Three Short Novels Read Online Free Page A

one coast to the other. She felt the vibrations of the city at work in the night; woke for a moment at midnight and knew that people were moving through the city on trolleys and in cars, going to and from the shipyards; heard the long convoys of brown, canvas-covered trucks rumbling through the streets in the hours before dawn; and knew, at dawn, that people were rising from their beds in rooms they had moved into the day before. It seemed to her that whole regions of people were moving into the city; she heard dialects that were like foreign languages, and strange intonations, strange pitches. Around her everything was in flux, and when she lay down beside David during the blackouts, the time of hiding in darkness with the rest of the people in the city was like a step into further mingling with them. She felt that she was using the child as ballast, as a mooring, and that, without him, if he did not exist, she might step out the door into the flood of change.
    One night, before they fell asleep together, she kissed him over his face and head fervently, in need of protection from him, trying to kiss him into that condition of stability that she had desired from her husbands and that her kisses of adoration deluded her into believing they possessed. With her kissing of her son she wanted to persuade him to become at once a man and protect her from her desire to run out into the chaos. David whimpered against the fervency of her kisses, and she released him and lay back, turning her face to the window. The night was faintly illumined by the moon that was rising in that part of the sky not visible to her. She felt an exhaustion as after love and the dissatisfaction that at times combined with it, that desire for something more, as if something more had been promised her that was not yet given.

4
    A friend of her mother’s owned a dress shop off the lobby of one of the larger hotels, and she accepted a job there as a salesgirl. She wanted to sing again in a lounge, but that would be like an act of infidelity. Even her job at the hotel might seem like that to her husband, and when he returned for a few days before he was sent to England, she did not tell him that she was working.
    The shop’s windows faced the lobby and the street, both, and so the shop, with its gilded, high-domed ceiling, was like a display case for her. The hotel guests glanced in at her and she glanced out at them. She saw them as also on display, a passing display of generals and officers, industrialists, and diplomats. The hotel was like a hub for the entire war-frantic city. She saw them arriving and departing in immaculate uniforms and perfect suits, their faces not so preoccupied with their great tasks that she went unnoticed.
    She sold dresses to wealthy women, some of them her friends and her mother’s friends, to discontented young women and young women delighted with their lives, and to elderly women whose sagging flesh was held up by elaborate corsets. Since her own mother wasslender, Vivian had never seen women’s bodies compressed and thrust up, and when these women took a long time to feel cloth between their fingers, or to decide for or against a ruffle or pleat, or to turn around and around again, in gowns and negligees, before the triple mirrors, their contemplation and deliberation seemed to her so futile. The war was not their concern; their anxiety was for their reflection in the long mirrors in the dressing room, whether they grew old like queens, as if age were an accretion of power, or sweetly, to placate the inevitable, or grew old retaliatively, as if everyone were cheating them of life. Among these elderly ones she felt a species apart, herself the only one of her kind, never to grow old and never to die.
    In this gilded room with claret carpet and chairs of ocher velvet and rows of gowns on black velvet hangers, in this room fragrant with cologne sprayed into the air, where she was visible from the street and the