“Roger,” I said, “I’m twenty now. And so are you.”
He seized my hand again, swiftly, as if he were falling over the side of a ship and it was me going away, leaving him to drown forever beyond help.
“One more year, Anna! Two, three, at the most!”
“Oh, no,” I said, forlornly.
“Four years at the outside! The doctors say—”
“The doctors don’t know what I know, Roger. She’ll live forever. She’ll bury you and me and drink wine at our funerals.”
“She’s a sick woman, Anna! My God, she can’t survive!”
“She will, because we give her strength. She knows we want her dead. That really gives her the power to go on.”
“I can’t talk this way, I can’t!” Seizing his luggage, he started down the hall.
“I won’t wait, Roger,” I said.
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He turned at the door and looked at me so helplessly, so palely, like a moth pinned to the wall, that I could not say it again.
The door slammed shut.
The summer was over.
The next year Roger came directly to the soda fountain, where he said, “Is it true? Who is he?”
“Paul,” I said. “You know Paul. He’ll manage the hotel someday. We’ll marry this fall.”
“That doesn’t give me much time,” said Roger.
“It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already promised.”
“Promised, hell! You don’t love him!”
“I think I do.”
“Think, hell! Thinking’s one thing, knowing’s another. You know you love me!”
“Do I, Roger?”
“Stop relishing the damn business so much! You know you do! Oh, Anna, you’ll be miserable!”
“I’m miserable now,” I said.
“Oh, Anna, Anna, wait!”
“I have waited, most of my life. But I know what will happen.”
“Anna!” He blurted it out as if it had come to him suddenly. “What if—what if she died this summer?”
“She won’t.”
“But if she did, if she took a turn for the worse, I mean, in the next two months—” He searched my face. He shortened it. “The next month, Anna, two weeks, listen, if she died in two short weeks, would you wait that long, would you marry me then?!”
I began to cry. “Oh, Roger, we’ve never even kissed. This is ridiculous.”