‘OK. You think she’ll like me?’

‘Oh I’m sure she will. She’s been wanting me to get married a long time.’

‘Is she very religious?’

‘Well, not fanatic. Since she got so she can’t walk I take her to church in a taxi once in a while. About once a month. We’d have to get married in the church,’ he said, half asking.

‘It’s the only place,’ she assured him.

‘Are you religious?’

‘I go every Sunday,’ she said.

‘Really What church?’

‘I go to different ones. You mean the denomination?’

‘Well yes.’

‘Don’t you remember what it said on my application?’

‘Episcopalian?’

‘That’s right.’ She seemed a little hurt, and somewhat belligerent.

‘That’s good,’ he said, as though it were of great importance to him, ‘I’m glad you are.’ She softened, he thought. ‘Because that’s what I am and it’ll make it easier with Mother.’

‘Then give me a kiss,’ she said, ‘a real one.’

He kissed her and she held him a long time. ‘We’d better go,’ he said in a whisper.

They got up and he walked her to her rooming-house, wondering about grass stains. An hour later, he was coming down his own dark block and he felt a yearning, an indefinite need for something; it was as though he had lost something in the grass perhaps … a coin, or his watch. A sense of having dreamed it all pervaded his mind. Who was she? He really didn’t know her. He knew she tended to make things up. It even occurred to him that she had never been in Hollywood at all. And now he would be coming into his house and telling his mother about her and he did not quite know what to say about her character. She was religious, anyway, and that was good. He would simply say he had picked out a nice, Episcopalian girl and dwell on that. Then again, maybe he ought not to mention it yet. Maybe tomorrow he would want to call it all off. And yet … she was so amazingly like the woman in his dream. The same softness on her hips.

Climbing the high stoop he decided that probably it always happened in this casual, almost accidental way. Probably tomorrow he would feel positively in love, and not at all afraid. Probably, he thought as he softly opened the door, he would start being happy tomorrow.

Chapter Thirteen

‘YOU make a pretty picture with that thing on,’ he said. The blue bandana over her hair and tied under her chin made her look madonna-like, he thought.

‘Just to keep my hair straight,’ she replied, pleased.

He drove with both hands clasping the wheel, his head raised so that he could see better over the hood. The warm summer air smelled of the woods that lay on both sides of the highway and he opened the second button of his sports shirt to feel the breeze on his chest.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ he said.

‘I’d like to pick some flowers,’ she said, watching the colors of the blooms beside the road.