is is the story of Hester which so insisted to be told. I think
she must have wanted you to know. And wanted Gerald to know that you
know, and, in the end, I rather think she wanted God to know.

THE VERTICAL CITY

In the most vertical city in the world men have run up their dreams
and their ambitions into slim skyscrapers that seem to exclaim at the
audacity of the mere mortar that sustains them.

Minarets appear almost to tamper with the stars; towers to impale
the moon. There is one fifty-six-story rococo castle, built from the
five-and-ten-cent-store earnings of a merchant prince, that shoots
upward with the beautiful rush of a Roman candle.

Any Manhattan sunset, against a sky that looks as if it might give to
the poke of a finger, like a dainty woman's pink flesh, there marches a
silhouetted caravan of tower, dome, and the astonished crests of office
buildings.

All who would see the sky must gaze upward between these rockets of
frenzied architecture, which are as beautiful as the terrific can ever
be beautiful.

In the vertical city there are no horizons of infinitude to rest the
eyes; rather little breakfast napkins of it showing between walls and
up through areaways. Sometimes even a lunchcloth of five, six, or maybe
sixty hundred stars or a bit of daylight-blue with a caul of sunshine
across, hoisted there as if run up a flagpole.

It is well in the vertical city if the eyes and the heart have a lift
to them, because, after all, these bits of cut-up infinitude, as
many-shaped as cookies, even when seen from a tenement window and to the
accompaniment of crick in the neck, are as full of mysterious alchemy
over men's hearts as the desert sky or the sea sky. That is why, up
through the wells of men's walls, one glimpse of sky can twist the soul
with--oh, the bitter, the sweet ache that lies somewhere within the
heart's own heart, curled up there like a little protozoa. That is, if
the heart and the eyes have a lift to them. Marylin's had.

* * * * *

Marylin! How to convey to you the dance of her! The silver scheherazade
of poplar leaves when the breeze is playful? No. She was far nimbler
than a leaf tugging at its stem. A young faun on the brink of a pool,
startled at himself? Yes, a little. Because Marylin's head always had a
listening look to it, as if for a message that never quite came through
to her. From where? Marylin didn't know and didn't know that she di