Free Gift of the Golden Mountain by Shirley Streshinsky Page B

so for the words to flow between us, I wanted an outpouring of feelings, I wanted to be able to ask the right questions, to say the right phrases that would unlock all the hurt, all the pain, and let it flow out forever. But the words would not come; I felt mute, struck dumb, frozen. It was as if a heavy, opaque screen had dropped between us and words would not go through. I knew it would take time and emotional strength to pierce that screen and I was too weak. I thought of Sara, who would not have been so weak, and a feeling of despair seeped through me.
         May helped me into the house and asked if there was anything she could do for me, but it was a perfunctory question, words to fill the emptiness between us. Then she kissed me on the cheek and left.
         I had no idea how angry she was at that moment, no idea that the anger would burst into flame the next day.
         The date is clear in my mind: Saturday, February 3, 1968. Ten days before May's twenty-fifth birthday. Had I been thinking straight, I might have read the signals, I might have been prepared, I might have spared us all the anguish.
         Or not. I can't be sure. It is possible that it had to happen as it did.
         My phone rang at exactly nine that morning and when I heard Karin's voice I knew she had been waiting for a decent hour to call

me. "Is May there?" she wanted to know. "I mean, I don't need to talk to her—I just wondered if she spent the night with you."
         She had not returned to the house, and Karin was worried.
         "I imagine she took a room at a hotel." I tried to sound reassuring. "She was upset last night, you know that, but she seemed quite calm when she left here. I'd be willing to bet she just needed some time to think. I'm sure we'll hear from her soon."
         There was an anxious pause. "She was so angry yesterday," Karin said, "I've never seen her like that before. She was mad at me for accepting an invitation from Kit, but I think that was only an excuse. I think she was looking for a reason to be mad."
         "At you?" I asked.
         "Yes," she answered, pulling out the word slowly, "at all of us . . . all of us who care about her, I mean. It's as if she has to hit out. Kit's the main one, you know that. The target. But she's angry at all of us, and that's what I don't understand."
         I was made dizzy by the clarity of her statement. Of course she was right. Of course May was angry with us all. I took a deep breath. "What a wise girl you are."
         "No," she said solemnly, "if I were, I would know what was going on with May. And I don't know."
         "It's a puzzle we have to put together," I told her, and promised to call as soon as I heard from May.
         The day stretched before me, interminable. To pass the time I went through the files again, all the letters May wrote in the years she was in the east. It was not until her second year at Mount Holyoke that she wrote Kit, to ask if Karin might be included in the invitation to spend the summer with us at Kit's place in the south of France.

    At four that afternoon Kit appeared at my door, unannounced, her face ashen, all the pain in the world reflected in her eyes.
         "May came to see me," she said, breathing erratically, and then she repeated herself, as if the words were stuck in her throat and she had to force them out: "May came, just now," she said, with little gasps in between the words. "And I know . . . know what it was . . ."
         "Quiet now," I said, and made her sit down. I held her hand and told her to take a deep breath and to tell me. She did exactly as I said, resting her head on the chair and closing her eyes, and my own eyes played tricks on me: Suddenly she was thirty again, her face smooth and unlined, even then a woman touched by sorrow.

    The doorman had explained that Kit had a guest—the son of an old friend had dropped by for a drink, a man in his thirties who was between jobs and who hoped