Collected Stories, page 32
Probably that portrait wasn’t anything special. It couldn’t have been. The chances were that Tom Stead was painting signs somewhere now, if he hadn’t drunk himself to death. But then, in this room, in the presence of its subject whose life overflowed upon them all, that slim golden shape with the velvet highlights was Lilith, Helen, Guenevere, das ewig Weibliche. And it was hardly a day before other girls, less fortunately endowed or graced, had begun dropping comments on how warm that Stead-Holly romance was getting, and hinting that there was hidden away somewhere a companion portrait—a nude.
Well, well, what a bunch of Bohemian puritans. Harris did not believe in any nude, or in its importance if there had been one, though at the time it had bothered him, and he had been malely offended, surprised that she would lower herself, you know?
Now, sitting bemused in the window, he reflected that what had truly shone out of that golden portrait, as out of Holly herself, was not so much glamour as innocence. Under the sheath she was positively virginal; if you cracked the enamel of her sophistication you found a delighted little girl playing Life.
Again he remembered the soft, childlike kiss by the piano on a Christmas morning, and he stood up so sharply that he startled himself with the sight of the dead woman. It was innocence. She could put away the predatory paws of college boys, twist laughing from the casual kiss, pass among the hot young Freudians as untouched as a nun, shed like water the propositions that were thrown at her seven to the week. There she sat in her gold gown by her window opening on the foam: a maiden in a tower.
He crossed the room and tried the bedroom door, wanting to look in on her intimately. In this room, now completely bare, aseptically painted, he had sat dozens of times when she was ill or when on Sunday mornings she made it a charming point of her sophistication to entertain in bed. While she lay propped with pillows he had read to her, talked to her, kissed her, had his hands fended away. The empty room was still charged with the vividness with which she invested everything. There was one night very late, two or three o’clock, when he had sat on one side of the bed and a mournful and lovesick jazz trumpeter had sat on the other, neither willing to leave the other alone there, and all that night he had read aloud into the smell of sandalwood the life story of a mad woman from Butte, Montana. I, Mary MacLean, that one was called.
What an occasion she made of it, laid up by flu, hemmed in by rival young men, covered to the chin in an absurd, high-necked, old-fashioned nightgown, taking aspirin with sips of ginger beer, laughing at them alternately or together with that face as vivid on the pillow as a flower laid against the linen. It was innocence. In that crackpot Bohemian pre-crash wonderful time, it was innocence.
How he and the trumpeter broke the deadlock, what had ever happened to the Tom Stead flurry, what had happened to any of Holly’s string of admirers—all gone. She sent them away, or they quarreled at her over their bruised egos, or they grew huffy at finding her always in a crowd. Plenty of self-appointed humming-bird catchers, but no captures.
And yet, maybe …
Summer and winter, day and night were telescoped in his memory. How old would he have been? Twenty? Twenty-one? It must have been near the end of Holly’s reign in this apartment, before everything went sour and the delayed wave of the crash reached them and he left school to go to work and Holly herself went away. There was neither beginning nor end nor definite location in time to what he most vividly remembered. What they were doing, whether there had been a party there or whether they had been out on a date, whether she had room-mates then or was living alone, none of that came back. But they were alone in a way they had seldom been.
They must have been talking, something must have led up to it, for there she was with the clarity of something floodlighted in his mind, Holly pressing against him and crying with her face against his chest, clinging and crying and saying—he heard only the refrain, not the garble against his chest—“Kim, Kim, get me out of here! I want to get out of this. This is all no good, I’ve got to, Kim, please!”
Both the tears and the way she clung excited him. But the game had been played so long by other rules that he went on in the old way, laughing, burlesquing gestures of consolation, patting the crow-wing hair, saying, “There, there, little girl.” Inanities, idiocies … She wore an evening dress cut very low in the back, and he played his fingers up and down her spine. He slid his hand in against her skin, slid it further, expecting the competent twist and shrug and fending and the laugh that would mean the emotional fit was over. But his hand went on around, clear around, and with a shock like an internal explosion he found it cupping the frantic softness of her breast.
Even in recollection, all his sensations were shocking to him. He remembered how smoothly the curve of her side swelled upward, how astonishingly consecutive her body seemed. Also, also, and almost with revulsion, how rigid and demanding the nipple of her breast. Innocence—he had never touched a girl there, never imagined, or rather had imagined wrong. Stupefied by the sudden admission to her flesh, made uneasy by the way she crowded and clung, he stood wrapping her awkwardly, and kissed her and tasted her tears, and thought with alarm and conviction of Tom Stead and the rumored nude, and was anguished with eagerness to escape.
He could remember not a scrap, not a detail, of how he got away. She offered herself passionately in his memory, and that was all. The Peewee Golfer putting his little white ball up the little green alley of his youth came suddenly upon the sidewinder in the sandtrap, the crocodile in the artificial lake.
Harris closed the door on the ridiculous and humiliating memory. It had begun to occur to him that he had been an extraordinary young man, and very little of what had been extraordinary about himself pleased him. Innocence? Well, maybe, though there were more contemptuous names for it. He had been a fraud, a gargler of whiskey he would obediently not drink. A great yapper with the crowd, but when the cat stopped running, what a frantic sliding to a stop, what digging not to catch what he was after.
Weakly he tried to prop up the slack thing he had been. He told himself that it was a pose with all of them, the life that revolved around Holly was an absurd and perhaps touching and certainly unimportant part of growing up. Or was it? What might he be at this moment, would he have more or less to regret, if he had taken Holly at her passionate word, married her, lived it, as she was determined to live it in her innocence, dangerously?
The last time he saw Holly she was boarding a train for Seattle, on her way to Shanghai and a job they all publicly envied but would probably not have risked taking themselves. Her life, whatever happened to her, would not have been dull. And yet it might have been more thoroughly wasted than at that moment he thought his own had been.
He had played it the other way, not so much from choice as from yielding to pressures, and he had done the best he could with it. How would he look to Holly now, at this very minute? How had he looked then?
Like a bubble of gas from something submerged and decaying in deep water, there rose to the surface of his mind one of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” that they had admired together that long-gone Christmas morning. It burst, and it said, “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”
It shamed him to remember, though he half repudiated it. From the life of prudence he had got a wife he loved and respected, children he adored, a job he could do with interest and almost with content. He regretted none of them. But he stood here remembering that moment when Holly stopped playing make-believe, and it seemed to him that his failure to take her when she offered herself was one of the saddest failures of his life. The fact that he might make all the same crucial choices the same way if he had them to make again helped not at all; it did him no good to remind himself that no one could turn in any direction without turning his back on something. The past had trapped him, and it held him like pain.
Angrily he looked at his watch. Past five. Starting for the door, he passed the dead woman’s table and saw her calm pale face, the skin delicately wrinkled like the skin of a winter-kept apple, but soft-looking, as if it would be not unpleasant to touch. What was her name, what had she died of, what had she looked like when she wore expression? Who mourned her, who had loved her, what things in her life did they regret or had she regretted? Would they think it disagreeable that a total stranger had been alone with her here, staring into her dead face? And in that face what was it that the caution of death enclosed and hid?
The barbaric silver necklace seemed somehow to define her. What it said of frivolity, girlishness, love of ornament and of gaiety and of life made him like her; the way it lay on the sober black crepe breast preached the saddest lesson he had ever learned.
He thought of how she had been transported and tampered with by McBride, and how further touches of disguise would complete her transformation from something real and terrible and lost to something serene, removed, bearable. Alone with her here, before the arrival of others, before she went away, he felt almost an anguish for this woman he had never known, and a strange gratitude that he had been permitted to see her.
Gratitude, or something near it. And yet as he started for the door he threw a sick, apologetic glance around the room as quiet and empty as a chapel, and at the woman who lay so quietly at its center. He meant to tiptoe out, but he heard, almost with panic, the four quick raps his heels made on the bare floor before they found the consoling softness of the stairs.
Impasse
By the time they dropped down off the heights, the reluctant sun, which had hung interminably on the Col de Vence and forced Louis to doge and shield his eyes as he cramped the Citroën around the curves, had finally been dragged below the rim, and the glare of the day was taken off them. Along the grateful gray edge of evening they bounced through the streets of Nice and on to the highway returning back up the coast.
Out on the water it was still full afternoon. Sails passed like gulls; close in, the bay was creased with the water-bug tracks of paddle boats. But where they drove, the day had quieted, and in the confined car the bickering seemed to have quieted, too. Straightening out with the traffic toward Monte Carlo, a drink, dinner, Louis appraised the lengthening silence and grew halfway hopeful.
But he said nothing; the quiet was too pleasant. Only in the sloping windshield he saw the reflection of his wife’s face, the mouth drawn down ruefully, and he dropped his hand from the wheel to cover hers. That got him a wan, surprised smile.
Pretending to stretch, he focused his daughter’s face in the rearview mirror. No smile there, wan or otherwise. Margaret sat like a captive barbarian queen. Her hair stood up from her forehead in an abrupt black mane. Her eyebrows were heavy, level, finely outlined. Photographs always showed her handsomer than she was, perhaps because photographs, like his shadowed view of her in the mirror, obscured the coarse and roughened skin. But no photograph ever hid what he could not miss now—the arrogant curl of her mouth, the way her eyes looked flatly out in insolence and challenge.
Not a pretty girl. That, of course, was a good part of the trouble. In the windshield he surprised on his own face the rueful, puzzled expression he had seen on his wife’s. He heard their friends saying, “How I envy you your three months in France. And how nice you could arrange to take Margaret. How wonderful for all of you, especially for her.”
The mildness of evening drifted down off the hills, the first faint, perfumed stirring of the land breeze. Through trees and across gray headlands he saw villas clinging like balconies on the mountain, and turning to see what view they would have, he found Cap Ferrat flood-lighted, sharp and cleanly colored, its white villas and red roofs, gray shore and blue encircling sea drenched in light. It seemed to have emerged that minute from the water, wet and fresh. Stuck behind the stinking exhaust of a bus, he watched the promontory, and forgetting that they were silent and at odds, he said, “Somerset Maugham has a villa out there somewhere.”
Jean looked, interested. She had read everything Somerset Maugham ever wrote. But from the back seat, Louis heard what he knew he should have anticipated—the contemptuous noise and the voice. “What are we supposed to do about that? Make a pilgrimage?”
Patience, he told himself. Aloud he said lightly, “Nothing as strenuous as that, I guess.”
“Everybody’s got a villa around here someplace, the King of Sweden and the Aga Khan and the Duke of Windsor and King Farouk—everybody you ever heard of. Why go into a tizzy about an old hack like Maugham?”
“Did I go into a tizzy?” Louis said.
“Anyway, how did we get so superior to a great writer all of a sudden?” Jean said, turning half around. “If we’re taking that tone, what’s so fascinating about King Farouk?”
“I didn’t say he was fascinating.”
“You implied he was a whole lot more fascinating than Maugham.”
“That wouldn’t be hard,” Margaret said, and turned from the discussion, leaning out the window and raising her indifferent eyes to the hanging houses of Èze Village high on their crag. Louis opened and closed his hands on the wheel and pulled around the bus.
Curving through Villefranche, they looked across the harbor and saw the slim shapes of three destroyers—beautiful, precise toys. The water-front was dotted with the white figures of sailors.
“Why, they’re American,” Jean said.
“The Mediterranean Fleet’s visiting for a few days. I saw it in the paper.” He waited for some contradiction from Margaret, thinking, If she doesn’t say something contentious, it’ll be the first time since we came here.
But she was silent, and they climbed, circling a hill, and left that harbor and came above another, and there, too, were ships—two more destroyers, a cruiser, and a tanker. The ragged stone of the mountains pitched down to the man-smoothed cirque of the town and its sea fortress, and on a sudden impulse Louis cramped the steering wheel and turned down a steep, narrow street into Beaulieu.
“Where are you going?” Jean said.
“I thought we might have a drink and maybe dinner here. Is there any reason we have to go back to the hotel?”
She glanced at him curiously, but said nothing. He had a feeling that she was thinking exactly what he was—that anything was better than going back to their suite and being alone with their child.
And what a melancholy pass that was, he thought, as he parked and held open the door. Margaret had always been too much for them. It was as if she were dedicated to revenging herself on them for something, as if her rebellious spirit, which turned on everybody in blind, competitive rage, turned most of all on them.
Looking at her now, her dress wrinkled across her too-heavy hips, her face too strong for a girl’s, her hair too blue-black, her skin too rough, Louis felt a sad emptiness, a consciousness of failure and loss. Am I to blame? he asked her or himself or the world. Is it my fault you were born unattractive? How much blame shall parents take for begetting and rearing a child? Is that the matter? Do you resent being born? Or have we compounded failure for eighteen years in your bringing-up?
Touched by pity and love, he took an arm of each of his women to escort them across the street; but Margaret pulled her elbow free and walked alone into the open street along the quay, looking into the doors of cafés and cabarets, from which the noise of American jazz erupted. The street was full of sailors, most of them young, hurrying toward something they were very eager about. Their laughter and loudness insulated them, as if behind a layer of glass; they poured by, unseeing; not one so much as looked at the slouching girl who moved along the wall, and she paid no attention to them.
As Jean and Louis turned on to the quay between awninged cafés and shops on one side and the oily harbor water on the other, Jean said, “She’ll just make everybody miserable till she gets her way. She’s already spoiled the trip for me. I almost wish we could go home.”
“Would it be any better there?” he said. He steered her toward the beckoning finger of a waiter in the last café on the quay, and as he seated her, he saw her biting her lip, close to tears. “What would you like to drink?” he said.
“I don’t care. Anything.”
“Vermouth cassis?”
“All right.”
“Two,” he told the waiter, and sat down.
For a while, it was as if they were calm. Across the cobbled street a moored barge rocked and thumped softly against the stone. A half-dozen shrill, bare-legged boys played tag from barge to shore and back again. Down by the corner at which they had entered the waterfront, a Navy launch was unloading sailors. A pair of shore patrol sauntered and watched. The waiter brought their drinks and turned over two saucers. Margaret had wandered past all the cheap shops and was now wandering back again.
“Is she even going to come and sit down with us?” Jean said.
Louis moved his shoulders. “She has to punish us, I expect.”
“I wish I knew what for.”
“You know what for.”
Her eyes, suddenly full again of weak tears, sought his across the table. “How could we fail so badly?” she said. “She’s rude, isn’t she? She’s insolent and rude, and she hates people and lets them know it. Why? You’re not that way, and I don’t think I am. Where did she learn it?”
Shrugging his shoulders down over his drink, Louis brooded without answering. He remembered how, when Margaret was a child, he had imagined her grown up, imagined them dining out, the attractive girl fresh and interested and warm, clear-colored and with candid eyes, and he protective, gravely courteous, the two of them watched by people because of the obvious trust and gentleness between them. He saw himself standing to help his tall daughter into her wrap, moving with her among the crowded tables of such a sidewalk café as this, in some fashionable international place that would delight her. With his elbows on the table, his hands around the cool glass, he looked up and saw his lumpish, arrogant daughter standing above him with her discontent like alum in her mouth.
