board, of course, and had to wait for a connection. After a bit, she got it, and Jacqueline’s voice, a cool, measured modulation, was saying, “Miss Wieland speaking.”
Kathy answered with a rush. “Jacqueline? This is Kathy, Jacqueline.”
There was a pause in which something grew, and Jacqueline’s voice, when it came back on, had subtle undertones, like the voice of a woman speaking casually to her lover when her husband was present. “Oh, hello, Kathy. How are you this morning?”
“I want to see you. I went to your place last night, but you weren’t home.”
“I had an engagement, I’m afraid. Sorry you made the trip for nothing.”
“I must see you, Jacqueline.”
“Well, I have a rather full schedule today. I’m not even having lunch out.”
“Please, Jacqueline.”
The pause again, a slight alteration in the undertone. A kind of soft wariness. “You sound urgent, Kathy. Is something wrong?”
“Yes. I can’t tell you about it now. Not over the telephone.”
“Very well. I’ll leave here about five o’clock. Meet me in the Bronze Lounge, and you can tell me over a cocktail. I’m sure it can’t be too serious.”
The line went dead, and Kathy sagged against the side of the booth, fighting again the dark compulsion to hysterical laughter. Not serious, Jacqueline had said. Not too serious. Just the bad end of a good idea.
Outside the booth, she looked again at her watch and was astonished to see how few degrees the minute hand had progressed. Five o’clock seemed remote in time, an improbable prospect in her own life. It was not yet ten. Over seven hours before five. She wondered how she could ever get through them to the Bronze Lounge and Jacqueline, and the appointment, now that it had been made, had assumed in her mind the character of a goal to be reached at any cost, a kind of terminal point of danger, beyond which she would be once more quite secure. She understood, actually, that there was no good reason for this, no reason at all to think that anything would be better after she had seen Jacqueline, but that there was, on the other hand, a good possibility that everything would be worse, depending upon Jacqueline’s response. But though she understood this very well, it would have been ruinous to acknowledge it, and so she continued to think of the hour of five as an established haven toward which the hands of her watch crept with unnatural slowness. It was only necessary to survive, somehow, the intervening time.
If only she could sleep. If she could sleep away the time, waking just soon enough to keep the appointment, all her trouble would be resolved. But she would never be able to sleep. If she tried, she would lie staring with hot, dry eyes into a past that offered no consolation and a future that offered no hope, and this was something to be avoided beyond all else. But there were inducements to sleep. What about a sedative? A barbiturate of some kind. Perhaps it would be possible to take just enough of something to let her sleep five or six hours, but not enough to prevent her keeping the appointment with Jacqueline. It would be a risky business, and she would have to be very cautious in the amount she took, rather too little than too much, for it would be the culminating disaster if she failed to be in the Bronze Lounge at the stipulated time. She held desperately to the blind, irrational conviction that Jacqueline would somehow have the solution to her problem, that her ills could be cured over a cocktail.
Turning with a jerk, she walked over to the prescription counter and stood drumming with her fingers until a bald man in a tan linen jacket came up from the rear and asked her what she wanted.
“I’d like some sleeping medicine,” she said, and added redundantly because her nerves were taut: “Something to make me sleep.”
The pharmacist looked at her, lifting his eyes from her drumming fingers to her face. “Have you a prescription?”
“No. I…I didn’t realize that it was necessary to have a prescription. Can’t you sell me something without one? Surely there’s some kind that doesn’t require a prescription.”
He shook his head. “Sorry, lady. Law’s pretty strict about it. You go see a doctor, get a prescription and come back. I’ll be glad to serve you if you get a prescription.”
“Yes. I guess I’ll have to. Thanks very much.”
She turned and walked rapidly up the aisle between counters and out onto the sidewalk. She had the feeling all the way that the bald pharmacist was watching her suspiciously from behind his counter, that she had in some way given him a clue to her guilt simply by asking for sleeping medicine. It required a tremendous exertion of will to keep from running, and she felt icy sweat gather in her arm pits and trickle in thin lines down across her ribs. Turning left on the sidewalk, she walked for several blocks with the same accelerated pace with which she’d left the drug store. After a while, she saw a small park on the opposite side of the street, just one square block with trees and shrubs and scattered benches and the cast-iron figure of a man with an axe in his hands. Crossing the street, she went into the park and sat down on a bench, staring straight ahead past the cast-iron man and breathing deeply with a slow, measured rhythm.
Most doctors are men, she thought. This in itself was insignificant, but she was disturbed by the probability that no doctor would give her a prescription for what she wanted just because she asked him for it. He would want to know why. He would ask her questions. He would want to assure himself by his own diagnosis that the medicine was proper and necessary. He would want to examine her, and though she might suffer all the other elements of a consultation, this she certainly couldn’t She might find a woman doctor, of course. But they were fewer than men and would be more difficult to locate. She would probably have to travel quite a distance to reach the office of one, and even after she had gone to so much trouble, she couldn’t be sure that she would get what she wanted. Trouble and the chance of failure combined to weigh heavily against the effort.
Still, it would be sweet to sleep. To sleep and to waken and to go at once to Jacqueline. Sleep was the balm of hurt minds. Who had said that? Surely someone had said it. It was not something that had just come into her mind. It had the nice, round sound of something that someone had said before. The balm, the balm, the balm of hurt minds. Oh, yes! Oh, God, yes! Who else but old Macbeth? Who but the bloody old Thane of Cawdor himself? The Thane had committed a murder, too, though it was a long time ago and for a different reason, so murder gave them a sort of common denominator, and it was right that she should now remember something he had said. But if you wanted to be technical, it wasn’t really Macbeth who had said it at all, but Shakespeare. Shakespeare had written a play about Macbeth, and he had made Macbeth say that bit about sleep being the balm of hurt minds, so it was really Shakespeare himself who had said it. Not that one needed to quibble. It was a fine line, a true line, a line big enough to divide its credit among all the people in the world who had ever said it—among Macbeth and Shakespeare and Dr. Vera Telsa. There was probably no line Shakespeare had ever written that Dr. Vera Telsa hadn’t repeated sometime or other, and most of them many times. Dr. Vera Telsa loved Shakespeare. She had once settled an old argument by telling Kathy in confidence that Shakespeare was neither Shakespeare nor Sir Francis Bacon. Shakespeare, she’d said, was a woman.
Dr. Vera Telsa was a teacher of literature in a college Kathy had once attended for a very short while. Her class in Shakespeare had an excellent reputation on the campus, but Kathy had never been in the Shakespeare class, because Shakespeare was not open to freshmen, and Kathy had never got to be anything else. She had been in Dr. Telsa’s freshman survey class, however, because the college, Burlington College for girls, was small and select, and that was one of the advantages of a small, select school. Even when you were a freshman, you got good teachers, really top-drawer teachers with Ph.D.s who had written books and maybe some articles for scholarly and literary magazines, and not someone who was working his way to a degree by teaching a class or two. And even in a survey course, if it happened to be a survey of English literature, you got some Shakespeare. Just one play. Just a taste. Just enough to make the receptive students want more. Dr. Telsa was interested only in the receptive students. It was her mission to make them want more.
Dr.