The empty room downstairs troubled her, its door open, the blackness within holding accusation against her of wastefulness and desolation. The whole story of Joe was a trouble in her mind. Although he surely hadn’t killed himself for love of her! A picture came and went in her mind, a child dragging cotton blankets out onto a field of snow.

Then everything was solved for her temporarily, two weeks after Joe’s suicide. On a Saturday morning at 2:00 A.M., she heard someone stumbling around below on the seashells. She got up and went to the stoop—she’d lost certain night fears recently, as though her irritability with her life had made her brave.

In the moonlight, Walter Vogel’s face was turned up toward her, and swept by feelings she didn’t pause to think about she raced down the stairs and threw herself in his arms.

Chapter 13

It was to be, Walter said, a vacation, time out before the serious matter of settling down. She had never heard of Yosemite. He had gone camping there as a boy; he wanted her to see it because it was the only place he loved—as places went on this earth. They would stop near Merced to pick up camping equipment from his uncles who were sheep ranchers. They were his father’s bachelor brothers, but, like Walter, had no truck with Mr. Vogel, even though they were of the same stripe. When last he’d seen them, he said, they were forming an organization of ranchers to prevent Orientals from buying land.

Walter had not gone to Murmansk but to England, then to South America. It had been in Buenos Aires harbor where Walter, a Daily Worker gripped between his teeth, had dived off his ship and swum through the dark water to another American merchant ship to deliver the paper to a “comrade” in the black gang. He spoke of this feat frequently, with a satisfaction that appeared more piratical than political. There had been sharks in that harbor and foul patches of oil and dangerous patrols.

He was histrionically astonished at Annie’s ignorance of what had happened that summer in Europe; she welcomed his reproaches; they sheltered her from deeper regrets. Her confession of ignorance was vigorous.