Hangsaman (7 page)

“One is one and all alone and evermore will be so,”
everyone sang.

“
I'll sing you two-O
,” the single voice sang, clearly through the noise.

All around the lawn people were talking, raising their voices to override what someone else was saying, looking secretly at one another, frowning openly at one another, talking, laughing, talking. As though she had just come onto the lawn, Natalie heard suddenly the swell of sound that so surely meant “party.” It rose and moved and eddied, individual voices rising for a second, laughter riding high over the rest, the thin sound of glasses rattling, so fine that it could be heard straight through the heavier noises. It was shocking, loud, and Natalie stepped back, and found herself almost stepping again on the man who had tripped her when she came in earlier with the plate of crackers.

“Bound we're going to kill each other today,” the man said, smiling. He was alone now, and Natalie spared a thought for the odd recognition of the fact that his voice came clearly to her through the noise; in spite of the loudness of the party, which she could still hear, she knew exactly what the man was saying as though they had been alone, or, perhaps, as though his voice were in her mind like the detective's.

Two, two, lily-white boys, clothed all in green-O,

One is one and all alone and evermore will be so.

“Sit down,” the man said pleasantly. “Tired?” he asked her as she sat in the empty chair next to him, and Natalie nodded.

“Now let me see,” the detective was saying, and she could not quiet him now; his voice came to her as clearly as that of the man in the chair. “This morning you were in the garden, were you not? At about what time was that?”

“I don't remember,” Natalie said. “Please leave me alone now; I want to think.”

“Think?” said the detective. “Think? Suppose you think about the fact that you are very close to being in serious trouble?”

“Are you having a good time?” Natalie said inadequately to the man in the chair. All the polite things she had heard so many people say this afternoon fled her mind, and she could only smile vacantly at him and say something foolish like, “Are you having a good time?”

“Very nice,” said the man soberly. “Are you?”

“Very nice,” Natalie said.
“One is one and all alone,”
everybody sang, “
and evermore will be so
.”

The man looked at her curiously and Natalie was provoked. Here he was, this man, in her father's house—in her
own
house—and he was staring at her and very likely laughing. Worse, he was old, she could see now, much older than she had thought before. There were fine disagreeable little lines around his eyes and mouth, and his hands were thin and bony, and even shook a little. Natalie formulated a thought which she intended to use forever after: “I like a man with nice hands,” she told herself. “Nice hands are a particular beauty in a man.” She tried to remember what her father's hands were like, and could only remember his doing things with them—lifting a fork, holding a cigar. She glanced quickly across the lawn and found that she could not see her father's hands—one was in his pocket reaching for a pencil, the other lost around the waist of the pretty girl.

“—And so I came,” the man was saying. He looked at her as though he expected some appreciation of the point of the story he had been telling her, and, Natalie, still provoked with him, smiled politely. “I'm glad you did,” she said, as her mother would have.

“You realize,” said the detective weightily, “that you were seen at almost every moment?”

The man in the big chair offered Natalie a cigarette and she took it, hoping earnestly that she would not fumble it, would not blow out the match he was holding for her, would, at all costs, not look as though she had not often smoked publicly before. “Your father tells me,” he said, holding the match, “that you're quite the little writer.” As though he might have been saying, “a girl scout patrol leader,” or, “top in your grade in algebra,” and obviously meaning to make her sound less like her mother and more like a frightened girl not yet in college.

Natalie wanted to hurt him back, so she said, quite with the air of a silly girl not yet in college, “I suppose you probably want to write too?” She knew she had done right because he blinked, and she felt a new wild excited joy in the thought that here was Natalie, enough a woman of the world to keep her head during a conversation, to perceive and follow and employ the innuendoes of a man who had probably talked to many people, most of them women, and heard many answers and who could very likely read almost any meaning. Perhaps someday, Natalie thought quickly, chiding herself, I'll learn to talk for a longer time and not stop to think about it in the middle.

“—novel?” the man said.

This was hopeless; they were too far into their conversation for Natalie to say anything at all without losing all the ground she had gained; she would betray herself utterly if she asked him what he had said; she could hardly pretend she didn't care, or walk off, or turn her back; she could certainly not go back now and ask him if he were having a nice time. “I didn't hear you,” she said suddenly, frightening herself almost to tears. “I was thinking about myself instead of listening.”

Four for the gospel-makers;

Three, three, rivals,

Two, two, lily-white boys, clothed all in green-O,

One is one and all alone and evermore will be so.

“Thinking what about yourself?” the man asked.

Said the detective, leaning foward, “Have you given any thought to the extreme danger of your position? What about the knife?”

“About how wonderful I am,” Natalie said. She smiled. Now I can get up and walk away, she thought, the faster the better. She started to get up, but the man got up first, and took hold of her arm.

“About how wonderful she is,” he said as though to himself. “Thinking about how wonderful she is.”

A little chill went down Natalie's back at his holding her arm, at the strange unfamiliar touch of someone else. Leading her by the arm, he moved to the tray where full glasses stood, took one and handed it to Natalie, and took another for himself.

Five for the cymbols at your door,

Four for the gospel-makers,

people shouted at them as they moved.

“Come along,” the man told Natalie. “This I intend to hear more about.”

“And the blood?” the detective said fiercely. “What about the blood, Miss Waite?
How
do you account for the blood?”

“One is one and all alone and evermore will be so.”

“You will not escape this,” the detective said. He dropped his voice and said, so quietly that she barely heard him, “
This
you will not escape.”

The strange man led Natalie away from the crowd on the lawn and across the grass; after a minute the people and their voices (
“Six are the six proud walkers . . .”
) were removed into a background noise, distantly behind them in the night-filled garden. They moved slowly; Natalie was afraid to speak, not trusting her voice in the new silence, perhaps she was still turned to the noise behind and when she spoke it would be in a scream. In those few quick minutes the man walking next to her had changed so rapidly from one shadow, on the lighted lawn, to another shadow, in the dark garden, and her final statement to him had been so conclusive, that past “Are you having a good time?”—which now seemed even less appropriate than before—there was nothing to say.

He spoke, at last. Without the support of other noise, his voice was weak, and perhaps even older than it had sounded before.

“Now then,” he said. “Tell me what she thinks is so wonderful about herself.”

How far wrong, Natalie thought, can one person be about another? Perhaps in that little time I have grown in his mind and he is now talking to some Natalie he thought he had hold of by the arm. She felt the grass under her feet, the soft brush of bushes against her hair, and his fingers on her arm. It was no longer afternoon; the time had slipped away from under Natalie and while she had been behaving in her mind, under the lights, as though it were five o'clock, she found now in the darkness that it was much, much later, long past dinnertime, long past any daylight. She found that she was carefully carrying a glass in her hand, and she brought it up and sipped at it, standing still to do so.

“Tell me,” he said insistently.

“I can't answer that,” Natalie said.

“Do you realize,” he said, amused, “that you made a perfectly outrageous statement? You
can't
refuse an explanation.”

I wonder what I said, Natalie thought; she tried to remember and found that just as her feet were wandering over the grass, so her mind was wandering over the hundreds of words she had heard and spoken that day; it was not possible, she thought, annoyed, to sort out any one statement from that confusion and answer it; he was asking too much. “Where are we?” she asked.

“Near some trees,” he said.

They had come, then, to the trees where Natalie had once encountered knights in armor; she could see them ahead, growing together silently. There were almost enough of them to be called a forest. Natalie could still, before reaching the trees, see the path under her feet; the darkness was then not yet absolute, but the light came by some unknown means, since there was no moon and the lights from the house could not reach this far; Natalie thought briefly that the light came from her own feet.

“I used to play in here when I was a child,” she said.

Then they were into the little forest, and the trees were really dark and silent, and Natalie thought quickly, The danger is here, in
here
, just as they stepped inside and were lost in the darkness.

What have I done? she wondered, walking silently among the trees, aware of their great terrifying silence, so much more expectant by night, and their great unbent heads, and the darkness they pulled about her with silent patient hands.

When the man beside her spoke she was relieved: there was another human being, then, caught in this silence and wandering among the watchful trees, another mortal.

“Let's sit down here,” he said, and without speaking Natalie sat beside him on a fallen trunk. Looking up as she did immediately, she saw immeasurable space, traveling past the locked hands of the trees, past the large nodding implacable heads, up and into the silence of the sky, where the stars remained, indifferent.

“Tell me what you thought was so wonderful about yourself,” the man said; his voice was muted.

Oh my dear God sweet Christ, Natalie thought, so sickened she nearly said it aloud, is he going to
touch
me?

*   *   *

Natalie awoke the next morning to bright sun and clear air, to the gentle movement of her bedroom curtains, to the patterned dancing of the light on the floor; she lay quietly, appreciating the morning in the clear uncomplicated moment vouchsafed occasionally before consciousness returned. Then, with the darkening of the sunlight, the sudden coldness of the day, she was awake and, before perceiving clearly why, she buried her head in the pillow and said, half-aloud, “No, please no.”

“I will not think about it, it doesn't matter,” she told herself, and her mind repeated idiotically, It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, until, desperately, she said aloud, “I don't remember, nothing happened, nothing that I remember happened.”

Slowly she knew she was sick; her head ached, she was dizzy, she loathed her hands as they came toward her face to cover her eyes. “Nothing happened,” she chanted, “nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened,” she said, looking at the window, at the dear lost day. “I don't remember.”

“I will not think about it,” she said to her clothes, lying on the chair, and she remembered as she saw them how she had torn them off wildly when she went to bed, thinking, I'll fix them in the morning, and a button had fallen from her dress and she had watched it roll under the bed, and thought, I'll get it in the morning, and I'll face it all in the morning, and, in the morning it will be gone.

If she got out of bed it would be true; if she stayed in bed she might just possibly be really sick, perhaps delirious. Perhaps dead. “I will not think about it,” she said, and her mind went on endlessly, Will not think about it, will not think about it, will not think about it.

Someday, she thought, it will be gone. Someday I'll be sixty years old, sixty-seven, eighty, and, remembering, will perhaps recall that something of this sort happened once (where? when? who?) and will perhaps smile nostalgically thinking, What a sad silly girl I was, to be sure.

How I worried, she would think—would it have happened again by then? “I won't think about it,” she said. “Won't think about it, won't think about it.”

Get up, she thought, so that someday, as quickly as possible, with infinite speed, somehow, she might get to be sixty-nine, eighty-four, forgetting, smiling sadly, thinking, What a girl I was, what a girl . . . I remember one time; did it happen to me or did I read it somewhere? Could it have happened like that? Or is it something one only finds in books? I have forgotten, she would say, an old lady of ninety, turning over her memories, which would be—please God—faded, and mellowed, by time. “Oh, please,” she said, sitting on the edge of her bed, “oh, please, please.”

The most horrible moment of that morning, and of that day—horrible in itself by being, horrible with its sidelong (suspicious? knowing? perceiving?) looks from her mother and father, heavy amusement from her brother, horrible with remembered words and impossible remembered acts, horrible with its sunlight and its cold disgusting hours—the most horrible moment of that morning or any morning in her life, was when she first looked at herself in the mirror, at her bruised face and her pitiful, erring body.