cropped. His skin was dark, retaining faintly the mark of shallow pocks, but his eyes were, rather startlingly, pale and brilliant blue. He had money, apparently a great deal of it that came from sources he never mentioned, and he drove down from the city, over a hundred miles north, in a black Cadillac trimmed with much glittering chrome. How he and Stella had met was something Kathy never learned. Nor did she care, now that the meeting had occurred and could not be prevented. Now she was interested only in how they might part, and she was disturbed, actually made ill, by the pervasive fear that they would not part at all.
In her room, she sat and waited for them to return.
The room was dark, and she sat in a chair by the window and looked out into the soft night. She was seventeen then, and she had just finished high school, and it was a night when a pretty girl of seventeen who had just finished high school should have had in her mind something far different from the aberrant fear and corrosive hatred that were in hers. On the trellis below her window, the Paul’s Scarlet roses, flowers of brief life, still bloomed like bright blood in the darkness. On the air that stirred came the sigh, the restless rustling of young leaves. At a distance, someone laughed.
A car turned the corner and came down the street along the curb. From her position at the window, she followed its progress until her span of vision was cut off by the house. Out front, a powerful engine revved briefly and died. She heard laughter and language and footsteps and a key in the door. The center of life was in peril.
The Negro woman had long ago quit staying nights, Kathy being old enough to stay alone, and now there would be no intervening sound of her departure before the other familiar sounds of a man and woman entertaining themselves. Kathy sat and waited for them to begin, but tonight they didn’t. Instead there was the sound of Stella on the stairs and in the hall, of her voice, light and errant and a little intoxicated, in the doorway to the room.
“Kathy?”
“Yes. I’m here, Stella.”
“Have you been in bed?”
“No.”
“Are you dressed?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’d like you to come down for a minute, darling.”
“I don’t want to come down, Stella.”
Stella came into the room behind the significant scent and stood behind Kathy’s chair. “Why not? Only for a minute. Won’t you do such a small thing for me?”
“I’m sorry, Stella. I don’t feel well. I have a headache.”
This was true enough. She frequently had headaches, and the frequency had increased since the appearance of Felix Brannon. But she would have claimed the headache even if there had been none.
Stella said, “I’m sorry you have a headache, darling, but this time I’m going to insist. Just this once, just for a minute. If it weren’t so important to me, I wouldn’t have asked.”
The peril came closer, breathed its cold breath into her heart. She stood up and said, “All right, Stella. If you insist.”
They went out into the hall and down into the big living room where Felix Brannon stood with his legs apart and his burnished, handsome head cocked a little to one side as he watched them approach. He was holding a highball in one hand. He lifted the glass and drank and set the glass down on a table at the end of the sofa. He smiled a little, watching them.
Kathy kept her eyes averted. She refused to look at him. She thought that if she looked at him she would be deathly sick. She looked instead at the radio-phonograph beyond his shoulder.
“Hello, Kathy,” Felix Brannon said.
“Hello, Mr. Brannon.”
“Oh, come, now. Skip the formality. Just call me Felix.”
“Felix, then.”
“As a matter of fact, there’s another name you can call me after tonight.”
The peril was monstrous now, swollen and terrible and panting. Her heart was a block of ice. She continued to look at the radio-phonograph and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Beside her, Stella laughed her errant, intoxicated laugh and put an arm around her shoulders. “Darling, Felix is asking you to accept him as a father. Or would it be uncle? Anyhow, it’s a kind of secondary proposal, and you’re supposed to feel flattered. You’re supposed to say yes, thank you, and let him kiss your cheek.”
He picked up his cue and stepped toward her, and it was a repetition, only worse, of the evening incident by the muddy creek in the shadows of scrub timber. She was aware of sudden darkness and frenzy and violent confusion of sound and action, and when the proximate items of earth sorted and fixed themselves in the return of sanity, her wrists were captured in his strong fingers and she was staring up into glittering pale eyes in a stony, closed face.
Stella’s voice sliced between them. “Kathy! For God’s sake, Kathy, what’s the matter with you?”
She tugged fiercely against his restraint, and he released her suddenly. She stumbled back, regained her balance, and ran out of the room and upstairs. On her bed, she lay face downward, her body racked by dry, convulsive sobs. The sobs tore her throat, detonated against her ear drums. She didn’t hear Stella come after her into the room, was not conscious of her until she felt the touch of fingers or her head. She remained in the position into which she had thrown herself, but after a while the sobs subsided, and Stella’s voice sounded clearly from the darkness behind her.
“Kathy, Kathy, how can I understand you? It’s so simple, darling. So natural. Just a man and a woman getting married. Do you think you will be excluded? It won’t be that way at all. There will be three of us instead of two, no more than that. I’m still young, still pretty, I’m in love. Felix wants to marry me, and I want to marry him. Is that so disturbing? Is that so difficult to understand? If it is, if you can’t understand, for God’s sake tell me why so that I can at least try to understand you.”
She knew, of course, by that time she could hardly help knowing, but the truth was such a monstrous distortion of nature as nature functioned in herself that she found it incredible as well as monstrous, and so she would not accept it. She stood waiting in the darkness by the bed, dreading the response she might elicit, the normal warmth of her heart dispelled by pervading cold.
Kathy rolled over on the bed and sat on the edge, reaching out for the soft white blur of Stella’s hand. “Please don’t marry him, Stella. Please, please, please don’t marry him.”
“But I want to marry him. Why shouldn’t I marry him?”
“You can’t. You just can’t.”
“That’s no reason, darling. Surely you can see that.”
“It would be the end of you and me. Nothing would ever be the same again.”
“Nonsense. Felix is very fond of you. He wouldn’t come between us in any way.”
“You don’t understand! Oh, Stella, you don’t understand!”
“I’m sure I don’t. And I want to. Can’t you make me understand?”
