The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

Joyce Carol Oates PHANTOMWISE: 1972 ^{from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine}

Out of the steep snowy ravine. Clutching at rocks, her hands bloodied. And all the while snow falling, temperature dropping to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

How still, the soft-falling snow amid rocks! The yearning, the temptation to lie down, sleep.

He’d wanted her to die. He’d wanted to kill her with his hands. But she has escaped him, he will not follow her. (She vows) he will not find her ever again.

By the time she allowed herself to think, It has happened. To me, it was already too late.

So unexpectedly it had begun. Almost, Alyce would think afterward, as if someone else had acted in her place. She’d stared in astonishment from a little distance.

She hadn’t been drunk. Except so excited, so elated, so—exhilarated.

That he’d even noticed her. Invited her to come with him after the reception. After the lecture. He’d known the speaker, a visiting professor from the University of Edinburgh. Before the lecture she’d seen him speaking with the distinguished white-haired professor, she’d seen them smiling, shaking hands.

A theory of language. Theories of language. How does language originate?—is consciousness a blank slate (as it had been once thought by philosophers like John Locke), or is consciousness something like a field of shimmering possibilities, generated by the particularities of the human brain?

If consciousness can be disembodied, is there the possibility of consciousness persisting after physical death? Is there the possibility of hauntedness?

He’d asked what had she thought of the lecture and Alyce said she could give no opinion, she had not enough knowledge. And he’d said what sounded like, Well, you will. You’ve only just begun.

How flattering to Alyce Urquhart, at nineteen.

They were crossing the darkened campus. Afterward she would realize how subtly he was guiding her—a light touch to her arm, an indication Yes, this way. Here.

Afterward she would recall how at dusk the old gothic buildings of the campus took on a sepulchral air. And how a light mist seemed to radiate from streetlamps as if the very air had become blurred.

Tall straight fir trees rose out of sight. Entering the region of trees was like entering an enchanted forest marking the western edge of the campus.

Her heart swelled, she felt such happiness. If she were to die—if she had already died—it would be this moment she would remember most vividly: the fir trees that were so beautiful, and the young philosophy professor at her side who had singled her out for his attention that evening.

But she did not know him, her instructor, well enough to exclaim, Oh, how beautiful! Look.

Whatever Simon Meech said to Alyce Urquhart that evening, Alyce would not recall precisely. Even in the presence of persons whom she knew Alyce was inclined to shyness, and she did not know Simon Meech at all. Yet suddenly he meant much to her; she had not guessed how much. And only vaguely would she recall how without seeming to do so he led her away from her residence hall. Away from the bright-lit, overwarm, and buzzing dining hall, where at this hour of evening she’d have been pushing along a cafeteria tray in the company of other girls and listening or half listening to their chatter, in a pleasantly neutral state of mind—mindlessness—and not required to think, But who am I, to be doing this? And what will come of it?

What will come of it: the steep snowy ravine, bloodied hands grasping at rocks, the determination to haul herself up, not to surrender and not to die.

A misty and rain-lashed autumn. Her second year at the college she’d envisioned as a sort of floating island, an oasis-island, amid the rubble of her familial life.

And what will come of it. Of me.

Alyce’s most cherished class was a creative-writing poetry seminar taught by an elderly visiting poet from Boston. Once, Roland B___ had known Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. He counted himself a friendly acquaintance of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton. He’d known Sylvia Plath—“for a teasingly short while.”

A smooth hairless dome of a head, which seemed too large for the narrow shoulders. Suety eyes deep-sunken like a turtle’s eyes, yet luminous. Roland B___ seemed always cold, though dressed for the upstate New York winter: Harris tweed jackets with leather elbows, sweater vests, woolen scarves slung cavalierly around his neck. The backs of his delicate hands were unusually pale, the skin seemed soft, flaccid. Alyce had the idea that if she were to lean across the seminar table and press a forefinger into that skin, the indention would very slowly fill in.

Aloud in a hoarse reverent voice the elderly poet read, sometimes recited poetry as if he were alone and the students were privileged to overhear, straining to listen. Alyce complained that her neck ached after three hours in the seminar leaning forward not wanting to miss a syllable.

This was not an actual complaint, of course. Her heart beat with awe for the distinguished poet, so blissfully self-centered he seemed a very Buddha basking in his own divinity.

At the first class meeting Roland B___ asked each young poet to recite a favorite poem—“a poem of unqualified greatness.” The request was a total surprise, no one was prepared.

Alyce recited a little-known poem by William Butler Yeats—“To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.” Technically the poem was fascinating to her: harsh, percussive, accusatory, with a formal rhyme scheme, rage tempered by art. As a first-year student she’d unconsciously memorized the poem out of her English literature anthology; one day she’d realized that she knew it by heart.

Liking the quiet rage of the final lines. Amid a place of stone, / Be secret and exult, / Because of all things known / That is most difficult.

Whatever Roland B___ might have expected from an undergraduate at the university, it was clear that he hadn’t expected this impassioned poem by Yeats. “Well! A unique choice, Miss”—squinting at the class list as Alyce provided her last name in an embarrassed murmur—“‘Urquhart.’”

“Ah, Urquhart.” As if the name might mean something to him, Roland B___ gazed at Alyce with an expression of wonder.

Clearly Roland B___ did not know what to make of her just yet.

This season of reversals. A balmy autumn followed by an abrupt snowstorm in early November. Leaves ripped from trees, the pale sky mottled with clouds, a dank air in the “historic” eighteenth-century buildings modeled (it was said) after Cambridge University.

Not a season for romance. Not a season for sentiment. If others in the residence hall could have guessed that Alyce Urquhart was newly pregnant they would have been astonished, speechless. For God’s sake—how?

No one had seen Alyce Urquhart with any man or boy publicly. Her lover was her Philosophy 101 quiz-section instructor, but each was discreet in the presence of the other, and Alyce took care to match Simon Meech’s aloofness with her own.

Though Alyce would sometimes raise her hand in class to answer a question Simon had put to several rows of students, that no one else knew to answer or had answered inadequately. “Yes? Miss—” Just perceptibly, Simon might smile. But Alyce did not mistake the gesture as an invitation to smile back.

It was in this way that she’d attracted Simon Meech’s attention, of course. Always the bright young schoolgirl determined to be impressive to her teachers.

As a young instructor Simon inclined toward haughtiness, disdain. A kind of Kinch—James Joyce’s notion of himself as Stephen Dedalus, a brilliantly unhappy young man in his midtwenties, vain and uncertain, insecure, eaten up with pride. Yet, in his way, wanting to be good.

Before coming to the university to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy, Simon had been a seminary student for three years. He’d intended to be a Catholic priest, a Jesuit, but, as he’d told Alyce, his plans had not worked out.

Another girl would have asked, But why not? but Alyce understood that Simon did not want to be asked such a question.

Nothing personal, private! Nothing that pried into the young man’s soul. Alyce understood, for she did not want to be asked such questions either.

Through lowered eyes Alyce observed him at the front of the classroom, her lover. Though she did not consciously think lover.

For was love involved? She had not heard love—the word—uttered between them.

In class Alyce took careful notes. Or it appeared that Alyce took careful notes. Leaning over her notebook in a trance of concentration, hair falling across the side of her face as she moved her pen quickly across the page.

Now her feverish note-taking had a singular theme. What could not be uttered aloud took shape beneath her pen. I am afraid, Simon…

But no. Why should she announce that she is afraid.

Instead she would say, Simon, I think…

But this too was weak, craven. Why should she say merely, I think!

Bravely she would say, Simon, I am…

But her resolve faded. Her courage melted away, a puddle at her feet. How could she bring herself to tell her sardonic Kinch-lover, I am pregnant.

The words would not come. She could not choke up such words, which were both banal and terrible. Her tongue had gone numb, a chill suffused her body.

Hurrying away from the classroom even as the bell clanged. If Simon glanced after her with something like surprise, that Alyce should be so eager to leave the classroom even as other students lingered to speak with him, she didn’t want to notice. Away, away. Must get away.

Desperate to hide in the women’s restroom, beneath the stairs. To check another time. To determine if.

Though knowing—No. Don’t be ridiculous.

In less than a week she’d become compulsive about checking her underwear, to see if the bleeding had begun. Though knowing that it had not.

In the morning after troubled sleep checking her nightgown, bedsheets. But—is it? No.

Haunting to her now, the dark menstrual blood that refused to appear. Like a shadow that, when you glance up, startled, has vanished—has not been there at all.

He’d tried to pull out of her at the crucial moment, Simon had.

Tried, but had not, or had not exactly. Not entirely.

A groan of something like pain, anguish. The hawkish Kinch-face contorted for a long moment, the teeth bared.

She’d scarcely seen him. His lower body. His penis, which was (she would try to recall afterward, as one might try to recall a frightening dream, to master the dream) blunt and hard, hot with blood and angry-seeming.

Yet soft-skinned. Astonishingly soft, flaccid. When they’d lain together panting and sweating and whatever had passed through them like an electric current had vanished as if it had never been and she’d felt it—felt him—against her belly, sticky with mucus.

For this was love, was it? Naively she’d wanted to think, It’s a promise. Love will come.

The truth was, she’d hardly known what was happening. What Simon was doing to her, or trying (awkwardly) to do to her, which yielded no pleasure for her, only just a sharp-piercing shocking hurt between her legs that had felt like an evisceration.

Clumsily they were lying together on a sofa in Simon’s apartment, much too narrow for them. The sofa was not very clean, and now it would be less clean, a patina of grime on a nubby beige fabric. Without wishing to, Alyce had noted the frayed carpet, stains in the hardwood floor and in the faded wallpaper. A smell of cooking odors from the floor below. The apartment was furnished, Simon had said with a smiling shrug, as if to absolve himself of responsibility for it.

It was an interim life, Simon said. A between-life. Neither here nor there. Not yet.

She hadn’t known what he meant. Much of his speech, airy, witty, self-conscious, Alyce didn’t quite understand; but she understood that she was expected to react, with a smile, laughter, admiration.

In their lovemaking Simon had panted like a creature that has been hunted down, not like a hunter. Yet Alyce would recall he had hunted, pursued, chased down, all but coerced her.

Not rape. Nothing so physically coercive. Instead he’d made her feel shame, that she had caused him to misunderstand her.

“Why did you come back here with me, then? Why are you being disingenuous now?” He’d professed surprise, reproach when Alyce had seemed to resist him.

Disingenuous. She knew what this word meant though guessing he might assume that she did not know.

“I—I don’t know… I’d thought—you wanted to…”

Spend time with me. Talk with me. About linguistics, philosophy of mind…

She’d been confused. Her brain wasn’t functioning with its usual precision. Like a fine mechanism into which static has been introduced, to befuddle.

Simon had shocked her by addressing her with an air of disdain, sarcasm that was totally unlike the way he’d behaved at the reception or the way he behaved in the classroom. Oh, but didn’t he like her? She’d thought he had liked her.

Like a child she was abashed, wounded. Naively wanting to say, But I’d thought you liked me…

But then, hearing the petulant edge in his own voice, Simon smiled, and was friendly again, and charming; holding her hand, stroking her arm, her shoulder. Telling her that she was very beautiful, he’d seen from the first day in their class that she was very beautiful, and quick to understand what others were slow to understand or never understood at all. He had seen that she was special. It was rare that any undergraduate had such an instinctive grasp of philosophy, especially a female undergraduate. (Had Simon been about to say girl? But he had not.) He’d had trouble looking away from her, he claimed, paying proper attention to the other students. He’d shown her first short paper, intriguingly titled “Zeno’s Paradoxes and Our Own,” to the professor who lectured in the course, who’d been impressed as well. Both had agreed on a grade of A.

He was leaning very close to Alyce and breathing audibly, hotly, like one who is not accustomed to such intimacy yet believes it to be his due.

Still, Alyce held herself stiff and unyielding. Her heart was beating rapidly as the heart of a creature that is trapped, that has not quite acknowledged it is trapped.

“Well. We can leave. We don’t have to stay if you’re not comfortable here, Alyce.” Simon’s voice was flat, dismissive. The enunciation of Alyce was not flattering.

“I—I think—yes, I would like to l-leave…”

Her voice trailed off. The misunderstanding had been hers, that was clear. Yet, she had no idea what to say. Apologize? Simon saw how she was hesitating, trying to smile, and put his hands on her, and his mouth against her mouth, and so a kind of fury passed over them.

Not rape. Not—precisely.

Though her body tensed against him, unmistakably. Stiffening in sheer physical panic, dread. Another man, a truer lover, would have relented, drawn away. Would have soothed the frightened young woman, comforted her, spoken to her. But not this man, who’d lost awareness of Alyce except as a physical being, in opposition to him, but weaker than he, unable to withstand his greater strength.

Oh Christ. Jesus! The cry was torn from him.

Not pleasure, such intensity of feeling. Convulsive, anguished.

Not guessing at the time, he would blame her.

Afterward she’d dressed quickly, in the bathroom of his apartment, a space so cramped she could barely move without colliding with the sink, the toilet, a wall. Clumsily washing herself, not meeting her dazed and bloodshot eyes in the mirror, dragging wetted fingers through her straggly hair.

He’d walked her back to the residence, mostly in silence. Long Kinch-legs, eager to stride ahead of her. The air was colder, the mist had thickened. The tall straight fir trees were near-invisible. She would recall, her pride would insist, Simon had clasped her hand for at least part of the walk, but in fact he’d only just gripped her arm at the elbow from time to time, not so much to comfort as to hurry her.

“I’ll let you go, from here. It’s not a great idea for us to be seen together.” He’d stopped at the sidewalk leading to her residence and was already backing away.

No kiss. No final squeeze of Alyce’s hand. She would tell herself, of course, he was concerned for her, for her as well as himself.

She would not see him again. She would stay away from his class, which met late on Thursday afternoons. He’d had so little awareness of her in that moment; he’d forgotten her entirely in the very instant of penetrating her body.

Hating him. So very ashamed that she had not been able to withstand the man.

She would not stay away from class. Certainly not!

Why should she deprive herself of philosophy? She loved and revered the texts she was reading for the first time—Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Locke, Hume. John Stuart Mill. Ridiculous for her to stay away from class because of the man, and risk a failing grade.

And she would see Simon Meech again. If he summoned Alyce, she would come to him.

In all, five times. In the furnished apartment, arriving by stealth, after dark. On that sofa. As winter deepened. As dark came earlier each day, and snow muffled the stone walkways, and there were more of Alyce’s clothes to be tugged off by the man’s impatient hands. And afterward clumsily washing herself, her raw and chafed and heated body, avoiding her reflection in the mirror. Is this me? Alyce? Doing such things? The wonderment in it, dread and pride commingled.

Touching her mouth, tenderly. Lips swollen from being kissed, sucked.

Yes. It is you. No one else.

And then Roland B___ interceded in her life.

No one could have anticipated. (Alyce could not have anticipated.) How crossing the snow-swept square in front of the university library a few days after she’d had no choice but to realize that she must be pregnant she’d heard a familiar voice calling her name—“Alyce?”

Blindly she’d been making her way. Head lowered, thoughts abuzz with alarm, fear. No. Can’t. Not possible.

The surprise of her name in this public place like a burst of music.

She turned and saw—who was it? A gentlemanly older man—in a brown winter overcoat with a sealskin collar, pumpkin-colored knit cap pulled down over his head—crinkling his eyes at her in delight. “Miss Urquhart? It is you.”

Startling Alyce, the gentleman reached for her hands. She was too surprised to shrink back shyly.

“Alyce, I believe? Hello.”

“H-Hello…”

It was an astonishment to be greeted this way by the visiting poet, who was so formal in his speech in the seminar. Rarely—indeed, never—had Professor B___ called any student by a first name that Alyce could remember. She wouldn’t have dared to assume that the poet even knew her first name or that, outside the seminar room, he would recognize her.

“Have you seen the Poet’s House, Alyce? No? Come, then. You will be my first visitor.”

“I wish that I could, Professor, but…”

“It’s close by. In this direction. My dear, come!”—linking his arm through Alyce’s arm in a display of mock gallantry.

How playful Roland B___ was, in the bright, open air! Not a small tentative man as he’d appeared in the seminar room but as tall as Alyce, and quite forceful.

The Poet’s House, as it was called, was a handsome old faded-red-brick Edwardian residence that looked as if it were held together by the thick-clustered ivy that covered its walls. Set back behind a wrought-iron fence and gate, it had the air of a quaint period piece; in its small front lawn was a statue in black marble of the Presbyterian minister who’d founded the college in 1847.

In the foyer a brass plaque noted that such distinguished poets as Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Galway Kinnell had been residents in the house. The interior exuded an air of faded opulence: antique furniture, musty brick fireplace, French silk wallpaper, Steinway grand piano with several (muted) keys, which Roland B___ cheerfully struck as he led his visitor into the drawing room.

“Let me take your coat, dear. You will stay awhile, I hope.”

“I—I can’t stay long. I was on my way to the library…”

“And would you like tea, dear? I was going to prepare tea for myself.”

No, no! I must leave.

“Y-Yes. Thank you.”

Roland B___ was standing somewhat close to her, smiling.

She could see just his lower teeth, which were somewhat small, uneven, stained.

Roland B___ was observing her with a smile. The flush in his cheeks and glisten in his eyes made Alyce wonder if he’d been drinking in the afternoon.

No doubt it was lonely for him here, away from friends and companions in Boston. In the seminar he’d several times spoken of Boston with a wistful air.

“Your choice of tea, dear: green, Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Lapsang.”

Whatever Roland B___ was having, Alyce said she would have.

“You are very agreeable, dear Alyce! In our seminar you are not so easily persuaded.”

This seemed to Alyce a remark provocative as a nudge in the ribs. As if, through the weeks of the semester, the poet had been hoping to persuade her—of what?

How little he knew of her, or could guess! Alyce herself could not bear to think of her predicament, what grew in her belly like a tiny acorn, unstoppable.

Leading Alyce along a corridor into a rear bedroom with elaborate white molding at the ceiling. A four-poster bed with a brass headboard, threadbare Indian carpet, tables piled with books and magazines. A small chandelier hung from the ceiling, also brass, in need of polishing.

“Here you have a glimpse, my dear, of a bachelor’s stoical life. When I was young I yearned to be alone, and got my wish. And now I am older, and the danger is past.”

Seeing that the faded quilt on the bed was crooked, Roland B___ deftly smoothed out the wrinkles.

The four-poster bed was not large, an old-fashioned double bed, but you could see that the occupant used just one half of it, with large square pillows propped up against the headboard; on the bedside table, a notebook and a stack of books. There came to Alyce’s nostrils a faint, musty smell of bedclothes not freshly laundered.

“D’you read in bed, Alyce?”

Alyce nodded yes.

“D’you write in bed? In a notebook?”

Alyce nodded yes.

“Reading poetry, scribbling poetry, dreaming poetry. Yes, I’m sure that you do.”

Roland B___ was standing uncomfortably close to Alyce. She laughed nervously, and edged away.

In all of the rooms of the Poet’s House that Alyce had seen, the poet kept books, papers, worksheets. You could see that wherever he went, Roland B___ had to have a book at his fingertips, and he had to have his work. In a bay window he’d positioned an antique writing desk so that he could sit and gaze out the window at the brick-walled courtyard filling up with snow.

“My dear Alyce, sit! Sit here.”

Roland B___ urged Alyce to sit at the desk, hands on her shoulders. Then leaning over her, his chin grazing the top of her head.

Very peculiar, Alyce thought this. As if Roland B___ was imagining he might see through her eyes.

Alyce would have liked to throw off the poet’s hands, leap to her feet, and escape. But a sensation of lethargy came over her, as if her limbs had lost their strength. She could barely move.

He sees that I am unhappy. An open wound.

“You are welcome, you know. At any time.”

In the courtyard snow was falling steadily now. A swirl of white, mesmerizing. Soon the old, faded brick would be obscured by powdery snow. Footsteps would be muffled. Voices would be muffled. Within the movement of the snow flurrying to earth all was still. Alyce Urquhart and Roland B___ might have been alone together in a remote place, in a remote time. The elderly poet standing behind Alyce, hands on her shoulders, silent, staring out the window at the foreshortened view filling up with snow.

In that way it began.

All things begin in innocence.

That is to say, ignorance.

God help me. Even if you don’t love me.

Feverishly her brain worked. Like a cornered rat, she thought herself. Scrawling lines of poetry until her fingers ached.

Yet she did nothing. Like one waiting for—what?

Each morning after a feverish night. Choking back waves of nausea she could not bear to think was morning sickness.

So banal! Shameful.

What had taken root inside her, without her awareness. What grew darkly, flourished. That tough rubbery little slug not to be named, still less confronted.

What she could not acknowledge, had revealed to no one. And could never, to her lover.

For he was Kinch, he would be repelled by her.

Futile pounding at her belly with her fists, as a child might pound, biting back tears of anger and self-derision. Each morning checking her nightgown, the bedsheets. So desperately did she wish to see coin-sized spangles of blood, streaks of blood, almost her eyes blurred with moisture saw these in the rumpled sheets.

God help me, just this once. I will never doubt you again.

It’s your baby too, Simon. We are equally responsible. Therefore you must help me.

Could not bring herself to approach the man. Certainly not in the classroom, or in the university office that he shared with another young professor.

Nor could she envision herself walking (slowly? briskly?) across campus, making her way to the weathered Victorian house in which the man she loved (for she did love Simon Meech, that was the shameful fact) rented a furnished apartment. A lone figure in a film, dark-clad against snowy white. Climbing stairs, lifting her fist to knock on a door. Dear God, no.

Haunted by the thing inside her, in the pit of her belly, in her uterus, that was so tiny! Surely something might happen to it. How frequent were miscarriages, if Alyce continued not to eat, not to sleep, dazed and uncertain, descending staircases, crossing busy streets…

The fact was, Alyce had no idea how to procure an abortion, and she had no money to pay for an abortion, nor even any idea how much money would be required for an abortion. One hundred dollars? Five hundred? A thousand? In high school she’d heard rumors… Unexplained disappearances of girls, deaths.

What she did know: abortion was illegal. There was no region of the country in which abortion was legal. Simply to inquire about an abortion might be illegal—might be enough to get her expelled from the university. She dared not risk assuming that another girl would take pity on her and help her. And not report her to authority.

There was only Simon with whom she might plead. And yet there was not Simon.

He would stare at her in disbelief, dismay. Revulsion.

He’d seemed to praise, in certain of his remarks, the “celibate” life. The life that “transcends” the merely personal, trivial. The biological self that is a refutation of the spiritual self. The priestly life, far superior to the conjugal life. Several times he’d expressed impatience with Alyce when she tried to discuss such issues with him, as if there might be two sides to a question and not just his.

Like a candle flame extinguished by a single rude breath, the man’s feeling for her. Erotic longing could not withstand such raw need. Alyce could not risk that.

How do you “abort” a fetus yourself? Not easily.

There were drugs, Alyce knew. Powerful abortifacients available only to physicians, for provoking miscarriages when something has gone wrong with a pregnancy. But these could be lethal if not administered by a doctor. And they were not available, in any case.

Wire coat hanger: the most common remedy. Possibly ice pick, long-bladed knife, chopstick… Alyce began to feel faint, dazed, at the mere thought.

So lonely, could not say no.

Astonishing to Alyce to learn, in time, that Roland B___ wasn’t old—not old. Just sixty-one.

Old enough to be Alyce’s father (of course) but (possibly) not old enough to be her grandfather…

She was recalling: Sylvia Plath, patron saint of lost souls, had been only thirty at the time of her suicide.

Despite the bald dome of his head and the formality of his public manner, Roland B___ was a surprisingly youthful person. His face gave the impression of being unlined, though (as Alyce saw close up) his skin was a network of creases fine as cobwebs. His pebble-colored eyes were heavy-lidded at times, like a turtle’s, though at other times alert and curious. What appeared to be a scattering of liver marks on the backs of his hands were freckles. Guarded and muted in the seminar, he was capable of quick spontaneous laughter in the privacy of the Poet’s House, especially if he’d had a drink or two.

Red wine, occasionally whiskey. Alyce accepted a drink but (usually) left it untouched.

In the seminar, when Alyce spoke Roland B___ regarded her through half-shut eyes as if it wasn’t Alyce’s words but her voice that fascinated him. She reminded him of someone—did she? She’d wondered at first if he even knew who she was—which of the names on the student roster was hers.

And in the Poet’s House Alyce wondered if he knew who she was among the many women and girls with whom he’d been intimately acquainted in his lifetime.

From his poetry Alyce knew that Roland B___ had had lovers. He spoke of a stoical bachelor’s life as if with regret, but his had not been a bachelor’s life, and probably not stoical. Only first names attached to the wraithlike presences that had drifted in and out of the poet’s life when he’d been a younger man.

But he never forgot Alyce’s name once he’d learned it. Very carefully he pronounced the name—“Alyce.”

Telling her that he’d once met the original Alice: “Alice Liddell.”

Alice Liddell? For a moment Alyce didn’t recognize the name, then she recalled: of course, the child Alice, model for the Alice of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. The dark-eyed, dark-haired, dreamy little seven-year-old whom the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”) had photographed in poses of extraordinary tenderness and intimacy, of a kind that would be outlawed in the present time.

“Alice Liddell’s family banished Lewis Carroll finally—no one knows exactly why, but we can imagine. His heart was broken.”

Poor Alice Liddell, forever haunted by “Alice”—the child she’d never really been and could not escape; as an elderly woman brought to the United States by her ambitious son, who’d wished to peddle a book he’d written about her, obliged to meet with the press, pose for photographs, sign copies of the son’s book. Roland B___ had been a young man at the time, newly arrived in New York City, and at a gathering at the National Arts Club he’d actually—for a fleeting moment—shaken the hand of the “original” Alice.

Still an attractive woman, he’d thought, despite being exploited by her son and his publishers. The following year, 1934, she’d died, at the age of eighty-two.

Nineteen thirty-four! Alyce was astonished, this was so long ago.

Roland B___ said thoughtfully, “All her life she’d had to endure seeing pictures of herself, growing ever older, set beside the Tenniel drawings of ‘Alice’—perpetually a little girl, with beautiful eyes and thick ringlets of hair. Newspaper reporters fawning over her, to her face, then writing ironic profiles of her as an adult, aging woman.”

Alyce agreed, that would be painful. A difficult life.

Haunted by your own child-self! A vision of you in another’s eyes, and not in your own. Forever young, as you grew older.

Alyce told Roland B___ she’d thought the Alice books were frightening when she’d been a child. Even the illustrations by John Tenniel frightened her. So grotesque! And Alice so often looking pained, grown too big, or shrunken, made to carry freakish creatures in her arms, fleeing from a shrieking mad queen—Off with her head! Off with her head!

She recalled the Alice of the books as a child very different from herself. Rather, the British girl had seemed somewhat adult to Alyce. And an orphan.

An orphan? Roland B___ was curious.

Well, Alice has no parents in the Alice books. Down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland and through the mirror into the Looking-Glass World, Alice wanders entirely alone, lost, without even a last name.

“I suppose you are right, dear. I’d read the books so long ago, I scarcely remember details. It never occurred to me that, as you’ve said, Alice was alone.”

Roland B___ began to recite:

The poet’s voice trailed off with an air of melancholy, regret.

Alyce was feeling uneasy. In the poet’s overheated drawing room, a sense of chill.

Fragments from the Alice books she was being made to recall, as one might recall fragments from disturbing dreams. Like bats with fluttering wings these beat about her head. “Curiouser and curiouser”—“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves”—“beat him when he sneezes”—“six impossible things to believe before breakfast.” The mad twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum screaming at each other. The elderly white king sleeping beneath a tree, dreaming of Alice, and if he wakes from dreaming of her, Alice will vanish. Oh, terrifying! The Walrus and the Carpenter, strolling along the beach and devouring baby oysters one by one. Alice is herself going to be eaten—it’s only a matter of time. Alice is only protected by remaining entranced in Wonderland and in the Looking-Glass World by the game of chess in which the (unlikely) promise is she will become a queen. Recalling the elderly White Queen disappearing into a soup tureen, about to be eaten by a leg of mutton, and candles rising madly to the ceiling—Something is about to happen!

Alyce shuddered. She’d hated and feared the Alice books and had had bad dreams about finding herself captive inside their pages. She was only realizing now.

On his fingers Roland B___ calculated how old he’d have been when Alyce was seven: “Fifty, at least! More than the difference in years between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell.”

But why was Roland B___ telling Alyce this? And why, with such a strange smile?

The poet dared to take her hands, to comfort her.

“‘Still she haunts me, phantomwise.’”

Alyce tried to smile, embarrassed. The poet held her hands with surprising strength.

“You are an unusually beautiful girl, Alyce—I mean, your beauty is unusual. It is not at all conventional, and some might say—those lacking a discerning eye might say—that you are not ‘conventionally attractive’ at all. You remind me of the child Alice Liddell, actually—those dark, melancholy eyes.”

Alyce drew a sharp breath. “Well. I am not Alice Liddell, Professor. And I think I will leave now.”

And so the comforting hands released hers, startled. The eyelids hooded like turtles’ eyelids fluttered in alarm. Alyce rose to her feet, smiling, to think, Enough of goddamned dark, melancholy eyes. I have shocked you at last, haven’t I.

Each morning the tiny slug held firm. Deep inside the dark-haired, dark-eyed girl who’d once been, no, had never been Alice Liddell.

No loosening of menstrual blood, fresh dark stains in the bedclothes. No.

God help me. Even if you don’t love me.

And the blunt and unassailable answer came at once to her: Die, then. The power is in your hands.

The possibility of killing herself.

In the early hours of the morning suicide appeared to be more feasible than abortion, certainly more convenient, since it didn’t involve others and would incur no expense.

Preposterous even to consider. A pregnancy would last only nine months, and nine months is not long in a normal lifetime. Yes, but there would be no normal lifetime remaining after the pregnancy.

Steeling her courage to ask one of the older girls in the residence if Alyce could speak with her in private about something serious, something private, rehearsing the faltering words she would say, but her weak courage failed, she could not bring herself to so expose herself, for she could not trust anyone. Could not.

Throwing oneself from a height, from a bridge, would be an effective means. Stepping in front of a speeding vehicle, preferably a truck or a bus. Alyce tried to imagine summoning such courage if she had not even the courage to approach someone to speak of her predicament.

Later in the pregnancy, when she became desperate. Maybe then. If desperate, fanatic, and obsessed, maybe you don’t need courage.

For certainly Alyce would become desperate when others began to notice, to suspect. When her stomach swelled out and her clothes no longer fit.

How long did she have? Weeks? A death sentence—the pregnancy growing like a tumor that could not be stopped.

Slashing her wrists. All she would require was a razor or a sharp knife and the act could be executed in the night, without detection if she acted sensibly. In a bathtub with running water to dilute the flow of blood, carry it away to oblivion. In one of the bathrooms in the residence which were single occupancy, equipped with a bathtub and not a shower stall; a room that could be locked, where no one could interrupt and Alyce could sedate herself with aspirin and lower herself into hot steaming water, shut her eyes refusing to see, for she was a coward and could not bear to see streams of blood in water rushing down a drain, as her heart beat slower with the loss of blood a sweet comfort would come over her at last… But—would she have removed her clothes, as if for a bath? Or would she be dressed, or partly dressed, in her flannel nightgown perhaps? For she would not (oh, she would not) want to be discovered both naked and dead.

And how would dead be accomplished, exactly? Only one wrist could be slashed by the badly trembling right hand, not both wrists. The left wrist, or rather the inside of the left forearm, the tender flesh there would have to be cut (deeply, swiftly, unerringly) before pain overcame her and the razor or knife fell from her fingers into the splashing water…

Overdose of pills? Which pills? Alyce had no prescription pills, would have to buy pills at a drugstore, and what pills would these be? Sleeping pills? She had no idea. If she were at home she’d have access to the medications in her parents’ medicine cabinet—pills for high blood pressure, angina, kidney trouble, arthritis. But if she swallowed enough pills to kill herself, that might be enough pills to cause her to vomit, for she was not accustomed to swallowing pills. Had no idea how her stomach would react. And if she didn’t vomit enough she would sink into a sweaty stupor but not die, her heart continuing to beat like a stubborn metronome, waking hours or days later in her own vomit and excrement, taken by ambulance to an ER, where her stomach would be pumped—whatever pumped meant, it did not promise romance or dignity. Hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation, parents contacted, discovery of pregnancy, removed from the university, possibly brain-damaged, possibly “vegetative state”…

Alyce laughed. Three-twenty a.m. and she was standing flat-footed on a cold hardwood floor, having heaved herself up from the bed in which she’d failed to sleep since turning out the light several hours before.

Deciding, Goddamn, she would not. Would not kill herself, nor even make the attempt.

Returning from morning classes to discover a folded note in her mailbox, a phone message. Something like a sliver of glass piercing her heart at the thought that this was Simon summoning her to him at last, but in fact as her fluttering eyes barely made out through a scrim of tears the note was a phone message for her—Dearest Alyce, Please call this number. R. B.

In this way her life was decided.

The gift of her life. So Alyce would think at the time.

Returning to the Poet’s House. Her heart beating eagerly as Roland B___ opened the door with a playful bow.

“Dear Alyce! I have missed you. Come in.”

It was decided, Alyce would act as Roland B___’s assistant and archivist. For that would be the formal title of her role in his life and (as she might have anticipated at the time) in his posthumous life—assistant, archivist.

“I will pay you, of course, Alyce. I don’t expect you to give up your precious time for nothing.”

And, “Please do call me Roland, dear. Will you at least try?”

It was touching to Alyce that the poet so readily forgave her for her rudeness to him. Brushing aside her embarrassed apology with a dismissive gesture—“Don’t be absurd, dear. An old man is well advised to be put in his place when he oversteps boundaries. Good to remind me.”

“Oh, but, Professor, you’re not old.”

The words leapt from Alyce. She had no idea that she would speak at all in response to the poet’s rueful remark.

She’d spoken laughingly, out of nervousness. Like Alice in the Looking-Glass World in which all things are reversed, comical.

But she saw how it was true. Roland B___, in his solitude, loneliness. At the university he was admired, often invited to receptions, luncheons, dinners, but he went everywhere alone and returned to the faded-brick Poet’s House alone. In the antique-furnished bedroom, in the four-poster bed alone.

And Alyce in her solitude, loneliness. Surrounded by others her age, swarms of others on the university walkways, yet alone.

For Simon Meech had not contacted her, and in the classroom he seemed now scarcely to glance in her direction and to take no notice how she departed immediately when the class ended.

All of the colors of the drawing room in the Poet’s House seemed brighter to her, richer and more beautiful than she recalled. Crimson velvet pillows on a dove-gray velvet sofa, a deep russet-brown Chinese vase on the fireplace mantel, portraits of stern-looking eighteenth-century gentlemen on the walls.

How comical, these portraits! As if, long dead, long forgotten, they were playing the roles now of ancestors.

“Come in, dear Alyce! Your hands are cold. Will you have tea?” Drawing her into the overheated interior, where, on the beautiful old grand piano, a crystal vase of red roses pulsed with vivid color—For me? Those roses are for me.

Here was someone who cherished her. Would not repudiate, hurt her.

Strange, since Alyce’s previous visit there’d come to be a new mood between her and Roland B___ that was lighter, more playful and (just perceptibly) erotic.

She’d dared to speak sharply to the professor. She’d pushed away his hands and left him. Astonishing him, as she’d astonished herself, and now they were beginning anew.

He’d brought back from a local bakery delicious flaky-buttery scones. Serving these to his visitor, with Lapsang tea in Wedgwood teapot and cups. Though she’d been stricken with nausea only a few hours before, Alyce felt now a wave of hunger powerful enough to make her tremble.

“You do look pale, dear. I was noticing in our class the other day. You were very quiet while the others chattered so self-importantly. Is something troubling you? Or is it ‘Time’s wingèd chariot, hurrying near’?”

An obscure reference, surely to a poem. But not a poem that Alyce knew.

“But you’re too young, I think, to be troubled by the rapid passing of time as we others are…”

At this Alyce laughed again, spilling tea from the dainty Wedgwood teacup. As if time passing wasn’t painful to her as an abscess. As if such rituals as tea mattered when a few hours ago she’d been crouched over a toilet, dry-heaving.

“If there is something in your life that troubles you, I hope that you can confide in me, dear. I realize that at your age, so much is undecided, undefined. Recall what Paul Bowles said—‘Things don’t happen, it depends upon who comes along.’”

Alyce had no idea who Paul Bowles was, but from the tone of Roland B___’s voice, she gathered that he was a visionary of some sort.

How shaky Alyce was feeling, yet how elated, in the presence of this kindly man. The gleaming dome of a head, across which feathery strands of gray hair lay lightly. The pouched eyes, crinkling at their corners. The hopeful smile, exposing yellowed teeth. Alyce felt how brittle her composure, which could be broken by a tender word from this man, a caress.

But what had he asked her? Hungrily she’d devoured an entire scone, and emptied her cup of Lapsang tea. Her hands were still trembling.

“Well, dear. Perhaps in time you will confide in me, as your friend. From your poetry, I believe that I know you—inwardly. Please think of me as the ‘friend of your soul.’”

On a mahogany table in the drawing room were manuscripts, drafts of poems, letters both handwritten and typed. On the floor, boxes of papers. Much of this was new since Alyce’s most recent visit.

“I’ve had these boxes sent to me so that I can begin working on my archive here. D’you know what an archive is, dear?”

Alyce thought so, yes. Only the estimable merited archives.

“Virtually everything in a writer’s life. But I’ve only saved papers, documents, publications, letters—hundreds of letters. Out-of-print books, limited editions. I’ve delayed for years—never answered inquiries from Harvard, Yale, Columbia—as I’ve delayed making out a will. It’s damned difficult, you see, for those of us who fantasize that we will live forever, to think of ourselves as mortal, let alone posthumous… But if you could help me, dear, I think I could face the challenge.”

“Of course, Professor. I can try.”

Again she spoke without thinking. So yearning to please the elderly poet, so lonely, so desperate, she could barely contain herself in the presence of someone so seemingly kindly.

“Please, I’ve told you—Roland. Professor is for les autres.”

“Roland.” The name sounded unreal in Alyce’s voice, unconvincing.

“Rol-land. Give it a French inflection, s’il vous plais.”

“Rol-land.” Like an overgrown child, Alyce was blushing with embarrassment.

“Well. That’s an improvement, at least. Merci!”

Outside the drawing room windows, daylight was rapidly fading. In the chipped Wedgwood pot Lapsang tea cooled, forgotten. In a hearty mood Roland B___ poured whiskey into shot glasses for his visitor and himself and insisted that Alyce drink with him: “We have much to celebrate, my dear.”

Soon a fever came into the poet’s face; he was laughing happily; by the end of the evening, when Alyce prepared to return to her residence, Roland B___’s words had begun to slur and his fine-creased skin was deeply flushed. It was touching to Alyce, how in her presence the poet seemed to warm, even to glow.

Insisting, of course he would pay her. He would pay her very well. But she must tell no one else about their arrangement, none of Alyce’s classmates in the seminar, not anyone, for fear that les autres would misunderstand.

Not wanting Alyce to leave. Please no! Not just yet.

She had a curfew, Alyce tried to explain, laughing. All undergraduate women who lived in university residences had midnight curfews.

Ridiculous! Alyce should move out of such a confining place to a place of her own. He would help her pay for it.

How happy Alyce was, in the Poet’s House! It did not have the power to paralyze her here.

That interlude of days nearing the winter solstice when Alyce arrived breathless and hopeful at the red-brick residence between 4:30 and 5 p.m. Bringing her schoolwork, anthologies and texts she had to read for courses, papers she had to write, her notebook in which she kept drafts of her poems, in the interstices of helping Roland B___ organize the archive.

“My dear, we are making progress! I’m proud of us.”

By the time Alyce arrived Roland B___ would have had a whiskey or two, a glass of wine or two, or three. Grateful to see her. Trying to maintain dignity. Kissing her hand, hands.

Sometime between 8 and 9 p.m. they would eat a meal together, which Roland B___ ordered and paid for, delivered to the Poet’s House from one of a half-dozen restaurants in town. By the time the food arrived Roland would have had another whiskey, or begun another glass of wine, and Alyce would have left the work table to set the dining-room table with beautiful if chipped and cracked china she’d discovered in a sideboard, tarnished silverware, white linen napkins, cut-glass water goblets. Candlestick holders, candles. Their food was delivered in Styrofoam packages, transferred by Alyce to platters set in an oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. The aroma of heating food made her mouth water, she’d never been so ravenous.

Interludes of nausea were behind her now, mostly. Her center of gravity was settling in the region of her pelvis, closer to the ground.

Five days a week Alyce came to the Poet’s House. Soon then six days a week. Seven. For always there was much to do that was thrilling to do, and in addition Roland B___ paid her generously as he’d promised, often in twenty-dollar bills, hastily, scarcely troubling to count out the bills, as if paying were embarrassing to him, as being paid was embarrassing to Alyce. “You need not report this income, you know, dear,” Roland B___ said quietly, “as I shall not. What passes between us, IRS shall not know.”

On Roland B___’s sturdy old Remington typewriter Alyce typed ribbon copies of poems as well as numerous drafts of poems, personal letters of Roland B___ which she was entrusted with critiquing and even correcting.

Telling herself, I am doing this for him, he is my friend. The more I do for him, the more he is my friend.

Only when she left the overheated Poet’s House to return across the snow-swept campus to her residence a quarter mile away did reality sweep in upon Alyce, jarring as a clanging bell.

What was happening to her! What must she do.

Out of compulsion checking her underwear, her nightgown. Bedclothes. Hardly recalling what it was she sought, smears of blood, barely recalling it was menstrual blood, which had begun to seem to her remote like an imperfectly recollected dream.

Yes, but: the swell of her belly. Definitely. She could feel.

No longer losing weight out of anxiety and nausea but gaining weight. Five pounds, six… Eight pounds.

Roland B___ remarked how beautiful Alyce was. How smooth her skin, how shining her eyes… She wasn’t so thin as she’d been. Definitely she was looking healthier.

“You see, you are my Alice. Come into my life when Alice was required, like magic.”

Alyce laughed, embarrassed. Did Roland B___ really mean such things, or was he being fanciful? Poetic?

She wondered if in his vanity the elderly poet might have thought that his undergraduate assistant was falling in love with him.

It was becoming ever more difficult for Alyce to politely decline Roland B___’s offers of drinks. Possibly she would take a few sips of wine. But whiskey—no.

Pointing out, primly, “You know, Professor—I’m underage.”

Roland B___ protested, “My dear, this is a private residence. No one can intrude here. The state has no authority here. My domicile.” Pausing, slyly considering: “Our domicile. Our Wonderland. Without a warrant no officer of the state can cross the threshold and certainly no officer of the state can arrest me.”

Soon too wanting Alyce to stay the night.

And what were you thinking, Alyce? That it would just—go away?

As one might be fascinated by a lump in a breast, a thickening tumor. A kind of paralysis. Sleeping heavily, her limbs mired in something soft like mud. Warm mud.

Recalling overhearing her mother and an aunt speaking in lowered voices of a friend’s daughter, who’d had a six-months miscarriage when no one, including (allegedly) the girl, had even known that she was pregnant. A stocky girl, wearing loose-fitting shirts, overalls, not a very attractive girl (so it was said, an important detail), utterly astonished the family had been, disbelieving, scandalized. It had seemed improbable at the time that the girl hadn’t seemed to know she was pregnant, yet now Alyce understood. It was very easy not to think about it. Anxiety about the future was replaced by a sudden need for a nap.

A swoon of ignorance, the most refreshing of deep sleeps.

That somehow it would go away. Cease to exist.

And you would wake to discover that it was all a bad dream—like Alice waking from her nightmare.

“My dear, unavoidably I must be away for the rest of the afternoon. But I will hurry back, I promise!”

It was flattering to Alyce that Roland sometimes left the Poet’s House while she remained behind. The poet had come to trust his assistant, deferring to her out of respect for her good judgment or out of a cavalier wish not to be bothered with details. Yes, yes!—those were letters from T. S. Eliot, who was plain “Tom Eliot” to anyone who knew him, indeed yes, as Robert Lowell was “Cal,” Alyce was correct, such precious archival material needed to be kept in plastic binders, but—where would you get such binders? The university bookstore? Huge ghastly place with racks of insipid bestsellers, dour textbooks, T-shirts and sweatshirts, couldn’t bring himself to step inside a second time…

Of course Alyce would acquire the binders. Far more capably than Roland B___, Alyce did such mundane tasks.

Mesmerizing to Alyce, to lose herself in hours of close, exacting reading, deciphering handwritten letters to Roland B___, faded carbon copies of Roland B___’s letters, handwritten manuscripts by the poet himself, annotated galleys. Hundreds of letters from individuals whose names were known and from individuals whose names were unknown. In the 1930s Roland B___ had begun publishing verse; by 1954 Roland B___ had become poetry editor of the Nation and would correspond with dozens of poet-friends. You could see—Alyce could see—how the young ambitious poet had made his way, not unerringly but erratically, haphazardly, sending poems to whoever would receive them and offer comment or publication, grateful for any attention, encouragement, acceptance from any editor, like one who is climbing a wall of sheer rock, grasping at slippery surfaces.

Often Alyce brought letters to the window, to read carefully. Small crabbed handwriting, faded typewriter ink. A letter from John Crowe Ransom, editor of Kenyon Review, praising and accepting several poems. A short, scribbled letter from the poet Delmore Schwartz thanking Roland B___ for some favor. A letter from Elizabeth Bishop on hotel stationery, a sequence of dashed-off sentences, rueful complaints about “Cal”—had to be Robert Lowell. In these letters there was an air of intimacy, intrigue, and gossip that fascinated Alyce, who had nothing like this in her life.

Very easily she could fold up such letters. Some of them were paper-thin—blue airmail stationery. Slip them into her bookbag. Roland B___ would never know, for Roland B___ was a very careless custodian of what was his.

Especially the poet’s early limited-edition publications, what Roland B___ called chapbooks, carelessly crammed together in boxes.

One of these was Phantomwise and Other Poems, published in 1936, beautifully printed on stiff white paper, with a mother-of-pearl cover and, on the title page, Roland B___’s youthful grandiloquent signature.

According to the copyright page, there’d been just fifty copies of this Phantomwise printed. In the box were three copies, each water-stained and torn.

The epigraph was familiar to her:

What was this: a line from Alice in Wonderland? Charles Dodgson looking back at the seven-year-old Alice, suffused with yearning.

Leafing through the water-stained little book, which was just twenty pages. A half-dozen poems of Roland B___’s which Alyce had never seen before, and did not fully understand. Probably forgotten now by the poet himself.

Quickly she returned the copy of Phantomwise to the box. Even if her eccentric employer never knew the book was missing, even if no one would ever care that it was missing, Alyce would not behave so dishonestly. She could not steal.

It would be a betrayal of Roland B___’s tender regard for her. Her regard for him. Their mutual respect, which was unlike anything else in Alyce’s life.

“Which of these do you prefer, Alyce?” The poet was revising poems originally published years ago, in 1953, in preparation for a Selected Poems; with the tactlessness of the young, Alyce said, “The older version. It’s much stronger.”

“Really? The older version?”

“Yes.”

The poem was a clever imitation of a Donne sonnet. Alyce, who knew only a few poems of John Donne, knew this. The harsh rhythms, masculine accents. By adding lines Roland B___ had softened the poem.

Her remark had surprised him. As she’d surprised him, yes and pleased him enormously, entering the Poet’s House with the little cracked opal ring on the smallest finger of her right hand.

The look on Roland B___’s face! Like a candle, lighted.

My dear. You have made me so happy.

But now he’d gone away, not so happy.

In the kitchen she heard him clattering about. Seeking a glass.

Often Alyce washed dishes after their meals. Liking the feel of hot soapy water. If she had not, the elderly poet would have left dirtied dishes in the sink, in a pool of scummy water, awaiting the cleaning woman on Wednesday mornings. He seemed incapable of washing even teacups and coffee mugs. Whiskey glasses, wineglasses accumulated, out of an impressive store in the Poet’s House cupboards, until Alyce washed them, and left them sparkling on the shelves.

Of course, Roland B___ was getting a drink now. To soothe his jarred nerves.

Returning at last, whiskey in hand, to Alyce’s relief no whiskey for her.

But he also had a gift for her—“In gratitude for your astute insight, and your honesty, dear Alyce. A ‘collector’s item’—supposedly.”

It was a copy of Phantomwise, the slender chapbook with the mother-of-pearl cover. Alyce felt her face burn as if she’d been exposed as a thief.

But Roland B___’s face was crinkled in a wide smile, without irony.

Holding the water-stained little book out to her, opened to the title page—For my dear Alyce, who brings the light of radiance into my life. With love, Roland.

Alyce took the book from Roland B___’s fingers. Tears leaked from her eyes. It was not possible to keep from crying, Roland B___ was so kind.

“Oh Alyce, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

Heard herself telling him, at last: she was pregnant.

That word, blunt and shaming: pregnant.

How long, how many weeks exactly, she didn’t know.

Didn’t want to know. Had not allowed herself to know.

Stammering, sobbing. Like a child. A broken girl. Her composure shattered as backbone might be shattered. Roland B___ tried to comfort her.

Later Alyce would realize that the elderly poet had not been so very surprised. Must have known, suspected—something…

Of course, he was very kind to Alyce. Sitting beside her on a sofa, gripping her hands to still them. Letting her speak in a rush of words, and letting her fall silent, choked with emotion. Such kindness was terrible to her, obliterating. She could not recall when anyone had been so kind to her. So sympathetically listened to her.

“My dear. My poor dear. This is not good news for you, is it?”

No. Not good news. Alyce laughed, wiping her eyes.

He was holding her. As an older relative might hold her.

Assuring her he would help her. If she would allow him.

In his arms Alyce wept. Heaving sobs, graceless. Her pride had vanished. She was exposed, helpless. The posture she’d so rigorously maintained in her classes, within the gaze of others, abandoned. Suddenly a pregnant creature, helpless.

“Marry me, dear. Make me your husband. I will take care of you and your baby. It will be our baby.”

Roland B___ spoke urgently, his words slurred from the whiskey.

Alyce laughed, nervously. No, no! She could not.

“I know you don’t love me—yet. I can love enough for both of us. You know, you are my Alice.”

Alyce wanted to push away. Alyce wanted to snatch up her dignity, what remained of her dignity, and flee the Poet’s House. Yet there was Alyce, weakly huddled in the poet’s arms. As if shielded from a strong wind. Scarcely recalling the man’s name. Yet her mind was working rapidly. He will help me. He has saved me.

In the four-poster bed, in the dim-lit bedroom. An antique bed with a hard mattress that creaked beneath their weight. It was too absurd, Alyce thought. This was not happening! The elderly man breathing loudly, panting as if he’d climbed a flight of stairs. Tenderly holding her, kissing her mouth, her throat. Feathery-light kisses that became by quick degrees harder, sucking kisses that took her breath away.

“No. Please. Don’t.” Alyce pushed at him, frightened.

“Sorry!”

The elderly lover would make a joke of it, if he could.

Still he was breathing hard. Harshly. Excused himself to go into the bathroom, swaying on his feet.

There came a sound of faucets, plumbing. Alyce sat up, swung her legs off the bed. What was she doing, why was she here? She would leave, before he returned. Or—she would wait for him in the drawing room, in her coat. For it would be rude, unconscionable, to rush away without speaking to him.

She would ask him for financial help. Please would he help her!

All she wanted was her old, lost body. The not-pregnant body. A girl’s slender body with narrow hips, small hard breasts, flat belly and nothing inside the belly to make it swell like a balloon.

How happy she’d been, in that not-pregnant body. Wholly unaware, oblivious. And now.

She had no doubt Roland B___ could put her in contact with someone who could help her. Roland B___ could provide the money.

An abortion. A doctor who could perform an abortion.

These blunt words had to be uttered. She, Alyce, would have to utter them.

After some minutes Alyce returned hesitantly to the bedroom. But Roland B___ was still in the bathroom. Something fell to the tile floor, clattered. Alyce came closer to the door, not knowing what to do. She had not wanted to think that something might be wrong with the elderly poet, that his breathing had been harsh and laborious, almost as soon as he’d urged her into the bedroom and onto the bed.

Alyce had balked, like an overgrown girl. She had given in, but stiffly. She had not returned his kisses except weakly, out of a kind of politeness. For a man of his age he’d been surprisingly strong. He’d been surprisingly heavy. But then, he was not old. She knew that.

Her face was wet with tears. Hair in her face. At last daring to call, “R-Roland? Is something wrong?”

How the name Roland stuck in her mouth! She could hardly bear to speak it. Like playacting this felt, speaking a name in a script.

The panicked thought came to her, Is he ill? Is he dying? Am I to be his witness?

Alyce approached the bathroom door. Leaned her ear against it.

“Hello? Excuse me? Is—something wrong?”

In poetry you chisel the most beautiful words out of language. In life you stutter words. It is never possible to speak so beautifully as you wish to speak.

Inside, a response she could not quite hear. Maybe it was a reply, No, yes, I am all right, go away. Or maybe it was a groan. A cry. A muffled plea. Help me, I am not all right. Do not go away.

A terrifying thought, that the elderly poet was ill. At the very moment of his declaration of love for her, his wish to help her, to marry her… Alyce had long suspected that Roland B___ was not entirely well: hearing him breathing laboriously, moving with unnatural slowness at times. Wanting to think at the time, Oh, he’s been drinking. That’s why.

Like seeing a spark fly out of a chimney and fall into a carpet.

In the next instant the spark may become a flame. The flame may become fire.

Is he dying? He doesn’t want to die alone…

Then, suddenly: the door was opened. Roland B___ emerged, trying to smile.

A ghastly smile. His skin pale as if drained of blood. And his eyelids fluttering. His hand pressed against his chest.

She would call 911, Alyce told him. They could not wait any longer.

Roland protested no. Not yet. His heart “played tricks” on him—sometimes…

No. No longer. Alyce would call 911, and save the poet’s life.

“He is expecting me. He needs me.”

At the ER insisting that yes, she was Roland B___’s assistant, a student at the university enrolled in the professor’s course. For she could not bring herself to say that she was the elderly poet’s friend.

Still less that she was the poet’s Alice. The girl he’d offered to marry.

“He needs me, he expects me. I would have ridden with him in the ambulance but there was no room…”

A nurse led Alyce into the interior of the ER. She could not stop from glancing into small rooms with doors ajar—dreading to see what, who was inside. Smells assailed her nostrils, her eyes filled with tears. She thought, Oh God if he dies. If he has died.

Barely could she recall her own condition. What was growing, flourishing in her belly. Her aching and oddly full breasts. How she’d confessed to the poet, and how he’d taken hold of her hands, his kindness. His wish to help her.

… love enough for both of us.

The nurse was handing Alyce—what? A half-mask of white gauze. Slipped a half-mask onto her own face. Explaining to Alyce that until bloodwork confirmed that the patient didn’t have a contagious illness they must proceed as if he might have one, and that the contagion might be spread by airborne germs or viruses.

Contagious? Illness? Was this possible? Alyce fumbled affixing the mask to her face, and the nurse adjusted it for her.

Before the door to room 8. Preparing for what was inside, as the nurse opened the door.

And there was the elderly poet in bed, in a sitting-up position, bare-chested, partly conscious, staring and blinking at Alyce as if he couldn’t see her clearly or was failing to recognize her in the mask. Without his glasses he looked much older than his age—disheveled, distraught. The pale dome of a head, shockingly bare.

“Oh, my dear… What have they done to you.”

Bravely Roland B___ was smiling at his visitor. Quickly she came to him, took his hand. Fingers cold as death.

Her first impression was one of shock, yet relief. Roland was alive, that was all that mattered.

Thanking Alyce for coming. Begging her not to leave him.

How misshapen, Roland B___’s body in the cranked-up hospital bed! He might have been a dwarf, with foreshortened legs. Alyce had never glimpsed the elderly poet unclothed, always he’d been quite formally clothed; in the Poet’s House when he’d removed his tweed coat he wore long-sleeved shirts beneath, often sweaters, vests. Scarcely had Alyce thought of the poet as a physical being.

Until he’d urged her into his bedroom and onto his bed she had not once thought of him as a sexual being; such a thought was repugnant to her.

Now with dismayed eyes Alyce saw folds of flesh at the poet’s chest and stomach, of the hue of lard. Sloping knobby-boned shoulders. The flabby chest was covered in a frizz of gray hairs and amid these a dozen electrodes, wires connected to a machine. Was this an EKG? Monitoring his heartbeat? An IV dripped fluids into his right arm: antibiotics? Medication to slow and stabilize the rapid heartbeat? Oxygen flowed into the patient’s nostrils through plastic tubes. Like clockwork every several minutes a blood-pressure cuff tightened on the patient’s left upper arm with an aggressive whirring sound, then relaxed like an exhaled breath. Alyce stared entranced at the monitor screen. The numerals meant nothing to her—84, 91, 18. Green, blue, white. During the course of this first visit Alyce would surmise that the numerals in the high 80s measured the patient’s oxygen intake.

It was explained to her that Roland B___ would have a CAT scan and an echocardiogram in the morning. He would have further bloodwork after eight hours of antibiotics. The rapid heartbeat wasn’t tachycardia but fibrillation, which was more serious. Possibly the elderly man had a viral infection, which had precipitated the attack. Possibly he had pneumonia. Alyce tugged at the mask, which fitted over her mouth and nose uncomfortably.

It alarmed her how Roland B___ was coughing. (Had he been coughing at the Poet’s House? She didn’t think so.)

“They don’t know what is wrong with me, I’m afraid,” Roland B___ said, with an attempt at his old gaiety, “but I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, dear. I hope it won’t be a cause of worry to you.”

Alyce insisted she wasn’t worried. Even as she felt sick, disoriented with worry.

Wondering if, in his physical distress, the elderly poet remembered what she had told him. If he remembered what he’d told her.

…love enough for both of us.

For hours that night sitting with Roland B___ in the small room, much of the time holding his hand.

Even when he drifted off to sleep, eyelids fluttering and lips twitching, holding his hand.

At 11:30 p.m., when the ER was closing to visitors, Alyce was told that she could remove the mask on her face. Blood tests had established that the patient didn’t have a communicable disease.

Removing the damned mask, which the nurse directed her to discard in a bin labeled MEDICAL REFUSE.

Removing the mask so that Roland B___ could see her more clearly and unmistakably identify her: “My dear—Alyce.”

“Yes—Alyce…”

“You are looking so—pale, dear. Please don’t worry! I feel so much better already, just knowing that you’ve been here, and that we—we have—we will settle matters between us, as soon as I am back home. Won’t we, dear? As we’d discussed?”

“Y-Yes.”

“Kiss me goodnight, dear. I’m not contagious now. And will you promise to see me in the morning?”

Alyce promised. How exhausted she was, and how badly she wanted to escape the stricken man, to burrow into sleep in her own bed.

But Roland was blinking at her, his eyes forlorn without his glasses. The blood-pressure cuff jerked to life, squeezing his upper arm as if in rebuke.

Lowering his voice, Roland B___ asked anxiously, “You are—I mean, you are not—my wife yet? I think—not yet? No.”

Was he joking? Alyce wanted to think so.

The patient in room 8 did not survive the night. We had no number to call and we regret to inform you…

In fact when Alyce returned to the ER the next morning, trembling with fear, she was informed that Roland B___ had been moved out of the ER to a room on the fifth floor. His heartbeat had been stabilized: his condition was “much improved.” Yet he would probably remain in the hospital for several days, undergoing tests.

In relief Alyce bought Roland a small bouquet of fresh flowers in the hospital gift shop. It was heartening to see how his face lighted when he saw her, and the bright yellow flowers in her hand.

“My dear! You’ve come back. Thank you.”

Leaning over the hospital bed to kiss his cheek. Resisting the impulse to shut her eyes in a delirium of relief. He is alive. Alive! That is all that matters.

She’d scarcely slept the previous night. Many times reliving the shock of the poet’s collapse, even as he’d vowed to protect her.

Marry her, and they would have a child together…

It was clear to her now, nothing mattered so much as Roland B___. She had to be with him, at his bedside. For he had no one but Alyce, whom he loved and had promised to protect.

She’d ceased thinking of the other. The man who’d impregnated her and now shunned her. She did not even hate him, who’d so wounded her.

Roland had not asked Alyce who the father of the unborn baby was. Alyce seemed to understand that he would not.

Saying to her only, in a discreet lowered voice so that no one might overhear, “And you, dear? You are all right also?”

“Yes! Oh, yes.”

It was a relief to Alyce, Roland B___ did seem to have improved since the previous night. He was still inhaling oxygen through tubes in his nostrils, but the numbers on the monitor were higher, in the 90s. IV fluids were still dripping into his veins, but his color was warmer, his eyes more alert. With a droll gaiety he showed his visitor his poor bruised arms, from which “pints of blood” had been drawn.

As Roland B___’s assistant Alyce had much to do. She must notify his closest relatives, whose names he provided her; she must notify the English Department that he would be postponing his seminar for a week. Alyce did not want to say, But are you sure, Roland? One week?

Clearly he had a serious cardiac condition. Still there was a possibility that he had an infection, for he was running a slight temperature. Though he was eager to be discharged from the hospital, he tired easily and several times dropped off to sleep while speaking with Alyce; once, explaining to her what she should say to his relatives, to keep them informed but discourage them from visiting him.

As it turned out Roland B___’s relatives, who lived in the Boston area, were not very keen on visiting him. On the phone with Alyce they expressed surprise, alarm, concern, but said nothing about visiting him in the hospital. (“Is Roland out of the ER? Not in intensive care? That’s a relief!”) Alyce wanted to ask sarcastically why didn’t they come to see him now, before he was in intensive care? Wouldn’t that be more sensible?

Roland had said that he didn’t want to speak with his relatives just yet. Nor did the relatives express much urgency in speaking with him.

Often when Roland slept he woke disoriented, frightened. A nurse suggested to Alyce that she remain close by him, to assure him. “Older patients need reassurance that they haven’t been abandoned.”

Abandoned! Alyce was determined that this should not happen.

If she missed more than a few classes she would fail her courses, Alyce was warned. She would have to apply for extensions through the dean’s office, and even then such applications might be denied.

But Roland was dependent upon Alyce for tasks he could not do from his hospital bed. Letters he must write, or believed that he must write, which he dictated to Alyce, who dutifully typed them out on the Remington in the Poet’s House, brought them back to him for proofreading, addressed, and mailed them. There were telephone calls Roland couldn’t bring himself to make, that Alyce must make for him; he’d grown to hate the phone because no one spoke loudly or clearly enough any longer. Since the shock of his collapse and hospitalization Roland seemed determined to show how alert, energetic, and assertive he was, how well—though he was still a hospital patient attached to monitors beside his bed and dependent upon Alyce or a nurse to help him make his faltering way to the bathroom when he needed it.

He’d been insistent the damned catheter be removed from his penis. No more! A man’s pride would not allow that insult.

Especially Roland wanted to display for Alyce his returning vitality, his good humor. He wanted the medical staff to see, his physician to see, how well he was becoming, in order that he might be discharged soon.

Wanting to suggest to Roland that she might spend fewer hours at the hospital so that she could return to her classes, catch up on her work. That she might write poetry of her own again, to read to him.

But she could not force herself to utter such words—I need more time to myself, Roland. I am afraid that I will fail my courses…

He would be hurt, she knew. Since his collapse he’d become extremely sensitive, thin-skinned and suspicious. If Alyce was late coming to the hospital by just a few minutes, he wondered where she’d been; if he dropped off to sleep and woke startled, not knowing at first where he was, he might stare at her almost with hostility, as if not recognizing her.

But then, when she spoke his name, it was wonderful how awareness and recognition flowed into his face again. “My dear! Dear Alyce. It is you, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I love you, Alyce. You know that, I hope.”

Alyce was deeply embarrassed. Could not bring herself to say, Yes. I know.

“When I am discharged—which will be next Monday, I’ve just been informed—we will make our plans, dear. We—have—many—plans—to make…”

It was the pregnancy to which he was alluding, Alyce supposed. Yet he could not quite name it. Nor had he asked who the father was, as if (Alyce was beginning to suspect) he preferred not to know.

Soon after their nighttime meal Roland fell asleep with a book in his hand, which Alyce extricated carefully from his fingers and set aside, with a bookmark to mark his place. She stooped and kissed the poet’s high forehead with its faint creases which felt cool against her lips; she listened to his shallow but rhythmic breathing, which was comforting to her as a baby’s breathing might be. Love for the man suffused her heart, but how vexing, just as she switched off the bright overhead light, preparing to leave the hospital for the night, a young nurse entered the room and switched it back on, rudely waking Roland, who fluttered his eyelids, confused.

Alyce watched as the nurse poked for a vein in his right arm, which was already discolored. “Be careful!” Alyce spoke sharply.

It was new to her, this sharpness. As if already she were the poet’s young wife, destined to outlive him and to bring up their child by herself, the renowned poet’s literary executrix whose life would be closely bound up with his.

Afterward she kissed the poet goodnight a second time and switched off the overhead light a second time, and in the corridor outside the nurse was waiting for her with a quizzical smile. “Is he your grandfather? Somebody said he’s a famous professor?”

It had been Roland’s third full day in the hospital, unless it had been the fourth.

In Alyce’s mailbox when she returned late from the hospital a folded note with the terse message Please call me. S.

Clutching the note, her heart pounding. A rush of sensation came over her, of dread, apprehension, and yet such excitement, she felt for a moment that she might faint; had to lean against the wall, her head lowered, as a struck animal might lean, uncertain what has happened to it.

No. Go to hell. It’s too late, I hate you.

And yet she could not say no.

Asking Alyce to meet him the next evening at a Greek restaurant some distance from the university, a place to which he’d never taken her, dim-lighted, near-deserted, where no one from the university was likely to see them together.

He’d heard, Simon said bluntly, with no preamble, two things about the visiting poet Roland B___: the man was in the hospital, and Alyce, one of his students, was visiting him daily.

Evasively Alyce said yes.

“And why would you do such a thing?”

“Why? I’m his assistant.”

“‘Assistant’? Since when?”

“And archivist.”

“Archivist?” Simon stared at Alyce, incredulous. “You’re an undergraduate, you know nothing about library archives. Why would anyone hire you?”

Alyce’s face burned with resentment, and unease. This question had occurred to her too, more than once.

“Did you know this Roland B___ before?”

“Before—?”

“When you—when we—when we first met…”

“I told you, he’s my professor.”

“I mean, were you his assistant then? His ‘archivist’? I hadn’t been under that impression…”

Alyce had never seen Simon Meech so discomforted. He was not so eloquent now, his manner not poised, aloof as it was when he stood before a classroom. When she’d approached the booth in the restaurant in which Simon was sitting with a drink in front of him, she’d seen his eyes glide over her with something like surprise, as if he’d forgotten, or had wished to forget, what she looked like. He had not, it appeared, even shaved that day, or had shaved carelessly.

It had been five weeks since Simon had last brought Alyce back to his apartment. Five weeks since he’d spoken to her. In the interim she’d missed several philosophy classes, she’d neglected to hand in an assignment. He might have been concerned for Alyce, her health, her welfare, what was happening in her life, but in his frowning face Alyce saw that his concern wasn’t for her but for himself.

A waiter approached. Simon jerked his head irritably, without glancing at the man, to signal, Go away, this is a private conversation.

“When did you start seeing this Roland B___, outside your class with him? That’s what I’m asking.”

“Why are you interrogating me, Simon? Why does it matter to you?”

Even her naming of him—Simon. This was startling to him, for she’d scarcely dared to call him any name at all previously.

“Let’s leave here. We should talk, in a private place.”

“In your apartment? No.”

“Not—not there. I have a car…”

Almost Simon was pleading with Alyce. She wondered what he knew, or could guess.

How hard it was for him to speak. And amazing to Alyce, to hear the man uttering such words she might have fantasized hearing weeks before, when he had mattered to her.

Reaching for her hand. Squeezing her hand. As rarely he’d done when they were alone together. In a faltering voice telling her that he’d missed her. He had thought it was wisest—for her, for them both—not to continue to see her, but… “I’ve wanted to call. I haven’t really known what to do, Alyce.”

But—did Simon love her? Soon in her dazed state Alyce would imagine she was hearing the word love.

Staring at their hands. Badly wanting to extricate her hand from his. Yet he was gripping her hand hard. As Roland B___ had sometimes gripped her hand, as if in desperation of his life.

What a charade this was! Telling Alyce now that he missed her, when she no longer missed him.

“I didn’t think you cared for me, Simon. I didn’t think you even liked me.” Almost spitefully she spoke, childishly. Those hours of hurt, shame, despair when she’d wished indeed that she could die, cease to exist, without the effort and pain of suicide, the man must pay for.

“That’s ridiculous. Certainly you could tell—I felt strongly about you. I’m not accustomed to spilling my guts the way poets do.”

Poets. The word was a sneer in Simon’s mouth. Alyce was surprised that he remembered she’d been a poet, or had hoped to be. Fortunately she’d never dared to show him any of her (love) poems, nor had Simon asked to see any.

She had to leave, Alyce said. She had to return to the hospital. She’d been there for much of the day and had only returned to the campus briefly to get Roland B___’s mail and other items…

“Jesus, Alyce! What are you to that man? He’s—what? Seventy years old? You’re being used by him—exploited.”

“He is not seventy. He is sixty—barely.”

“Oh, ridiculous! You are doing this out of spite, to hurt me.”

Simon spoke angrily, resentfully. His face flushed as if with fever. This was a new, rough familiarity between them that would have been astonishing to Alyce if she’d had time to contemplate it.

Stubbornly she said, “He’s all alone. He doesn’t have anyone else.”

“Of course he has someone else! He probably has a wife somewhere, and grown children. He’s just taking advantage of you.”

Alyce didn’t want to say, Yes, but he loves me too. I am taking advantage of his love.

It seemed that they would not be having a meal together at the Greek restaurant. A waiter hovered nearby, ignored by Simon, who was becoming increasingly distracted.

Not a meal, not even drinks. Unless Simon had had a drink before Alyce arrived.

He began to plead. He apologized. He was very sorry for his poor judgment. Would Alyce forgive him? Try to forgive him? See him again?

No. Not ever.

Goodbye!

Preparing to leave, extricating her hand from his (sweaty) hand, and taking pity on him, the look in his narrow pinched face, his broken Kinch-pride, almost Alyce might have gloated, Now you know what it is like to be rejected, and humbled.

Simon was asking if he could drive her to the hospital, at least? They could talk together during the drive. She owed him that much, he would have thought.

Owed him! No.

Seeing the look on Alyce’s face, quickly amending: “I mean—since—since we’ve meant something to each other… At least, I’d thought that we did.”

Alyce felt again that rush of pity, sympathy for the stricken man. He had not meant to hurt her, perhaps. He had not thought of her but of himself—not her weakness but his own.

Simon was a young man: not yet thirty. Several years in the seminary had kept him immature: he knew little of the fullness of life.

Before Alyce he had not had any lover. He seemed awkward at touching and being touched. Yet Simon was older than Alyce Ur­quhart by at least ten years. A (male) faculty member at the university, improperly involved with a (female) undergraduate.

Alyce had the power to sabotage his career, she supposed. If she reported him to the dean of students, if she described his sexual coercion of her, as she saw it now, her shyness and intimidation by him. And the pregnancy. If she told anyone!

Relenting, yes, all right. He could drive her to the hospital if he wished. And they could talk—“Though I don’t really think we have anything to talk about, Simon.”

This was bravely stated. Never in the raging despair of the previous weeks had Alyce imagined such a statement made to the man who had impregnated her and abandoned her.

They were standing beside the booth. Still the restaurant was near-deserted. Simon seemed about to embrace her but hesitated.

On the way to the car along a windy snow-swept street, Simon thanked her. His voice was elated, excited. She had forgotten his height—he was taller than she, by several inches. She had forgotten the intensity of which he was sometimes capable, so very different from his calm, cutting eloquence.

He was considering returning to the seminary, Simon said. His contract at the university was being negotiated for the following year. In fact, there was the possibility of a three-year contract, and tenure. But he was no longer certain that he wanted tenure, a career in the university.

“The lay world, the civilian world, is… thin. Everything seems flat. Bleached of color.”

Simon spoke with bitterness that was a kind of wonder. Glancing about as if seeing in this very place, which to Alyce looked so solid, how flat and two-dimensional the world was, how empty. She tried to see the world as he might see it but could not.

“It’s God that has drained away. The meaning of my life.”

In the car, driving. Alyce was deeply moved that Simon Meech would speak to her in this way. As thinking out loud. Baring his soul.

The streets had been plowed recently. The air was very still and cold, and what Alyce could see of the night sky was beautifully illuminated by a partial moon, but Simon, behind the wheel of his vehicle, which rattled and shuddered, did not seem to notice. Belatedly she realized that he’d (probably) been drinking before she’d met him, he had hurriedly settled a bill on the way out of the restaurant.

“I think that I can regain it. Him. By returning to where I was before I left the seminary. The person I was.”

Him. What a curious way in which to refer to God. As if this him were a fellow creature, with whom the seminarian would be on particularly good terms.

“Not everyone wants to live in the secular world. Some of us require a different air.”

Alyce heard herself murmur yes. Perhaps she was disappointed, Simon didn’t love her after all. There was no room for earthly love in his priestly heart.

“I think we need to talk, Alyce. I think there is much you have not told me.”

Calmly he spoke. But Alyce could hear the rage quivering beneath.

Instead of driving Alyce directly to the hospital, Simon was taking a longer route that involved crossing a bridge over a wide, dark river edged with serrated jaws of ice.

Weakly Alyce protested, but Simon promised he wouldn’t keep her long.

Driving away from the city. Into the countryside. Simon’s foot on the gas pedal erratic, aggressive.

Very still Alyce sat, staring at the rushing road.

Understanding that possibly she’d made a mistake. Leaving the restaurant with Simon instead of walking quickly away. Accompanying him to his car parked on a side street. Stepping into the car, into which she’d never stepped before, out of a (vague, apologetic) wish to placate the man whom (she’d been encouraged by him to think) she had hurt.

In the darkness of the countryside asking her almost casually, glancing at her, a smirk of a smile, “You’re pregnant, aren’t you? That’s why you’ve been avoiding me.”

Alyce was stunned, speechless. That Simon had asked such a question. Never had she imagined that Simon Meech would be capable of uttering the word aloud—pregnant.

“N-No…”

“What do you mean, no? You are not pregnant, or you haven’t been avoiding me?”

Still Alyce stared ahead, at the rushing road. Her thoughts beat frantically, she could not think how to reply.

“Well, are you? Look at me. Answer me.”

“I—I am n-not…”

Realizing now she had not wanted the man to know. Not this man.

Not because he would cease to love her, he did not love her. But because he would wish to harm her, as his enemy.

“How long? How pregnant are you?”

Just short of jeering. Furious. In the restaurant he’d kept glancing at her, furtively. And now, with that look of reproach and disbelief.

Rapidly Alyce’s brain worked. She must find a way to answer him, to placate him. A raging man beside her, a vehicle hurtling her into the snowy countryside.

Simon’s foot on the gas pedal alternately pressing down, releasing, and pressing down again. Several times he asked her how long, how long pregnant, and Alyce managed to stammer that she was not, not pregnant. And still he asked her, how long.

She had not calculated. So long as the duration of the pregnancy was imprecise, not marked on any calendar, it did not seem altogether real to her, even as her belly was swelling, thickening. Even as her breasts were becoming the fatter, softer breasts of a stranger.

How many miles Simon drove, into the countryside, away from the lighted city, Alyce had not a clear idea. Seeing his hands on the steering wheel tight as fists.

She hadn’t even known that he owned a car. But perhaps this wasn’t Simon’s car but one borrowed for the night.

At last turning into an area cleared partially of snow. Long swaths of snow left by a forked plow. A small parking lot, it appeared to be, a rest stop with shuttered restrooms, beside the state highway and overlooking the river.

Had he planned this place? Alyce wondered. It did not seem to her by chance, Simon’s car turning into this remote place.

He has brought other girls here. It was his intention all along.

Telling Alyce that he knew what the situation was but wanted to hear from her. In her own words.

“No accident, is it? You knew. You wanted it.”

She had no clear idea what he was talking about. But there was no mistaking his anger.

“Did you? Purposefully? Use me? To trap me? Or—for some reason of your own, you’re too stupid even to know?”

Alyce licked her lips. To deny this, to cry no, would be a confirmation of his suspicion, a mistake.

She would not beg him to drive back to the city. She would not beg him. Desperately calculating how quickly she must act, to get out of the car before it was too late.

“I don’t intend to let you ruin my life, Alyce. No one is going to do that. If—”

Alyce grasped the car door handle, managing to open it before Simon could stop her. Surprising the man, she was so quick, and so strong, pushing away his flailing hand.

Because she’d seemed mute, passive. Because she had not resisted. He had underestimated her, had no idea of her cunning.

Outside, cold wet air against her face. Running, slipping on icy pavement as the man pursues her, thudding footsteps, surprisingly fast, faster than Alyce would have thought the priestly Kinch capable of. Coming up behind her furious and cursing and suddenly near enough to strike her with his fist, a glancing blow that would knock her down if she were not in motion, ducking instinctively from him, silent, teeth gritted, knowing she must not infuriate him more by screaming, and she must not squander her breath.

And now she is down, falling heavily onto the freezing ground. And the man above her, face white and contorted. Kicking her. Grunting, cursing. As she tries to shield her face, her head. Kicking her back, her sides, her thighs. Trying to turn her over, to kick her belly. Bitch. Whore. Did it on purpose. I will kill you.

So quickly it has happened, the man’s fury. As when he’d first touched her weeks ago. She’d felt the sudden flaring up of the man’s desire like flames that ran over each of them, and each of them helpless to thwart it. Thinking, But this can’t be happening. He would not—no…

In fury the man is sobbing. Oh, he had not meant to kick her.

Her fault, the woman’s fault. Provoking his feet to kick. Not his fault but hers. Making a beast of him when it is she, the female, that is the beast, the bestial thing. How can he forgive her!

Seeing that Alyce lies very still in a paralysis of terror, he ceases kicking her. Very exhausted, panting—he relents. But blaming her nonetheless. You! You did this. God damn your slut-soul to hell.

Simon will think that she has died, possibly. Or, no—Simon wipes tears from his eyes and can see that she is breathing, just perceptibly.

Backing off from the fallen girl, in disgust. Alyce can hear him muttering to himself. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! It is a plea, the most succinct Catholic prayer for help, forgiveness.

Alyce groans, wracked with pain. The man has returned to his car. He will drive away now, he will abandon her in this freezing place.

Her head is throbbing, her eyesight blotched. Later she will discover that the cartilage of her nose is broken, blood flows freely. Close against her face, rivulets of ice like veins. The warm blood—not hot: lukewarm—will freeze against the ice, if she gives in, if she allows herself, as she so badly wants to do, to sleep.

Lying on the ground. Trying to breathe. Lying where he has flung her. Where he stood above her kicking her, her belly, her chest, she can scarcely draw breath, the pain is so strong. Ribs cracked, broken. Massive bruises on her chest, belly. The bleeding face, broken nose. Broken tooth crushed into the gum. Wanting to kill her, but he has not killed her. Whatever is growing inside her, the living thing, the baby, he has wanted to kill but did not.

Ruining his life. It is the baby that will ruin his life.

All this Alyce thinks. Calmly and almost coolly, as if (already) she were floating some distance overhead observing the abject fallen figure (her own), the figure crouched over her (Simon Meech) and then backing away.

Very still she lies, in the cunning of desperation. Willing the man to drive away and leave her. Willing the car engine to flare into life, the foot pumping the gas pedal.

But then she hears his footsteps—staggering and wayward in the hard-crusted snow like the footsteps of a drunken man. Is he returning to her, to murder her?

By this time Alyce has managed to rise from the ground. She is very dizzy. She is on her knees. Her stunned face is smeared with blood, she has no idea she has been cut. No idea her tooth has been smashed into her gum, for there is no sensation in her lower jaw. A fist in her face, the heel of the man’s boot in her face. Her face, which has been so precious to her.

The man, infuriated, past all restraint, is returning to her. He is the priestly Kinch, he cannot help himself. Like one who must crush a beetle beneath his feet, cannot trust the badly wounded beetle to expire of its own volition, a filthy thing he must grind into oblivion. And Alyce fumbling to seize a rock too large for her hand, fist-sized, a rock covered in ice, as the man stoops over her, panting audibly, to strike her, to take hold of her, close his fingers around her neck.

Doesn’t know what he is doing. Fingers around the girl’s neck to squeeze, squeeze. Not planned. Not premeditated. There is innocence to it, almost. But Alyce slams the rock into his face, unbelievably. Somehow this has happened. Scarcely able to clutch the rock in her hand, yet Alyce summons the strength to slam the rock into the jeering face. Into the eyes and the bridge of his nose and she feels the crack of the bone and feels or imagines she feels the man’s wet warm rushing blood against her fingers. Against her face. Hears him cry out in rage, disbelief.

Running from him, limping. In triumph.

In triumph carrying her life as one might carry a torch, shielded against the wind. Her life, and the precious life within her, a torch, a tremulous flame, shielded by her crouched and running body from the wind.

And behind her the man calling to her. Pleading, Al-yce! Al-yce! Where are you, come back, I wasn’t serious. Al-yce!

Suffused with strength. Where moments before she’d been weak, paralyzed. Weak as if the tendons of her legs have been cut. As if the vertebrae of her upper back have been broken. As if her carotid artery has been slashed by an invisible knife wielded in the murderer’s hand, but new strength flows into her. Running into a snowy field beyond the parking lot. Thick-crusted banks of snow. Pathways through the snow, trampled by myriad feet. But the surface of the snow is icy-hard, treacherous. There has been a thaw, and refreezing. Melting, and immediate refreezing. Alyce is slip-sliding down a hill, into a ravine of rocks, boulders. Trickling water she imagines she hears, amid columns of ice.

Fainter now, the man’s uplifted voice. An attempt at laughter—Al-yce! I was only joking!

In the ravine she hides. A steep ravine, filled with snow. But beneath the snow, cast-off household things—broken chairs, sofa, stained carpet. The skeletal remains of a small creature—raccoon, dog. The man will drive into the interior of the park, along a winding road, calling to her—Al-yce! Darling! I love you, I was only joking! Come back! Sees, or thinks she sees, the headlights of the vehicle on the road until finally the lights have vanished and the wind is still.

Out of the steep snowy ravine. Clutching at rocks, her hands bloodied. And all the while snow falling, temperature dropping to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

How still, the soft-falling snow amid rocks! The yearning, the temptation to lie down, sleep.

Five miles back to the city. She will stagger to the highway, she will limp along the highway facing oncoming traffic. Blinded by headlights and her eyes aching where he’d kicked and punched and pummeled her until at last a motorist stops to pick her up.

Call ambulance? But no, Alyce insists no.

She is going to the hospital, no need of an ambulance.

Call police?—but no, Alyce insists no.

Trickle of blood between her legs. Not a sensation of heat but cold. Begins high in her belly, higher still in the region of her heart. Between her thighs clamped together tight, sticky clots she hopes won’t leak out and through her clothing onto the vinyl seat of the stranger’s car.

Thinking, I am alive. That is all that matters.

Elated to think so. Elated thanking the motorist for the ride.

Saying to the driver, Thank you. We owe you everything!

At the hospital, it is nearing midnight. At such an hour the front entrance of the building is locked, the foyer is darkened, and you must enter by the ER at the side of the building.

On foot, in light-falling snow. Lucky Alyce is wearing boots, these hours she has been walking, trudging, staggering in snow that has accumulated to a depth of four to five inches. On her hot skin, snowflakes melt at once. Laughing to see, as a child might see, how, behind her, there are no tracks in the fresh-fallen snow leading from the curb to the ER entrance.

“Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Let me in, please!”

A surprise to Alyce, the automated doors refuse to open. Locked from inside? She peers through the plate-glass window, baffled.

But yes, this is the ER. The reception area of the ER. Where they’d brought Roland B___ on a stretcher. An interior Alyce had not realized she’d memorized as one might memorize a poem unconsciously.

But at last someone comes to open the door. A medical worker in white nylon shirt, trousers. Alyce has no ID—Alyce has left her bookbag, her wallet, miles away. Fallen onto the floor of the man’s car, or out onto the frozen ground when she’d fled in terror of her life, to be discovered by a snow-removal crew in the morning.

At first they will not admit her into the ER. But then the decision comes to admit her.

Carefully it is explained to Alyce, she must take a back stairway to the fifth floor to where Roland B___ awaits her.

“You are his—granddaughter?”

“Yes! I am his granddaughter,” Alyce says, laughing. “He is expecting me. He won’t have gone to sleep without me.”

When she’d been alive she would have been deeply embarrassed. And the seeping-cold sensation between her legs, deeply embarrassing if anyone sees.

Now, grateful to be here. For nothing else matters, Alyce sees that now. The elderly poet awaits her. They will be together, he will cherish and protect her.

On the fifth floor. She is breathless from the stairs, there are no elevators at this hour. She is breathless from hurrying. The corridor is deserted. Where is the nursing staff? The doors to several rooms are ajar. And the door to room 526 is open, there is a blinding shaft of sunshine inside.

“Alyce, my dear! My darling. Where have you been? My beautiful ghost-girl, I have missed you.”

On the morning of December 11, 1972, the body of a young woman was found by hikers in a snow-filled ravine in a wooded area of Tecumseh State Park five miles north of Bridgewater. The young woman was initially believed to have been strangled to death, for there were multiple bruises on her throat as well as elsewhere on her body, but the Tecumseh County coroner has ruled the primary cause of death to be hypothermia. Subsequently identified as nineteen-year-old Alyce Urquhart of Strykersville, New York, a sophomore at the university, the victim is believed to have been left unconscious by her assailant or assailants in a ravine, to freeze to death when the temperature plummeted to a low of zero degrees Fahrenheit during the night.

If there were tire tracks on the roadway and in the parking lot near the ravine, a five-inch snowfall had covered them.

The deceased young woman had been an undergraduate in the College of Arts and Sciences at the university. Residents in her dormitory were reported to be shocked by the news of her death and spoke of her with respect and admiration, saying, You could see that Alyce was a very serious student. The rest of us would goof around, but not Alyce. She was always in the library. (At least, we thought Alyce was always in the library. We’d see her rushing off after class, she’d say she was going to study in the library where it was quiet, then she wouldn’t return until midnight.)

No, Alyce didn’t have a boyfriend, or a man friend. Never saw her at frat parties, or anywhere with a guy.

During her freshman year at the university Alyce Urquhart had earned high grades and was on the dean’s list. Her current instructors have testified that the young woman was an outstanding student until mid-November, when with no explanation she ceased attending classes regularly and failed to complete assignments.

Her philosophy instructor, Dr. Simon Meech, testified to police that Alyce Urquhart had done “usually very good” work in his section of Introduction to Philosophy.

No, he had not had any personal contact with the victim. He’d only realized that she was one of his students when he’d seen the “shocking and tragic” article on the front page of the local newspaper and checked the name against his class list to discover Alyce Urquhart on that list.

Dr. Meech had begun to notice that Miss Urquhart was missing classes when she failed to turn in a written assignment in early December. She had not offered her instructor any explanation and there had been no contact between them. Our undergraduates are adults whom we treat accordingly, Dr. Meech said. They must be responsible for attending classes as for completing their coursework.

Yes. The deceased had turned in work of unusual quality for an undergraduate in philosophy, and especially for a young woman.

Bridgewater police officers are investigating the death, which has been classified as a homicide. At the present time there are no suspects. Anyone with information that might prove helpful to the case is asked to call the Bridgewater Police Department at 555-330-2293.