Memory is short. So short. At the crucial point the President is on the stand, a potential criminal needing but one push to be impeached, scorned by the upright for leagues around. Let him be acquitted—and in a year all is forgotten. "Yes, he did have some trouble once, just a technicality, I believe. He's a businessman, after all, not a humanitarian." Time passes quickly, like an epileptic fit, and his sins are all washed away. Oh, the memory is so very short! How I wish it was the same with murder.

Get up, something tells me, it's getting late.

I woke up with a droning in my ears and a feeling of utter weakness all over. I was still on the floor, head on the bundled dress. I must have pulled it off the hanger, and gone to sleep there. The air was pungent with an organic smell of flesh, sweat and a tinge of iron, from the blood, and another smell, more animal, that was coming, it must have been, from me. My hands were sticky and bright pink, but my body was dull and white and dry. I could see it in the mirror, out of the corner of my left eye. Mary, blessed mother of God. I slowly got up, moaning, and shed my clothes to take a better look at myself. Everything, including my underpants and socks, was anointed with thick drops of congealed blood, and as I reached my hand behind my back, I realized that I was still bleeding. My heart swelled up with misery. Ignoring the pain and the sick feeling caused by the pain, I attempted to produce a smile.

"Well, it could've been much worse," I said to myself, smiling with helpless stupidity. "Why, it could've been so much worse."

I moved at last from the mirror and began to cover my salty nakedness with a fresh dress. At last I said a quick prayer and stepped outside the room, cautiously, noiselessly, like a cat, my mouth hurting from having over stretched it, and went downstairs. Inevitably I began to feel in myself a faint, dreadful stirring of something unshakable; a great cold, and trembling, and ache so painful I thought my chest would burst. As I saw Vella, who was leaning absent-mindedly over the banister, I felt almost merry. As she saw me, she turned deftly away. I drew a long breath of relief.

"Miss Smith, what time is it? I might have overslept."

But without even as much as a glance in my direction, Vella hurdled right past me and disappeared upstairs. I was confused and disappointed, but I was also cold and not quite myself, so I took refuge in her indifference.

About a week ago Lee and Belcher dragged from the basement a wash-tub of unbelievable dimensions and placed it in our bathhouse (no question, naturally, of there being an actual bath), but pretty soon they found out that it was too small for any other men to fit in it, that is, I was the only one who could use it. We didn't have hot water, so I never took the opportunity; but now I felt a strange need for it, maybe to soothe my back, maybe to perform a second Baptism. I really can't remember.

On the floor of the bath house there was no skimpy glorified towel of a rug—instead, a succession of white rags layed out as a sort of path leading to the tub, like a great stretch of snow presided over by a cold and formidable sun of a flickering lightbulb. The scalding water, turned pink from my touch, held me down like hands and was as sharp as broken glass. Shivering, I lathered my head with soap and poured the water down my back. Instantly I felt a sharp tug of pain and had to gather all the forces of resistance left within me not to cry out. Something heavy rolled up through my loins and throat. The misery and anxiety of the last hours weighed so heavily upon me that it became almost unbearable. Tears started into my eyes. I covered my face with my hands and wept hard and quietly for a while, shaking in the same parts as a weeping woman.

At that moment in came Charles, who seemed not in the least disconcerted to see me.

"Here's our little John Brown! I was searching for you all over the place.Where've you been all night?"

I felt uneasy at the sound of my name.

"I'm no John Brown," I said, quickly wiping my eyes and rinsing the soap into the tub. "There's nothing even remotely heroic about me."

"You don't say."

Charles went to the sink to wash his hands. Something in him reminded me of a Southern farmer: his shirt was covered in dried mud, and his wide straw hat was knocked at a brave slant over one side of his head. He was handsome. That is, I call him handsome because everyone called him so. He was thin and finely built, with thick black hair, a fresh but somewhat sallow skin, and always clean-shaven. Obviously he would remain a beauty even when his skin stretched tight over his cheekbones–the essential structure was there. What's more, his face was able to change suddenly from hardness to a wonderfully friendly, gentle and tender expression, and, what is more, with unmistakable frankness. It was just that frankness which made him attractive.

"Henry is a great name. I bet you everybody in the next generation will be named John or James," Charles suggested, "because everyone in this country is Catholic all of a sudden. Only to be a John you ought to look sort of like a horse, with a long narrow face—and you ought to be in tatters; at least that's how I see it."

I had to laugh.

"That's only the John part, though. How should Brown look?"

"You look like Brown," he assured me seriously—"Rather solemn. And warm."

"I'm a solid block of ice, though" I murmured casually, glancing at my feet whose color underwater was of the most delicate and transparent bluish white.

Charles turned away from the sink and came towards me.

"You're bound to end up with pneumonia if you keep sittin' in cold water," he said. "Come on now, get out before you freeze to death."

I covered my partly washed body with a rag.

"I'm alright, thank you."

"We've got to ask Hamilton to get us one of them heater things," Charles leaned forward to touch the water. "Like those they have in New York, you know, that blows warm air up at you as you stand on it—What the hell is that?"

Startled, he drew back.

"It's the blood," I answered calmly, as though speaking to myself.   

"Blood! What blood?"

I turned my face down, staring at the wisps and patches of light that rippled in the pink around me.

"I got myself whipped."

Charles grabbed me by my shoulders and made me turn my back to him.

"Jesus Christ!" he cried. "What did you do?"

"I spilled some wine on Jefferson's pants. It's no big deal."

Charles spent the next two or three minutes aimlessly poking around my wounds, first with the rag and then with his fingers. After two minutes of this, he despaired of making me feel better.

"Oh, what an ass he is!" he muttered angrily. "Comes into this house like he owns it, and then beats servants that aren't even his! God, if I had my way, I'd strangle him myself."

Through clenched teeth I grunted:

"It wasn't Jefferson."

"Then who was it? Your entire back is crushed."

"Well, who do you think it was?"

An indefinable expression of wonder passed over Charles' face. A week prior, Vella looked at me with a similar puzzled expression. I felt myself growing annoyed.

"Are you trying to say that Hamilton beat you?"

"Well, yes!" I interposed roughly. "God, why does no one ever believe me? Your Hamilton is a goddamn tyrant!"

Charles' voice was strangely quiet and he spoke slowly as if drawing his words from a store of thought seldom used:

"Trust me, buddy, you'd rather he'd beat you. You'd be happier if he did. But he's queer in other ways, and there's no understanding of him at all. I like him, but it's neither heads nor tails I can make of most he does. Now tell me true, what happened?

"I'm rather too cold to talk," I said, briskly, to hide my disappointment. "Forget it."

I began to dry my hair with a towel.

"Look, I'm sorry–"

"I said, forget it. Maybe I am a schizophrenic after all."

"What are you talking about?"

I hesitated, but quickly corrected myself:

"I was meaning to say that I must be imagining things. Now turn away, will you?"

Charles obliged, strangely embarrassed.

The morning outside weighed on my shoulders with the dreadful weight. The giant pines were very vivid beneath the wakening sky, as the horizon beyond them was starting to ame. Vella had just begun opening the upper windows of the house, appeared momentarily in each, and then disappeared. It was time I went back. Sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my bath, I walked towards the house – across the lawn well-shaved by Charles, and abounded in small muddy swamps from the rain. Then I slowly crept to the kitchen, from the back door, casting hurried glances about me. Why was I suddenly so scared? Theodosia was occupied there, kneading dough in a big tin pot. The kitchen smelled of yeast, a nostalgic smell. It reminded me of other kitchens. It smelled of mothers; although my own mother did not make bread.

"Will you eat?" Theodosia asked, without looking at me.

"I could eat a horse."

She nodded, and wiped her floury hands on her apron.

"Sit down."

She brought my lunch, covered, on a tray. She must have prepared it last night.

"Do you need anything?"

I gazed up at her, and wondered, with sudden annoyance, why on earth she should look so sad.

"No," I responded, flatly. "Thank you."

It was quite clear that she didn't believe me. But she just shrugged her shoulders. Now that I saw she was about to leave I wished I could think of something to make her stay. Perhaps I had something to say to her—to her? I felt that I wanted to be forgiven, I wanted her to forgive me. But I did not know how to state my crime.

After breakfast, I tried to distract myself by mopping the floors downstairs. Now that I have an altogether different mess on my conscience, I know that I am not a courageous man; far from it. But in those days I was not aware of it, and I remember being surprised by my own terrified impulses. As I crawled on all fours around the hallway, hissing and wreathing from pain, trying to get rid of water stains on the floor, I belated myself endlessly for being such a baby. I ached abruptly with a longing to go home; not to a room in Buffalo, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, across the country, to the things and people I knew and understood; perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. It was not really so strange, so unprecedented, though voices deep within me boomed, For shame! For shame! that I should so abruptly, so hideously deteriorate into a state of childlike terror.

I clenched the rag in my fist. The fear of something passing all understanding and outside the natural order of things, as though in mockery of all the conclusions of reason, came to me and stood before me as an undeniable fact, hideous, horrible, and relentless. Every noise and every fleeting shadow made me feel as though someone was watching me; and perhaps, indeed, I was being watched, only I hadn't noticed it because I was sitting with my back to all doors, and that just at that very instant perhaps one of the doors was opening. When another inexplicable noise came, this time from the library, I couldn't bear it any longer and had to turn back. At this instant, coincidentally, monstrously, the library door swung open, and someone almost tripped over me from where I was lurking outside it.

"Oh, for Christ's sake, you scared the living daylights out of me!"

I started to quiver– why doesn't the epithet "quiver" quite satisfy me?

"I apologize."

I felt like a moth crystal, hiding in the attic, or wardrobe, under a helical staircase, or behind a lonely buficit forgotten in a bare room, about to be crushed under someone's enormous blind shoe. The shoes in front of my eyes seemed all-powerful, indeed, and the fact that their owner was wearing pajama pants, spotted in front, a button undone on the fly, gave them a certain pleasant immunity. Still there remained, on top of the shoe polish, a clear footmark from last afternoon. Polish was Hamilton's natural element; sometimes he even used it for his hair, when he was out of gelatin. And yet, he hadn't even attempted to conceal the stain I had left on him. As I searched this fact for a vibration of logic, an unexplained sense of anger began to steal over me.

"It was hard to find you," said the voice above me, unpoised. "Where've you been?"

I slowly raised my head. Now, kneeling at Hamilton's feet, I saw with sudden and ineffable vividness how in five minutes he would enter his study, furnished in luxury, would settle in the deep leather armchair beside the mahogany desk with its Turkish snuffbox open for him, would light a cigar, cross his legs with cheap gaiety and forget all about the agony of his hopeless servant.

"I'm expecting an answer."

"I was asleep, sir," I faltered pathetically, in a voice quite unlike my own.

"Good, because I didn't sleep at all. All this trifle has distressed me– for, after all, it is a trifle, you will agree. But there are more important things. I lost a cuffing in the library. Can't find it anywhere."

For a moment I felt that I should like to be a wild beast— to drive my nails into his shoes, or his jaunty flannel suit, to tear it into pieces like a cat does a mouse. I cared but little what became of me provided I could get rid of this aloof, cruel snob. Yet I couldn't force out a single word. His dark eyes took me in, and for a moment I wondered what they would look like if he wasn't lying. He seemed shaken up– perhaps more shaken up than usual, ruffled and sweaty; even his right hand, which had formerly displayed two heavy rings, was now innocent of ornament; but ultimately what gave him away was the nervous wriggling of toes under the taught black leather. He fiddled with his cuff for a little while, and then, giving up on the lie, stared me right in the face, as though he wished to study it and to linger on it. The hideous and agonisingly fearful sensation I had felt before began to come back more and more vividly. He must have noticed it in my reddened face and dripping nose, because it made him look away and clear his throat.

"I don't want you to talk to Vella," he said at last. "And altogether don't let me see you beside her. It's an order. Do you understand?"

Was this his intention from the very beginning, then? To have me wondering, What's he going to do next? To have me flinch when he moves, even if it's a harmless enough move, to fix his collar perhaps. To have me crawling on my knees?

There was a moment of shocked silence – and then murmurs of protest, stricken queries– all inside my head. I could have said it then, said no to him, or at least asked the reason why, for I knew I could not let the girl go now – but something else told me to sleep on it. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with someone's cold hand around my throat.

"Yes, Sir."

"Very well. Now, do you mind addressing me properly?"

He reached his hand out towards my head, subconsciously it seemed, as though trying to pet a dog. I flinched. His fingernails were unkempt and yellow, but the phalanges, the whole carpus, the strong shapely wrist were far, far finer than mine: I have hurt far more bodies with  my twisted little hands to be proud of them. I shut my eyes, feeling the bevel of the revolver in my tight-clutched fist.

"Yes, Your Exellency."

Hamilton retracted his hand. Alas I couldn't hold my lunch, and after he left, I threw up decorously into the soap bucket.

***

After this we had a period of stagnation which lasted for about a week. The pain was beginning to go away, but not the fear; the fear never went away. I was scared of him, scared of what he might do to me. I was afraid when he talked tome, afraid when he looked at me, more afraid yet when he didn't. I needed to know exactly where he was at all times; otherwise I felt like I'd go mad. When I think back to that week, I can never sort the sequence of events. There are a few key scenes. Friday, wearing a well-tailored overcoat and brown gloves, Mister H. might be seen maneuvering his Ford out of the yard and around the evergreens, and down onto the slippery road. Seen on Tuesday, around  one P.M., locking himself in the library. Sunday, raising a cold eye from his newspaper when I walked past him; then looking away. Sometimes he would disappear for days. The hours of his absences were heavenly, hours when sound from the world beyond the house would suddenly filter in so clearly that I was sure I had traveled back in time. But even these hours were strained by fear, as if fear were a poltergeist haunting the walls of the estate. Inevitably Hamilton would return in the early morning hours, hungover and putrid, and dimly depraved, the top buttons of his shirt unfastened. No one else seemed to care about his wanderings. Oh, that's right, he's been gone for a while. No, no idea. 

Then there are leftover scenes: a stormy afternoon, rain pelting the windows, the lean, hooded figure of Charles doing battle with the elements outside, always pulling up weeds even in the rain, and in the background, all the way from the kitchen downstairs, Vella's voice twittering away about some sort of candy she particularly liked. This was one of the rare times I could hear her talk. She must have received the same order from Hamilton, and chose to follow it without question. Clearly I was being punished for something; but so was she. I could see that she strived to open to me occasionally, as if inadvertently. Sometimes she would give me a timid jerk of a smile, or steal a rapid glance at me, before dropping  her eyes on the ground. This was as unjust to her as it was to me.

The crisis which I then felt to be approaching had arrived soon, but in a form a hundred times more unexpected than I had looked for. This week of scattered showers and shadows elapsed with an ultimate sunburst, one gloomy night when I was cleaning the library. It was yet another task I had purposefully burdened myself with, although I did not have to. I invented in myself a kind of pleasure in playing the housewife, but the pleasure was never real or deep. Over and against this pleasure was something else which my brain persistently analyzed and dealt with as a tiresome complex and which, as a result, had sent me to a library that had none of the books I really wanted to read. I wiped the dusty shelves, examining the contents of the innumerable volumes on history and philosophy and law, all bound in gold and silver. But I couldn't care less about those wonderful books.

Sweating in the fierce white light, and howled at, and trodden upon by policemen, John Laurens is now ready to make another confession: I am thoroughly obsessed with romance. I leaf again and again through the memories of my miserable childhood, and keep asking myself, was it then that the obsession began. My father didn't love my mother – that much was obvious. They got on very badly and, without ever knowing how or why I felt it, I felt that their battle had everything to do with my existence. Eleanor, buoyant with nature, wanted to travel, to lay on the sofa, reading magazines, but I held her down, like led strapped to her ankles. Ever since I had the horror of her death, Henry spoke of her only as my mother and, in fact, as he spoke of her, he might have been speaking of his own. He concluded her passing had had an unsettling effect on my imagination and perhaps I shouldn't be grieving. He explained, before sending me away to New York, that death is but an inevitable part of life and he suggested that I take it lightly. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed how much I had grown to hate him, and how much I wanted to be nothing like him. From then on, to me life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to my defiance that I formed the habit of reading—it soothed me. I read about love, because love is the opposite of death. The first two years my allowance was more than liberal, and I laid the foundations for a personal library by purchasing rare editions of Austin, Mitchell, and Brontë. I was as proficient as any of my peers in gambling, smoking and politics, and was the best dancer of them all; but I differed from all the rest of my friends in that these pleasant activities were not the end and aim of life to me, and I stood alone in my interest in books and romance. I dreamt of love. Love I thought was something soft, maudlin and aesthetic, quite different from that passion full of rage which my friends described to me. My heart was ardent and receptive. In my younger years I had believed myself bound to be in love, and I had done my best to persuade myself that I was deeply smitten with that girl or another. I know that the shock of Eleanor's death made a permanent obstacle to any further romance  throughout  the  years  of  my  youth. In my relationships with girls I was brisk and prudent; I was even unable to mate with them, as other children would  have  so  easily  found  an opportunity to do, and, in fact, I never did. Whenever I saw a girl naked, an image of my mother would appear before my mind's eye, blind with worms, her red hair as dry as metal and brittle as a twig, straining to press me against her crushed body. Then I, alone, and relieved to be alone, returned to my room and read, or wrote to my father asking for money, or sat in a park and read, about secret affairs, heartbreak, and love at first sight, always imagining myself in place of the female lead; it seemed to come more naturally. But no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of whether this was quite normal.

Despite its limited character, Hamilton's library was majestic: side by side with clumsy ancient book cabinets were superb easy-chairs, a large writing-table of excellent workmanship, a daintily carved bookcase, little tables, shelves. By the time I got around to dusting the furniture, gray dusk had entered the room. It was then that I noticed a book laying open face down on the end of the writing table. It had a worn down appearance, with its yellowed pages and a mangled spine. I flipped it over and read the title page: Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal: the psychological romance of to-day. Romance, then. I stared at the book like one would stare at an almost extinct animal at the zoo. Suddenly I desired it with a force that made the ends of my fingers ache. At the same time I saw this longing of mine as trivial and absurd, because I'd taken such books lightly enough once. Here was my personal instrument of relief, the adulterant of my teenage years, left carelessly, in Hamilton's private library, where you'd least expect to find such a thing. The idea of H. reading romantic literature in his spare time, in between mysterious wanderings and violent outbursts, at once introduced a richer and more  intimate  shot  of  color to his identity than was strictly necessary. It was impossible to believe that his personality, or at least a certain homogenous  and  striking part of his personality, had affinities with my own. I  had  always  been  singularly  absent-minded, or nosey, or both. Curiosity got the best of me at last, and I began reading from where he must have previously left off.

"Our two bodies were now in as close a contact as the glove is to the hand it sheathes, our feet were tickling each other wantonly, our knees were pressed together, the skin of our thighs seemed to cleave and to form one flesh.

"Though I was loath to rise, still, feeling his stiff and swollen phallus throbbing against my body, I was just going to tear myself off from him, and to take his fluttering implement of pleasure in my mouth and drain it, when he—feeling that mine was now not only turgid, but moist and brimful to overflowing—clasped me with his arms and kept me down.

"Opening his thighs, he thereupon took my legs between his own, and entwined them in such a way that his heels pressed against the sides of my calves. For a moment I was gripped as in a vice, and I could hardly move."

It was too late when realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that my hands were trembling and the book was suddenly hot, alive, some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed creature which I had miraculously happened to find dying on the ground. The creature wanted something from me. All the blood vessels in its delicate body were strongly extended and the nerves stiff, the spermatic ducts full to overflowing; it lay in my hands, spouting blood from one end and life-giving fluid from another, and I knew I was responsible for every single drop– they seemed to be drops of caustic, burning me, and producing a strong, unbearable irritation. I felt a dull pain spread over and near all the organs of generation. I dropped the book and backed away. I was ashamed. I could have cried.

"Encule. Dirty son of a bitch."

I feel in myself now a faint, dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then. So this was le grand moment. Without the least warning, the book became forthwith the weighty sesame to a rapturous and formidable future.