Surprise! Lit with a Twist

Surprise! Lit with a Twist

Hi,

Writing Assignment: Lit with a Twist! Remember what you read in this week’s lecture and the stories that you read this week (“The Story of an Hour,” “Roman Fever,” The Memory of Mars). You may want to refer to the Week 2 lecture, “Understanding Fiction,” as well as the vocabulary, as well. Write a 1½ – 2 page response (at least 500 words) in which you reflect on “The Story of an Hour,” “Roman Fever,” and The Memory of Mars. Submit: go to the Writing Assignments area in Blackboard and click on use submissions area for this assignment. Consider all three stories in your response: · How did setting affect your involvement with the stories? Did the setting draw you in to the story? Did it make the story believable? · What were the conflicts of the main characters? How were the conflicts resolved? Was the resolution part of the “twist”? · Which story did you enjoy the most – and why? · Which story did you enjoy the least – and why? Note: You must use at least one (1) direct quote from the stories, to support your discussion. MLA Format Format your document in MLA style – refer to the MLA Handbook, 8th ed., or to the OWL at Purdue MLA pages. If you quote or paraphrase from the stories, you must cite correctly in the response and also include a Works Cited entry for the stories. On the page below is a sample that shows the required elements.

The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death. It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message. She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her. There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window. She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams. She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air. Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will–as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under hte breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body. She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome. There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination. And yet she had loved him–sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! “Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering. Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold, imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door–you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.” “Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window. Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long. She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom. Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease–of the joy that kills. ________________________________________________________________________ Source: Adapted from Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Virginia Commonwealth University, 1996-2016, http://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/webtexts/hour/. Accessed 27 Jul. 2017

13 hours ago

Roman Fever by Edith Wharton From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval. As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below. “Well, come along, then,” it cried, not to them but to an invisible companion, “and let’s leave the young things to their knitting,” and a voice as fresh laughed back: “Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting—” “Well, I mean figuratively,” rejoined the first. “After all, we haven’t left our poor parents much else to do.. . .” At that point the turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue. The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling embarrassment, and the smaller and paler one shook her head and colored slightly. “Barbara!” she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mocking voice in the stairway. The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in color, with a small determined nose supported by vigorous black eyebrows, gave a good-humored laugh. “That’s what our daughters think of us.” Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. “Not of us individually. We must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see—” Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. “One never knows,” she murmured. “The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill; and sometimes I get tired just looking—even at this.” Her gesture was now addressed to the stupendous scene at their feet. The dark lady laughed again, and they both relapsed upon the view, contemplating it in silence, with a sort of diffused serenity which might have been borrowed from the spring effulgence of the Roman skies. The luncheon hour was long past, and the two had their end of the vast terrace to themselves. At its opposite extremity a few groups, detained by a lingering look at the outspread city, were gathering up guidebooks and fumbling for tips. The last of them scattered, and the two ladies were alone on the air-washed height. “Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t just stay here,” said Mrs. Slade, the lady of the high color and energetic brows. Two derelict basket chairs stood near, and she pushed them into the angle of the parapet, and settled herself in one, her gaze upon the Palatine. “After all, it’s still the most beautiful view in the world.” Lapointe/English “It always will be, to me,” assented her friend Mrs. Ansley, with so slight a stress on the “me” that Mrs. Slade, though she noticed it, wondered if it were not merely accidental, like the random underlinings of old-fashioned letter writers. “Grace Ansley was always old-fashioned,” she thought; and added aloud, with a retrospective smile: “It’s a view we’ve both been familiar with for a good many years. When we first met here we were younger than our girls are now. You remember!” “Oh, yes, I remember,” murmured Mrs. Ansley, with the same undefinable stress— “There’s that head-waiter wondering,” she interpolated. She was evidently far less sure than her companion of herself and of her rights in the world. “I’ll cure him of wondering,” said Mrs. Slade, stretching her hand toward a bag as discreetly opulent-looking as Mrs. Ansley’s. Signing to the headwaiter, she explained that she and her friend were old lovers of Rome, and would like to spend the end of the afternoon looking down on the view—that is, if it did not disturb the service! The headwaiter, bowing over her gratuity, assured her that the ladies were most welcome, and would be still more so if they would condescend to remain for dinner. A full moon night, they would remember…. Mrs. Slade’s black brows drew together, as though references to the moon were out of place and even unwelcome. But she smiled away her frown as the headwaiter retreated. “Well, why not! We might do worse. There’s no knowing, I suppose, when the girls will be back. Do you even know back from where? I don’t!” Mrs. Ansley again colored slightly. “I think those young Italian aviators we met at the Embassy invited them to fly to Tarquinia for tea. I suppose they’ll want to wait and fly back by moonlight.” “Moonlight—moonlight! What a part it still plays. Do you suppose they’re as sentimental as we were?” “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t in the least know what they are,” said Mrs. Ansley. “And perhaps we didn’t know much more about each other.” “No, perhaps we didn’t.” Her friend gave her a shy glance. “I never should have supposed you were sentimental, Alida.” “Well, perhaps I wasn’t.” Mrs. Slade drew her lids together in retrospect; and for a few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected how little they knew each other. Each one, of course, had a label ready to attach to the other’s name; Mrs. Delphin Slade, for instance, would have told herself, or anyone who asked her, that Mrs. Horace Ansley, twenty-five years ago, had been exquisitely lovely—no, you wouldn’t believe it, would you! though, of course, still charming, distinguished…. Well, as a girl she had been exquisite; far more beautiful than her daughter, Barbara, though certainly Babs, according to the new standards at any rate, was more effective—had more edge, as they say. Funny Lapointe/English where she got it, with those two nullities as parents. Yes; Horace Ansley was— well, just the duplicate of his wife. Museum specimens of old New York. Goodlooking, irreproachable, exemplary. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had lived opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years. When the drawing-room curtains in No. 20 East Seventy-third Street were renewed, No. 23, across the way, was always aware of it. And of all the movings, buyings, travels, anniversaries, illnesses—the tame chronicle of an estimable pair. Little of it escaped Mrs. Slade. But she had grown bored with it by the time her husband made his big coup in Wall Street, and when they bought in upper Park Avenue had already begun to think: “I’d rather live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it raided.” The idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched it at a woman’s lunch. It made a hit, and went the rounds—she sometimes wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley. She hoped not, but didn’t much mind. Those were the days when respectability was at a discount, and it did the irreproachable no harm to laugh at them a little. A few years later, and not many months apart, both ladies lost their husbands. There was an appropriate exchange of wreaths and condolences, and a brief renewal of intimacy in the half shadow of their mourning; and now, after another interval, they had run across each other in Rome, at the same hotel, each of them the modest appendage of a salient daughter. The similarity of their lot had again drawn them together, lending itself to mild jokes, and the mutual confession that, if in old days it must have been tiring to “keep up” with daughters, it was now, at times, a little dull not to. No doubt, Mrs. Slade reflected, she felt her unemployment more than poor Grace ever would. It was a big drop from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being his widow. She had always regarded herself (with a certain conjugal pride) as his equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the exceptional couple they were: but the difference after his death was irremediable. As the wife of the famous corporation lawyer, always with an international case or two on hand, every day brought its exciting and unexpected obligation: the impromptu entertaining of eminent colleagues from abroad, the hurried dashes on legal business to London, Paris or Rome, where the entertaining was so handsomely reciprocated; the amusement of hearing in her wakes: “What, that handsome woman with the good clothes and the eyes is Mrs. Slade—the Slade’s wife! Really! Generally the wives of celebrities are such frumps.” Yes; being the Slade’s widow was a dullish business after that. In living up to such a husband all her faculties had been engaged; now she had only her daughter to live up to, for the son who seemed to have inherited his father’s gifts had died suddenly in boyhood. She had fought through that agony because her husband was there, to be help ed and to help ; now, after the father’s death, the thought of the Lapointe/English boy had become unbearable. There was nothing left but to mother her daughter; and dear Jenny was such a perfect daughter that she needed no excessive mothering. “Now with Babs Ansley I don’t know that I should be so quiet,” Mrs. Slade sometimes half-enviously reflected; but Jenny, who was younger than her brilliant friend, was that rare accident, an extremely pretty girl who somehow made youth and prettiness seem as safe as their absence. It was all perplexing—and to Mrs. Slade a little boring. She wished that Jenny would fall in love—with the wrong man, even; that she might have to be watched, out-maneuvered, rescued. And instead, it was Jenny who watched her mother, kept her out of drafts, made sure that she had taken her tonic… Mrs. Ansley was much less articulate than her friend, and her mental portrait of Mrs. Slade was slighter, and drawn with fainter touches. “Alida Slade’s awfully brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks,” would have summed it up; though she would have added, for the enlightenment of strangers, that Mrs. Slade had been an extremely dashing girl; much more so than her daughrer, who was pretty, of course, and clever in a way, but had none of her mother’s—well, “vividness,” someone had once called it. Mrs. Ansley would take up current words like this, and cite them in quotation marks, as unheard-of audacities. No; Jenny was not like her mother. Sometimes Mrs. Ansley thought Alida Slade was disappointed; on the whole she had had a sad life. Full of failures and mistakes; Mrs. Ansley had always been rather sorry for her…. So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope. II For a long time they continued to sit side by side without speaking. It seemed as though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which faced them. Mrs. Slade sat quite still, her eyes fixed on the golden slope of the Palace of the Caesars, and after a while Mrs. Ansley ceased to fidget with her bag, and she too sank into meditation. Like many intimate friends, the two ladies had never before had occasion to be silent together, and Mrs. Ansley was slightly embarrassed by what seemed, after so many years, a new stage in their intimacy, and one with which she did not yet know how to deal. Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver. Mrs. Slade glanced at her wristwatch. “Five o’clock already,” she said, as though surprised. Mrs. Ansley suggested interrogatively: “There’s bridge at the Embassy at five.” For a long time Mrs. Slade did not answer. She appeared to be lost in contemplation, and Mrs. Ansley thought the remark had escaped her. But after a while she said, as if speaking out of a dream: “Bridge, did you say! Not unless you want to…. But I don’t think I will, you know.” Lapointe/English “Oh, no,” Mrs. Ansley hastened to assure her. “I don’t care to at all. It’s so lovely here; and so full of old memories, as you say.” She settled herself in her chair, and almost furtively drew forth her knitting. Mrs. Slade took sideways note of this activity, but her own beautifully cared-for hands remained motionless on her knee. “I was just thinking,” she said slowly, “what different things Rome stands for to each generation of travelers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangers—how we used to be guarded!—to our daughters, no more dangers than the middle of Main Street. They don’t know it—but how much they’re missing!” The long golden light was beginning to pale, and Mrs. Ansley lifted her knitting a little closer to her eyes. “Yes, how we were guarded” “I always used to think,” Mrs. Slade continued, “that our mothers had a much more difficult job than our grandmothers. When Roman fever stalked the streets it must have been comparatively easy to gather in the girls at the danger hour; but when you and I were young, with such beauty calling us, and the spice of disobedience thrown in, and no worse risk than catching cold during the cool hour after sunset, the mothers used to be put to it to keep us in—didn’t they!” She turned again toward Mrs. Ansley, but the latter had reached a delicate point in her knitting. “One, two, three—slip two; yes, they must have been,” she assented, without looking up. Mrs. Slade’s eyes rested on her with a deepened attention. “She can knit—in the face of this! How like her…. ” Mrs. Slade leaned back, brooding, her eyes ranging from the ruins which faced her to the long green hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fronts beyond it, and the outlying immensity of the Colosseum. Suddenly she thought: “It’s all very well to say that our girls have done away with sentiment and moonlight. But if Babs Ansley isn’t out to catch that young aviator—the one who’s a Marchese— then I don’t know anything. And Jenny has no chance beside her. I know that too. I wonder if that’s why Grace Ansley likes the two girls to go everywhere together! My poor Jenny as a foil—!” Mrs. Slade gave a hardly audible laugh, and at the sound Mrs. Ansley dropped her knitting. “Yes—?” “I—oh, nothing. I was only thinking how your Babs carries everything before her. That Campolieri boy is one of the best matches in Rome. Don’t look so innocent, my dear—you know he is. And I was wondering, ever so respectfully, you understand… wondering how two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic.” Mrs. Slade laughed again, with a touch of asperity. Mrs. Ansley’s hands lay inert across her needles. She looked straight out at the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor at her feet. But her small Lapointe/English profile was almost expressionless. At length she said, “I think you overrate Babs, my dear.” Mrs. Slade’s tone grew easier. “No; I don’t. I appreciate her. And perhaps envy you. Oh, my girl’s perfect; if I were a chronic invalid I’d—well, I think I’d rather be in Jenny’s hands. There must be times… but there! I always wanted a brilliant daughter… and never quite understood why I got an angel instead.” Mrs. Ansley echoed her laugh in a faint murmur. “Babs is an angel too.” “Of course—of course! But she’s got rainbow wings. Well, they’re wandering by the sea with their young men; and here we sit… and it all brings back the past a little too acutely.” Mrs. Ansley had resumed her knitting. One might almost have imagined (if one had known her less well, Mrs. Slade reflected) that, for her also, too many memories rose from the lengthening shadows of those august ruins. But no; she was simply absorbed in her work. What was there for her to worry about! She knew that Babs would almost certainly come back engaged to the extremely eligible Campolieri. “And she’ll sell the New York house, and settle down near them in Rome, and never be in their way… she’s much too tactful. But she’ll have an excellent cook, and just the right people in for bridge and cocktails… and a perfectly peacefuI old age among her grandchildren.” Mrs. Slade broke off this prophetic flight with a recoil of self-disgust. There was no one of whom she had less right to think unkindly than of Grace Ansley. Would she never cure herself of envying her! Perhaps she had begun too long ago. She stood up and leaned against the parapet, filling her troubled eyes with the tranquilizing magic of the hour. But instead of tranquilizing her the sight seemed to increase her exasperation. Her gaze turned toward the Colosseum. Already its golden flank was drowned in purple shadow, and above it the sky curved crystal clear, without light or color. It was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in midheaven. Mrs. Slade turned back and laid her hand on her friend’s arm. The gesture was so abrupt that Mrs. Ansley looked up, startled. “The sun’s set. You’re not afraid, my dear?” “Afraid—?” “Of Roman fever or pneumonia! I remember how ill you were that winter. As a girl you had a very delicate throat, hadn’t you?” “Oh, we’re all right up here. Down below, in the Forum, it does get deathly cold, all of a sudden… but not here.” “Ah, of course you know because you had to be so careful.” Mrs. Slade turned back to the parapet. She thought: “I must make one more effort not to hate her.” Aloud she said: “Whenever I look at the Forum from up here, I remember that story about a great-aunt of yours, wasn’t she? A dreadfully wicked great-aunt?” Lapointe/English “Oh, yes; Great-aunt Harriet. The one who was supposed to have sent her young sister out to the Forum after sunset to gather a nightblooming flower for her album. All our great-aunts and grandmothers used to have albums of dried flowers.” Mrs. Slade nodded. “But she really sent her because they were in love with the same man—” “Well, that was the family tradition. They said Aunt Harriet confessed it years afterward. At any rate, the poor little sister caught the fever and died. Mother used to frighten us with the story when we were children.” “And you frightened me with it, that winter when you and I were here as girls. The winter I was engaged to Delphin.” Mrs. Ansley gave a faint laugh. “Oh, did I! Really frightened you? I don’t believe you’re easily frightened.” “Not often; but I was then. I was easily frightened because I was too happy. I wonder if you know what that means?” “I—yes… ” Mrs. Ansley faltered. “Well, I suppose that was why the story of your wicked aunt made such an impression on me. And I thought: ‘There’s no more Roman fever, but the Forum is deathly cold after sunset—especially after a hot day. And the Colosseum’s even colder and damper.'” “The Colosseum—?” “Yes. It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night. Far from easy. Still, in those days it could be managed; it was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere. You knew that?” “I—I daresay. I don’t remember.” “You don’t remember? You don’t remember going to visit some ruins or other one evening, just after dark, and catching a bad chill! You were supposed to have gone to see the moonrise. People always said that expedition was what caused your illness.” There was a moment’s silence; then Mrs. Ansley rejoined: “Did they? It was all so long ago.” “Yes. And you got well again—so it didn’t matter. But I suppose it struck your friends—the reason given for your illness. I mean—because everybody knew you were so prudent on account of your throat, and your mother took such care of you…. You had been out late sightseeing, hadn’t you, that night” “Perhaps I had. The most prudent girls aren’t always prudent. What made you think of it now?” Mrs. Slade seemed to have no answer ready. But after a moment she broke out: “Because I simply can’t bear it any longer—” Mrs. Ansley lifted her head quickly. Her eyes were wide and very pale. “Can’t bear what?” Lapointe/English “Why—your not knowing that I’ve always known why you went.” “Why I went—?” “Yes. You think I’m bluffing, don’t you? Well, you went to meet the man I was engaged to—and I can repeat every word of the letter that took you there.” While Mrs. Slade spoke Mrs. Ansley had risen unsteadily to her feet. Her bag, her knitting and gloves, slid in a panic-stricken heap to the ground. She looked at Mrs. Slade as though she were looking at a ghost. “No, no—don’t,” she faltered out. “Why not? Listen, if you don’t believe me. ‘My one darling, things can’t go on like this. I must see you alone. Come to the Colosseum immediately after dark tomorrow. There will be somebody to let you in. No one whom you need fear will suspect’—but perhaps you’ve forgotten what the letter said?” Mrs. Ansley met the challenge with an unexpected composure. Steadying herself against the chair she looked at her friend, and replied: “No; I know it by heart too.” “And the signature? ‘Only your D.S.’ Was that it? I’m right, am I? That was the letter that took you out that evening after dark?” Mrs. Ansley was still looking at her. It seemed to Mrs. Slade that a slow struggle was going on behind the voluntarily controlled mask of her small quiet face. “I shouldn’t have thought she had herself so well in hand,” Mrs. Slade reflected, almost resentfully. But at this moment Mrs. Ansley spoke. “I don’t know how you knew. I burned that letter at once.” “Yes; you would, naturally—you’re so prudent!” The sneer was open now. “And if you burned the letter you’re wondering how on earth I know what was in it. That’s it, isn’t it?” Mrs. Slade waited, but Mrs. Ansley did not speak. “Well, my dear, I know what was in that letter because I wrote it!” “You wrote it?” “Yes.” The two women stood for a minute staring at each other in the last golden light. Then Mrs. Ansley dropped back into her chair. “Oh,” she murmured, and covered her face with her hands. Mrs. Slade waited nervously for another word or movement. None came, and at length she broke out: “I horrify you.” Mrs. Ansley’s hands dropped to her knees. The face they uncovered was streaked with tears. “I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking—it was the only letter I ever had from him!” “And I wrote it. Yes; I wrote it! But I was the girl he was engaged to. Did you happen to remember that?” Mrs. Ansley’s head drooped again. “I’m not trying to excuse myself… I remembered… ” Lapointe/English “And still you went?” “Still I went.” Mrs. Slade stood looking down on the small bowed figure at her side. The flame of her wrath had already sunk, and she wondered why she had ever thought there would be any satisfaction in inflicting so purposeless a wound on her friend. But she had to justify herself. “You do understand? I’d found out—and I hated you, hated you. I knew you were in love with Delphin—and I was afraid; afraid of you, of your quiet ways, your sweetness… your… well, I wanted you out of the way, that’s all. Just for a few weeks; just till I was sure of him. So in a blind fury I wrote that letter… I don’t know why I’m telling you now.” “I suppose,” said Mrs. Ansley slowly, “it’s because you’ve always gone on hating me.” “Perhaps. Or because I wanted to get the whole thing off my mind.” She paused. “I’m glad you destroyed the letter. Of course I never thought you’d die.” Mrs. Ansley relapsed into silence, and Mrs. Slade, leaning above her, was conscious of a strange sense of isolation, of being cut off from the warm current of human communion. “You think me a monster!” “I don’t know… It was the only letter I had, and you say he didn’t write it” “Ah, how you care for him still!” “I cared for that memory,” said Mrs. Ansley. Mrs. Slade continued to look down on her. She seemed physically reduced by the blow—as if, when she got up, the wind might scatter her like a puff of dust. Mrs. Slade’s jealousy suddenly leaped up again at the sight. All these years the woman had been living on that letter. How she must have loved him, to treasure the mere memory of its ashes! The letter of the man her friend was engaged to. Wasn’t it she who was the monster? “You tried your best to get him away from me, didn’t you? But you failed; and I kept him. That’s all.” “Yes. That’s all.” “I wish now I hadn’t told you. I’d no idea you’d feel about it as you do; I thought you’d be amused. It all happened so long ago, as you say; and you must do me the justice to remember that I had no reason to think you’d ever taken it seriously. How could I, when you were married to Horace Ansley two months afterward? As soon as you could get out of bed your mother rushed you off to Florence and married you. People were rather surprised—they wondered at its being done so quickly; but I thought I knew. I had an idea you did it out of pique—to be able to say you’d got ahead of Delphin and me. Kids have such silly reasons for doing the most serious things. And your marrying so soon convinced me that you’d never really cared.” “Yes. I suppose it would,” Mrs. Ansley assented. Lapointe/English The clear heaven overhead was emptied of all its gold. Dusk spread over it, abruptly darkening the Seven Hills. Here and there lights began to twinkle through the foliage at their feet. Steps were coming and going on the deserted terrace— waiters looking out of the doorway at the head of the stairs, then reappearing with trays and napkins and flasks of wine. Tables were moved, chairs straightened. A feeble string of electric lights flickered out. A stout lady in a dustcoat suddenly appeared, asking in broken Italian if anyone had seen the elastic band which held together her tattered Baedeker. She poked with her stick under the table at which she had lunched, the waiters assisting. The corner where Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley sat was still shadowy and deserted. For a long time neither of them spoke. At length Mrs. Slade began again: “I suppose I did it as a sort of joke—” “A joke?” “Well, girls are ferocious sometimes, you know. Girls in love especially. And I remember laughing to myself all that evening at the idea that you were waiting around there in the dark, dodging out of sight, listening for every sound, trying to get in—of course I was upset when I heard you were so ill afterward.” Mrs. Ansley had not moved for a long time. But now she turned slowly toward her companion. “But I didn’t wait. He’d arranged everything. He was there. We were let in at once,” she said. Mrs. Slade sprang up from her leaning position. “Delphin there! They let you in! Ah, now you’re lying!” she burst out with violence. Mrs. Ansley’s voice grew clearer, and full of surprise. “But of course he was there. Naturally he came—” “Came? How did he know he’d find you there? You must be raving!” Mrs. Ansley hesitated, as though reflecting. “But I answered the letter. I told him I’d be there. So he came.” Mrs. Slade flung her hands up to her face. “Oh, God—you answered! I never thought of your answering…. ” “It’s odd you never thought of it, if you wrote the letter.” “Yes. I was blind with rage.” Mrs. Ansley rose, and drew her fur scarf about her. “It is cold here. We’d better go…. I’m sorry for you,” she said, as she clasped the fur about her throat. The unexpected words sent a pang through Mrs. Slade. “Yes; we’d better go.” She gathered up her bag and cloak. “I don’t know why you should be sorry for me,” she muttered. Mrs. Ansley stood looking away from her toward the dusky mass of the Colosseum. “Well—because I didn’t have to wait that night.” Mrs. Slade gave an unquiet laugh. “Yes, I was beaten there. But I oughtn’t to begrudge it to you, I suppose. At the end of all these years. After all, I had Lapointe/English everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn’t write.” Mrs. Ansley was again silent. At length she took a step toward the door of the terrace, and turned back, facing her companion. “I had Barbara,” she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway. ________________________________________________________________________ Source: Adapted from: Wharton, Edith. “Roman Fever.” ebooksbrowsers, eBrowsers.org, 2015, http://ebookbrowsee.net/ro/roman-fever#.VTvga890yUl. Accessed 27 Jul. 2017Roman Fever by Edith Wharton From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval. As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below. “Well, come along, then,” it cried, not to them but to an invisible companion, “and let’s leave the young things to their knitting,” and a voice as fresh laughed back: “Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting—” “Well, I mean figuratively,” rejoined the first. “After all, we haven’t left our poor parents much else to do.. . .” At that point the turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue. The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling embarrassment, and the smaller and paler one shook her head and colored slightly. “Barbara!” she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mocking voice in the stairway. The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in color, with a small determined nose supported by vigorous black eyebrows, gave a good-humored laugh. “That’s what our daughters think of us.” Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. “Not of us individually. We must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see—” Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. “One never knows,” she murmured. “The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill; and sometimes I get tired just looking—even at this.” Her gesture was now addressed to the stupendous scene at their feet. The dark lady laughed again, and they both relapsed upon the view, contemplating it in silence, with a sort of diffused serenity which might have been borrowed from the spring effulgence of the Roman skies. The luncheon hour was long past, and the two had their end of the vast terrace to themselves. At its opposite extremity a few groups, detained by a lingering look at the outspread city, were gathering up guidebooks and fumbling for tips. The last of them scattered, and the two ladies were alone on the air-washed height. “Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t just stay here,” said Mrs. Slade, the lady of the high color and energetic brows. Two derelict basket chairs stood near, and she pushed them into the angle of the parapet, and settled herself in one, her gaze upon the Palatine. “After all, it’s still the most beautiful view in the world.” Lapointe/English “It always will be, to me,” assented her friend Mrs. Ansley, with so slight a stress on the “me” that Mrs. Slade, though she noticed it, wondered if it were not merely accidental, like the random underlinings of old-fashioned letter writers. “Grace Ansley was always old-fashioned,” she thought; and added aloud, with a retrospective smile: “It’s a view we’ve both been familiar with for a good many years. When we first met here we were younger than our girls are now. You remember!” “Oh, yes, I remember,” murmured Mrs. Ansley, with the same undefinable stress— “There’s that head-waiter wondering,” she interpolated. She was evidently far less sure than her companion of herself and of her rights in the world. “I’ll cure him of wondering,” said Mrs. Slade, stretching her hand toward a bag as discreetly opulent-looking as Mrs. Ansley’s. Signing to the headwaiter, she explained that she and her friend were old lovers of Rome, and would like to spend the end of the afternoon looking down on the view—that is, if it did not disturb the service! The headwaiter, bowing over her gratuity, assured her that the ladies were most welcome, and would be still more so if they would condescend to remain for dinner. A full moon night, they would remember…. Mrs. Slade’s black brows drew together, as though references to the moon were out of place and even unwelcome. But she smiled away her frown as the headwaiter retreated. “Well, why not! We might do worse. There’s no knowing, I suppose, when the girls will be back. Do you even know back from where? I don’t!” Mrs. Ansley again colored slightly. “I think those young Italian aviators we met at the Embassy invited them to fly to Tarquinia for tea. I suppose they’ll want to wait and fly back by moonlight.” “Moonlight—moonlight! What a part it still plays. Do you suppose they’re as sentimental as we were?” “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t in the least know what they are,” said Mrs. Ansley. “And perhaps we didn’t know much more about each other.” “No, perhaps we didn’t.” Her friend gave her a shy glance. “I never should have supposed you were sentimental, Alida.” “Well, perhaps I wasn’t.” Mrs. Slade drew her lids together in retrospect; and for a few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected how little they knew each other. Each one, of course, had a label ready to attach to the other’s name; Mrs. Delphin Slade, for instance, would have told herself, or anyone who asked her, that Mrs. Horace Ansley, twenty-five years ago, had been exquisitely lovely—no, you wouldn’t believe it, would you! though, of course, still charming, distinguished…. Well, as a girl she had been exquisite; far more beautiful than her daughter, Barbara, though certainly Babs, according to the new standards at any rate, was more effective—had more edge, as they say. Funny Lapointe/English where she got it, with those two nullities as parents. Yes; Horace Ansley was— well, just the duplicate of his wife. Museum specimens of old New York. Goodlooking, irreproachable, exemplary. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had lived opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years. When the drawing-room curtains in No. 20 East Seventy-third Street were renewed, No. 23, across the way, was always aware of it. And of all the movings, buyings, travels, anniversaries, illnesses—the tame chronicle of an estimable pair. Little of it escaped Mrs. Slade. But she had grown bored with it by the time her husband made his big coup in Wall Street, and when they bought in upper Park Avenue had already begun to think: “I’d rather live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it raided.” The idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched it at a woman’s lunch. It made a hit, and went the rounds—she sometimes wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley. She hoped not, but didn’t much mind. Those were the days when respectability was at a discount, and it did the irreproachable no harm to laugh at them a little. A few years later, and not many months apart, both ladies lost their husbands. There was an appropriate exchange of wreaths and condolences, and a brief renewal of intimacy in the half shadow of their mourning; and now, after another interval, they had run across each other in Rome, at the same hotel, each of them the modest appendage of a salient daughter. The similarity of their lot had again drawn them together, lending itself to mild jokes, and the mutual confession that, if in old days it must have been tiring to “keep up” with daughters, it was now, at times, a little dull not to. No doubt, Mrs. Slade reflected, she felt her unemployment more than poor Grace ever would. It was a big drop from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being his widow. She had always regarded herself (with a certain conjugal pride) as his equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the exceptional couple they were: but the difference after his death was irremediable. As the wife of the famous corporation lawyer, always with an international case or two on hand, every day brought its exciting and unexpected obligation: the impromptu entertaining of eminent colleagues from abroad, the hurried dashes on legal business to London, Paris or Rome, where the entertaining was so handsomely reciprocated; the amusement of hearing in her wakes: “What, that handsome woman with the good clothes and the eyes is Mrs. Slade—the Slade’s wife! Really! Generally the wives of celebrities are such frumps.” Yes; being the Slade’s widow was a dullish business after that. In living up to such a husband all her faculties had been engaged; now she had only her daughter to live up to, for the son who seemed to have inherited his father’s gifts had died suddenly in boyhood. She had fought through that agony because her husband was there, to be help ed and to help ; now, after the father’s death, the thought of the Lapointe/English boy had become unbearable. There was nothing left but to mother her daughter; and dear Jenny was such a perfect daughter that she needed no excessive mothering. “Now with Babs Ansley I don’t know that I should be so quiet,” Mrs. Slade sometimes half-enviously reflected; but Jenny, who was younger than her brilliant friend, was that rare accident, an extremely pretty girl who somehow made youth and prettiness seem as safe as their absence. It was all perplexing—and to Mrs. Slade a little boring. She wished that Jenny would fall in love—with the wrong man, even; that she might have to be watched, out-maneuvered, rescued. And instead, it was Jenny who watched her mother, kept her out of drafts, made sure that she had taken her tonic… Mrs. Ansley was much less articulate than her friend, and her mental portrait of Mrs. Slade was slighter, and drawn with fainter touches. “Alida Slade’s awfully brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks,” would have summed it up; though she would have added, for the enlightenment of strangers, that Mrs. Slade had been an extremely dashing girl; much more so than her daughrer, who was pretty, of course, and clever in a way, but had none of her mother’s—well, “vividness,” someone had once called it. Mrs. Ansley would take up current words like this, and cite them in quotation marks, as unheard-of audacities. No; Jenny was not like her mother. Sometimes Mrs. Ansley thought Alida Slade was disappointed; on the whole she had had a sad life. Full of failures and mistakes; Mrs. Ansley had always been rather sorry for her…. So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope. II For a long time they continued to sit side by side without speaking. It seemed as though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which faced them. Mrs. Slade sat quite still, her eyes fixed on the golden slope of the Palace of the Caesars, and after a while Mrs. Ansley ceased to fidget with her bag, and she too sank into meditation. Like many intimate friends, the two ladies had never before had occasion to be silent together, and Mrs. Ansley was slightly embarrassed by what seemed, after so many years, a new stage in their intimacy, and one with which she did not yet know how to deal. Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver. Mrs. Slade glanced at her wristwatch. “Five o’clock already,” she said, as though surprised. Mrs. Ansley suggested interrogatively: “There’s bridge at the Embassy at five.” For a long time Mrs. Slade did not answer. She appeared to be lost in contemplation, and Mrs. Ansley thought the remark had escaped her. But after a while she said, as if speaking out of a dream: “Bridge, did you say! Not unless you want to…. But I don’t think I will, you know.” Lapointe/English “Oh, no,” Mrs. Ansley hastened to assure her. “I don’t care to at all. It’s so lovely here; and so full of old memories, as you say.” She settled herself in her chair, and almost furtively drew forth her knitting. Mrs. Slade took sideways note of this activity, but her own beautifully cared-for hands remained motionless on her knee. “I was just thinking,” she said slowly, “what different things Rome stands for to each generation of travelers. To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental dangers—how we used to be guarded!—to our daughters, no more dangers than the middle of Main Street. They don’t know it—but how much they’re missing!” The long golden light was beginning to pale, and Mrs. Ansley lifted her knitting a little closer to her eyes. “Yes, how we were guarded” “I always used to think,” Mrs. Slade continued, “that our mothers had a much more difficult job than our grandmothers. When Roman fever stalked the streets it must have been comparatively easy to gather in the girls at the danger hour; but when you and I were young, with such beauty calling us, and the spice of disobedience thrown in, and no worse risk than catching cold during the cool hour after sunset, the mothers used to be put to it to keep us in—didn’t they!” She turned again toward Mrs. Ansley, but the latter had reached a delicate point in her knitting. “One, two, three—slip two; yes, they must have been,” she assented, without looking up. Mrs. Slade’s eyes rested on her with a deepened attention. “She can knit—in the face of this! How like her…. ” Mrs. Slade leaned back, brooding, her eyes ranging from the ruins which faced her to the long green hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fronts beyond it, and the outlying immensity of the Colosseum. Suddenly she thought: “It’s all very well to say that our girls have done away with sentiment and moonlight. But if Babs Ansley isn’t out to catch that young aviator—the one who’s a Marchese— then I don’t know anything. And Jenny has no chance beside her. I know that too. I wonder if that’s why Grace Ansley likes the two girls to go everywhere together! My poor Jenny as a foil—!” Mrs. Slade gave a hardly audible laugh, and at the sound Mrs. Ansley dropped her knitting. “Yes—?” “I—oh, nothing. I was only thinking how your Babs carries everything before her. That Campolieri boy is one of the best matches in Rome. Don’t look so innocent, my dear—you know he is. And I was wondering, ever so respectfully, you understand… wondering how two such exemplary characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic.” Mrs. Slade laughed again, with a touch of asperity. Mrs. Ansley’s hands lay inert across her needles. She looked straight out at the great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor at her feet. But her small Lapointe/English profile was almost expressionless. At length she said, “I think you overrate Babs, my dear.” Mrs. Slade’s tone grew easier. “No; I don’t. I appreciate her. And perhaps envy you. Oh, my girl’s perfect; if I were a chronic invalid I’d—well, I think I’d rather be in Jenny’s hands. There must be times… but there! I always wanted a brilliant daughter… and never quite understood why I got an angel instead.” Mrs. Ansley echoed her laugh in a faint murmur. “Babs is an angel too.” “Of course—of course! But she’s got rainbow wings. Well, they’re wandering by the sea with their young men; and here we sit… and it all brings back the past a little too acutely.” Mrs. Ansley had resumed her knitting. One might almost have imagined (if one had known her less well, Mrs. Slade reflected) that, for her also, too many memories rose from the lengthening shadows of those august ruins. But no; she was simply absorbed in her work. What was there for her to worry about! She knew that Babs would almost certainly come back engaged to the extremely eligible Campolieri. “And she’ll sell the New York house, and settle down near them in Rome, and never be in their way… she’s much too tactful. But she’ll have an excellent cook, and just the right people in for bridge and cocktails… and a perfectly peacefuI old age among her grandchildren.” Mrs. Slade broke off this prophetic flight with a recoil of self-disgust. There was no one of whom she had less right to think unkindly than of Grace Ansley. Would she never cure herself of envying her! Perhaps she had begun too long ago. She stood up and leaned against the parapet, filling her troubled eyes with the tranquilizing magic of the hour. But instead of tranquilizing her the sight seemed to increase her exasperation. Her gaze turned toward the Colosseum. Already its golden flank was drowned in purple shadow, and above it the sky curved crystal clear, without light or color. It was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in midheaven. Mrs. Slade turned back and laid her hand on her friend’s arm. The gesture was so abrupt that Mrs. Ansley looked up, startled. “The sun’s set. You’re not afraid, my dear?” “Afraid—?” “Of Roman fever or pneumonia! I remember how ill you were that winter. As a girl you had a very delicate throat, hadn’t you?” “Oh, we’re all right up here. Down below, in the Forum, it does get deathly cold, all of a sudden… but not here.” “Ah, of course you know because you had to be so careful.” Mrs. Slade turned back to the parapet. She thought: “I must make one more effort not to hate her.” Aloud she said: “Whenever I look at the Forum from up here, I remember that story about a great-aunt of yours, wasn’t she? A dreadfully wicked great-aunt?” Lapointe/English “Oh, yes; Great-aunt Harriet. The one who was supposed to have sent her young sister out to the Forum after sunset to gather a nightblooming flower for her album. All our great-aunts and grandmothers used to have albums of dried flowers.” Mrs. Slade nodded. “But she really sent her because they were in love with the same man—” “Well, that was the family tradition. They said Aunt Harriet confessed it years afterward. At any rate, the poor little sister caught the fever and died. Mother used to frighten us with the story when we were children.” “And you frightened me with it, that winter when you and I were here as girls. The winter I was engaged to Delphin.” Mrs. Ansley gave a faint laugh. “Oh, did I! Really frightened you? I don’t believe you’re easily frightened.” “Not often; but I was then. I was easily frightened because I was too happy. I wonder if you know what that means?” “I—yes… ” Mrs. Ansley faltered. “Well, I suppose that was why the story of your wicked aunt made such an impression on me. And I thought: ‘There’s no more Roman fever, but the Forum is deathly cold after sunset—especially after a hot day. And the Colosseum’s even colder and damper.'” “The Colosseum—?” “Yes. It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night. Far from easy. Still, in those days it could be managed; it was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere. You knew that?” “I—I daresay. I don’t remember.” “You don’t remember? You don’t remember going to visit some ruins or other one evening, just after dark, and catching a bad chill! You were supposed to have gone to see the moonrise. People always said that expedition was what caused your illness.” There was a moment’s silence; then Mrs. Ansley rejoined: “Did they? It was all so long ago.” “Yes. And you got well again—so it didn’t matter. But I suppose it struck your friends—the reason given for your illness. I mean—because everybody knew you were so prudent on account of your throat, and your mother took such care of you…. You had been out late sightseeing, hadn’t you, that night” “Perhaps I had. The most prudent girls aren’t always prudent. What made you think of it now?” Mrs. Slade seemed to have no answer ready. But after a moment she broke out: “Because I simply can’t bear it any longer—” Mrs. Ansley lifted her head quickly. Her eyes were wide and very pale. “Can’t bear what?” Lapointe/English “Why—your not knowing that I’ve always known why you went.” “Why I went—?” “Yes. You think I’m bluffing, don’t you? Well, you went to meet the man I was engaged to—and I can repeat every word of the letter that took you there.” While Mrs. Slade spoke Mrs. Ansley had risen unsteadily to her feet. Her bag, her knitting and gloves, slid in a panic-stricken heap to the ground. She looked at Mrs. Slade as though she were looking at a ghost. “No, no—don’t,” she faltered out. “Why not? Listen, if you don’t believe me. ‘My one darling, things can’t go on like this. I must see you alone. Come to the Colosseum immediately after dark tomorrow. There will be somebody to let you in. No one whom you need fear will suspect’—but perhaps you’ve forgotten what the letter said?” Mrs. Ansley met the challenge with an unexpected composure. Steadying herself against the chair she looked at her friend, and replied: “No; I know it by heart too.” “And the signature? ‘Only your D.S.’ Was that it? I’m right, am I? That was the letter that took you out that evening after dark?” Mrs. Ansley was still looking at her. It seemed to Mrs. Slade that a slow struggle was going on behind the voluntarily controlled mask of her small quiet face. “I shouldn’t have thought she had herself so well in hand,” Mrs. Slade reflected, almost resentfully. But at this moment Mrs. Ansley spoke. “I don’t know how you knew. I burned that letter at once.” “Yes; you would, naturally—you’re so prudent!” The sneer was open now. “And if you burned the letter you’re wondering how on earth I know what was in it. That’s it, isn’t it?” Mrs. Slade waited, but Mrs. Ansley did not speak. “Well, my dear, I know what was in that letter because I wrote it!” “You wrote it?” “Yes.” The two women stood for a minute staring at each other in the last golden light. Then Mrs. Ansley dropped back into her chair. “Oh,” she murmured, and covered her face with her hands. Mrs. Slade waited nervously for another word or movement. None came, and at length she broke out: “I horrify you.” Mrs. Ansley’s hands dropped to her knees. The face they uncovered was streaked with tears. “I wasn’t thinking of you. I was thinking—it was the only letter I ever had from him!” “And I wrote it. Yes; I wrote it! But I was the girl he was engaged to. Did you happen to remember that?” Mrs. Ansley’s head drooped again. “I’m not trying to excuse myself… I remembered… ” Lapointe/English “And still you went?” “Still I went.” Mrs. Slade stood looking down on the small bowed figure at her side. The flame of her wrath had already sunk, and she wondered why she had ever thought there would be any satisfaction in inflicting so purposeless a wound on her friend. But she had to justify herself. “You do understand? I’d found out—and I hated you, hated you. I knew you were in love with Delphin—and I was afraid; afraid of you, of your quiet ways, your sweetness… your… well, I wanted you out of the way, that’s all. Just for a few weeks; just till I was sure of him. So in a blind fury I wrote that letter… I don’t know why I’m telling you now.” “I suppose,” said Mrs. Ansley slowly, “it’s because you’ve always gone on hating me.” “Perhaps. Or because I wanted to get the whole thing off my mind.” She paused. “I’m glad you destroyed the letter. Of course I never thought you’d die.” Mrs. Ansley relapsed into silence, and Mrs. Slade, leaning above her, was conscious of a strange sense of isolation, of being cut off from the warm current of human communion. “You think me a monster!” “I don’t know… It was the only letter I had, and you say he didn’t write it” “Ah, how you care for him still!” “I cared for that memory,” said Mrs. Ansley. Mrs. Slade continued to look down on her. She seemed physically reduced by the blow—as if, when she got up, the wind might scatter her like a puff of dust. Mrs. Slade’s jealousy suddenly leaped up again at the sight. All these years the woman had been living on that letter. How she must have loved him, to treasure the mere memory of its ashes! The letter of the man her friend was engaged to. Wasn’t it she who was the monster? “You tried your best to get him away from me, didn’t you? But you failed; and I kept him. That’s all.” “Yes. That’s all.” “I wish now I hadn’t told you. I’d no idea you’d feel about it as you do; I thought you’d be amused. It all happened so long ago, as you say; and you must do me the justice to remember that I had no reason to think you’d ever taken it seriously. How could I, when you were married to Horace Ansley two months afterward? As soon as you could get out of bed your mother rushed you off to Florence and married you. People were rather surprised—they wondered at its being done so quickly; but I thought I knew. I had an idea you did it out of pique—to be able to say you’d got ahead of Delphin and me. Kids have such silly reasons for doing the most serious things. And your marrying so soon convinced me that you’d never really cared.” “Yes. I suppose it would,” Mrs. Ansley assented. Lapointe/English The clear heaven overhead was emptied of all its gold. Dusk spread over it, abruptly darkening the Seven Hills. Here and there lights began to twinkle through the foliage at their feet. Steps were coming and going on the deserted terrace— waiters looking out of the doorway at the head of the stairs, then reappearing with trays and napkins and flasks of wine. Tables were moved, chairs straightened. A feeble string of electric lights flickered out. A stout lady in a dustcoat suddenly appeared, asking in broken Italian if anyone had seen the elastic band which held together her tattered Baedeker. She poked with her stick under the table at which she had lunched, the waiters assisting. The corner where Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley sat was still shadowy and deserted. For a long time neither of them spoke. At length Mrs. Slade began again: “I suppose I did it as a sort of joke—” “A joke?” “Well, girls are ferocious sometimes, you know. Girls in love especially. And I remember laughing to myself all that evening at the idea that you were waiting around there in the dark, dodging out of sight, listening for every sound, trying to get in—of course I was upset when I heard you were so ill afterward.” Mrs. Ansley had not moved for a long time. But now she turned slowly toward her companion. “But I didn’t wait. He’d arranged everything. He was there. We were let in at once,” she said. Mrs. Slade sprang up from her leaning position. “Delphin there! They let you in! Ah, now you’re lying!” she burst out with violence. Mrs. Ansley’s voice grew clearer, and full of surprise. “But of course he was there. Naturally he came—” “Came? How did he know he’d find you there? You must be raving!” Mrs. Ansley hesitated, as though reflecting. “But I answered the letter. I told him I’d be there. So he came.” Mrs. Slade flung her hands up to her face. “Oh, God—you answered! I never thought of your answering…. ” “It’s odd you never thought of it, if you wrote the letter.” “Yes. I was blind with rage.” Mrs. Ansley rose, and drew her fur scarf about her. “It is cold here. We’d better go…. I’m sorry for you,” she said, as she clasped the fur about her throat. The unexpected words sent a pang through Mrs. Slade. “Yes; we’d better go.” She gathered up her bag and cloak. “I don’t know why you should be sorry for me,” she muttered. Mrs. Ansley stood looking away from her toward the dusky mass of the Colosseum. “Well—because I didn’t have to wait that night.” Mrs. Slade gave an unquiet laugh. “Yes, I was beaten there. But I oughtn’t to begrudge it to you, I suppose. At the end of all these years. After all, I had Lapointe/English everything; I had him for twenty-five years. And you had nothing but that one letter that he didn’t write.” Mrs. Ansley was again silent. At length she took a step toward the door of the terrace, and turned back, facing her companion. “I had Barbara,” she said, and began to move ahead of Mrs. Slade toward the stairway. ________________________________________________________________________ Source: Adapted from: Wharton, Edith. “Roman Fever.” ebooksbrowsers, eBrowsers.org, 2015, http://ebookbrowsee.net/ro/roman-fever#.VTvga890yUl. Accessed 27 Jul. 2017Roman Fever by Edith Wharton From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval. As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below. “Well, come along, then,” it cried, not to them but to an invisible companion, “and let’s leave the young things to their knitting,” and a voice as fresh laughed back: “Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting—” “Well, I mean figuratively,” rejoined the first. “After all, we haven’t left our poor parents much else to do.. . .” At that point the turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue. The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling embarrassment, and the smaller and paler one shook her head and colored slightly. “Barbara!” she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mocking voice in the stairway. The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in color, with a small determined nose supported by vigorous black eyebrows, gave a good-humored laugh. “That’s what our daughters think of us.” Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. “Not of us individually. We must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see—” Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black handbag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. “One never knows,” she murmured. “The new system has certainly given us a good deal of time to kill; and sometimes I get tired just looking—even at this.” Her gesture was now addressed to the stupendous scene at their feet. The dark lady laughed again, and they both relapsed upon the view, contemplating it in silence, with a sort of diffused serenity which might have been borrowed from the spring effulgence of the Roman skies. The luncheon hour was long past, and the two had their end of the vast terrace to themselves. At its opposite extremity a few groups, detained by a lingering look at the outspread city, were gathering up guidebooks and fumbling for tips. The last of them scattered, and the two ladies were alone on the air-washed height. “Well, I don’t see why we shouldn’t just stay here,” said Mrs. Slade, the lady of the high color and energetic brows. Two derelict basket chairs stood near, and she pushed them into the angle of the parapet, and settled herself in one, her gaze upon the Palatine. “After all, it’s still the most beautiful view in the world.” Lapointe/English “It always will be, to me,” assented her friend Mrs. Ansley, with so slight a stress on the “me” that Mrs. Slade, though she noticed it, wondered if it were not merely accidental, like the random underlinings of old-fashioned letter writers. “Grace Ansley was always old-fashioned,” she thought; and added aloud, with a retrospective smile: “It’s a view we’ve both been familiar with for a good many years. When we first met here we were younger than our girls are now. You remember!” “Oh, yes, I remember,” murmured Mrs. Ansley, with the same undefinable stress— “There’s that head-waiter wondering,” she interpolated. She was evidently far less sure than her companion of herself and of her rights in the world. “I’ll cure him of wondering,” said Mrs. Slade, stretching her hand toward a bag as discreetly opulent-looking as Mrs. Ansley’s. Signing to the headwaiter, she explained that she and her friend were old lovers of Rome, and would like to spend the end of the afternoon looking down on the view—that is, if it did not disturb the service! The headwaiter, bowing over her gratuity, assured her that the ladies were most welcome, and would be still more so if they would condescend to remain for dinner. A full moon night, they would remember…. Mrs. Slade’s black brows drew together, as though references to the moon were out of place and even unwelcome. But she smiled away her frown as the headwaiter retreated. “Well, why not! We might do worse. There’s no knowing, I suppose, when the girls will be back. Do you even know back from where? I don’t!” Mrs. Ansley again colored slightly. “I think those young Italian aviators we met at the Embassy invited them to fly to Tarquinia for tea. I suppose they’ll want to wait and fly back by moonlight.” “Moonlight—moonlight! What a part it still plays. Do you suppose they’re as sentimental as we were?” “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t in the least know what they are,” said Mrs. Ansley. “And perhaps we didn’t know much more about each other.” “No, perhaps we didn’t.” Her friend gave her a shy glance. “I never should have supposed you were sentimental, Alida.” “Well, perhaps I wasn’t.” Mrs. Slade drew her lids together in retrospect; and for a few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected how little they knew each other. Each one, of course, had a label ready to attach to the other’s name; Mrs. Delphin Slade, for instance, would have told herself, or anyone who asked her, that Mrs. Horace Ansley, twenty-five years ago, had been exquisitely lovely—no, you wouldn’t believe it, would you! though, of course, still charming, distinguished…. Well, as a girl she had been exquisite; far more beautiful than her daughter, Barbara, though certainly Babs, according to the new standards at any rate, was more effective—had more edge, as they say. Funny Lapointe/English where she got it, with those two nullities as parents. Yes; Horace Ansley was— well, just the duplicate of his wife. Museum specimens of old New York. Goodlooking, irreproachable, exemplary. Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had lived opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years. When the drawing-room curtains in No. 20 East Seventy-third Street were renewed, No. 23, across the way, was always aware of it. And of all the movings, buyings, travels, anniversaries, illnesses—the tame chronicle of an estimable pair. Little of it escaped Mrs. Slade. But she had grown bored with it by the time her husband made his big coup in Wall Street, and when they bought in upper Park Avenue had already begun to think: “I’d rather live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it raided.” The idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched it at a woman’s lunch. It made a hit, and went the rounds—she sometimes wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley. She hoped not, but didn’t much mind. Those were the days when respectability was at a discount, and it did the irreproachable no harm to laugh at them a little. A few years later, and not many months apart, both ladies lost their husbands. There was an appropriate exchange of wreaths and condolences, and a brief renewal of intimacy in the half shadow of their mourning; and now, after another interval, they had run across each other in Rome, at the same hotel, each of them the modest appendage of a salient daughter. The similarity of their lot had again drawn them together, lending itself to mild jokes, and the mutual confession that, if in old days it must have been tiring to “keep up” with daughters, it was now, at times, a little dull not to. No doubt, Mrs. Slade reflected, she felt her unemployment more than poor Grace ever would. It was a big drop from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being his widow. She had always regarded herself (with a certain conjugal pride) as his equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the exceptional couple they were: but the difference after his death was irremediable. As the wife of the famous corporation lawyer, always with an international case or two on hand, every day brought its exciting and unexpected obligation: the impromptu entertaining of eminent colleagues from abroad, the hurried dashes on legal business to London, Paris or Rome, where the entertaining was so handsomely reciprocated; the amusement of hearing in her wakes: “What, that handsome woman with the good clothes and the eyes is Mrs. Slade—the Slade’s wife! Really! Generally the wives of celebrities are such frumps.” Yes; being the Slade’s widow was a dullish business after that. In living up to such a husband all her faculties had been engaged; now she had only her daughter to live up to, for the son who seemed to have inheri

13 hours ago

The Memory of Mars by Raymond F. Jones “As soon as I’m well we’ll go to Mars for a vacation again,” Alice would say. But now she was dead, and the surgeons said she was not even human. In his misery, Hastings knew two things: he loved his wife; but they had never been off Earth! A reporter should be objective even about a hospital. It’s his business to stir others’ emotions and not let his own be stirred. But that was no good, Mel Hastings told himself. No good at all when it was Alice who was here somewhere, balanced uncertainly between life and death. Alice had been in Surgery far too long. Something had gone wrong. He was sure of it. He glanced at his watch. It would soon be dawn outside. To Mel Hastings this marked a significant and irrevocable passage of time. If Alice were to emerge safe and whole from the white cavern of Surgery she would have done so now. Mel sank deeper in the heavy chair, feeling a quietness within himself as if the slow creep of death were touching him also. There was a sudden far distant roar and through the window he saw a streak of brightness in the sky. That would be the tourist ship, the Martian Princess, he remembered. That was the last thing Alice had said before they took her away from him. “As soon as I’m well again we’ll go to Mars for a vacation again, and then you’ll remember. It’s so beautiful there. We had so much fun–” Funny, wonderful little Alice–and her strange delusion that she still clung to, that they had taken a Martian vacation in the first year of their marriage. It had started about a year ago, and nothing he could say would shake it. Neither of them had ever been to space. He wished now he had taken her. It would have been worth it, no matter what its personal cost. He had never told her about the phobia that had plagued him all his life, the fear of outer space that made him break out in a cold sweat just to think of it–nor of the nightmare that came again and again, ever since he was a little boy. There must have been some way to lick this thing–to give her that vacation on Mars that she had wanted so much. Now it was too late. He knew it was too late. * * * * * The white doors opened, and Dr. Winters emerged slowly. He looked at Mel Hastings a long time as if trying to remember who the reporter was. “I must see you–in my office,” he said finally. Mel stared back in numb recognition. “She’s dead,” he said. Dr. Winters nodded slowly as if in surprise and wonder that Mel had divined this fact. “I must see you in my office,” he repeated. Mel watched his retreating figure. There seemed no point in following. Dr. Winters had said all that need be said. Far down the corridor the Doctor turned and stood patiently as if understanding why Mel had not followed, but determined to wait until he did. The reporter stirred and rose from the chair, his legs withering beneath him. The figure of Dr. Winters grew larger as he approached. The morning clatter of the hospital seemed an ear-torturing shrillness. The door of the office closed and shut it out. “She is dead.” Dr. Winters sat behind the desk and folded and unfolded his hands. He did not look at Mel. “We did everything we could, Mr. Hastings. Her injuries from the accident were comparatively minor–” He hesitated, then went on. “In normal circumstances there would have been no question–her injuries could have been repaired.” “What do you mean, ‘In normal circumstances–‘?” Dr. Winters turned his face away from Mel for a moment as if to avoid some pain beyond endurance. He passed a weary hand across his forehead and eyes and held it there a moment before speaking. Then he faced Mel again. “The woman you brought in here last night–your wife–is completely un-normal in her internal structure. Her internal organs cannot even be identified. She is like a being of some other species. She is not–she is simply not human, Mr. Hastings.” Mel stared at him, trying to grasp the meaning of the words. Meaning would not come. He uttered a short, hysterical laugh that was like a bark. “You’re crazy, Doc. You’ve completely flipped your lid!” Dr. Winters nodded. “For hours during the night I was in agreement with that opinion. When I first observed your wife’s condition I was convinced I was utterly insane. I called in six other men to verify my observation. All of them were as stupefied as I by what we saw. Organs that had no place in a human structure. Evidence of a chemistry that existed in no living being we had ever seen before–” The Doctor’s words rolled over him like a roaring surf, burying, smothering, destroying– “I want to see.” Mel’s voice was like a hollow cough from far away. “I think you’re crazy. I think you’re hiding some mistake you made yourself. You killed Alice in a simple little operation, and now you’re trying to get out of it with some crazy story that nobody on earth would ever believe!” “I want you to see,” said Dr. Winters, rising slowly. “That’s why I called you in here, Mr. Hastings.” * * * * * Mel trailed him down the long corridor again. No words were spoken between them. Mel felt as if nothing were real anymore. They went through the white doors of Surgery and through the inner doors. Then they entered a white, silent–cold–room beyond. In the glare of icy white lights a single sheeted figure rested on a table. Mel suddenly didn’t want to see. But Dr. Winters was drawing back the cover. He exposed the face, the beloved features of Alice Hastings. Mel cried out her name and moved toward the table. There was nothing in her face to suggest she was not simply sleeping, her hair disarrayed, her face composed and relaxed as he had seen her hundreds of times. “Can you stand to witness this?” asked Dr. Winters anxiously. “Shall I get you a sedative?” Mel shook his head numbly. “No–show me …” The great, fresh wound extended diagonally across the abdomen and branched up beneath the heart. The Doctor grasped a pair of small scissors and swiftly clipped the temporary sutures. With forceps and retractors he spread open the massive incision. Mel closed his eyes against the sickness that seized him. “Gangrene!” he said. “She’s full of gangrene!” Below the skin, the surface layers of fatty tissue, the substance of the tissue changed from the dark red of the wounded tissue to a dark and greenish hue that spoke of deadly decay. But Dr. Winters was shaking his head. “No. It’s not gangrene. That’s the way we found the tissue. That appears to be its–normal condition, if you will.” Mel stared without believing, without comprehending. Dr. Winters probed the wound open further. “We should see the stomach here,” he said. “What is here where the stomach should be I cannot tell you. There is no name for this organ. The intestinal tract should lie here. Instead, there is only this homogeneous mass of greenish, gelatinous material. Other organs, hardly differentiated from this mass, appear where the liver, the pancreas, the spleen should be.” Mel was hearing his voice as if from some far distance or in a dream. “There are lungs–of a sort,” the Doctor went on. “She was certainly capable of breathing. And there’s a greatly modified circulatory system, two of them, it appears. One circulates a blood substance in the outer layers of tissue that is almost normal. The other circulates a liquid that gives the remainder of the organs their greenish hue. But how circulation takes place we do not know. She has no heart.” * * * * * Mel Hastings burst out in hysterical laughter. “Now I know you’re crazy Doc! My tender, loving Alice with no heart! She used to tell me, ‘I haven’t got any brains. I wouldn’t have married a dumb reporter if I did. But so I’ve got a heart and that’s what fell in love with you–my heart, not my brains.’ She loved me, can’t you understand that?” Dr. Winters was slowly drawing him away. “I understand. Of course I understand. Come with me now, Mr. Hastings, and lie down for a little while. I’ll get you something to help take away the shock.” Mel permitted himself to be led away to a small room nearby. He drank the liquid the Doctor brought, but he refused to lie down. “You’ve shown me,” he said with dull finality. “But I don’t care what the explanation is. I knew Alice. She was human all right, more so than either you or I. She was completely normal, I tell you–all except for this idea she had the last year or so that we’d gone together on a vacation to Mars at one time.” “That wasn’t true?” “No. Neither of us had ever been out in space.” “How well did you know your wife before you married her?” Mel smiled in faint reminiscence. “We grew up together, went to the same grade school and high school. It seems like there was never a time when Alice and I didn’t know each other. Our folks lived next door for years.” “Was she a member of a large family?” “She had an older brother and sister and two younger sisters.” “What were her parents like?” “They’re still living. Her father runs an implement store. It’s a farm community where they live. Wonderful people. Alice was just like them.” Dr. Winters was silent before he went on. “I have subjected you to this mental torture for just one reason, Mr. Hastings. If it has been a matter of any less importance I would not have told you the details of your wife’s condition, much less asking you to look at her. But this is such an enormous scientific mystery that I must ask your cooperation in helping to solve it. I want your permission to preserve and dissect the body of your wife for the cause of science.” Mel looked at the Doctor in sudden sharp antagonism. “Not even give her a burial? Let her be put away in bottles, like–like a–” “Please don’t upset yourself any more than necessary. But I do beg that you consider what I’ve just proposed. Surely a moment’s reflection will show you that this is no more barbaric than our other customs regarding our dead. “But even this is beside the point. The girl, Alice, whom you married is like a normal human being in every apparent external respect, yet the organs which gave her life and enabled her to function are like nothing encountered before in human experience. It is imperative that we understand the meaning of this. It is yours to say whether or not we shall have this opportunity.” Mel started to speak again, but the words wouldn’t come out. “Time is critical,” said Dr. Winters, “but I don’t want to force you to an instantaneous answer. Take thirty minutes to think about it. Within that time, additional means of preservation must be taken. I regret that I must be in such haste, but I urge that your answer be yes.” Dr. Winters moved towards the door, but Mel gestured for him to remain. “I want to see her again,” Mel said. “There is no need. You have been tortured enough. Remember your wife as you have known her all her life, not as you saw her a moment ago.” “If you want my answer let me see her again.” * * * Dr. Winters led the way silently back to the cold room. Mel drew down the cover only far enough to expose the face of Alice. There was no mistake. Somehow he had been hoping that all this would turn out to be some monstrous error. But there was no error

13 hours ago

. Would she want me to do what the Doctor has asked? he thought. She wouldn’t care. She would probably think it a very huge joke that she had been born with innards that made her different from everybody else. She would be amused by the profound probings and mutterings of the learned doctors trying to find an explanation for something that had no explanation. Mel drew the sheet tenderly over her face. “You can do as you wish,” he said to Dr. Winters. “It makes no difference to us–to either of us.” * * * * * The sedative Dr. Winters had given him, plus his own exhaustion, drove Mel to sleep for a few hours during the afternoon, but by evening he was awake again and knew that a night of sleeplessness lay ahead of him. He couldn’t stand to spend it in the house, with all its fresh reminders of Alice. He walked out into the street as it began to get dark. Walking was easy; almost no one did it any more. The rush of private and commercial cars swarmed overhead and rumbled in the ground beneath. He was an isolated anachronism walking silently at the edge of the great city. He was sick of it. He would have liked to have turned his back on the city and left it forever. Alice had felt the same. But there was nowhere to go. News reporting was the only thing he knew, and news occurred only in the great, ugly cities of the world. The farmlands, such as he and Alice had known when they were young, produced nothing of interest to the satiated denizens of the towns and cities. Nothing except food, and much of this was now being produced by great factories that synthesized protein and carbohydrates. When fats could be synthesized the day of the farmer would be over. He wondered if there weren’t some way out of it now. With Alice gone there was only himself, and his needs were few. He didn’t know, but suddenly he wanted very much to see it all again. And, besides, he had to tell her folks. * * * * * The ancient surface bus reached Central Valley at noon the next day. It all looked very much as it had the last time Mel had seen it and it looked very good indeed. The vast, open lands; the immense ripe fields. The bus passed the high school where Mel and Alice had attended classes together. He half expected to see her running across the campus lawn to meet him. In the middle of town he got off the bus and there were Alice’s mother and father. They were dry-eyed now but white and numb with shock. George Dalby took his hand and pumped it heavily. “We can’t realize it, Mel. We just can’t believe Alice is gone.” His wife put her arms around Mel and struggled with her tears again. “You didn’t say anything about the funeral. When will it be?” Mel swallowed hard, fighting the one lie he had to tell. He almost wondered now why he had agreed to Dr. Winters’ request. “Alice–always wanted to do all the good she could in the world,” he said. “She figured that she could be of some use even after she was gone. So she made an agreement with the research hospital that they could have her body after she died.” It took a moment for her mother to grasp the meaning. Then she cried out, “We can’t even bury her?” “We should have a memorial service, right here at home where all her friends are,” said Mel. George Dalby nodded in his grief. “That was just like Alice,” he said. “Always wanting to do something for somebody else–” And it was true, Mel thought. If Alice had supposed she was not going to live any longer she would probably have thought of the idea, herself. Her parents were easily reconciled. They took him out to the old familiar house and gave him the room where he and Alice had spent the first days of their marriage. * * * * * When it was night and the lights were out he felt able to sleep naturally for the first time since Alice’s accident. She seemed not far away here in this old familiar house. In memory, she was not, for Mel was convinced he could remember the details of his every association with her. He first became conscious of her existence one day when they were in the third grade. At the beginning of each school year the younger pupils went through a course of weighing, inspection, knee tapping, and cavity counting. Mel had come in late for his examination that year and barged into the wrong room. A shower of little-girl squeals had greeted him as the teacher told him kindly where the boy’s examination room was. But he remembered most vividly Alice Dalby standing in the middle of the room, her blouse off but held protectingly in front of her as she jumped up and down in rage and pointed a finger at him. “You get out of here, Melvin Hastings! You’re not a nice boy at all!” Face red, he had hastily retreated as the teacher assured Alice and the rest of the girls that he had made a simple mistake. But how angry Alice had been! It was a week before she would speak to him. He smiled and sank back deeply into the pillow. He remembered how proud he had been when old Doc Collins, who came out to do the honors every Fall, had told him there wasn’t a thing wrong with him and that if he continued to drink his milk regularly he’d grow up to be a football player. He could still hear Doc’s words whistling through his teeth and feel the coldness of the stethoscope on his chest. Suddenly, he sat upright in bed in the darkness. Stethoscope! They had tapped and inspected and listened to Alice that day, and all the other examination days. If Doc Collins had been unable to find a heartbeat in her he’d have fainted–and spread the news all over town! Mel got up and stood at the window, his heart pounding. Old Doc Collins was gone, but the medical records of those school examinations might still be around somewhere. He didn’t know what he expected to prove, but surely those records would not tell the same story Dr. Winters had told. It took him nearly all the next day. The grade school principal agreed to help him check through the dusty attic of the school, where ancient records and papers were tumbled about and burst from their cardboard boxes. Then Paul Ames, the school board secretary, took Mel down to the District Office and offered to help look for the records. The old building was stifling hot and dusty with summer disuse. But down in the cool, cobwebbed basement they found it…. Alice’s records from the third grade on up through the ninth. On every one: heart, o.k.; lungs, normal. Pulse and blood pressure readings were on each chart. “I’d like to take these,” said Mel. “Her doctor in town–he wants to write some kind of paper on her case and would like all the past medical history he can get.” Paul Ames frowned thoughtfully. “I’m not allowed to give District property away. But they should have been thrown out a long time ago–take ’em and don’t tell anybody I let you have ’em.” “Thanks. Thanks a lot,” Mel said. And when she was fourteen or fifteen her appendix had been removed. A Dr. Brown had performed the operation, Mel remembered. He had taken over from Collins. “Sure, he’s still here,” Paul Ames said. “Same office old Doc Collins used. You’ll probably find him there right now.” Dr. Brown remembered. He didn’t remember the details of the appendectomy, but he still had records that showed a completely normal operation. “I wonder if I could get a copy of that record and have you sign it,” Mel said. He explained about the interest of Dr. Winters in her case without revealing the actual circumstances. “Glad to,” said Dr. Brown. “I just wish things hadn’t turned out the way they have. One of the loveliest girls that ever grew up here, Alice.” * * * The special memorial service was held in the old community church on Sunday afternoon. It was like the drawing of a curtain across a portion of Mel’s life, and he knew that curtain would never open again. He took a bus leaving town soon after the service. There was one final bit of evidence, and he wondered all the way back to town why he had not thought of it first. Alice’s pregnancy had ended in miscarriage, and there had never been another. But X-rays had been taken to try to find the cause of Alice’s difficulty. If they showed that Alice was normal within the past two years– * * * * * Dr. Winters was mildly surprised to see Mel again. He invited the reporter in to his office and offered him a chair. “I suppose you have come to inquire about our findings regarding your wife.” “Yes–if you’ve found anything,” said Mel. “I’ve got a couple of things to show you.” “We’ve found little more than we knew the night of her death. We have completed the dissection of the body. A minute analysis of each organ is now under way, and chemical tests of the body’s substances are being made. We found that differences in the skeletal structure were almost as great as those in the fleshy tissues. We find no relationship between these structures and those of any other species–human or animal–that we have ever found.” “And yet Alice was not always like that,” said Mel. Dr. Winters looked at him sharply. “How do you know that?” Mel extended the medical records he had obtained in Central Valley. Dr. Winters picked them up and examined them for a long time while Mel watched silently. Finally, Dr. Winters put the records down with a sigh. “This seems to make the problem even more complex than it was.” “There are X-rays, too,” said Mel. “Alice had pelvic X-rays only a little over two years ago. I tried to get them, but the doctor said you’d have to request them. They should be absolute proof that Alice was different then.” “Tell me who has them and I’ll send for them at once.” An hour later Dr. Winters shook his head in disbelief as he turned off the light box and removed the X-ray photograph. “It’s impossible to believe that these were taken of your wife, but they corroborate the evidence of the other medical records. They show a perfectly normal structure.” The two men remained silent across the desk, each reluctant to express his confused thoughts. Dr. Winters finally broke the silence. “It must be, Mr. Hastings,” he said, “–it must be that this woman–this utterly alien person–is simply not your wife, Alice. Somehow, somewhere, there must be a mistake in identity, a substitution of similar individuals.” “She was not out of my sight,” said Mel. “Everything was completely normal when I came home that night. Nothing was out of place. We went out to a show. Then, on the way home, the accident occurred. There could have been no substitution–except right here in the hospital. But I know it was Alice I saw. That’s why I made you let me see her again–to make sure.” “But the evidence you have brought me proves otherwise. These medical records, these X-rays prove that the girl, Alice, whom you married, was quite normal. It is utterly impossible that she could have metamorphosed into the person on whom we operated.” Mel stared at the reflection of the sky in the polished desk top. “I don’t know the answer,” he said. “It must not be Alice. But if that’s the case, where is Alice?”

“But the evidence you have brought me proves otherwise. These medical records, these X-rays prove that the girl, Alice, whom you married, was quite normal. It is utterly impossible that she could have metamorphosed into the person on whom we operated.” Mel stared at the reflection of the sky in the polished desk top. “I don’t know the answer,” he said. “It must not be Alice. But if that’s the case, where is Alice?” “That might even be a matter for the police,” said Dr. Winters. “There are many things yet to be learned about this mystery.” “There’s one thing more,” said Mel. “Fingerprints. When we first came here Alice got a job where she had to have her fingerprints taken.” “Excellent!” Dr. Winters exclaimed. “That should give us our final proof!” It took the rest of the afternoon to get the fingerprint record and make a comparison. Dr. Winters called Mel at home to give him the report. There was no question. The fingerprints were identical. The corpse was that of Alice Hastings. * * * * * The nightmare came again that night. Worse than Mel could ever remember it. As always, it was a dream of space, black empty space, and he was floating alone in the immense depths of it. There was no direction. He was caught in a whirlpool of vertigo from which he reached out with agonized yearning for some solidarity to cling to. There was only space. After a time he was no longer alone. He could not see them, but he knew they were out there. The searchers. He did not know why he had to flee or why they sought him, but he knew they must never overtake him, or all would be lost. [Illustration] Somehow he found a way to propel himself through empty space. The searchers were growing points of light in the far distance. They gave him a sense of direction. His being, his existence, his universe of meaning and understanding depended on the success of his flight from the searchers. Faster, through the wild black depths of space– He never knew whether he escaped or not. Always he awoke in a tangle of bedclothes, bathed in sweat, whimpering in fear. For a long time Alice had been there to touch his hand when he awoke. But Alice was gone now and he was so weary of the night pursuit. Sometimes he wished it would end with the searchers–whoever they were–catching up with him and doing what they intended to do. Then maybe there would be no more nightmare. Maybe there would be no more Mel Hastings, he thought. And that wouldn’t be so bad, either. He tossed sleeplessly the rest of the night and got up at dawn feeling as if he had not been to bed at all. He would take one day more, and then get back to the News Bureau. He’d take this day to do what couldn’t be put off any longer–the collecting and disposition of Alice’s personal belongings. * * * * * He shaved, bathed and dressed, then began emptying the drawers, one by one. There were many souvenirs, mementos. She was always collecting these. Her bottom drawer was full of stuff that he’d glimpsed only occasionally. In the second layer of junk in the drawer he came across the brochure on Martian vacations. It must have been one of the dreams of her life, he thought. She’d wanted it so much that she’d almost come to believe that it was real. He turned the pages of the smooth, glossy brochure. Its cover bore the picture of the great Martian Princess and the blazoned emblem of Connemorra Space Lines. Inside were glistening photos of the plush interior of the great vacation liner, and pictures of the domed cities of Mars where Earthmen played more than they worked. Mars had become the great resort center of Earth. Mel closed the book and glanced again at the Connemorra name. Only one man had ever amassed the resources necessary to operate a private space line. Jim Connemorra had done it; no one knew quite how. But he operated now out of both hemispheres with a space line that ignored freight and dealt only in passenger business. He made money, on a scale that no government-operated line had yet been able to approach. Mel sank down to the floor, continuing to shift through the other things in the drawer. His hand stopped. He remained motionless as recognition showered sudden frantic questions in his mind. There lay a ticket envelope marked Connemorra Lines. The envelope was empty when he looked inside, and there was no name on it. But it was worn. As if it might have been carried to Mars and back. In sudden frenzy he began examining each article and laying it in a careless pile on the floor. He recognized a pair of idiotic Martian dolls. He found a tourist map of the ruined cities of Mars. He found a menu from the Red Sands Hotel. And below all these there was a picture album. Alice at the Red Sands. Alice at the Phobos Oasis. Alice at the Darnella Ruins. He turned the pages of the album with numb fingers. Alice in a dozen Martian settings. Some of them were dated. About two years ago. They had gone together, Alice had said, but there was no evidence of Mel’s presence on any such trip. But it was equally impossible that Alice had made the trip, yet here was proof. Proof that swept him up in a doubting of his own senses. How could such a thing have taken place? Had he actually made such a trip and been stripped of the memory by some amnesia? Maybe he had forced himself to go with her and the power of his lifelong phobia had wiped it from his memory. And what did it all have to do–if anything–with the unbelievable thing Dr. Winters had found about Alice? Overcome with grief and exhaustion he sat fingering the mementos aimlessly while he stared at the pictures and the ticket envelope and the souvenirs. * * * * * Dr. Winters spoke a little more sharply than he intended. “I don’t think anything is going to be solved by a wild-goose chase to Mars. It’s going to cost you a great deal of money, and there isn’t a single positive lead to any solution.” “It’s the only possible explanation.” Mel persisted. “Something happened on Mars to change her from what she once was to–what you saw on your operating table.” “And you are hoping that in some desperate way you will find there was a switch of personalities–that there may be a ghost of a chance of finding Alice still alive.” Mel bit his lip. He was scarcely willing to admit such a hope but it was the foundation of his decision. “I’ve got to do what I can,” he said. “I must take the chance. The uncertainty will torment me all my life if I don’t.” Dr. Winters shook his head. “I still wish I could persuade you against it. You will find only disappointment.” “My mind is made up. Will you help me or not?” “What can I do?” “I can’t go into space unless I can find some way of lifting, even temporarily, this phobia that nearly drives me crazy at the thought of going out there. Isn’t there a drug, a hypnotic method, or something to help a thing like this?” “This isn’t my field,” said Dr. Winters. “But I suspect that the cause of your trouble cannot be suppressed. It will have to be lifted. Psycho-recovery is the only way to accomplish that. I can recommend a number of good men. This, too, is very expensive.” “I should have done it for Alice–long ago,” said Mel. * * * * * Dr. Martin, the psychiatrist, was deeply interested in Mel’s problem. “It sounds as if it is based on some early trauma, which has long since been wiped from your conscious memory. Recovery may be easy or difficult, depending on how much suppression of the original event has taken place.” “I don’t even care what the original event was,” said Mel, “if you rid me of this overwhelming fear of space. Dr. Winters said he thought recovery would be required.” “He is right. No matter how much overlay you pile on top of such a phobia to suppress it, it will continue to haunt you. We can make a trial run to analyze the situation, and then we can better predict the chance of ultimate success.” As a reporter, Mel Hastings had had vague encounters with the subject of psycho-recovery, but he knew little of the details about it. He knew it involved some kind of a machine that could tap the very depths of the human mind and drag out the hidden debris accumulated in mental basements and attics. But such things had always given him the willies. He steered clear of them. When Dr. Martin first introduced him into the psycho-recovery room his resolution almost vanished. It looked more like a complex electronic laboratory than anything else. A half dozen operators and assistants in nurses’ uniforms stood by. “If you will recline here–,” Dr. Martin was saying. Mel felt as if he were being prepared for some inhuman biological experiment. A cage of terminals was fitted to his head and a thousand small electrodes adjusted to contact with his skull. The faint hum of equipment supported the small surge of apprehension within him. After half an hour the preparations were complete. The level of lights in the room was lowered. He could sense the operators at their panels and see dimly the figure of Dr. Martin seated near him. “Try to recall as vividly as possible your last experience with this nightmare you have described. We will try to lock on to that and follow it on down.” This was the last thing in the world Mel wanted to do. He lay in agonized indecision, remembering that he had dreamed only a short time ago, but fighting off the actual recollection of the dream. “Let yourself go,” Dr. Martin said kindly. “Don’t fight it–” A fragment of his mind let down its guard for a brief instant. It was like touching the surface of a whirlpool. He was sucked into the sweeping depths of the dream. He sensed that he cried out in terror as he plunged. But there was no one to hear. He was alone in space. Fear wrapped him like black, clammy fur. He felt the utter futility of even being afraid. He would simply remain as he was, and soon he would cease to be. But they were coming again. He sensed, rather than saw them. The searchers. And his fear of them was greater than his fear of space alone. He moved. Somehow he moved, driving headlong through great vastness while the pinpoints of light grew behind him. “Very satisfactory,” Dr. Martin was saying. “An extremely satisfactory probe.” His voice came through to Mel as from beyond vast barriers of time and space. Mel felt the thick sweat that covered his body. Weakness throbbed in his muscles. “It gives us a very solid anchor point,” Dr. Martin said. “From here I think we run back to the beginning of the experience and unearth the whole thing. Are you ready, Mr. Hastings?” Mel felt too weak to nod. “Let ‘er rip!” he muttered weakly. * * * * * The day was warm and sunny. He and Alice had arrived early at the spaceport to enjoy the holiday excitement preceding the takeoff. It was something they had both dreamed of since they were kids–a vacation in the fabulous domed cities and ruins of Mars. Alice was awed by her first close view of the magnificent ship lying in its water berth that opened to Lake Michigan. “It’s _huge_–how can such an enormous ship ever get off the Earth?”

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