Read Online Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson - Free Book Online Page A

said, smiling. He was alone now, and Natalie spared a thought for the odd recognition of the fact that his voice came clearly to her through the noise; in spite of the loudness of the party, which she could still hear, she knew exactly what the man was saying as though they had been alone, or, perhaps, as though his voice were in her mind like the detective’s.
    Two, two, lily-white boys, clothed all in green-O,
    One is one and all alone and evermore will be so.
    â€œSit down,” the man said pleasantly. “Tired?” he asked her as she sat in the empty chair next to him, and Natalie nodded.
    â€œNow let me see,” the detective was saying, and she could not quiet him now; his voice came to her as clearly as that of the man in the chair. “This morning you were in the garden, were you not? At about what time was that?”
    â€œI don’t remember,” Natalie said. “Please leave me alone now; I want to think.”
    â€œThink?” said the detective. “Think? Suppose you think about the fact that you are very close to being in serious trouble?”
    â€œAre you having a good time?” Natalie said inadequately to the man in the chair. All the polite things she had heard so many people say this afternoon fled her mind, and she could only smile vacantly at him and say something foolish like, “Are you having a good time?”
    â€œVery nice,” said the man soberly. “Are you?”
    â€œVery nice,” Natalie said.
“One is one and all alone,”
everybody sang, “
and evermore will be so
.”
    The man looked at her curiously and Natalie was provoked. Here he was, this man, in her father’s house—in her
own
house—and he was staring at her and very likely laughing. Worse, he was old, she could see now, much older than she had thought before. There were fine disagreeable little lines around his eyes and mouth, and his hands were thin and bony, and even shook a little. Natalie formulated a thought which she intended to use forever after: “I like a man with nice hands,” she told herself. “Nice hands are a particular beauty in a man.” She tried to remember what her father’s hands were like, and could only remember his doing things with them—lifting a fork, holding a cigar. She glanced quickly across the lawn and found that she could not see her father’s hands—one was in his pocket reaching for a pencil, the other lost around the waist of the pretty girl.
    â€œâ€”And so I came,” the man was saying. He looked at her as though he expected some appreciation of the point of the story he had been telling her, and, Natalie, still provoked with him, smiled politely. “I’m glad you did,” she said, as her mother would have.
    â€œYou realize,” said the detective weightily, “that you were seen at almost every moment?”
    The man in the big chair offered Natalie a cigarette and she took it, hoping earnestly that she would not fumble it, would not blow out the match he was holding for her, would, at all costs, not look as though she had not often smoked publicly before. “Your father tells me,” he said, holding the match, “that you’re quite the little writer.” As though he might have been saying, “a girl scout patrol leader,” or, “top in your grade in algebra,” and obviously meaning to make her sound less like her mother and more like a frightened girl not yet in college.
    Natalie wanted to hurt him back, so she said, quite with the air of a silly girl not yet in college, “I suppose you probably want to write too?” She knew she had done right because he blinked, and she felt a new wild excited joy in the thought that here was Natalie, enough a woman of the world to keep her head during a conversation, to perceive and follow and employ the innuendoes of a man who had probably talked to many people, most of them women, and