Angels Go Naked. Cornelia Nixon

don’t know,” she said quietly, watching Margy with a light in her black eyes. “You just don’t know. Comprend-tu?”

      Henry wrote to Margy, in a big angular hand on heavy paper, about his father’s need to win at golf, and where they’d sailed that day, and how much he thought of her. Once he said remembering how she’d kissed him on the widow’s walk that night was driving him insane. But he didn’t trust letters, so he’d say no more. Except he hoped that he could see her the moment she got to Yale. In fact he would be waiting in her college yard.

      The night before she left, Ann stopped by with Rachel to give her a blank book with a dove-gray linen cover, for a journal while she was away, and Rachel gave her a God’s Eye she had made. Ann was wearing Rachel’s leather jacket, clutched around her tightly with both hands. She gazed at Margy with beautiful clear eyes.

      “You are coming to a place where two roads diverge, and taking the one less traveled by.” She touched Margy’s hand. “We understand each other, don’t we, Margy? No matter what happens.”

      Margy followed them out to the street and watched them walk away. In the dark, their heads inclined toward each other till their silhouettes converged.

      Her father drove her to New Haven, delivered her to his old college, and took her on a campus tour, pointing out the design of each quadrangle. Then he was gone, and Henry was there, in his seersucker jacket, fingers clenched around her arm.

      “Can we go now?” he said quietly, hardly moving his lips.

      It was Indian summer, hot sun with an autumn drowsiness, and Henry had the top down on the MG. Quickly crossing town, he raced south. The wind was too loud in the car for talk, but Margy knew where they were going now. She had on a simple sheath of rose linen that Ann had helped her pick out, her hair restrained in a ribbon the same shade. But as they crossed the bridge onto Long Island in late sun, the wind teased out the ribbon and her hair burst free, with a ripple of pleasure along the scalp.

      He had her back soon after breakfast, though she’d missed the freshman dinner in her college and had failed to sleep in her bed. Calhoun was full of Southerners, from Georgia and Virginia and the Carolinas, and they were all just trooping off in tennis whites, or to try out for some a cappella group, as she made her way upstairs, trembling slightly and trying to look blasé. At the last second, when the pain was most intense, she had tried to pull away. But Henry went on saying, “Just relax,” into her ear, and soon she lay still listening to him sleep, with a feeling she didn’t recognize, like floating in a warm bath, with an undertow of fear.

      In the morning he had quickly pulled a pillow across the bloodstain on the sheet, as if she shouldn’t see that, when she had already seen it in the bathroom twice, in the middle of the night and again after the second time, when he woke her at first light, his lean, hairless chest quivering before her eyes like a wall she had to climb. Driving back, he didn’t say a word. The law school had already started, and he had to be in class. But he kissed her tenderly by Calhoun gate in the open car, and said he would be there to pick her up on Friday afternoon.

      She took long, meditative showers, spent whole days in the practice rooms, and only joined her fellow frosh in class. On Fridays Henry drove her out to Wading River, where the house was always packed now with his friends, who played tackle on the beach and drank all night, and she was alone with him only in the sandy bed. With a football in his arms he was unexpectedly exuberant, and she watched him from a beach chair in the autumn sun, trying to write something profound to Rachel and Ann. They’d sent her two postcards, one from a small hotel in Provincetown. (“All quite legitimate, you understand,” Rachel’s part had said. “Searching the beach for pebbles you may have sent. Now is the time to buy a kite.”) But Margy had nothing to say that she could trust to letters now, so she watched Henry steal the ball, and laugh and cheat and leap across his fallen friends with lean, tan legs, and streak across the sand to score.

      The weather changed, dry leaves crackling in the wind at night. The first cold week, she did not hear from Henry, and on Saturday she called his rooms, where his suitemate said he had gone home to Boston. Margy was concerned. Of course she knew that men could change, from the days of Gary Slade. But the last time she had seen Henry, he had been more tender than before, and had held her hand on the long drive back to Yale.

      Monday night, on her way home from the practice rooms, she stopped by the law school dorm, where he was studying. He seemed surprised but glad, and pulled her in protectively.

      “Everything all right?” he said, ushering her quickly into his room, shutting the door. “Nothing wrong?”

      They talked politely, sitting on the bed, his law books lit up on the desk. He did not explain why he’d gone home to Boston, and she didn’t ask. When she rose to go, he said good-bye at the door and watched her leave. He strode behind her down the gleaming brown expanse of hall.

      “Don’t go,” he said, clutching her arm and looking at the floor. “Please stay, all right?”

      She couldn’t sleep in his narrow bed, and she got up late to walk back through the cold, clear night. That weekend she practiced all the daylight hours, avoiding telephones. But when she went back to Calhoun at night, there were no messages for her. She called Henry’s rooms, pretending to have a French accent.

      “Boston,” his suitemate said.

      “Ah, bon,” she said, and did not call again.

      Henry wrote her a careful letter, saying he had made a mistake and wasn’t ready to be serious yet, but asking her to let him know if she ever needed anything from him. Margy wrote four versions of a letter back, outraged, pleading, miserable, abject, and tore them up. Finally she sent a postcard with a view of Wading River (bought to send to Rachel and Ann), saying she was always glad to hear from him but didn’t think she would be needing anything. He sent her a biography of Freud, which she had already read (“From your friend, Henry,” it said inside), and a yard of rose-colored ribbon to replace the one she’d lost while riding in his car. Once she saw him on Elm Street, idling in traffic as the snow fell on the cloth top of his car. Honking and waving, he half emerged. But she saluted with her violin and hurried off against the traffic, so he couldn’t follow her.

      Sleet was rattling on the windows as if hurled from fists on the day she started to throw up. She tried to make it stop, lying on her bed in the hot blasts from the heating ducts, as Rachel’s God’s Eye twirled above. It was ridiculous, it was impossible. Henry had been so cautious, breaking open little hard blue plastic cases, exactly like the ones she’d seen once in her father’s dresser drawer when her mother was alive, and dropping them beneath the bed as he put their contents on. The night she’d visited his room, she had crouched to count the empties in the silvery light, and there had been at least a dozen more than he had used that night. Though it was hard to tell, of course, how old they were.

      She went to class and could not hear a word. She could not play the violin, or remember why she’d ever wanted to. The nausea surrounded her, six inches of rancid blubber through which she had to breathe. She threw up in the daytime, in the evening, in the middle of the night. She told herself to just relax. Morning sickness is all in the woman’s head, Freud said. She ate a crust of hard French bread, and saw it unchanged moments after in the white cup of the toilet bowl.

      She found a doctor down in Bridgeport, where she would not run into anyone from Yale. The man she picked had chosen his profession because the forceps used at his own birth had damaged a nerve in his face, causing his forehead to hang down across his eyes, while his mouth pulled to one side. Yes, he had good news for her, he said. Mrs. Henry Bergstrom, she had called herself, and lied about her age. Alone with him when the nurse had left, she mentioned that they weren’t quite married yet. The doctor may have given her a kindly look, though it was hard to tell.

      “Don’t be upset if something happens to it,” he said, lips flapping loose