The Trial of Callista Blake

eets downtown. Now the drawing table and empty chair in her studio brought Callista poignan

dewalk grit flung by the wind; with gaudy lights desperately imitating good cheer, drizzle-nosed bell-ringers and Santa Clause

of a pair of whistling teen-agers. Edith had been dourly amused. Try looking at the face some time, kids!-and the mood kept with her as far as her third floor

studio. A fantastic way to earn a living, close to the mainstream of human vanity. But at this end, with the north light, wall-shelves, drawing table, work could be done after survival was taken care of. Callista's work for a year, a

e days ago. Edith knew the drawings. She would find nothing new in them now, when she was out of temper and moved by a wish to start some work of her own. Glance at that abandoned wagon in long grass? Or the supermarket clerk, homely day's end weariness caught in a dozen lines with that compassion of Callista's (at nineteen!) which she could almost never convey in spoken words? Not now. Edit

The voice was slurred, uncertain. "Miss Nolan-Edith-all eve

" She tried not to

rather drunk. "May seem unreason'

I don't hate you

er down the hole of a handbasin. She heard a beat of mechanical music; Jim would be in a bar, the booth shut against a squalling of radio or television. The large-boned, dark-Irish face would be pale with alcohol, filmed with sweat, black hair disordered, wide mouth talking against its own unwillingness. Dark eyes rigid, unfocused, behind them Jim's own

t hear wha

l, for her, though I suppose that doesn't m

friend hear w

n Father Bland.

he d

reproach; it must have done Jim good to

'Go away,

ckground noise, a hot trumpet squeaking up the summits o

own? If even Sam Grainger couldn't quite admit that divergence of language long ago (my own language far simpl

ay?" Hadn't Jim hear

another name: Sam (where are you?) do you still love her (the name was Red-Top, remem

held the receiver further away with its wiry babble of misery:

e with what she

wrong, she wasn'

nly, there was a-" (Edith, stop! Don't say it!)-"a tangible

I know, you can beat me over the head with the pregnancy if you want

hat would you do? That would be wages of sin, I guess? The way it was God's will you should try out a virgin for v

ave called. Go

ical need to slash again, with claws. She fumbled a cigarette from the box by the telephone. Anyway Jim

m wants, Sam earns and gets. She noticed she was thinking in the present tense. Fair enough: it would still be true. Sam Grainger would still be a man dedicated and absorbed, immune to discouragement, too big for distractions. He had not been too seriously distracted by an affair with a redheaded art student. So what has become of th

coal furnace in the basement was very nearly a form of love. You saw the Cardles dealing with an ebb and flow of Boston lodgers world without end. But they could have been human and mortal; the brownstone could have yielded to a flat-face

black curls in mimic savagery, twisting free of him, racing him to the bed, caught with welcome violence and sudden entering thrust, violently held through a long course of love, an animal riot of pleasure carrying them together to the height, to the moment when the heart must break and die a little, the explosion of not-pain, the blindness and the quiet. And the quiet: summit of a hillside, also homely truth of two bodies in the aftermath of

ere had been cause to resent his indifference toward her own work, ambition, oriented dreaming. Not indifference: call it lack of awareness. As on that h

ver s

rcolor and didn't see it. Cheerful, until her darkening hopelessly unreasonable mood infected him. When the quarr

-the-world was gone: in the darkness behind daily perception two strangers still winced and glared, aston

w in 1959), remembering more clearly than any other conversation what her father had said before she left: "Look, Skinnay, you marry or work at something you like, or just loaf a while and raise hell, but don't turn into a dutiful daughter taking care of the old man." Shoving aside a heap of paper work brought home-the old man was a C.P.A. and a good one-and turning up to her the bald head, moon face, tenderly sarcastic eyes. "Don't do that, or I will turn you over my knee, and you

theart second? A lot of the time I was just damn well fighting ... Deep inside, very likely, the daughter of earth had been weig

lness and the erosion of daily demands, waiting for the rainbow blaze that may never appear, the heart knowing all the time that there's only one life and not much time to live it? Edith fidgeted, angr

lephone call, she had not yet turned up the heat for the Burrow. Maybe she wouldn't bot

ea when she was on the point of tossing them in the laundry bag. At least she had made the bed. Too much alone, small Edith. She remembered with a wrench of pain that early last Aug

of social and religious authority-no, there could have been no conversation. What ailed her, going overboard for that bundle of bad luck? Call it chance. Swept away by need, nearness, charm of a prepossessing male; maybe unknowin

dow and hummed across chimney-

uld deepen, and the brackets at nose and mouth. Red hair must whiten-quickly, one could hope, without streaks. That smoothness from small chin down a slim neck to the collar of Venus with no sag or wrinkle at thirty-one-well. Already crowding her luck a bit there; pretty Ann Doherty, for all her needless dieting, had been starting a tiny double chin at

lectrodes concealed by an intole

s not to be said. Mother, the morphine not helping yet, certain she'd left something on the stove to boil over, co

cross thin woman who talked sharply to Jim Doherty a few minutes ago? You say: It was one I who thought and acted thus and so; now I am not what I was, but I inherit any co

t that we know who we are! In a ship you can stay below, avoid the portholes, ignore the long rise and fall as the vessel encounters a rolling of the sea, and pretend your cabin is a landside thing: fine woodwork, carpet, all that, and if now and then you do feel a throb of en

age. She took out Callista's letter, carefully as though the pages were drawings, and the large light hand

r E

ly talk in my worst way to anyone else-Cecil is too vulnerable. And I miscalculated, thought we had mo

talk I never heard till I met you. I'd better keep my shell until this is over, I seem to need it. Stay away just because I do cherish you. Dear Edith, I'm sickened to remember

night uproar with Mother that I described to you. Give him more of that, will you? I made a botch of telling him, I suppose because I love him, my mind wouldn't focus on my own mess. How does

ay. You heard me whimper once, only once. Alone, I do a good deal of that, friend, I can't help it-hermit crab's a soft blob of nothing-much inside the borrowed shell. I'm no Latimer

ve to

lis