than your father can afford. We have deprived ourselves of many things.”

Natalie perceived that she was supposed to come to her mother in gratitude, as she had been invited to do many times before, so that between them they might make many false promises, and sketch out brilliant unreal futures, and console one another with imperfect emotions; in all her travels Natalie had not learned how to come to her mother in gratitude, and so she merely turned her head and said, “I know it, and I do remember it. I'll try to keep out of trouble.”

“Not
trouble
,” her mother said, as though trouble were murder or robbery or arson, something she could understand and possibly find among her own temptations, “not trouble, Natalie; just try to do better with your studies and with the other girls and even with your professors.”

Strange, Natalie thought, in all his wisdom my father never found from my letters that I get along badly with people; I suppose it's the first thing my mother fears, just as she is afraid that I have been visited with all her sorrows, because those she is better able to heal in me than she could in herself. It seemed that perhaps her father was trying to cure his failures in Natalie, and her mother was perhaps trying to avoid, through Natalie, doing over again those things she now believed to have been mistaken.

“Everything's really fine,” Natalie said to her mother. “I'm really doing very well. Everyone says so.” She decided that this last statement smacked too much of eagerness, and turned her head back abruptly to stare again into the fire.

“I haven't told your father,” her mother said surprisingly.

“You haven't?” It was the weak, the completely wrong and unnecessary thing to say, but for the moment Natalie was not able to think of any right thing. Her mother was silent for a minute, perhaps to give Natalie a chance to say something intelligent, and then with a little rustling sound she folded up her sewing. The small sounds of her mother's breathing nearly put Natalie, suspended in the silence her mother did not seem inclined to break, to sleep before the fire, but the realization that her father and brother would soon be home prevented her from relaxing completely. Before they came back she must have her coat ready and her mind made up and be standing near the door, ready for farewells; she hoped that her father would not want to drive her to the bus stop, and was resigned at the same time to the fact that he would not possibly allow her to take a taxi, or, better still, to walk.

“Natalie?” her mother said helplessly, looking at the back of Natalie's head, and as if her mother had been warning her, Natalie rose effortlessly, proud of the swift movements of her own long body. “You're getting so big,” her mother murmured. “I can hardly recognize my little girl.”

“Better get ready to go,” Natalie said hastily, moving toward the door and twisting involuntarily as she went past her mother, as though to avoid clutching hands. “Bus leaves at four.”

Her mother started to speak again, but Natalie hurried, and could safely pretend not to hear by the time her mother was ready to say anything. The wet raincoat smell was exciting, carrying with it remotely the institutional smells of the college, a faint echo of a cologne Natalie had never worn in her life; near the pocket was a cigarette burn she had not made; the raincoat was in itself a symbol of going and coming, of wishing and fearing, or, precisely, the going out of a warm, firelit house into the heartbreaking cold.

She tied a scarf over her head and thought that now she would not be able to hear her mother's last admonitions; when she went back to the fire her mother had risen and was standing where Natalie had been lying, and her father stood next to her mother by the fire. I didn't hear him come in, Natalie thought, and thought again, I suppose by now I'm out of practice on his coming and going; he and her brother had been to call on people she did not even know, and although they had asked her to go along, she had been able to decline without minding very much; her new acquaintances were all at college and a new acquaintance at home was, after all, so much time wasted.

An uncomfortable thing happened: her father spoke and for a minute Natalie thought it was her mother. “Well, my dear,” he said and again the conversation between him and her mother while Natalie was getting her raincoat became suddenly explicit; he had not believed that his wife was letting Natalie go, had perhaps been surprised at the exertion necessary to keep Natalie, had wondered over and abandoned as unworthy the notion of himself asking her to stay, had been then incredulous that his wife should ever have expected Natalie
not
to go.

“Did you have a nice time?” asked Natalie formally.

Her father bowed ironically. “No better than I expected,” he said, “I believe we keep better company at home.”

“We have been very quiet here,” Natalie said. She went over and put her arms around her mother; a little of this affection was surely not out of place at leave-taking, and did not commit Natalie to any certain course of action except going. Until this moment her going had been no more than a wanton impulse, but of course saluting her mother made it definite, and her father stirred, moving the car keys in his pocket.

“Bus at four?” he asked.

“Better get going,” Natalie said, disengaging herself easily from her mother and stepping back to nod at her brother, who nodded back and said, “See you sometime.”

Natalie and her mother and father stood then uncertainly together in the middle of the room, each of them with something to say to the others (“Will it always be the same?” “Will we any of us change by the next time?” “Has it always been like this?”), and involved themselves in a sort of dance, maneuvering one another into the most favorable position for a gesture whose extreme simplicity, that of departure, had become a sudden awkward thing. Natalie, finally, moved first. She found that as she went toward the door she was saying, “Goodbye, goodbye,” as though to confirm her going, and that her father, following her, was still rattling the car keys in his pocket. “Goodbye,” Natalie said at last, actually hesitating again in the doorway, looking beyond the solid coated figure of her father, past the expectant figure of her mother, to her own spot by the fire, untenanted and probably of no interest to anyone save herself, to remain empty of her until the next time, still optimistic, that she came home. “Goodbye,” she said again, directly to her mother, and went outside into the rain.

Once in the car with her father, but out in the rain nevertheless, she looked with interest on the street light at the corner, ornate and suburban, belonging undeniably to the home where her mother and father lived, and she saw with satisfaction the rain slanting brightly against the light; it was already dark on this rainy afternoon and this was the last outpost belonging to her father. Beyond here the people she might see were less familiar, less the exclusive property of her father, more the potential shining world of her own.