looked at her, lifting his eyes from her drumming fingers to her face. “Have you a prescription?”
“No. I…I didn’t realize that it was necessary to have a prescription. Can’t you sell me something without one? Surely there’s some kind that doesn’t require a prescription.”
He shook his head. “Sorry, lady. Law’s pretty strict about it. You go see a doctor, get a prescription and come back. I’ll be glad to serve you if you get a prescription.”
“Yes. I guess I’ll have to. Thanks very much.”
She turned and walked rapidly up the aisle between counters and out onto the sidewalk. She had the feeling all the way that the bald pharmacist was watching her suspiciously from behind his counter, that she had in some way given him a clue to her guilt simply by asking for sleeping medicine. It required a tremendous exertion of will to keep from running, and she felt icy sweat gather in her arm pits and trickle in thin lines down across her ribs. Turning left on the sidewalk, she walked for several blocks with the same accelerated pace with which she’d left the drug store. After a while, she saw a small park on the opposite side of the street, just one square block with trees and shrubs and scattered benches and the cast-iron figure of a man with an axe in his hands. Crossing the street, she went into the park and sat down on a bench, staring straight ahead past the cast-iron man and breathing deeply with a slow, measured rhythm.
Most doctors are men, she thought. This in itself was insignificant, but she was disturbed by the probability that no doctor would give her a prescription for what she wanted just because she asked him for it. He would want to know why. He would ask her questions. He would want to assure himself by his own diagnosis that the medicine was proper and necessary. He would want to examine her, and though she might suffer all the other elements of a consultation, this she certainly couldn’t She might find a woman doctor, of course. But they were fewer than men and would be more difficult to locate. She would probably have to travel quite a distance to reach the office of one, and even after she had gone to so much trouble, she couldn’t be sure that she would get what she wanted. Trouble and the chance of failure combined to weigh heavily against the effort.
Still, it would be sweet to sleep. To sleep and to waken and to go at once to Jacqueline. Sleep was the balm of hurt minds. Who had said that? Surely someone had said it. It was not something that had just come into her mind. It had the nice, round sound of something that someone had said before. The balm, the balm, the balm of hurt minds. Oh, yes! Oh, God, yes! Who else but old Macbeth? Who but the bloody old Thane of Cawdor himself? The Thane had committed a murder, too, though it was a long time ago and for a different reason, so murder gave them a sort of common denominator, and it was right that she should now remember something he had said. But if you wanted to be technical, it wasn’t really Macbeth who had said it at all, but Shakespeare. Shakespeare had written a play about Macbeth, and he had made Macbeth say that bit about sleep being the balm of hurt minds, so it was really Shakespeare himself who had said it. Not that one needed to quibble. It was a fine line, a true line, a line big enough to divide its credit among all the people in the world who had ever said it—among Macbeth and Shakespeare and Dr. Vera Telsa. There was probably no line Shakespeare had ever written that Dr. Vera Telsa hadn’t repeated sometime or other, and most of them many times. Dr. Vera Telsa loved Shakespeare. She had once settled an old argument by telling Kathy in confidence that Shakespeare was neither Shakespeare nor Sir Francis Bacon. Shakespeare, she’d said, was a woman.
Dr. Vera Telsa was a teacher of literature in a college Kathy had once attended for a very short while. Her class in Shakespeare had an excellent reputation on the campus, but Kathy had never been in the Shakespeare class, because Shakespeare was not open to freshmen, and Kathy had never got to be anything else. She had been in Dr. Telsa’s freshman survey class, however, because the college, Burlington College for girls, was small and select, and that was one of the advantages of a small, select school. Even when you were a freshman, you got good teachers, really top-drawer teachers with Ph.D.s who had written books and maybe some articles for scholarly and literary magazines, and not someone who was working his way to a degree by teaching a class or two. And even in a survey course, if it happened to be a survey of English literature, you got some Shakespeare. Just one play. Just a taste. Just enough to make the receptive students want more. Dr. Telsa was interested only in the receptive students. It was her mission to make them want more.
Dr. Telsa was tall and fairly young to have a Ph.D., and she had ash-blond hair and a deep, husky voice that was wonderful for Shakespeare and made you forget entirely that she was much too thin and that her hip bones were sharp protrusions under her clothes. Kathy had taken a rear seat in the classroom on the first day, but later she moved up front, and her feeling for Dr. Telsa became more and more intense after Beowulf, and by the time Shakespeare came around, she was thinking of Dr. Telsa as Vera and was even forgetting for short periods of time that Stella was dead, that Stella was nowhere on earth and would never be again.
Vera had intimate little extra-curricular sessions in her own home for those who responded adequately. One sat on a cushion and had refreshment and talked about whatever poet or essayist or critic happened to be most on one’s mind. There was a delicious freedom in it, a brave baring of soul, and you could smoke even if you were a freshman. Vera herself smoked. She smoked cork-tipped cigarettes in a long-holder that seemed, when you thought about it, to make the cork tips rather superfluous. She waved the holder when she talked or recited, and she blew smoke at the ceiling when someone else was talking or reciting. Kathy was invited to attend because she had moved up front, because her intense concentration on Vera was mistaken for absorption in what Vera was saying, and because, for reasons of her own, Vera would have eventually invited her anyhow.
She had been attending the sessions for about a month when she arrived one night to find that no one was there. No one but Vera, who stood framed in the doorway against a wash of soft light and said, “Have you come for our little session, my dear? I’m afraid it’s been canceled for tonight.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s quite all right. It is I who should apologize. I must have forgotten to tell you.”
This was a lie. She hadn’t forgotten at all. And Kathy knew intuitively that it was a lie, though she didn’t specifically categorize it then or later, and she knew also that she was supposed to recognize it as such and was expected to make a decision on the basis of it. She stood quietly outside the door, making no move to leave.
“Aren’t you going to the dance?” Vera asked.
“Is there a dance?”
Vera laughed softly. “Well, I can see that you aren’t going. The boys from the University are down tonight, you know. It’s a standard fall affair.”
“Oh, yes. I’d forgotten all about it. I never go to dances.”
“Is that so? In that case, why don’t you come in for a while? We can have a nice, cozy chat all by ourselves.” She stepped back out of the doorway, and Kathy walked past her into the room. She removed her coat and stood for a moment holding it, and Vera said casually, “Just drop it anyplace, my dear.”
She laid the coat over the back of a chair and moved farther into the room to drop, from habit formed in the sessions, onto a thick brocaded pillow on the floor by the sofa. Vera sat on the sofa itself and fitted a cigarette into her long holder and lit it with a silver table lighter. She leaned back and stretched her long, thin legs in front of her. She blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling in a blue plume and laughed gently.
“Yes,” she sighed, “when there’s a dance with boys available, I’m afraid stuffy old Dr. Telsa and her stuffy old literature must take a back seat. I’m deeply touched that you remembered me under the circumstances. Tell me, why don’t
