New York - The Novel

have to be pagan for a day.”
    Mary was carrying a light canvas bag slung over her shoulder, and when Gretchen asked her what was in it, she confessed. “It’s a sketching pad.”
    “When did you take up drawing? You never used to.”
    “It’s the first time,” said Mary. She’d been wondering what items she should take on holiday when Mrs. Master had suggested a sketchbook. It had seemed a rather ladylike sort of thing to do, but then she’d thought, why not? And seeing the sketching pad in a store the next day, she’d bought it, along with two A.W. Faber artist’s lead pencils.
    “I wouldn’t have brought it if Theodore had been with us this morning,” she admitted. “His being an artist.”
    “Well then,” said Gretchen, “I’m glad he stayed behind.”
    After a time they came to a place where two landscapes met. On one side, seagrass and beach and shallow water went out in a bright sheen to find the ocean horizon; on the other, over some low dunes, there was green pasture and mossy ground, and a small wood offered shade.
    “Why don’t you sketch here?” said Gretchen.
    “Not if you watch me,” said Mary. “I’d be embarrassed.”
    “I’ll stare at the seagulls,” said Gretchen, sitting down on a hummock, and gazing at the ocean as though Mary wasn’t there at all.
    But Mary wasn’t ready yet. So instead of sketching the seascape, she wandered over the little dune, and made her way along the broad green path toward the wood. Glancing back, she was surprised that she couldn’t even see the sea, though its invisible presence was there. And she’d only gone a short way further when, to her surprise, she caught sight of something else.
    It was a deer. A doe.
    She stopped and stood still. The doe hadn’t heard her. Neither she nor the deer would have expected the other to be there.
    Long ago, when only the local Indians lived by these shores, there were plenty of deer. But once the Dutch and English had come to settle there, the deer had little chance. Farmers do not care for deer, so they shoot them. Nowadays, along the whole hundred-mile length of Long Island, there were only a few sanctuaries from which the deer had not been driven out. Nor could the deer get away. They could not swim across Long Island Sound. But some, evidently, had come across the creek, or used the shell road, to find safety in the open wastes of Coney Island.
    The deer was not far away, and seemed to be alone. A few yards in front of Mary there was a small fallen tree. Carefully, she moved forward and sat on it. Then, drawing up her legs, she rested the pad on them, slowly opened a page, took out a lead pencil and began to draw.
    The doe seemed to be in no hurry to move. A couple of times she raised her head, ears alert. Once she stared straight at Mary, but evidently did not see her.
    Mary had made little drawings now and then: a standard house, or cat, or horse. But she’d never tried to draw anything from life before, and she hardly knew how to begin. The first lines she put on paper seemed to bear no relation to the doe. She tried concentrating on just the head, and drawing smaller. Not knowing any rules, she just tried to reproduce on the paper the exact line as it came into her eye. At first these lines seemed clumsy and formless, but she tried a few times more, and by and by they did seem to make shapes that were recognizable. Then, to her great surprise, something else seemed to happen.
    Not only the form of the deer’s head, but the lines on the page seemedto develop a kind of magic of their own. She’d never thought of such a thing, certainly never experienced it before. After half an hour, she had two or three little sketches, very imperfect, but which seemed to capture something of the deer’s head.
    She was enjoying herself, but Gretchen had been waiting patiently for a while, so she got up. The doe started and stared, then sprang away and ran into the trees.
    Retracing her steps, she found Gretchen sitting in the same place where she’d left her. But to her surprise, Theodore was also there. He’d taken off his jacket, and his shirt was open at the collar, so that she could see little curly hairs at the top of his chest. It gave her quite a start. He looked up with a smile.
    “Show me.”
    “Why?”
    It was such a silly thing to say. She’d wanted to say “No,” but that would have been rude, and somehow “Why” had come out. Theodore laughed.
    “What do you mean, ‘Why’? I want