First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories (10 page)

This was the stroke that fatally wounded him. Knowing he was frightened of that girl, he longed for her, the way men who think they are cowards long for war so they can prove they’re not. Or perhaps it was some other reason. The girl had a striking appearance; there was her youth and her proud, clean look to recommend her.

But whatever the reason, he did begin to think about her in earnest. She rose up in clouds of brilliant light in his head whenever he came across certain words in his reading. (“Mistress” was one, “beautiful” another; you can guess the rest.) He did a paper on “The Unpossessable Loved One in Troubadour Poetry.” When he walked through the Yard on his way to classes, his eyes revolved nervously and never rested, searching all the faces on all the walks in the hope of seeing her. In fact, on his walks to classes he looked so disordered that a number of his friends asked him if he was feeling ill, and it pleased Elgin, after the first two times this happened, to reply that he was. He was ill with longing.

At night, before going to the dining hall for supper, he would put on his bathrobe and slip down to the pool in the basement of Adams House. There, under the wooden beams, he would swim angrily from one end of the pool to the other, faster and faster, until his arms ached. Then he would take a cold shower.

When he slept, he dreamed of carnage, horses, and speeding automobiles. He went to French movies and ground his knees against the seat in front of him. He laughed at himself, and decided to break this absurd habit he had got into of thinking all the time about this girl he had never met, but he didn’t quite succeed. At last, he admitted to himself that he was in love with her; and one night, sleeping in his lower bunk while Dimitri breathed heavily over his head, he had tears in his eyes because he was so foolish and did desire that girl whom he had seen the two times mentioned and only twice more besides.

Having resigned himself—in imitation of Dante—to a state of perpetual longing, he felt calmer and looked at the world with sad, scholarly eyes. But his equilibrium was delicate, and in December Dimitri began having an affair with a Radcliffe girl named Felicia. Upperclassmen could have girls in their room in the afternoon if they signed them in with the campus policeman who sat in a little room near the main entrance of their house, and signed them out when they left. There was always the chance the policeman would come to the room and check up, but even so on gray December afternoons Dimitri, all bundled up, would come searching through Widener for Elgin and ask him not to come home until after six o’clock because Dimitri was taking Felicia to the room. Then Elgin would sit in front of his books, numbed, unable to read, with fine beads of sweat standing out on his upper lip and forehead.

Once he came back to the room and found Dimitri lying in front of a fire in the fireplace; the fire was being fed by Dimitri’s lecture notes.

“Oh God, it’s you. How I hate your ugly face!” Dimitri said, but Elgin knew what he meant; at that moment, being Elgin and not Felicia was a blasphemy. He tiptoed through the room to hang up his coat and tiptoed out again.

In January, immediately after exams, Elgin came down with flu. He was exhausted. When he was well again, it seemed to him that he had been washed clean and purified. He hardly thought about that girl at all.

But one sunny, cold morning in February Elgin saw her standing in front of Sever Hall. She was wearing long blue woolen socks, and she was talking to a pock-marked boy in a raccoon overcoat. Elgin suddenly turned and went into Sever and waited in the hall until the bell rang. The girl came in, and Elgin followed her upstairs and into a classroom; he sat three rows in back of her. It was a course given by Professor Bush on Metaphysical Poets of the Seventeenth Century. And that afternoon Elgin went and got permission to transfer from The Victorian Novel to that class.

The girl’s name was Caroline Hedges and she came from Baltimore. She was a horsewoman of considerable ability. She spent a good deal of her time on clothes, not ever being quite sure where true elegance lay. She was inclined to buy pale colors, blouses one size too large for her, and tweeds. She was easily embarrassed. She read a good deal, her favorite books being “The Charterhouse of Parma,” “Anna Karenina,” and “Madame Bovary.”

She was very proud and easily moved by appeals to her courage. She considered she’d had a happy childhood, and she liked her family (although she could not help looking down on them a little because their name was not famous in the history of America). When she was ten, she had briefly loved a cousin of hers, who was twelve, and who had taken her to the National Museum of Art in Washington and told her the names of the great painters.

At Radcliffe, her freshman year, she discovered that she had been sheltered, compared to most of the other girls, and she felt young and slightly ashamed of herself. This gave her a look of great purity, and she was something of a belle. But late in the spring of her freshman year she stayed up all one night, obsessed and genuinely moved by the fact that she was intelligent and hadn’t really known it before. She had just found it out by noticing that section men and assistant professors and sometimes full professors liked to hear her talk in class. From that night on, she limited her dating and threw herself into studying.

“It is poetry that I love,” she wrote in her diary. “It is hard for me to explain why. Once when I was staying with Aunt Kitty in New York I went for a walk in Central Park when it was snowing. In the zoo I saw the Bactrian camel standing in the middle of its pen. It was holding its head straight up in the air with its mouth open and its tongue out and the snowflakes were falling on it. Perhaps he never saw snow before. I’m not exactly sure where Bactria is or what its climate is like—perhaps it was remembering snow. That is how I feel about poetry.”

Another entry read, “My mother writes and asks me if I still see Louis Du Pont whom she thought such a charming boy. How can Mother think anyone so plump is charming?”

Early in April of her junior year, she wrote, “Today in Metaphysical Poetry, we discussed the tradition of Platonic Love in Jacobean England. A boy named Elgin Smith spoke brilliantly, I thought. He described the winters the young people spent in those vast country houses, twenty or so young people visiting in one house, with two or three chaperons, and snow everywhere. They sang and gave masques and such things. Because young people are so hot-blooded, it was necessary to devise a code of courtship to restrain them, for marriages of alliance had to be made later. Needless to say, it didn’t work, Platonic Love, I mean, and it was much more often written about than observed. I do so admire brilliance and wish that I had some. This young man had the oddest voice. It is positively nasal and twangs and twangs. I wanted to put my hand over his mouth and tell him ‘Sh-h-h.’ He is terribly intense and nervous. He has borrowed a pencil from me several times, and he asked me to have coffee with him once. I said I couldn’t, but next time he asks, I will accept. I long for some really intelligent friends.”

When you consider the combustibility of the emotions of these two young people, it is hardly surprising that within two weeks of their first long conversation together they were trembling when they talked, and found themselves oppressed whenever silences fell. The impulse to discuss this state of affairs with each other kept recurring, but they fought it, until one afternoon when they were sitting in the Cambridge Common and having a cigarette together before separating for dinner.

All through the Common, young mothers were sitting, bored, by baby carriages, and beneath the trees, newly come to leaf, children were climbing on the old cannon. Abraham Lincoln was brooding under his canopy, and trolleys clanged on Massachusetts Avenue.

“Elgin,” Caroline said, “we’ve talked about a hundred things, a thousand things, I bet.”

“Yes.”

“But we’ve never talked about what we think of each other.”

“No,” he said, twisting his fingers together. “I guess we never have.”

“I—I don’t approve of it, actually,” Caroline said. “Analyzing things and all. Some things are better left unsaid.”

“I agree,” Elgin said. The words seemed to explode on his lips, leaving a faintly surprised look on his face.

“Do you?” Caroline said. For her part, she was having difficulty hanging on to her poise.

“There isn’t much people can say that hasn’t been said before,” Elgin said with finality. Then he added, “It’s my reading. I’ve read so much I guess I’m a little jaded.”

“I see,” said Caroline. “Well, it’s a fascinating subject.”

“Yes,” said Elgin, “it is.”

They sat in silence for several seconds, both of them on the verge of speaking, but Elgin was frightened and Caroline was disconcerted, as if her ideas of what could happen had been trampled on and left for dead.

“Let’s get started back,” Elgin said. Caroline rose and the two of them walked on toward Radcliffe, past the Hotel Continental. At the corner, Caroline said, “You coming by this evening?”

Elgin nodded.

Caroline reached out and shook Elgin’s hand, which was a strange thing for her to do.

“Caroline!” Elgin said sharply.

“Yes.”

“Let’s go have dinner together.”

“Where? I thought you were broke.”

“The Chinese restaurant.”

“All right, if I have enough money.” She opened her purse and looked; she and Elgin went Dutch most places. “I’ve got two dollars and some change.” They linked arms and walked back to the Common.

“I think Vaughan is a little bit of a bore,” Caroline said. “Really, the language has deteriorated so much since Donne.”

They sat down on the same bench where they had sat before.

Elgin said, “I assume since our conversation fifteen minutes ago it would be terrible if I talked about the way I feel about you.”

“Oh, no,” said Caroline. “Go right ahead.”

“Well, they’re very strong.”

“I’d more or less guessed that,” Caroline said, unable to make her voice sound normal.

“But I never mentioned it before,” Elgin said, “because I didn’t want anything to come up that might make you want to stop seeing me.”

“I understand,” Caroline said. “That was very subtle of you.”

“Please shut up,” Elgin said. “I’m trying to get something out and it’s very hard. I want you to know I’m not just chasing you or anything like that.”

“Oh?”

“I saw you last fall. You were going into Widener. It was—you know—at first sight.”

“Elgin!”

“It was. I only took Metaphysical Poetry because you were taking it. Caroline, I have deep feelings about you.”

Caroline felt an intense sense of relief. “Well, I always thought so,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure.” Then she realized Elgin was trembling. “Elgin, what’s wrong?”

A child ran by with a red disintegrator pistol. “You’re not angry?” Elgin asked.

“Of course not!” she said ringingly.

“You’re not going to tell me that the most I can expect is your friendship? And if I expect more we oughtn’t to see each other any more?”

There was silence. “I hadn’t thought this far,” Caroline said. She thought it was much more decent if she didn’t have to mention her feelings; she felt trapped. “Well, Elgin, I’ll tell you, I certainly don’t want to stop seeing you.” She moved her legs until they were spread ungracefully. “But, really, I think…we ought to be careful and not get, oh, I don’t know, sloppy, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t mind that,” Elgin said. He swallowed. “But is it all right—Is it all right, Caroline, if I show how I feel a little more?” His voice rose and quivered with longing.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do.”

“Honestly, Elgin, I—”

“You do!”

“I suppose so…. Yes. Do show it. Let’s be honest. For God’s sake, who can it hurt? Yes, let’s not be priggish.”

To her astonishment and delight, Elgin caught her hand and pressed it to his lips.

They hadn’t kissed then, nor did they kiss each other for several days afterward. It was a tacit confession that they suspected the presence of passion, and in such cases, if one is at all practical, one stands back, one dawdles, one doesn’t rush in to confront the beast in its lair. Or to put it another way, one doesn’t go tampering with the floodgates. What they did, after this conversation, was suddenly to become lighthearted. They made jokes; Caroline stole Elgin’s notebook from his hands and made him chase her; they discussed Metaphysical Poetry. And when this lightness and gaiety had eased their suspicion and their fright was in abeyance, Caroline decided she wanted Elgin to kiss her.

She was walking up Garden Street in late afternoon, and the sunlight was clear and golden. There was a light wind that ruffled her hair, and she was striding along, passing any number of couples, Harvard boys and Radcliffe girls, some with their arms around each other’s waist, some holding hands, some just walking side by side. Caroline decided then, in a single flash; and the next minute her cheeks began to glow and she pushed happily at her hair, which kept blowing across her eyes.

At seven o’clock that evening, Elgin arrived at Cabot Hall to pick her up. He was wearing his shabby tweed jacket and khaki pants and a striped tie. Caroline came downstairs wearing her prettiest sweater, a pink cashmere. Her hair was carefully brushed and she wore lipstick, so Elgin knew something was up.

“I’d sort of like to go to a movie tonight,” she said. “I’ve got enough money for both of us if you’re flat.”

Elgin told her he had a little cash. They settled on the U.T.—the University Theatre in Harvard Square.

“I’m in the mood for gangsters,” Caroline said as they emerged from Cabot into the spring evening.

The sky between the trees was purple, a deep, stirring plum color. Caroline put her arms through Elgin’s, and they strode briskly through the Quad toward Garden Street, and then through the Common—one of a number of couples, in a long, irregular procession stretching from the Radcliffe dormitories to Harvard Square.

“I finished my paper on Donne,” Elgin said.

Caroline laughed inconsequently, and Elgin laughed, too, for no good reason.