Part 1 (2/2)

”Tell me your name,” he said.

I answered without hesitation, ”Laurie Morgan,” and wondered why I hadn't said ”Waldron.” True, I no longer wore Peter's ring, though I wasn't sure why I'd wanted to put it aside since I didn't think I would ever marry again. And now I had put aside his name as well. Yet I didn't feel especially dis- II.

loyal. I'd given Peter everything I could. He was gone, but I was alive, and I had to find a new way for myself.

”Laurie Morgan,” Hillary Lange repeated, an odd note that was almost wonderment in his voice. As though in his quick way he already sensed something I would grope my way toward more slowly-that we were going to mean a great deal to one another.

He introduced me to the company and then handed me the blue-bound side for my speeches. ”It's a very small part-you won't have any trouble. It's just that it's a key role and we need it: to go through the reading. Run through it yourself, if you like. We'll give you time.” Nonchalantly he dropped my hat upon an empty chair and waited. Everyone else waited too, perhaps not as sure as their director that this amateur should be invited to partic.i.p.ate.

I noted the name of the play and looked into the dark flash of his eyes. ”I've seen it in New York. I remember the part.”

Somehow I thrust back a self-consciousness that wanted to envelop and smother me, an^ read my opening lines. Not too badly. Only a falter here and there. I was scared but I was doing it, and lightning hadn't struck me down, nor was anyone roaring with laughter. With this new tension perhaps the other was fading a little.

Hillary's eyes were upon me and I could tell that he was pleased, perhaps even a little surprised, and the tiny kernel of courage began to grow. I read on with more confidence.

The spotlights were still being turned off and on, as the stage crew experimented with them. They made me uneasy, as lights often did. But at least they weren't being focused on the table-and they had nothing to do with me. I could hear my voice growing in strength with my growing a.s.surance.

Then, without warning, one blinding beam of the big spot turned suddenly and fell directly upon me, fell also upon the 12.chrome plating of the coffeepot, striking from its sides a silver dazzle. And I knew that the moment I always feared had come. My voice broke in the middle of a word, and my eyes stared. My body froze into a state that was almost catatonic, though I knew, as if from a distance, what was going on around me. Vaguely I heard voices raised in alarm, heard someone speaking my name. But there was nothing I could do except stare in utmost terror at that silver flash of light. Then the spot was turned off, in response to Hillary's shouted command. I was aware of what was happening, but I couldn't move. Red was alternately whining and barking wildly. Red knew.

Hillary came behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders, shaking me gently. Someone whispered, and I heard him stop the whisper curtly. With the light turned off the nightmare broke its spell, releasing me, and I could look about in shame and dismay.

I was trembling and my body was bathed in sweat, but the spinning was gone, the tension released. The moment of frightful revelation had once more beervpostponed.

Hillary pulled back my chair and helped me up. ”We'll take a break,” he told the others, and I went with him blindly to a side door that opened upon the June morning, leaving the whispering behind.

We sat on the gra.s.s beside the pond, not bothering with a bench. Inside the theater someone had released Red, and he came das.h.i.+ng out to frolic around us, making friends with Hillary at once. At least I had stopped s.h.i.+vering.

”I'm sorry,” I said. ”I'm all right now. I really am,” but my voice broke as I spoke the words.

He was studying me with a sympathy that was as welcome as it was unexpected. I needed someone to cling to, if only for this pa.s.sing moment.

”Has this happened to you before?” he asked.

”Not for a long time. I'm so awfully sorry-”

”Stop apologizing,” he told me. ”I shouldn't have drawn you into something you didn't want to do.”

I liked his saying that. Usually men considered very little what I wanted, but were given to instructing me i what they thought I ought to do.

”Do you know what causes it?” he went on.

”No, not really. Yet it seems to happen when there are strong lights around. Perhaps they hypnotize me in some way. Fm not unconscious. I know what's happening, but I just freeze.”

”I see,” he said quietly. ”I'd like to understand.”

With complete naturalness he took my hand in his and held it gently.

”You're very pretty,” he said, ”and much too frightened. What can I do to help?”

For the first time since Peter's death I wanted to let myself go, to respond to a touch, to accept anything that might be offered. Hillary Lange was even more compelling up close than he was on a stage, and I felt all my resistance weakening. - ”Try to talk & jout it,” he said. ”Talking may help.”

That was what Peter had always said, and sometimes I had tried. Now I tried again, haltingly, putting my few memories into words, finding it almost easier to talk to a stranger than to my husband.

Mostly, I remembered mountains. Not the gentle mountains of the eastern coastline, but the tall, fierce mountains of the West. Sometimes I could close my eyes and glimpse a rugged cone-shaped outline that stood up alone against the sky.

Over the years I'd had a strange half-waking dream in which I seemed to be on a horse riding wildly toward the high, dominant mountain, driven by the desperate knowledge that I must help someone. Someone I loved who was in terrible danger. In my dream I could feel a cold wind stinging my face, and hear the sound of hooves pounding after me in frightening pursuit.

But I never followed through to any conclusion, and when I was fully awake the dream had no meaning.

All this I poured out in a tumble of words to Hillary Lange, and he listened gravely, considerately.

There was something more that I had never told anyone, and that I couldn't put into words even now. I could almost remember the face of a young boy, perhaps a few years older than I. A face that could appear stubborn and rebellious, yet always kind when he looked at me. I had no name to attach to the memory, but only a sense of warmth and comfort. The memory of a time of frantic fear, when young arms had held me awkwardly, young hands had* soothed me as they might have soothed a lost kitten.

Perhaps I'd never told Peter because he would have a.n.a.lyzed a precious feeling out of existence. He would have told me that I was looking for a protector and this was my s.e.xual fantasy, my fantasy man. Whether that was true or not, I didn't want to tell any of this to the stranger beside me. But there was something else that I could speak of.

”I remember a mountain town with one main street and false fronts that made it look like a movie set. Except that these were the real thing. And there was a house. My grandmother's house, I think. The house of my father's mother.”

”Take me into your house,” Hillary said. I could sense the electric urgency in him, and knew that he had the actor's ability to empathize, to almost become me.

But not even in response to so intense an interest could I open the door of that house.

I had tried before, at Peter's instigation, but I could never force mind and memory beyond the closed door. Sometimes there were flashes that came without warning. Glimpses in my mind's eye of an enormous shadowy room, of a flat box of some dark wood that sat on a table. A box I was forbidden to touch. Vaguely, too, I remembered my grandmother. Grandmother '5.

Persis of Morgan House. Her first husband's name had been Morgan, like mine. The ”silver Morgans” of Jasper, Colorado. This I knew from my mother's tales. But I couldn't remember my grandfather-if I'd ever known him. And there had been another man. That man named Noah. But here my thoughts flinched away, not wanting to remember.

I went on aloud to Hillary. ”Something must have happened in that house when I was about eight years old. Something so terrible that it made me dangerously ill. Afterward my mother brought me home to the East, where she had grown up, and I was in a hospital for a long while. When I was well again, I couldn't remember anything about that time in Colorado. What was more, my mother didn't want me to remember. I never saw my grandmother again. So much is gone.”

Gone except for those disturbing glimpses that came like flashes of light, and those times when the feeling of tension began to build and I grew horribly afraid. It was as though something in me knew that once I remembered I would be annihilated. My reason-everything-would go! Peter said that was ridiculous, but he could never convince me of anything else.

I spoke abruptly to Hillary. ”Let's go back. Tell them to keep those lights off, and I'll try again.”

He looked approving. ”Good for you. I like courage. Come along then.”

Courage? The thing Peter had always told me I had too little of? I stiffened my spine and my will, and went back with an inner quaking that I didn't allow anyone to suspect. And I read my lines straight through, coming in properly on the cues. When the reading was over the actors crowded around me, and some of them even patted me demonstratively, as people were often given to doing. As though I were a child who had fallen and been hurt and was recovering, much to everyone's relief. It was a role I was very tired of playing.

i6 Hillary stood aside and said nothing, offered me no soothing words or pats, but there seemed something truly concerned in his watchfulness that reached me. When the company broke for lunch, he led Red and me out to his bright yellow car and drove us to Aunt Ruth's. She came to the door with a raised eyebrow when I brought Hillary up the porch steps, but she greeted him guardedly and invited him in.

His refusal was graceful enough, and I expected him to vanish out of my life and never be seen again. Instead he held my hand for just a moment.

”Will you have dinner with me tonight, Laurie? This is our night off at the theater.”

It was my new self who answered, ”I'd love to.”

”Then I'll pick you up around six-thirty. There's a good place out on the highway.”

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