The Folks

I. The Hidden Time

I. THE HIDDEN TIME MARGARET had locked her door again. At least she had a door that would lock. That was her one consolation in this house. It gave her a savage pleasure to shut herself in with her own misery and to keep the folks outside. She lay on the floor-the bed was too soft for her wretchedness-and her head rolled from side to side. This was the culmination of all her unhappiness at home. Let mother plead now. Let dad break the door if he wanted to. He had shaken it once until the whole upstairs seemed to shake. She would never forgive them again. She felt her heart as hard as a stone inside her-imagined hands tearing apart that frozen stone . . . The folks had not believed her. They had believed that old-Margaret couldn't think of anything bad enough to call her-of a Dean of Women. She had never really belonged to her own family, and now she wasn't going to pretend at all any more. Lying there on the floor, on the harshness of the rug, feeling the stealthy drafts that managed to get through the storm windows , Margaret went back through the whole story. She felt as if she were looking back into the seductive shine of Sybil's eyes-but remote, with a sense of hopeless estrangement, almost as if Sybil were dead. She couldn't exactly wish for the old-it wasn't exactly friendship; more fascination-back. The folks had spoiled it for her. They had believed just what the Dean of Women had told them. Well, it was true, Sybil was deceiving her father and the faculty, and she was in love with a man who was getting a divorce, and meeting him "outside." Yes, and Margaret was helping her to deceive. But none of it in the way that the folks thought. She felt again the futile, struggling pain of not being able to make them understand her side. But then, she had never been able to explain anything to them. Her real life had always been lived inside herself, in secret. The others were the kind of children that mother and dad really wanted. She had always been the off one. "Where does she get it?" Margaret could hear Aunt Ella saying that, in her flat, naively wondering voice. Sometimes mother said it too, in despair. Margaret remembered how she used to brood over being adopted. She had always felt like an aristocrat in disguise. "Margaret always thinks she must have the best of everything." That had long been an accusation against her. She used to imagine the kind of parents it seemed to her she must really have had instead of just the folks. She wanted her father to have distinguished gray hair and black-rimmed eyeglasses with a very broad black ribbon. And she wanted a father who adored her, like those artist fathers in books-the mother had conveniently died at the birth of the child, who was so exactly like her that the father would turn pale. Virginia Brattle's father was a little like that, so that Virginia had always seemed to Margaret something like a girl in a story-except that Mrs. Brattle was very much alive, and she and Mr. Brattle spoiled the story by squabbling over Virginia. The things that dad had said to her when he came to the Normal after her were cut deep into Margaret's memory in a bleeding pain. She felt that she could never have a father again. But she was frightened of being in the world without one. She imagined herself leaning her head against a big strong chest, smelling of harsh expensive wool like Frank's, a deep voice telling her indulgently that he would look after her ... Frank Gesell was more her father, in her heart, than dad was. Margaret began to cry again, but drearily, rolling her head on the harsh nap of the rug. How could she stand never to see Sybil again, to lose all the luxury and loveliness and brightness, Sybil's white arms in sleeveless dresses, the square-cut bottles with ribbons from which Sybil dabbed little dampnesses of perfume on Margaret's hair, so that she went stepping down to dinner in a dreamy, scented luxury.... She moved with "restless impatience, away from the soothing 306 heat of...