When the door had closed, Cabrielle looked up from her hands and said:
“Owen is dead.”
She didn’t ask, she said it; but there was no way of treating it except as a question.
“No.” I sat down in the nurse’s chair and fished out cigarettes. “He’s alive.”
“Will he live?” Her voice was still husky from her cold.
“The doctors think so,” I exaggerated.
“If he lives, will he–?” She left the question unfinished, but her husky voice seemed impersonal enough.
“He’ll be pretty badly maimed.”
She spoke more to herself than to me:
“That should be even more satisfactory.”
I grinned. If I was as good an actor as I thought, there was nothing in the grin but good-humored amusement.
“Laugh,” she said gravely. “I wish you could laugh it away. But you can’t. It’s there. It will always be there.” She looked down at her hands and whispered: “Cursed.”
Spoken in any other tone, that last word would have been melodramatic, ridiculously stagey. But she said it automatically, without any feeling, as if saying it had become a habit. I could see her lying in bed in the dark, whispering it to herself hour after hour, whispering it to her body when she put on her clothes, to her face reflected in mirrors, day after day.
I squirmed in my chair and growled:
“Stop it. Just because a bad-tempered woman works off her hatred and rage in a ten-twenty-thirty speech about–”
“No, no; my step-mother merely put in words what I have always known. I hadn’t known it was in the Dain blood, but I knew it was in mine. How could I help knowing? Hadn’t I the physical marks of degeneracy?” She crossed the room to stand in front of me, turning her head sidewise, holding back her curls with both hands. “Look at my ears–without lobes, pointed tops. People don’t have ears like that. Animals do.” She turned her face to me again, still holding back her hair. “Look at my forehead–its smallness, its shape–animal. My teeth.” She bared them–white, small, pointed. “The shape of my face.” Her hands left her hair and slid down her cheeks, coming together under her oddly pointed small chin.
“Is that all?” I asked. “Haven’t you got cloven hoofs? All right. Say these things are as peculiar as you seem to think they are. What of it? Your step-mother was a Dain, and she was poison, but where were her physical marks of degeneracy? Wasn’t she as normal, as wholesome-looking as any woman you’re likely to find?”
“But that’s no answer.” She shook her head impatiently. “She didn’t have the physical marks perhaps. I have, and the mental ones too. I–” She sat down on the side of the bed close to me, elbows on knees, tortured white face between hands. “I’ve not ever been able to think clearly, as other people do, even the simplest thoughts. Everything is always so confused in my mind. No matter what I try to think about, there’s a fog that gets between me and it, and other thoughts get between us, so I barely catch a glimpse of the thought I want before I lose it again, and have to hunt through the fog, and at last find it, only to have the same thing happen again and again and again. Can you understand how horrible that can become: going through life like that–year after year–knowing you will always be like that–or worse?”
“I can’t,” I said. “It sounds normal as hell to me. Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking’s a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That’s why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they’re arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you’ve got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place.”
She took her face out of her hands and smiled shyly at me, saying:
“It’s funny I didn’t like you before.” Her face became serious again. “But–“