Hangsaman Read online

  “That’s what I mean,” she said, thinking, Oh, the fool, “can you imagine having a mind like mine and losing it when you die?” Had she, she wondered, had she the original mind?

  He waved his hand at the papers on the desk. “There are almost two hundred papers there,” he said. “I have to read every one of them. And I always watch for yours.”

  (Joan? Helen? Anne?) “I find your criticisms very helpful,” Natalie said demurely. “My father discusses my work with me very much as you do.” She thought of her father with sudden sadness; he was so far away and so much without her, and here she was speaking to a stranger.

  “Does your father think your work shows talent?”

  “My father does not praise anyone.”

  “Do you plan to be a writer?”

  A what? Natalie thought; a writer, a plumber, a doctor, a merchant, a chief; the best-laid plans of; a writer the way I might plan to be a corpse? “A writer?” she repeated, as though she had never heard the word before.

  He was staring at her with his mouth half-open; she must have delayed her idiotic answer beyond any reasonable time for thought. “Do you plan to be a writer?” he asked again.

  He did mean it, then. “Look,” Natalie said, “why does everyone say they’re going to be writers? When they’re not? I mean, why do you and my father and everybody say ‘to be a writer’ as though it were something different? Not like anything else? Is there something special about writers?”

  Her delay had not helped him any. “It’s because writing itself,” he began, hesitating, and then, “I suppose it’s because writing—well, it’s something important, I suppose.”

  “Well, then, what am I going to write?”

  “Well . . .” he said. He looked at her and then irritably at the papers on his desk. “Stories,” he said. “Poems. Articles. Novels. Plays.” He shook his head and then said, “Anything—well, creative.”

  “But why is it so important, this creating?” Natalie was positive at the moment that she was asking him something very important, and that he could answer it, and she leaned forward eagerly; she needed only one answer, only one, she thought, and then she knew that he would not tell her, because he shook his head and said, “Natalie, this is metaphysical nonsense. Questioning one’s own soul is not something at which I am particularly good at any time, and certainly it is not a subject which ought to be indulged in broad daylight. Some other time,” he laughed, “we can sit in the darkness under an oak tree and tell one another vast truths.”

  It was precisely as Natalie’s father would have rebuked her; she sat back in her chair and thought, I will never ask him this again, and then thought, What a silly person I am, and now he does think I am a fool.

  “Tell me,” he said, leaning forward. “You were giving me your ideas about death.”

  * * *

  “But the best thing they did,” Anne said, laughing before she had even begun to describe it, “was the time they wrote to someone’s boy friend and told him not to come to the dance.”

  “They sent him a telegram,” Vicki said. “And the girl waited and waited and of course he never showed up.”

  “But everyone knew except her,” Anne said. “That was the joke of it.”

  “Didn’t she ever find out?” Natalie asked.

  “That was the best part,” Anne said. “Of course she found out later, and of course it was awful for her, but she had to be a good sport about it, naturally. It was only a joke, after all, and she waited and waited all dressed up for the dance.”

  “And remember the time they called up and pretended to be some guy’s mother and had this girl almost in hysterics?”

  “And that old car and they ran it right across anyone’s lawn or anything or anywhere they pleased, and they weren’t afraid of anyone; and the time they poured iodine all over someone’s fur coat?”

  “She was sore,” Vicki said with satisfaction.

  “I should think so,” said Natalie.

  “But of course she had to be a good sport,” Vicki said.

  “And the time,” said Anne, giggling, “that they sent invitations to all the faculty, inviting them to a party, and on the bottom of the invitation it said in big letters ‘Your wife is NOT invited’?”

  Vicki laughed. “There was trouble then,” she said.

  “Nothing’s the same since they graduated,” Anne said wistfully. “No one can think of anything to do, any more.”

  Natalie, my dear,

  Needless to say, your letters amuse and delight me, although, as I have often told you (how humorless I sound!) your style leaves much to be desired; how very often, my dear Natalie, have we, you and I, spent our morning hours puzzling out the intricate filigree of the subordinate clause, and yet I find, in your last letter but one, the following (please forgive my quoting you, my dear; it is the only way, you know, to improve you. I have a notion you would hardly read a bare, invented example): “I like college very much, but am still a little confused. I don’t think I’ll ever learn French. I like philosophy, though. Is there any chance of your coming down soon?”

  Ignoring the sense of the quotation (except to mention, in passing, that it is not possible to “learn” French; as I believe someone else has said, one either is or is not born with the kind of personality to which French is a mother-tongue), let me only say that two self-evident remarks connected with “but” do not constitute an English style. Nor do a series of short sentences, unless they are building into something very clear and definite, which in your case seems to be “with love to all, Natalie”—a desirable sentiment, and one your mother could hardly do without, but surely not an adequate consummation—almost, in fact, an anticlimax.

  Enough for your letter; you are presumably studying English composition and we may expect to see an improvement soon. Your mother and I are better able to avoid one another without you and your brother cluttering up the house. Your mother remarks nostalgically that the dinner table seems unusually deserted, which of course is true, although it persuades me finally that your mother has from the beginning counted her children only by the places set at table, and has marked your growth from one chop to two with pride and appreciation—soon her little girl will be quite grown up, and able to manipulate her own knife and fork. You may, however, suppose that we miss you.

  Has your Mr. Langdon seen my piece in the last Passionate Review? If not, you may use its arguments as your own, and confound him.

  Obediently,

  Dad

  Natalie’s journal; middle October:

  I suppose you have been wondering for a long time, my darling Natalie, what I can find to be thinking about. I suppose you have even noticed—Natalie seems so strange lately, she seems so withdrawn and distant and quiet, I wonder if Natalie is coming along all right, or if there is something troubling her. Perhaps you have been thinking, dearest, that Natalie had something she wanted to say to you. Perhaps, you thought, Natalie is frightened and perhaps she even thinks sometimes about a certain long ago bad thing that she promised me never to think about again. Well, that’s why I’m writing this now. I could tell, my darling, that you were worried about me. I could feel you being apprehensive, and I knew that what you were always thinking about was you and me. And I even knew that you thought I was worried about that terrible thing, but of course—I promise you this, I really do—I don’t think about it at all, ever, because both of us know that it never happened, did it? And it was some horrible dream that caught up with us both. We don’t have to worry about things like that, you remember we decided we didn’t have to worry.

  No, what I have been thinking about is something entirely different. I have been thinking—and it is very very hard to say this, so be patient with me—about the beautiful wonderful exciting things that are happening. That does not quite describe it. Look. Let me say it like this: when I came here to college I was all alon
e and that bad thing had just happened and I had no friends and no one to think about and I was always frightened. Now all of a sudden I find that I am walking around in a world very full of other people, and because they are all frightened too I can afford to be frightened, and then once I know I am frightened then I can go ahead and forget about it and start looking around at other things. And of course now I know that it isn’t important about other people, and only the people who don’t dare be all alone need friends. I don’t suppose I will need any friends or anything for the rest of my life, now that I am not frightened.

  But of course I think sometimes (thank heaven no one will ever read this but you and me, my dear) about being in love, which is something I hardly expect ever to happen to me, but I think I have just a slight idea, from the way I feel about other things, what it would be like. I think, for instance, that no one can really love a person who is not superior in every way. For instance, I know from how I feel about people who are superior to me in some things just exactly how I would feel about someone who was superior to me in everything, which of course would be the only kind of person I could really love.

  I wanted to tell my father about this, and I wanted to tell Arthur too, but of course it is not really possible to go up to some man and say that you could never really love any person who was not superior to you in everything and let them see clearly that they are not that.

  I wish I knew why I am so excited all the time. I keep thinking something is going to happen. I keep thinking I am right on the point of telling someone all about myself.

  I wonder what I would say to a psychoanalyst. I wonder where people find words for all the funny things inside their heads. I keep turning around in circles and finding how well things fit together, but nothing is ever complete. I think if I could tell someone everything, every single thing, inside my head, then I would be gone, and not existing any more, and I would sink away into that lovely nothing-space where you don’t have to worry any more and no one ever hears you or cares and you can say anything but of course you wouldn’t be any more at all and you couldn’t really do anything so it wouldn’t matter what you did.

  Of course I realize that the first thing to do if you wanted someone to tell you everything would be to make your minds go along together, so that if for instance a psychoanalyst wanted me to tell him everything in my head, he would have to be very close to me so that our minds were running exactly together, coinciding, and what I told him would not be told, really, but only an echo of the way both our minds were going, and would sort of cancel out. And there, you see, is what I mean by superior, because after all this he would have to have enough left over after he had taken all my mind, so that he could keep on thinking by himself, after I was nothing. But of course I don’t believe anybody really exists like that and that all these people like Elizabeth who talk about going to psychoanalyst don’t want this at all, or perhaps their minds are so little and move on such a small amount of energy or space that a psychoanalyst could use just a little bit of himself to capture them and have plenty of mind left over, so as not to be absorbed in them at all particularly. And that, I suppose is why these people find it so easy to get along with the idea of having their minds taken away from them, because their minds were never very useful to them in the first place. Although I do not have to worry about being modest here, it is certainly not necessary to point out to you that Elizabeth is not as wise as I am.

  I want somebody who will fight about it, too. Suppose there is a person, somewhere very near me, right now, who is thinking about me and who watches me and knows everything I think about and who is just waiting for me to recognize

  Odd things, these days, came back into Natalie’s mind. For instance, she remembered a scene that happened when she was about six years old; it recurred to her often, and mostly during classes when her mind relaxed and she drew strange little patterns in her notebook, and, with her eyes fixed earnestly upon the front of the room, wandered away by herself. The scene she remembered so clearly was of herself, small vague Natalie in a pair of shorts and sneakers, looking honestly and with the eyes of pure truth up at her mother, who bent down over her and listened with concern. “I found a wishing stone,” little Natalie was telling her mother. “I knew it was a wishing stone because when I dug it up it looked like a wishing stone, so I held it tight in my hand and closed my eyes and wished for a bicycle, and then nothing happened at all and so I threw the stone away.” Natalie could still, this many years later, see her mother’s stricken eyes. She remembered that her father had laughed, and that her mother had begged for the bicycle for Natalie; these cynical later days, Natalie suspected that her mother had been right. It was less important, Natalie thought, to allow her father’s humor to be transmitted to his children than to keep alive her mother’s faith in magic. Too, Natalie saw now that if she had kept the wishing stone until the right time came, she could have used it to wish for a bicycle on that Christmas Eve when a bicycle was so obviously awaiting her under the Christmas tree. Then, magic would have been sustained, and cause and effect not violated for that first, irrecoverable time.

  Behind Natalie a girl said aloud, puzzled, “Well, I think that if Romeo wanted her so much all he had to do was take her. I mean, why all that bother with secret marriages and stuff when they could just walk off together?”

  Mustn’t violate the sacred rules of magic, Natalie thought sleepily. Never wish for anything until it’s ready for you. Never try to make anything happen until it’s on its way. The formal way is best, after all; no short cuts allowed in this passage.

  “Seems to me,” said someone on the far side of the room, “that if the ending was happier it would be a better play.”

  She was a minute or two late and was trying to phrase apologies in her mind when she knocked softly on the door of the Langdon’s house. It was a perfectly legitimate delay, but it was difficult to tell Elizabeth Langdon that one was late for tea with her because her husband had stood in the center of the path, refusing to recognize any hints about appointments, asking endless questions, making well-turned compliments . . . she knocked again, a little more emphatically. The door was not latched, and slipped back and open under her hand. For a minute she stood there and then, thinking that she was expected and telling herself she would do the same anywhere, she pushed the door a little farther and stepped in. For a minute she saw nothing and then, all at once, she saw Elizabeth Langdon asleep with her head on the arm of the couch, and the thick line of smoke rising from the upholstery near her head. Moving quickly and crying out, “Elizabeth,” before she thought to say, “Mrs. Langdon,” Natalie went to the couch and pushed Elizabeth’s head aside, and began to slap at the burning couch.

  “Oh my God,” said Elizabeth from somewhere behind Natalie. She too began to slap at the chair, hitting Natalie’s hand, and then she said, “Wait, wait,” and ran down the hall and into the kitchen. The cigarette that had fallen from Elizabeth’s hand had burned itself out of sight in the couch, and the smoke coming from some horrible secret inner part choked Natalie as she leaned over it. Elizabeth came back behind her with a shakerful of cocktails and said with a giggle, “Couldn’t wait to fill a pitcher with water. Got to remember to save two drinks.” Natalie knocked her arm away so that the cocktails poured on the floor, and said, “That stuff burns! Get water!” Elizabeth stared vacantly, and Natalie, thinking, I am acting in an emergency, ran into the kitchen and filled a saucepan with water and hurried back, spilling water on the hall floor as she ran, and poured the water carefully and accurately into the burning hole on the couch.

  As the smoke died away Natalie realized that Elizabeth was laughing, and she began to laugh too. The hole became a sodden ugly spot, the smoke stopped, and the room suddenly smelled most violently of gin. Elizabeth lifted the shaker and peered into it. “Terrible waste,” she said.

  “I’ll never be able to drink it,” Natalie protested, laughing because it was over and she
felt that she had been perhaps a little impulsively heroic. “I thought you were on fire,” she explained with embarrassment.

  “I nearly was,” Elizabeth said, wide-eyed. “Thanks,” she said.

  “I’m sorry I shouted at you,” Natalie said. They stared at one another uncomfortably for a minute. Then Elizabeth said, “Saved some cocktails, anyway.”

  “Spilled water on the hall floor,” Natalie said.

  “That’s all right,” Elizabeth said largely. “That’s the third time I’ve done it, you know. Fires, I mean.”

  “The third time?” Natalie said, unbelieving.

  Elizabeth nodded. “Third time this year,” she said. “Once the fat in the frying pan caught fire because I wasn’t watching it, and before I could put it out the kitchen curtains caught, and then if Arthur hadn’t been there my dress would have caught but he pulled me out of the way and put the fire out. He was so frightened he couldn’t talk. I could have been killed.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Natalie earnestly.

  “And the second time was when I accidentally dropped a lighted match into the wastebasket in Arthur’s study, and the wastebasket flamed right up and that time my skirt did catch fire, but I picked up the wastebasket and ran into the bathroom and turned on the shower and threw the wastebasket under it and got under myself. So that time was all right.”

  “I’ll bet he was frightened then,” Natalie said.

  “He was when I told him. He wanted me to stop smoking. He said—” Elizabeth looked at Natalie queerly “—he said I was trying to kill myself.”

  “Are you?” Natalie asked in spite of herself.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said mournfully. “I really don’t know. Sometimes, though, I think I have cause.” She stopped, thinking, and there was a silence. Natalie stirred uneasily, and Elizabeth said, “Serve him right, too.”

  “That’s no way to die, though,” Natalie said.