Hangsaman (27 page)

Effortlessly, Natalie found herself falling asleep, warm and happy. She was agreeably aware of the slow relaxations of her hands, her feet, her face, and felt the lines beside her mouth smooth out and her face fall into nothing more than a covering of bone; she thought vaguely that at this moment she must look as she would when dead, and heard then Tony rising to go once more to the door. “
Will
you leave us alone?” Tony said quietly.

A confused murmur outside, and then Tony said, “What would I expect of you, poor things? Go off to bed—there won't be another sound from
here
.”

Much, much later, Natalie was sound asleep aware of Tony's slipping into the bed beside her. Side by side, like two big cats, they slept.

Opening her eyes in the morning Natalie saw first that it was barely light outside and then turned to see Tony's eyes regarding her.

“—Morning?” Natalie said.

“Come on, lazy,” Tony said.

They got out of bed together, enjoying the quietness of the morning when everyone else was asleep, and enjoying, too, the feeling of being together without fear. They did not speak much, but moved as though speech were not necessary: first Tony, rolling out of bed, turned a somersault on the floor and rose laughing silently, then Natalie, stretching and turning to the window to see the rising sun, bent and touched her toes without bending her knees. Together, warning one another not to laugh, they went down the hall full of the sounds of sleep from rooms on either side, into the showers, where they bathed together, washing one another's backs and trying to splash without sound. Then, dry and shivering from a cold shower, they went back to Tony's room and dressed.

“I have to get the money from my room,” Natalie whispered remembering when she saw her clothes.

“I'll get it,” Tony said. “You finish dressing.”

Natalie laughed helplessly and silently as Tony slipped out the door in a battered blue bathrobe. Although she could not see the campus and the path Tony must take from the window of the room, she set her elbows on the windowsill and contemplated the rising sun and wondered with amusement on Tony's probable progress across the sleeping campus to Natalie's room in an old blue bathrobe and the insolence of being awake before anyone else.

“Did you get it? Anyone see you?” she asked anxiously when Tony came back into the room. Tony tossed Natalie's raincoat onto the bed and shook her head.

“I could have danced up and down the paths,” Tony said.

Dressing quickly, then, because although they were awake before anyone else, time went on without them, and they might yet be caught by some early riser, they combed each other's hair and slipped into coats and opened the door softly and went out into the hall. Natalie thought as she followed Tony down the hall how easy it would be to create some kind of sensation in this, or any other, house; how easy it would be to write some kind of message, probably obscene, or else menacing, and leave it under each door, and was proud and pleased with herself because she had not, and it was too late now.

They tiptoed down the stairs, afraid at this moment of waking some curious person who might ask them where they were going, and reached the front door in safety. Once Tony had opened the door they knew they were surely out, and they gave up trying to go quietly; Tony let the door slam behind them in a gesture calculated to awaken every sleeper within hearing, and, followed by Natalie, ran down the path—running not from fear, but because it was early morning and they were together and they had fifteen dollars and a world ahead of them and no one to know at any time where they were.

The college was located, with singular lack of imagination, on School Street, and was approximately a mile from the center of the town from which it derived its name. The college owned most of the land along School Street, and all the land behind School Street; where the college land ended, there were nothing but fields and trees. On the one side of the college, where School Street ended and Evergreen Street began, there was a quiet and slightly decayed residential section, inhabited largely by single professors and married students. On the other side of the college, where School Street ended and Bridge Street began, there was—with the odd literal quality that characterizes the inventors of towns—a river with a bridge across it. Bridge Street turned into Main Street when its function as a street over a river ended, and Main Street was, inevitably, the street which led into the center of the town. The stores at the Bridge Street end of Main Street had a bare, utterly straightforward look; they had intruded boldly into a section formerly devoted to small dirty shops with dubious wares, building and asserting themselves under the banners of “improvement” and “help our city grow,” and they found themselves now, their banners still valiant and their cleanliness untarnished, unpaid for and unpatronized, since the people who shopped and longed for a cleaner city drove naturally to the center of town to the grimy stores they already knew. On one corner, here, was a new grocery, all chromium counters and great glass windows, with red and black and white signs shouting, “Veal chops, special,” and, “Our coffee is the best in town,” and, “Holiday bargains”—the holiday unspecified in case the sign should not be taken down before Christmas, or Easter, or Judgment Day. Nestled comfortably close to the shining grocery was a stained small hollow calling itself a “Coffee Shop,” with a crude counter in front exhibiting candy bars and gum to the public, and, within, another counter supported by three stools, at which no doubt the weary shopper could sit and drink coffee made, at least by assumption, from the best coffee in town sold next door. Across the street was an antique shop, flaunting its dirt by rights of the unwritten law which requires that antique shops should soil the white gloves of matrons who drop in, laughing, to see if they can match the brasses on Grandmother's breakfront. Next to this, an empty showroom which had at one time exhibited pianos, had at another time housed an importer of fine woolens and which was now borrowed annually by the Girl Scouts for their White Elephant Sale, by the Campfire Girls for their Handiwork Show, by the P.T.A. for their home-cooked Food Sale, by the Crippled Children's League, by the D.A.R., by all the organizations who take in, and sell, one another's washing. Beyond this charitable center which was at this time—due no doubt to the impending holidays—empty of beggars, was a tiny one-column tailor shop, odorous and hardly large enough for a winter coat in need of repair. And next to the tailor, but possessing odors enough of its own from imported cheeses, was what called itself an “Epicure Shoppe” and dealt largely in elaborately packaged foreign foods; this shoppe was the only one in the neighborhood which had any kind of trade at all, since it was virtually impossible to find Norwegian herring in sour cream or authentic Turkish delight or
espresso
or English tinned biscuits anywhere else in town. Farther down the block was the town's one movie house which showed exclusively foreign films and dazzled the honest townfolk with
Blood of a Poet
seven times a year. The college students went to the large movie houses in the center of the town, and it was only such folk as lady librarians, traveling in packs, and ambitious interior decorators, coming from the newly adapted apartments in the city's older residential sections, and an occasional French faculty member, who ever went into the small unpolished theater to see
Blood of a Poet
or
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
or
M
.

This street hurried along, widening and becoming more populated, until it turned (with the large intersection where four department stores faced one another dourly, each stubbornly insisting that its bargains were more bargainful than the others', each featuring, in its own decor and color scheme, a Garden Restaurant, or a Spanish Tea Room, or a Black Watch Grill, or a Bayou Terrace) into the center of town, and became a busy, imperative, trafficked Main Street. Here one might find the better dress shops, here were a candy store and a bookstore—which also sold novelties and souvenirs—here were the restaurants with Men's Grills and Business Men's Lunches, and the jewelry store and the large hotel with afternoon Thé Dances. Here the buses congregated, and the radio station sent its antenna curiously, skyward. There were offices where secretaries (local girls who could not afford college) typed busily, and a radio store, and a toy store, and a bank.

If a child building with blocks had planned a city, saying, “This is the town, and here is where the people go to shop, and here is where the man lives, and here is where the lady takes her little boy to the dentist, and
here
is the school, and when you want to go to the park it is
here
, and then here is where the trains go, and the station with the station man is right here, and . . .”—if such a child, building on a rainy afternoon, had planned a city, he might have planned it to look like this one: square, respectable, carefully designed without criminal or foreign or unsubmissive elements, boasting of its college, fostering within itself a small and very decent community organization, a community playhouse, a health center, a fearless and extraordinarily biased newspaper, and all the other elements necessary in a city to keep its loyal inhabitants from becoming restless, or uncharitable, or content.

Down this street—turning from School Street to Bridge Street and from there onto Main Street, Natalie and Tony came, almost dancing; it was twenty minutes to eight.

“Three of wands,” said Natalie, stopping in front of the antique shop and indicating the three-section candelabra.

Tony, who was required by the rules of the game to give the Tarot meaning of the card symbol Natalie had found, thought for a minute and then said, “Established strength. Trade, commerce, discovery. Ships crossing the sea. Reversed, the end of troubles.”

“I saw three ships a-sailing,” said Natalie meaninglessly, but they both laughed.

“Three of pentacles, then,” said Tony, indicating a pawn-broker's sign which stood unobtrusively but emphatically just around the corner, as though hiding from preference rather than timidity.

“Nobility, aristocracy,” said Natalie. “Reversed, pettiness.”

“I wonder what the rest of them do with their time?” Tony said absently. “Do you think they go on to their classes as usual? Or has the whole college faded away or blown into dust or collapsed—”

“—or crumbled or snapped out like a light—”

—Just because we've gone? Tony thought. “We are on a carpet,” she announced soberly. “It unrolls in front of us, but in back of us it rolls up and there is nothing under it.”

“The immediate spot where we are walking is the only immediate spot there is,” Natalie said.

“Ace of cups,” Tony said, pointing to the fire hydrant.

“House of the true heart,” said Natalie. “Joy, fertility.”

“Reversed, revolution,” Tony said.

“Better still,” Natalie said, “suppose they're all just frozen where they were when we left? Like in the
Arabian Nights
, and everything stays like that for a thousand years.”

“They are all turned into black and red and gold fish,” Tony said, “We must come back and strike three times upon the ground with a staff of brass.”

“Ace of wands,” said Natalie immediately.

“The origin of all things. Reversed, ruin.”

There was so much money in fifteen dollars that they had no need to be lavish all at once, always providing that they were correct in assuming that money was actually a medium of exchange. Perhaps, indeed—they never could know for sure, from one dollar to the next—the green bill or heavy silver coin proffered to the man behind the counter might be met with an incredulous stare, or guffaws, and payment insisted upon in blades of grass, or handfuls of milk, or some unidentified substance which everyone could see and touch but themselves. In a strange country one must be extremely cautious; “Shall we have just coffee to start?” Tony asked.

They were far enough into the center of town to find a drugstore easily. They sat together at the counter, looking at each other and at themselves in the mirror facing them. Natalie, on the right (the one on the right
was
Natalie?) looked very thin and fragile in the black sweater; Tony, (on the left?) seemed dark and saturnine in blue. Neither of them looked at all like the girls in bathing suits who lounged colorfully in the soft drink ads over the mirror. Tony's face was quite pale in the sanitary fluorescent lights of the drugstore, and beyond their two faces, crowding into the picture and immense in their piled variety, were the wares of the shopkeeper: ointments against the sun, dolls—perhaps charms against the evil spirit? were these natives superstitious?—boxes of candy and boxes of candy without sugar, and an infinite number of articles to be used in the control of light: gadgets to make light, gadgets to shut out light, gadgets to improve and distill light, gadgets that operated only upon light or that operated only upon the absence of light, books questioning the source of light and books wondering about the speed of light and books denying the existence of light or recommending its use as food. There were also an infinite number of articles to control air, and articles to control water, and articles to control fire and wind and rain, and many articles, indeed, to control, most effectively, earth. One section of the store—and only a corner of this could be reflected in the mirror—was devoted entirely to nostrums for controlling the human body, and this department, unlike the others, was small and dignified and its transactions were conducted in low voices. Tony and Natalie in the mirror were exactly at a height, their shoulders touching and beyond their heads the glitter of chromium.

At last Tony said peacefully, “Let's go to the station.”

Natalie nodded; because the money was in the pocket of the blue raincoat Tony was wearing, it was Tony who offered money to the man behind the counter and it was accepted without comment.