Isabel walked out of the bedroom and went to the French windows and pushed them open. She lit a cigarette and stood smoking it. Someone passing by, she thought, would imagine I lived here. She smiled. It was almost a shock to lay for a moment the image of her own house against this one—that sprawling modern house with its swimming pool, its deep freeze to which packs of children went constantly to open pints of ice cream, air and sun and wind flowing in and out, and cocktails for Henry when he came home, tired, wanting only to relax over a game of bridge after dinner, untroubled, in the midst of life, voting the straight Republican ticket, secure behind the walls of their life. Walls? Yes, said Isabel Cavan, taking a long look at California from Boston, at Isabel Ferrier’s life from Isabel Cavan’s. We have paid something for peace of mind. What? Her eyes, roving round the room again as if in search for something fell on the New Republic she had turned over. She went and picked it up, disliking the rough cheap paper and the thick black headlines. It seemed to shout and yell, so one could not trust what it said, yet she found herself reading—people were losing their jobs, professors in state universities, because they believed in the things Edward had believed in, as he, driven by the same guilt no doubt, guilt at their own safety and immunity, by their desire for “solidarity”—she remembered suddenly Edward using that word, apropos of Walt Whitman, was it? Long, long ago.

Here, in this room, so empty of any human ties, swung as it were a little above the human world, where her brother, the witness, had sat in his silent agonies of isolation, she felt suddenly dizzy with what she saw, what opened out, the whole world like a cry, like a need—

But this is an emotional response, she told herself quickly. Unless Edward had committed suicide, I would not feel it.…

XII

XII