section and dust particles suspended in the shafts slanting down from the high windows.
She’d taken the thin volume off the shelf, and it had fallen open in her hand right to the poem, as if it were pointed at her. Anyhow, she was sensitive to ideas of reference, and she always believed that it was pointed. The poem was a kind of revelation, and she never forgot it. She remembered it word for word, and sometimes when she was alone at night she lay in bed and repeated it to herself, and sometimes, on her bad days, which were frequent, she awoke in the morning, as she had now, with the lines in her mind.
Portland was a prison, she knew. She hadn’t ever been in prison, although it now seemed that she might go there; but that didn’t matter, because prison, like hair, could be taken to mean something else entirely. That was the thing about the poem. You could make it mean just about whatever you wanted it to, and so there wasn’t any use getting technical.
As far as she was concerned, because of her idea of reference, it had only one meaning, however. That was why she always remembered it exactly, even without ever referring back to it again, and why she repeated it to herself at night and at the beginning of her bad days. Not that it brought her any comfort or made the bad day any the less bad. On the contrary, it deepened her depression and hardened her despair. It was like pressing on a sore place, repeating the poem or just thinking it, and that’s why she did it.
Thinking back, which she often did in spite of the fact that she knew it was bad for her, she had the feeling that everything had begun with the scent of flowers. Beyond the scent, far back in the mists of beginning, there was the shadow of a man who had been her father, but in her mind he was someone who had had nothing to do with anything. He had died of something, and he had been buried someplace, but this was academic knowledge, devoid of significance. She realized, naturally, that this was irrational, that some part of her was of necessity a development of some part of him, but the realization didn’t give him any more substance in her mind. He was before the beginning, and the beginning was the scent of flowers.
There was, first, the scent of lilies, and it was strange that this scent which signified the beginning for her should have signified the end for someone else. The lilies lay in the living room in a large spray on top of her mother’s casket, and the scent filled the room to the point of suffocation and crept out through all the house and even out into the yard. She had gone out into the yard to get away from it, but it had followed her there.
She always had a sense of guilt about her mother’s death, because she hadn’t felt sufficient grief. But that wasn’t exactly true. At first, she had felt very intense and genuine grief, even if it was in large part loneliness and terror of loneliness, but then Aunt Stella had arrived, and after that it was impossible to feel anything except a consuming sense of anticipation that was almost as terrifying in its own way as the loneliness had been.
Aunt Stella was beautiful. She was certainly the most beautiful creature God had ever made, and it was difficult to believe that she was really the younger sister of the thin, bitter, bone-tired woman who lay, no longer tired nor bitter nor anything at all, under the weight of lilies in the living room. Aunt Stella was twenty-eight at the time, but she could have passed for less. Her hair was shoulder length and loose, and it shone in the light almost like silver. Her eyes were blue and wide and soft with a kind of secret laughter, and her mouth was wide, too, and soft, too, and it seemed always to tremble slightly with the same laughter that was in the eyes.
There were so many beautiful things about Aunt Stella—or, as she insisted upon being called with a delicious familiarity that was nearly sufficient to burst the heart, just Stella. But more beautiful than everything else, perhaps, were her hands. Long, narrow hands with long, scarlet-tipped fingers, wonderfully certain and talented and incredibly gentle. Cupping your face or stroking your cheek, they achieved in a touch an intimacy that was a wild, singing delight. As a matter of fact, Stella was naturally accomplished in the achievement of intimacy. She was other things, too, of course. She was kind and generous and full of fun, and she was about as bad for a starved and lonely girl as anything that could possibly have happened.
It was the scent that Stella wore, more than the scent of lilies, although they were inextricably mixed, that signified the beginning. Simply because Stella was herself the beginning, and the scent was the first thing known of her. It preceded her into the room where Kathy sat, and it stood waiting, sharp and light and strangely penetrating, like something alive, for Kathy’s attention. The scent was common enough, the essence of a common flower fixed in ambergris, but Kathy could never remember the name of it, would never be able to as long as she lived, because naming it would have destroyed it, would have established it as the ordinary thing it really was.
“You must be Kathryn,” Aunt Stella said, and Kathy looked up with sudden, breathless expectancy at the beautiful woman filled with secret laughter.
“Yes.”
“Did your mother call you that? Kathryn?”
“Mostly.”
“What else did she call you? A pet name?”
“Yes. Kitten.”
The slender arches of brows were extended for a moment above Aunt Stella’s eyes, and her silent laughter grew briefly to the stature of husky sound.
“Oh, I don’t believe I like that. Kitten, I mean. I think a girl should be called something she can grow up with, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“What would you like me to call you?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”
“How about Kathy? It’s a nice name, and it uses part of your real one. Do you think you would like that?” The affectionate diminutive acquired on her lips a quality of magic. It swelled and sang in the house of death. “Yes, I’d like that very much.”
“Good. That’s settled, then. And you must call me Stella. I’m afraid I couldn’t bear being called Aunt. Let me hear you say my name once, just to make us better acquainted.”
Kathy tried to force the name through the hard, hurting constriction in her throat, but the monstrous familiarity with such a shimmering, charming woman was more than she could manage. The sound came out a dry, strangled gasp, and Stella’s voice in response was edged with alarm. “Oh, now. You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“No.”
“No doubt it’s just that I’m strange. Do you think you could learn to like me?”
“I like you already.”
The laugh again, the husky amplification of the inner secret. “That’s nice. Then you should be able to say my name. Why don’t you try again?”
This time she accomplished it. “Stella,” she said, and the sound was like the closing of a door that would never be opened again, a small sound, definitive, shutting away everything that had gone before and making of the woman under the lilies a kind of static improbability, as if she had been a corpse from the beginning.
Stella turned and dropped into an overstuffed chair, a sad construction of lumps and squeaks and worn plush. Her narrow skirt slipped up over shining, silken knees. “That’s better. Come here, Kathy.”
Kathy went and stood beside her, and for the first time she felt the enchantment of Stella’s long, slender hands, reacting to the delicate touch of fingers with an intensity that made her tremble. The fingers touched her hair, her temple, traced
