Evergreen by Belva Plain Page A

the art museum. I like that the best.”
    “What do you like there?”
    “It’s so big, I haven’t seen it all yet. But I liked the Egyptian things.… And last week I found Cleopatra’s Needle out behind the building. I had missed it before.”
    He shook his head. “I’m thinking, Anna, how strange it is that here we’ve been living under the same roof for all these months and we’ve never talked until today!”
    “Not so strange, when you think about it.”
    “You mean, because it’s my parents’ house and you just work in it.”
    She nodded.
    “Isn’t that artificial, though? Isn’t that stupid? But thank goodness that sort of thing is changing. People make friends where they find them nowadays, not just in the same little group that their families grew up with. Much better that way, isn’t it?”
    “Oh, yes, much better!”
    “Tell me something about yourself, Anna.”
    “I don’t know what you want to hear.”
    “What your parents did, what your home was like, what made you leave it.”
    “But I can’t now. I have to go downstairs, I have work.”
    “Next Saturday morning, then. Or whenever else we can find the time. Will you?”
    They found the time, odd minutes of it, on Saturday mornings, or in the hallway after dinner—he standing in the doorway of his room, she standing by the staircase, whenever she happened to be going up or down on some errand or other. She told him about her village. He told her about their Adirondack camp. She told him about her father. He told her about Yale. She thought of their talk as a game, a ball going back and forth over a net. She was as breathless as though it had been a game. She sang as she went about the house, and had to catch herself. She laughed a lot and was aware of it.
    One day halfway through spring, he said: “Tell your friend not to come next Sunday. I want to take you to tea.”
    “But I don’t see how we can! I don’t think—”
    “What don’t you think? I want to talk to you, to sit down and have a proper talk!”
    She hesitated and felt a creeping fear.
    “Nobody needs to know, if that’s what you’re worried about. Although there’s nothing to hide! I’m not asking you to do anything to be ashamed of.”
    They sat on gilded chairs with a screen of palms at their backs. A waiter brought cakes on a little cart. Violins waltzed.
    “You look really beautiful, Anna, especially in that hat.”
    He had insisted on buying the hat for her. When she had protested he had bought it anyway, a magnificent straw hat crowned with red silk poppies and wheat.
    “I can’t take it,” she had said. “It wouldn’t be right.”
    “Oh, damn the proprieties, how idiotic they are! Here am I, a man with plenty of money to spend, and here are you, a girl who needs a spring hat and hasn’t got enoughmoney for a nice one. Why shouldn’t I make myself happy by giving it to you?”
    “You make it sound so simple,” Anna had said.
    “It is simple. Take it and wear it to tea.”
    So here she sat, the greenhorn Anna, in this vast perfumed room, watching the people come and go, all the tall, easy, graceful people who belonged here.
    “I’ve been thinking a lot about you, Anna. You’re so young and already you’ve done so much with your life.”
    “What have I done? Nothing, it seems to me.”
    “But you have! You’ve taken your life into your own hands, coming across the world by yourself, learning a new language to get along in—”
    “I’ve never thought about it like that.”
    “While I have only been acted upon. You see what I mean? I was born in the house where I live now; I was sent to school, then put into my father’s, actually my grandfather’s, business. It’s all been done for me. I don’t really know anything at all about what the world is like.”
    “That’s what I think about myself!” Anna laughed.
    “You are absolutely lovely when you laugh. I go all over the city, and do you know, I never see girls as lovely as