Hangsaman Read Free

itself into three weeks, and seemed endless; sometimes it seemed a matter of minutes slipping by so swiftly that there would never be time to approach college with appropriate consideration, to form a workable personality to take along. Natalie was desperately afraid of going away to college, even the college only thirty miles away that her father had chosen for her. She had two consolations: first, the conviction from previous experience that any place becomes home after awhile, so that she might assume a reasonable probability that after a month or so the college would be familiar and her home faintly alien. Her second consolation was the recurring thought that she might always give up college if she chose, and simply stay at home with her mother and father; this prospect was so horrible that Natalie found herself, when she thought confidently about it, almost enjoying her fear of going away.
    Thus, at nine-thirty of a Sunday morning the Waites had breakfasted together. Mr. Waite felt with complacence the touch of the sunlight on his head; Bud, stirring in his chair, sighed with the deep resignation of a boy fifteen years old who is going back to high school in fourteen more days; Mrs. Waite, looking deeply into her coffee cup, spoke with the soft, faintly wistful intonation she kept for her husband. “Cocktail olives,” she said. It was as though she were deliberately setting him off, because Mr. Waite stared for a minute and then said emphatically, “You mean I have to make cocktails for that crew? Cocktails for twenty people? Cocktails?”
    â€œYou
couldn’t
very well ask them to drink tea,” Mrs. Waite said. “Not
them
.”
    Natalie, fascinated, was listening to the secret voice which followed her. It was the police detective and he spoke sharply, incisively, through the gentle movement of her mother’s voice. “How,” he asked pointedly, “Miss Waite,
how
do you account for the gap in time between your visit to the rose garden and your discovery of the body?”
    â€œI can’t tell,” Natalie said back to him in her mind, her lips not moving, her dropped eyes concealing from her family the terror she hid also from the detective. “I refuse to say,” she told him.
    Mr. Waite spoke patiently. “You serve cocktails,” he said, “you’re always making them. With ordinary highballs everyone can make his own. They will anyway,” he added, driving home his point.
    â€œ
I
didn’t invite them,” Mrs. Waite said.
    â€œ
I
didn’t invite them,” Mr. Waite said.
    â€œI called them,” Mrs. Waite said, “but you made out the list.”
    â€œYou realize,” the detective said silently, “that this discrepancy in time may have very serious consequences for you?”
    â€œI realize,” Natalie said. Confess, she thought, if I confess I might go free.
    Mr. Waite shifted his ground again; by now he and his wife knew one another well enough to substitute half-hearted disagreement for a more taxing marital relationship, and an aimless, constant argument where either one took any side was to them a familiarity as affectionate as the ponderous sympathy of a Victorian household. “God,” Mr. Waite said, “I wish they weren’t coming.”
    â€œI can cancel it,” his wife said, as she always did.
    â€œI could get some work done for a change,” Mr. Waite said. He looked around the table, at his wife gazing into her coffee cup, at Natalie regarding her plate, at Bud watching out the window some presumably enrapturing adolescent dream. “No one ever
looks
at anyone else in this house,” Mr. Waite said irritably. “Do you realize I’m two weeks behind in my work?” he demanded of his wife. He enumerated on his fingers. “I’ve got to review four books by Monday; four books
no
one in this house has read but myself. Then there’s the article on Robin