Free Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen

rubeate face would be close to the icy glass of the door and it wavered and glowered through the frozen water. His features were then distorted and a little monstrous. His eyes were dark shadows, his face fiery and forlorn; he seemed a man of sorrows. Sometimes he seemed almost ready to admit me, to open the frozen crystal door to the faery bower of the hothouse. O tender nurse of this forbidden garden, what have you to say?
    But what were my feelings as this strange denying relationship grew? At the beginning it was clear to me that I rankled because a figure of power had denied me. Defiance heated me. Rebellion dizzied me. I’d throw a stone through a window, climb to the top of the Biology Lab, which was on the top floor of a building that rose up beside the greenhouse, and drop something—hurl a chair—through the glass roof, and let in the freezing air and so burn the warm flowers, vandalizing the beautiful thing I was denied. Once because the first-grade class didn’t elect a boy to be the one to take home for the weekend the class goldfish—a dreaming delicate creature wafting on golden wings through a green waving paradise—but chose a girl, the boy reached into the bowl and squished the golden fish through his fingers like pudding. I felt like that—again—after all these years. Also—beauty denied. I defied those who had held back from me, who had given me the pain of feeling not-taken. Whatever their reason, I had fallen into states of rage and accusation. Not chosen, kept outside—these feelings gave me such heartbreak at first that I wanted to vanish and hide. So abandoned, I thought I’d die, and wished to. But I rose up in defiance.
    My next visit to the greenhouse was around midnight (the first had been at twilight). I had to get in. The cold was so bitter. Yet the icebound hothouse was glowing like a radiant stove. I felt that I was dying. My room in the Guest House was bleak with chill; the awful pictures of founders and donors were glaring with comfort and satisfaction. I had felt quite mad in that room of transients’ odors and early American pewter, those white curtains scalloped at the bay window, that chintz. If only the Nurseryman would let me in. From the freezing cold outside I saw him in the distance in a drunken trance, there by the sunny orange tree. Seeing me, his old enemy, he held fast for a moment and I thought he was about to come to me to give me, at last, welcome—in a split second a look of yielding, of need, of almost reaching out, had crossed his body. But in another moment up slowly came the awful interdicting hand. I only showed him, in my answer, my own face of need; and then I went away.
    The third time was in the early morning at daybreak. As I stood at the ice-veiled glass door, it happened. I saw it chute. Something like the rushing sound of wings drew my glance upwards. Whatever was falling from the top of the Biology Building in another second crashed through the glass roof of the hothouse. A plume of silver steam rose and floated over the broken greenhouse. Some pressure sprang open the frozen door like a miracle, and I entered, at last, the ripe heat of the Nursery. I was admitted. I was in. The smell of humid mulch and sticky seed was close to the smell of sex, genital and just used. I was for a moment almost overcome with the eroticness of it.
    And then the fog rose from the ground and from the very leaves and through the fog I saw the body. The body lay face up, flat on its back. It lay out like an anatomy lesson figure. Arms outstretched, legs spread. Who had leaped from the Biology Building into the frozen lake of the glass roof of the greenhouse? To crash and the among the ferns and blooming Oleander in the frozen month of January? And naked? My God this white body of marble skin and coal-black finest hair lying splashed among the curling ferns. Just as the diver must have envisioned it—if she had planned the leap