The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross by Amanda Cross Read Free Book Online Page B

fire. “Someone, I suppose, should know. But if I tell you, it will end our friendship. I’ll trust you, but I won’t want to know you anymore. Which is a pity; the world is not that full of intelligent friends.”
    Kate couldn’t argue with the truth of that. “But if Isay don’t tell me, shall we go on being friends? Is it my decision?”
    “Probably not,” Henrietta said, sighing. “In telling you there was anything to tell, I’ve already crossed that bridge; I’ve already burned it.”
    “It’s ironic,” Kate said. “Like so much else. I guessed, of course–not what you would tell, but that there was something to tell. Once you knew that, we were destined to have only this one night by the fire.”
    “Truncated friendships are my fate,” Henrietta said. “As you shall learn. There never is any turning back.” Henrietta paused only a moment.
    “It began with a young woman very like Caroline now, a graduate student. We became friends, as you have with Caroline. But it was, or seemed, a more perilous friendship then. Women didn’t become close to one another; their eyes were always on the men. I was an associate professor, rather long in the tooth for that, but women didn’t get promoted very rapidly in those days. We talked, this graduate student and I, about, oh, everything I seemed never to have talked about. Such talk became more ordinary later, with CR groups and all the rest; it’s hard now to recall the loneliness of professional women in those years, the constant tension and anxiety of doing the wrong thing, of offending.
    “You have to understand what a conservative woman I was then. If I felt any criticism of the academic world I had fought my way into, I never let it rise to consciousness, let alone expressed it. I just wanted to be accepted, to teach, to write; I liked to tell myself it was simple. And my life was very full. There were the twins; there was my marriage, good then, better now, fine always–we’ve worked on it, examined our assumptions. But tounderstand this story you have to imagine yourself back then, back before Betty Friedan described ‘the problem that has no name.’
    “I asked my new friend to the country, alone, just as you are here tonight. The children stayed in Boston with their father; he was good about helping me to get away, now and then. And they were all involved in Red Sox games and other things I could never pretend interest in. He thought it might be good for me to talk to someone; ‘girl-talk,’ he called it. None of us had any decent language for women friends.” And Henrietta stopped and began to cry, not loudly, no noise at all. The tears fell silently. “Maybe you can guess the rest,” she said.
    Kate nodded. “She misunderstood, or you did. She made what used to be called a ‘pass.’ Today I think they would say she came on to you. Were you terrified?”
    “It isn’t even right to call it a pass. It was a gesture of love. I can see that now. Then, I simply went rigid with terror. And that’s what I felt: sheer, paralyzing terror. I knew nothing about women loving women, except that I feared it; we had been taught to fear it. My terror was obvious.”
    “And she ran away?”
    “No. She didn’t run. We went on with the evening–we’d arrived in late afternoon–we went on with dinner, we ‘made’ conversation. I never really understood the agony of that phrase until then. Somewhere in her diaries Woolf talks of beating up the waves of conversation. We did that. Nothing helped; not wine, not food. We said nothing that mattered. The next morning she was gone.”
    “Gone from graduate school too?”
    “Yes. I had no idea where she was, or what had become of her. I tried, discreetly of course, to find out, but sheseemed simply to have vanished. The way graduate students do vanish, from time to time. Sometimes they surface again, sometimes not. Once in a while–and this is what terrified me most–they kill themselves.”
    “But she