“Now, Sue, now!” Joe pressed his arms tightly around her tiny waist and she could feel his proud excitement. “Now! Around this curve . . . and there! You see those big old trees? And the roofs? That’s . . .”
“La Prairie?”
“No, that’s an old monastery, a farm now, that’s just across the road. And now, to the left, Sue! That’s it!”
Sue felt a shyness flood into her body again as she looked where Joe pointed clumsily with his one unhindered arm. She was almost overcome with dread at the thought of meeting more people. Sara Porter’s little speech about “sin,” which surprised Sue more than she realized, sounded again in memory. She felt a wave of shock to have learned that Sara and Tim Garton were not married—she’d always assumed his name was Porter. That she herself was not married to Joe Kelly seemed natural to her and didn’t trouble her except when she remembered that she was deceiving her father. It was a shock to remember this was not acceptable for certain people. But to find that the people at La Prairie, that almost mythical couple, Tim-and-Sara, were like Joe and herself! This was such startling news as to seem improbable. Older people should be married, shouldn’t they? Wasn’t it unfair for them to be acting with the unconventionality of college lovers?
And all those strangers! Even Sara Porter had looked uncomfortable, in her remote way, as she had swiftly mentioned them. Sue wondered desperately if there would be anybody at La Prairie who was more or less her own age.
She drew in her stomach and tilted her head proudly. They’ll all probably be horribly smart and clever—Joe was always quoting what had been said or done or eaten at La Prairie. The only thing she could think of was to try not to sniff and to pretend that her green tweed skirt had just been whisked out of an enormous wardrobe trunk, after much pondering by her of what to wear. If she held herself well she’d look taller and more unwrinkled and it was—as she remembered—always wiser not to talk.
“Look, Sue!” Joe tried to jiggle her on his cramped knees. “Do you see? There! You can see the roof now.”
Sue nodded silently.
To their left, a little past the tree and hidden by the bulk of the old monestery, a driveway forked from the road and sank rapidly out of sight between two plain and heavy gateposts. Sara flicked the car expertly through them, cut off the engine, then coasted slowly down a short steep incline to the open garage.
On the right and above their heads was the road wall. The ground sloped downward so abruptly that on their left they looked into the tops of aged apple trees heavy with green fruit and the feathery empurpled bows of prune and plum. Under them wound a steep path past an old square basin-like watering trough. Sue could hear the steady trickle of its spout.
Susan sighed. Joe was right. It was lovely, lovely. She felt that this might really be the place where all her turmoil would be calmed, where she could find help for her every present need and trouble and worry.
“Hey! Where is everyone? Isn’t anybody hungry?” Sue listened to Sara’s calling out to the others, then lay back in Joe’s strong arms looking at the house as avidly as if she might never see it again.
The garage was attached to the house, then it dropped with the slope of the land so that the front was almost two stories below, facing a terrace where there was a steadily flowing fountain. There were only two windows, one on either level, each filled with a luxuriant splash of tumbling, flickering petunias, white and deep purple. The walls were almost dust-colored, the shutters a muted green, above was the soft clay-red of the tiles of the roof. Sue felt a fastidious pleasure that the tones were right, as right as her own intuitive selections of greens and whites to blend with her gray eyes and her brown skin and her wild and sun-bleached hair.
Which room would I have, she wondered, if I were a good woman and could stay here? Joe says the house is long, stretched out facing the lake. Where is the lake? It must be very far below. What about this horrid woman who was making life difficult, making Sara Porter and me into whores? That’s too funny. I wonder if she really means it?
Sara banged on the auto’s horn, almost crossly, then sat back. Nothing happened. The fountain sounded clearly in the silent air and a little puffing breeze filled their nostrils with the scent of bees and rotting fruit.
“I don’t know where everybody is. I thought they’d be out in the road looking starved . . .”
“How about my carrying all this in anyway, Sara?” Joe asked and flicked open the door with his elbow, shoving Sue off his lap and out gently, then unfolding himself rather stiffly from the small, low car. He looked with exaggerated amazement at the piles of paper bags and the heaped bundles in the back.
“My God! Well, at least we’ll eat!”
“Don’t rub it in,” Sara told him mildly. “I can’t help it if the house is full. Or if you and Sue are shameless. Or if one of my guests . . .?”
“Hell, I’m sorry, Sara. I’m the rat.”
“Yes, you are,” she said.
Sue listened with astonishement as the two talked quietly, all the while Sara piling packages on Joe’s enormous outstretched arms. He was blinking beatifically about him like a happy dog. She followed to look over the tiles of the sloping roof again and into the dark exciting squares of the flowered windows, on into the fruit-filled treetops.
She had never before heard him talk in such a relaxed way. With her he was almost always making love, fervent, demanding, and, with the people they had met this summer in the south of France and in the little taverns of Bavaria, he had always been passionately angry or excited or upset. His low voice—although it had never grown either loud or shrill—had always rushed and pressed upon her, whether with its own desires or with its angers against the extreme injustices others were witnessing on a daily basis. But now it was somnolent and amused.
She knew that if she were not so filled with shyness and the certainty of having to sniff or blow her nose within the next few minutes she might be jealous of Joe’s happiness being found in something besides Sue herself, jealous too of Sara Porter and all these surroundings that made Joe so beamish.
She wondered why Sara called him Giuliano, as she did occasionally. Did it mean something secret between them? Sara seemed simple but was she, beneath her quiet manners, actually a grasping woman, a bitch?
Oh, please don’t let Sara be a bitch, Sue prayed frantically. She’s got to be nice! She’s got to help me. The boat sails in seven days and I know Joe wants me to be on it, so why does he keep begging me not to go? And why do I want him to beg me not to leave him? It’s too cruel, cruel. She’s got to help me and soon.
“Here, Susan, give a hand,” Sara was telling her.
Sue flushed. How could she have stood there so stupidly while they worked? What would they think of her? She sniffed and picked up a bag of tomatoes with awkward haste. As the bag split open, she stood staring in horror at a dozen round red devils rolling merrily down in to the dim garage.
But Sara laughed and said, “Don’t you mind, Sue! They’re that much nearer the kitchen. Here, take these instead.” She piled three packages expertly in Sue’s arms and said, “Come on, we’ll let Daniel get the rest.”
Instead of taking the steep path past the watering basin, Sara now led them into the cool garage and through a door in the far wall.
Sue and Joe followed her gingerly down some twisting steps, peering as best they could over their bundles into the cool darkness of the unfamiliar stairway. The house smelled fresh and airy and was quite without signs of life.
Sara stopped at the bottom of the stairs and they stood for a minute, listening. Susan stirred, hoping that they would not notice how her heart was thumping. Who would appear in this strange place? What would happen next? She felt like a lost child waiting for goblins from the depths.
Suddenly a door crashed open in the little hall in which they stood. Susan looked at the tiled floor, soft green and light gray, and then at the green wooden door and then let her eyes ride up the interminable length of legs of the one wh
o stood there, legs hung with mussed thin cotton pajamas. They did not move. The hips were small and properly tied about with crumpled cloth and the thin lank torso was brown and wide-shouldered and as naked as it was born, and now Susan felt herself to be staring into blinking and bloodshot green eyes.
iv
In the half-second before he’d stut the door with a mumble that sounded rather like jzza en sczzmhm, Susan had decided that this was the darlingest, but the darlingest, boy she had ever seen.
She stood, ecstatically blank, seeing clearly against the soft green wood the rangy figure who’d been standing there, and she could easily imagine his half-shut eyes, as the sleepy garble of astonishment rang again in her ears with all the clarity of a French train whistle, all the magic sonority of an organ in a dim cathedral.
She flattened her flat little belly and reached with her one free hand, without even knowing it, for Joe’s handkerchief. She needed a good blow. Her heart thumped delightedly.
“We’ll put these things in the kitchen,” Sara muttered. “Damn that lazy boy anyway! Oh, hello, Nor.” She nodded at the tall girl who was arising slowly from the blue velvet chaise longue upon which she had been stretched. “We’ll drop these things and be back in a minute to be polite.”
She led them across a long light room toward the open wall along one side of the fireplace.
Sue picked her way down the three broad steps into the room and followed Sara, flicking one terrified look at this new person. Her mouth had turned dry and she was appalled to realized that in spite of her emotional nose-blow in the hall she would once more need to sniff, and mightily. Where else in the world were there as many enormous people as she had seen today?
She was used to Joe, so he didn’t count, but Sara Porter had always seemed as tall to Sue as the city hall, and now here Sue was, peering up at yet more people who seemed even taller! And they were all thin. Her neck ached and she slowed down in front of the strange girl with a painful feeling that very soon her head would snap off and roll back off her shoulders with a hollow thump on the floor.
Suddenly it all seemed funny. She grinned and looked up into the benign brown eyes of one of the prettiest faces she had ever seen. She had a new certainty that she was after all so small that no matter what she did nobody would notice her.
Hurray, she thought lazily, I’ll do what I like! I’ll be Mosca the Gadfly. I’ll have a little fun, maybe, and stop worrying myself thin over silly old Joe and whether he wants me and how many miles it is to Munich or Babylon or Oxford.
“Hello,” Sue heard herself saying with a kind of passive amazement at her own nonchalance. This girl was one of the handsomest things in the world, certainly, slim, brown, dressed in impeccable white with high-heeled white pumps on her small feet and her silky dark hair piled on top of her head in a way that almost belligerently accentuated her extreme height.
If I didn’t feel a little crazy, Susan thought, I’d be paralyzed by her, but paralyzed! Poor girl, though, she’s so tall I bet it’s hard for her to get dates.
“I’m Honor Tennant,” the girl said. She spoke slowly, as if she were thinking of something else.
“I think I saw your brother.”
“Dan? Yes. I heard his door while you were in the hall. That’s too bad. I’ve been meaning to get him up before Sara got home. But he won’t be long, now he’s seen you. If you’ll give me some of your bundles . . . here, let me just put these things on the table and I’ll take you upstairs.”
“But what about Mrs. Porter? Hadn’t I better . . .?”
“No. Leave them here. Sara will find them. She likes to be let alone when she’s cooking. Anyway, I think what’s-his-name went into the kitchen with her.”
“You mean Joe?” Sue felt faintly resentful at this tall beautiful girl’s complete dismissal of her love. She frowned and went on: “That’s Joe Kelly. Please excuse us for not introducing ourselves.”
“Yes, I know,” Honor said, as if bored. “Star football, Rhodes fellow, all that. He looks nice. But don’t worry about introductions. Sara should have done it and she always gets into a twitch before meals and I don’t know where Tim is. I know you’re Susan Harper, though, we we’re at least safe on that point. And I do know we’re all awfully glad that you’re here.”
She started to walk off with the long strides of her long legs toward the wide door through which Sue had just come. Sue ran after as an amused exasperation struggled in her. Suddenly she laughed aloud and darted quickly past Honor and up the stairs to the dim cool hall.
“You know,” she said, her voice sounding rather thick to her own interested ears, “I am really scared to death and so have decided to say just what I want to, for once, while I’m here. I’m catching a terrible, but terrible, cold.” She paused, then added, unnecessarily, “In my head.”
Honor stopped her deliberate progress toward the stairs and looked quietly at Sue.
“Gosh, that’s too bad,” she said seriously, as if this were somehow an important thing about which she suddenly—in spite of her apparent boredom with the world—felt pierced to the very quick of her being. She looked with real concern in her lovely brown eyes, into the strangely twinkling gray ones of Sue, which—because Sue was above her on the stairs—were on a level with her. Then Honor walked on.
They went on up the twisting stair on granite steps. The walls were rough white plaster. There were green tiles on the little landing and green woodwork. Sue, bewildered and excited though she was, was again overwhelmed by the same aesthetic safistfaction that had risen in her in first seeing La Prairie from the car.
Honor turned a final left, Sue following her into a small airy room. She noticed a beautiful desk, a couch bed, a fat squat chair covered with pale cretonne, and long white organdy curtains billowing softly between apple-green and white walls, before the two wide windows which seemed half-filled by boxes of opulent petunias, white and purple. This is the room I saw first, she thought, exultantly. I looked up at these flowers and wondered if I should be here! Sue could hear the fountain below.
Honor stood for a minute, her head bent, as if she, too, were listening or waiting for something. Then she said, “You know, I’m really awfully sorry about your cold. They’re hell, so ignominious somehow. I’ll give you some face tissues, for hankies.
“And I know what you mean about being scared to speak,” she went on almost hurriedly. “I know what you mean. I was too scared when I first came here. It’s different now, but my sister’s really pretty overpowering. I don’t know why . . . I don’t think she means to be, but she is. She’s nice, though. Wait ’til you see Tim. He’ll take the curse off it. And anyhow, I know you won’t be scared long.” Then Honor suddenly turned away.
She’s embarrassed at talking so much, Susan thought. She watched Honor, as the girl stood by the old wooden desk and stroked a curve of its low fluted backboard with one finger. She’s embarrassed, and how queer that her hands are short and plump! Sue laughed again softly. She felt much less intimidated now that Honor Tennant had talked even so inconclusively to her.
“You have a strange name.”
Honor looked up as if she had forgotten for a second that she was not alone. Her face lightened but she only answered briefly, “Yes.” Then, as if ashamed of her curtness, she almost rattled on, “My mother wanted it to be Norah but Father drew the line at that, so it’s Honor, which is, of course, even more Irish than Norah, though in America there aren’t as many cooks named that. Not that I’d mind being one either, just so long as I was a good one, cook I mean. Here. This is the dressing room. You’ll find everything you want, I think, and that door to the left is the toilet. And help yourself to those tissues, they make swell hankies.”
She smiled vaguely at Sue, ran one hand slowly through the top curls of her pile of soft brown hair, and disappeared rather heavily but majestically down the stairs.
Sue listened to her steps and smiled again to herself. Honor was nice and she felt somehow that it was because
she herself had adopted an important new policy, clearly and definitely, as she’d stood only a few moments before in the bewildering strangeness downstairs.
That’s all I need, she told herself triumphantly. With nerve, anybody can carry off a difficult situation—not that things have been terribly difficult so far—but they laughed at me when I sat down at La Prairie. I’ll just act silly and say what I think. That will fool them all, all these tall people.
As she washed her hands and dried them sensually on the softest towel she’d used that summer, she wondered—and not for the first time—what made her feel so awkward and timid at the thought of this place. Certainly Joe had never offered anything but glowing praise for La Prairie and the people in it and the food and flowers and drink and the good beds and the freedom—all of it had always sounded pefect to her. She had longed to be here and now she was, if shaking a little again inside at the thought of having to go down those stone steps alone and wishing Honor had stayed with her.
Nonsense, she told herself savagely. You’re almost twenty, and even if you are shorter than anybody, you do have a great deal of dignity.
She pulled out her three rather bent gold hairpins, shook her topknot loose, and wrapped it into place again expertly. As she poked the ribbon into place in front of her topknot, she stopped in order to look searchingly at herself in the mirror.
She scowled and—with quick determination—pulled the pins out again and did her hair all over again allowing it to sit in place more softly. It was easy to pinch into place the waves always lurking in her wildly gleaming, white-blonde hair. Yes, Joe was used to her and he didn’t matter but she felt sure that Dan Tennant would like her better if she looked a little bit less like she’d been skinned.
She pulled deftly at the curls around her face to loosen them, leaving her fine brow bare, her little eyes looking wide and knowing. Then she moistened one finger and flicked her long eyelashes to point them before she looked at herself in the mirror with satisfaction.
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