There was a long silence. Upstairs a door banged. They listened with a particularly polite attention to the first rush of water as it filled a bathtub. Joe finally spoke.
“Look, Sue,” he said. “I think you’re crazy. I think you should think this over. You should talk to Sara, see what she says. Talk to anyone at all, I don’t see what the rush is. We have plenty of time to decide. Why don’t you talk to Tim? You know now what I think, of course . . .?”
Yes, I do, Sue thought bitterly. But why can’t you say what you think, she wondered, because I’m so little? Because you think I haven’t brains enough to see what you really think, you poor stupid child?
“I might,” she said, agreeing automatically. “Or maybe I won’t. I think perhaps I won’t talk to anyone, that maybe I know already.”
He looked almost panic-stricken and gulped at his glass. “No,” he protested. “You’d better see what they think. Tim’s the swellest person in the world, he’ll tell you.”
“Why don’t you ask him then?”
“Ask him what? I don’t need to ask him anything. I know what we should do without getting anyone’s advice. You ought to follow me to London.”
“Oh, please, stop,” she said. “You’ve said that so often it sounds like famous last words. Round and round. I’m tired of it.” She looked away.
“All right,” he said stiffly. “If that’s the way you feel, maybe you’re right after all. Maybe you had better go home.”
Joe stood up, his face averted, then walked to the window.
It’s to hide his relief, Sue thought and winced. She called to him softly, “Joe, Joe darling, please forgive me. Come here. I’m a little cranky from drinking all that beer and gin, then falling asleep so hard. Come here!”
He turned slowly and went to her side.
“Look, Sue,” he said. “We’re all mixed up about this thing. I think it would be best to wait. You’re right. I’m a hypocrite and sometimes I do really think you ought to go home. Most of the time I don’t. I want you near me, I want to sleep with you. I want you near me to eat with and drink with. I get so damned lonely at Oxford, pretending I don’t mind being the crude Yankee, going to damned silly teas for Rhodes men, trying to ape the manner of the well-born Oxonians or else trying awfully hard to act the part of Wild West rodeo riders, using slang I haven’t thought of since I used to read the Sunday funny papers when I was a kid at home. And I don’t understand English girls. And I need you. Sue, we’re made for each other, you know that, at least in bed.”
Joe stopped, looked at her seriously, then moistened his full lips.
She lay before him without moving. At last she was getting some of what she’d asked for. She felt stunned and that she’d been within a spiritual hare’s breath of turning tail and throwing herself in his big fumbling passionate arms.
She drew in her breath and stared up at him, her eyes very bright, mouth curved into a hypnotized half smile.
“So?” she said it provocatively. She was daring him.
Joe was silent for a moment. His eyes shifted. He then finished the last tepid swallow in his glass.
“So,” he said. “I want you to wait until tomorrow morning to decide. You know what I think. In a way it would be cutting our own throats to stay together this year. It will hurt your father and it would make things damned hard for me at college. But I don’t know if we can live without one another.”
He then turned away abruptly and she was horrified to find herself wondering coldly if the little tremor in his voice was sincere. He had sounded so very frank, so very man-to-man. Had he suddenly come to some decision of his own? It would be almost funny if after all her feminine worrying and shilly-shallyings it was finally Joe who took matters in his own hands and decided everything for her.
She shivered at the thought that maybe he already knew, that he was simply waiting until she felt fresher and better in the morning to tell her she must go. Oh God, to have Joe tell her the bitter truth that she’d always seen herself telling him? That would be unbearable.
“You’re right, darling,” she was almost stuttering. “I think we ought to wait. I’ll come down and talk to Sara tomorrow morning. Everything will seem clearer. Let’s wait. Let’s not decide now. Let’s forget all this and have some fun.”
She held out her hands to him, and Joe pulled her up. As she walked toward the terrace with his hand hot and pulsing on her shoulder she was thinking, Fools! I know what we must do and he knows, as well, and we go on pretending and putting it off and I go on praying that somebody will be strong enough or foolish enough to convince me to do what neither of us really wants. We both know what we’re going to do. How can we keep on being so false with one another? Oh, why can’t anyone help me? Why must I decide all alone?
“Let’s go play the gramaphone,” Joe said.
2
Near dawn the doctor looked at the woman and raised his arms, then let them slap sorrowfully against his fat sides. She felt the first screw turn in an iron collar that was being afixed around her throat, the tight cold band that never again was fully loosened, so that even when she was an old woman she sounded her words tightly and coldly, as if through heavy iron.
That morning her husband still lived, after a fashion. He had withered and his lips were drawn back snarlingly from his dry teeth. As men lifted him onto the stretcher his arms clawed the air with short despairing movements, like that of a newborn child. The woman looked at him and he at her, but did either see?
After the operation she lay on a narrow hospital cot listening to his sick wretching in the next room. Doctors came in and told her of incisions and embolisms and then lifted their hands and let them fall, like philosophers.
The next day, however, he still lived, still after a fashion. As the stretcher took him toward the operating room he smiled dreamily and she felt one more screw settling into place in the iron collar. She smiled at him and then lay down carefully on the bed to wait for the doctors to come in and raise their arms in their helpless way.
She waited several hours without moving and she’d planned that when they came she would not look at them. Just as she opened her eyes she saw their hands, still covered with the thin spotted gloves, fall slowly toward their sides and slap faintly agaisnt their aprons. She smiled. She kept smiling even when they said the man was still alive.
i
Lucy Pendleton woke a little later than usual on the morning of August 31. She lay still for a moment, running her tongue over her dry lips and blinking painfully at the light streaming through the one big window that led onto the balcony, then she turned to look at the little shagreen-covered clock by her bed.
It was only seven ten. Oh God, how could she fill in the time before eight o’clock and her breakfast? And what if her breakfast was late, as it often had been? But what could you expect in a house run as carelessly as this one? If it weren’t for a little direction that she herself, ill as she often felt, had been forced to give now and then, she was sure she’d never get anything to eat.
She closed her eyes and a tear rolled slowly from each one, down her face and onto the skin of her neck. She lay quietly, feeling them with a certain amount of grim pleasure. Finally she reached one hand under the pile of soft pillows—she never slept with less than six piled cosily around her shoulders to ward off asthma—and pulled out a damp and wadded-up handkerchief. She shook it out with a gloomy kind of pride in its humidity, then dabbed her eyes. Her breath caught. She sounded like a tired child as she sighed.
She might as well get up and kill a little time fixing her hair. She was sure François had noticed it the day before, all soft from a shampoo. As he’d laid her tray reverently across her knees, she’d peered at him sharply but it was impossible to tell much from his dark, rather bristly face. Really, Sara should be more particular about his shaving! She most certainly would be were he her servant. She’d felt strongly that he was somehow conscious of all her soft brown beautiful hair.
She stuc
k her feet into her green leather Pullman slippers, straightened her pale pink satin nightgown, noting the insertions of ecru lace, then pulled on her green chintz wrapper. It always pleased her to button its long rows of white buttons. Arranging the frilled bosom and puffed sleeves made her feel charming and old-fashioned and completely womanly.
Lucy Pendleton then stood before the bureau and shook out her two thick braids. No wonder! What man could resist hair such as this, even the ignorant peasant they kept as a valet? Not a single gray hair and each strand as fine as silk! With every stroke of her good strong brush she thought of the almost worshipful care with which the little Swiss coiffeur in Veytaux had touched her—it was actually so funny!—the last time she’d had her hair done. He’d been almost trembling and had become quite pale as he’d wound his fingers through the thick heaviness of her braids.
She stopped then, suddenly remembering with disgust what Tim and Sara said when she’d told them—rather what they’d not said but had implied. There was no avoiding it, the two were filthy minded. Just because a man was gentle and dainty and had a lovely face and speaking voice there was no proof he was . . .?
They were filthy and her blood felt hot to think of it every time she allowed herself to think, as happened again and again over this whole dreadful summer. Those two managed to imply something so low and foul about even the most innocent things and now things were worse, with Sara’s younger brother and sister here, being taught to laugh in the same perverted way. They were all awful, all of them, even . . .
Lucy put her brush down and resolutely started toward the door. She would speak to Nan this very moment as this could go on no longer. Could Nan not see how she was allowing the atmosphere of this place to coursen her? To make her as loose and common as the rest of them? How could Nan have let her morale slip so during the course of their time here, the whole summer but especially since young Dan and Honor came?
No, before it was too late, Nan had to be spoken to.
But with her hand upon the doorknob Lucy stopped. It was only seven thirty and Nan had mentioned the night before that she wanted to sleep until eight. Why, God only knew, Lucy thought. She was suddenly furious. Always before, Nan had been happy to have little exchanges of ideas in the freshness of the morning. It’s the atmosphere of La Prairie, Lucy thought, where it’s all slack.
Nan never slept that late in Philadelphia, even after a concert. It was Tim and Sara who were changing her.
The last thing Lucy had heard the night before—as they’d stood saying good night at the foot of the stairs—was Sara’s light, breathy voice commanding them, “Everybody sleep late tomorrow! You’re all tired, even if you don’t know it. You’re tired from the change of altitude and from our batting around in Dijon.”
They’d all still been in their hats and sweaters from their drive around the lake.
Lucy frowned and spoke up in disagreement. “Everybody may be but I’m not everybody, my dear.” That should have shown Sara how grossly imperative she had been, but the woman had apparently been born without the appreciation for subtlety. Sara laughed, saying, “Lucy, I’m talking to you especially. I hate to have you driving yourself, up painting at dawn, wearing yourself out.”
She found herself then softening as she remembered the tone of real concern and affection in Sara’s voice. It was a pity that Lucy so thoroughly disapproved of the poor creature. This only showed that young people, even those as thoroughly repulsed as was Sara, were drawn toward Lucy’s sympathy and understanding. Had things only been a little different . . .
Her face stiffened once again as she remembered what she thought of as the situation. No matter how nice they might seem, these people were spurning all the moral teachings of their families and breaking their parents’ hearts in the bargain. They were nothing but common criminals and should be treated as such. She’d often said so to Nan, and not even Sara’s clever and beguiling ways, nor all Tim’s gallantries, would ever shake her poor opinion of them. Tim Garton—even if he was her beloved Nan’s brother—was a weakling and Sara—in spite of the apparent decency of her family and Nan’s pathetic defense of her—was a bad woman.
Last night! This was the reason she’d awakened feeling so excited and upset this morning. Even Nan would have to agree that it was deliberate, how Sara had shooed them—as if they were two old ladies, old!—off to bed, saying they were tired, then stayed up until early morning herself, drinking and talking.
The insolence. She’d lain awake tossing and turning for hours listening to the muffled laughter that came from downstairs. It was obvious that Tim and Sara had deliberately got the children drunk and that they were telling them their usual battery of filthy jokes. Anyone could tell this from the lewd way they all laughed.
But even such behavior, its thoughtlessness of the comfort of the decent people in the household—had not upset Lucy as much as did the deceitful way Sara had sent her and Nan packing. Lucy was not used to being considered de trop, particularly by young people who tended to admire her, and now she stood before the mirror suddenly trembling with anger, knowing she would never forget the impotent rage it had made her feel as she lay listening to the thoughtless voices downstairs, hardly getting any sleep at all.
She wondered if poor Nan had comprehended the severity of the insult. Certainly Nan’s face, as they’d said good night, had betrayed no signs. She needed to talk to Nan. Lucy could now barely contain herself.
She was staring at herself in the small oval mirror above the bureau as she whacked almost viciously at her hair with the brush and felt her anger dissolve into a rush of homesickness. Oh, how she longed for her own comfortable dressing table upon which sat her own carefully polished silver set. The table had three mirrors and a low comfortable stool. How she hated the heavy color and the silly mirror of this wretched mannish bureau. It was no wonder she always felt messy as she could hardly see herself to dress.
Sara could not have put her in a more thoroughly hateful room, this was no doubt purposeful, as she’d probably learned from Nan that blue was Lucy’s worst color, especially the hard cold blue that covered the chaise longue and the bed and the windows. She’d have easily heard from Nan or even Timothy that nothing upset her more than plastered walls.
Could it have been Nan who’d written secretly to ask Sara to give her just what would make her most unhappy? Nan, who knew her better than anyone? Who knew, too, how dreadfully sensitive Lucy was to her surroundings? But, no, not even Tim’s malignant influence would have made her own dear Nan behave as horribly as this. It had to be Sara, who had in someway divined . . .?
And now Lucy’s eyes again burned with tears and she hurried over to wash her face at the washstand behind the ghastly blue screen. Her face felt swollen. She opened the medicine cupboard and searched through the masses of tubes and jars and bottles and sticks for the lotion for her eyes that she always carried with her, as one never knew! How good it felt, how lucky Lucy was, to have brought along all these supplies!
She used both the white and the pink toothpastes that morning. She’d read that the white would neutralize mouth acids and the pink was for the stains caused by nicotine. Then she used a little mouthwash, then a gentle patting of her face with astringent, then another drop of lotion and one for her hands and now she was beginning to feel awake.
She pulled the windows open to a sun already high. She smiled disdainfully at the thought of all the people sleeping all over this house, while she alone was wide awake to the beauty of the morning. Typical of them, aside from her own dear Nan, who might, she thought, be awake too.
She tiptoed along the balcony toward Nan’s windows and looked into the dim room. Nan lay like a tiny child with her face lifted trustfully toward a bar of sunlight that slanted across it. Her hair was gold and spread out in a fan over her naked shoulders, and Lucy’s heart contracted with love.
She looked in, sighed sharply, thinking how odd it was that Nan hadn’t heard her. Of course, Lucy hadn’t called out
loudly enough to have actually awakened her but she’d felt so strongly that Nan would already be awake, waiting to share this beautiful morning with Lucy alone.
How young she looked lying there. Who’d believe that Nan—seeing her like this—was only two years younger than was Lucy herself? And yet people said, confidentially of course, that Nan did not stand up to the light half as well as did Lucy. Who was it, that man on the boat, who’d been amazed when Lucy told him she was the older. He had, in fact, refused to believe it.
But that was the way Lucy was, utterly frank, instead of letting people build illusions all too easily shattered. She was probably the most frank and forthright woman she knew, in her own estimation. It was hard to be so relentlessly truthful but it was better than the alternative, which was fooling other people, as even poor Nan did, with all her youthfulness and ingenuity.
Now she heard a sudden slapping step on the path and Lucy lept into the shadow of her window. François, late as usual, was hurrying down from the village. Lucy’s heart thudded with exasperation as she saw it was almost eight. This meant her breakfast would not be up until at least a quarter past the hour. She felt suddenly weak with hunger as she threw herself down on the detestble blue chaise.
This was Sara’s fault, of course. It was a ridiculous idea to have this lanky villager come clear from the village every morning to serve their breakfasts. And it wasn’t that François was inefficient—indeed, he served very well and cleaned like a madman all morning and the few times he’d helped with dinners he’d done so beautifully.
It was simply to feel Sara’s outrageous vanity about her cooking that she refused to keep a servant in the house and instead made this poor man climb up and down the hill from the village, sometimes twice a day. Of course Sara was a good cook but it made Lucy almost laugh to see how Sara used this to attract attention.
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