Bedelia

by Vera Caspary

  Ellen found the jambalaya too filling. She wished she had not helped herself so greedily.

  “If he’d lived, he’d have been an important artist, perhaps a great one. When he died, one of the dealers bought up all his paintings as an investment, knowing they’d be valuable some day.”

  “Why, Biddy!”

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “You told me his friends had sold them at auction.”

  “Oh, oh!” said Bedelia, watching Charlie through her eyelashes, “yes, of course, dear, they sold them at auction because the dealer wanted to give me only a hundred dollars. So they made him auction them off instead of just buying them from me, and I got over two hundred. You remember, Charlie, I told you.” Without waiting for Charlie’s reply, she went on, “We’re going there someday to see if we can buy back some of the paintings. I’m no critic, but lots of people thought he had great promise.”

  Ben had been watching Bedelia. When he caught Ellen staring at him, he picked up his fork and began to eat again.

  “You sold them all!” Abbie cried. “You didn’t keep any for yourself?”

  “I didn’t have a dollar to my name,” Bedelia confessed, quite without shame or embarrassment.

  “What did your husband die of?”

  “Appendicitis. It was too late when they took him to the hospital.”

  She stated the fact simply, and smiled at each of her guests in turn as if to tell them she was not asking for sympathy. Then Abbie asked Ben Chaney if he knew the work of a painter named Cochran.

  “The first name was Raoul,” Charlie said.

  “Raoul Cochran, that’s a queer one.”

  “His mother was French,” Bedelia explained. “Raoul wasn’t known in artistic circles in the North. He’d sold a few pictures, but only to people down South.”

  Although Ellen disapproved of personal questions, she found herself asking, “If you were so terribly poor, how did you happen to be spending the summer at Colorado Springs?”

  “It does sound extravagant, doesn’t it? But I was ill, the shock, you know, it had affected my nervous system, and I lost my baby.” She offered this with appropriate modesty, avoiding their faces. “The doctor said I must have a change of scene. The mountains had always appealed to me and since the Springs is a health resort, I decided to go there. Of course, I couldn’t consider stopping at the hotel. I lived in a cheap boarding-house, but it wasn’t uncomfortable and I had a magnificent view.”

  “When I met her,” Charlie said, “she had given herself two more weeks at the Springs. She was hoping to find work in a Denver department store. She had come to the hotel that day to see the fashions.”

  “I hadn’t had anything new for years and I thought that if I applied for work in a good shop, I’d better show that I knew something about style. So, before I started altering my clothes, I decided to go and see what the Easterners were wearing.”

  “She came to look at the millinery, but she found me more interesting.”

  “Now, dearest”—Bedelia flirted with her husband enchantingly—“you know that you pursued me relentlessly.”

  “From the lounge where you’d been drinking tea to the porch where you’d gone to look at the view. Is that relentless?”

  Bedelia included the guests in the next chapter of her story. “How indifferent he tried to look when he chose the chair next to mine. He put on such a show of not noticing me that I knew precisely why he was interested in the view from that particular angle. It took him almost ten minutes to work up the courage to ask if I wasn’t awed by the grandeur of the Rockies.”

  “We might never have met except for an accident. I’d planned to pack-trip with some fellows at the hotel and one of them sprained his ankle and we postponed it, fortunately for me.”

  “And I,” Bedelia added, “had almost decided not to go to the hotel because the cheapest tea was fifty cents.”

  “The gods were good to us.”

  Charlie’s pious pleasure and Bedelia’s nervous assurance annoyed Ellen. The conversation seemed natural, like a scene rehearsed over and over again by zealous actors. Ellen complained, because there was nothing else to fuss about, that the room was too hot. “It’s unbearable in here. Can’t you do something about it, Charlie?”

  Ellen’s shrillness punctured Charlie’s mood. He had dwelt for those few seconds among the peaks of the Rockies. He went grumpily to turn off the heat. Then he fetched his mother’s white Angora shawl for Bedelia.

  “How thoughtful, darling. But you needn’t have bothered. I’m not cold.”

  “We must be careful now,” Charlie said.

  Bedelia shook her head at him.

  “What’s the matter? Is Bedelia pregnant?” asked Abbie, who had begun to affect frankness.

  “Excuse me,” Bedelia said, pushed back her chair and hurried through the swinging door to the kitchen.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Abbie was puzzled. “What’s so shocking about babies when people are married?”

  “Do hush up,” Ellen said.

  “She’s sensitive since she lost the last one,” Charlie explained. “She thinks talking about it might bring bad luck.”

  “Superstition,” snapped Ellen, and immediately regretted it.

  “We can’t all be as rational as you, my dear.”

  Bedelia returned with the coffee urn. Mary followed with cups, cream and sugar.

  Every time Bedelia served coffee, she enjoyed turning the little faucet on the urn, and Charlie enjoyed the sight of her childlike pleasure. She was composed again, gracious, the charming hostess. “How do you take your coffee, cream, and sugar, one lump or two?”

  “How nice you look today, Mary. Is that a new cap?” Ben asked as the young hired girl brought his coffee.

  Mary blushed and giggled as she hurried through the swinging door.

  “You mustn’t tease her, please, Ben,” whispered Bedelia.

  “I wasn’t teasing. She’s a pretty girl.”

  “He was driving into town one Thursday when she was off,” Bedelia said, “so he drove her in and treated her to an ice cream soda. She’s got a crush on him.”

  “Mary, too,” thought Ellen, and glanced toward Abbie to see if she recognized this as another of his predatory habits.

  But Abbie was flirting with Ben. “That doesn’t leave us older girls much chance, does it? With Mary’s simple ways and unspoiled charms, she must be very pleasing to a city man.”

  “I haven’t shown her my paintings.”

  “Why should you?” asked Bedelia.

  “I’ve asked you to look at them, haven’t I? You’re the sort of woman who couldn’t possibly have had tea with a man and not know how he paints.”

  Ellen tried to look unconcerned, but Abbie accepted the challenge boldly. “What sort of painting do you do? Don’t tell me you’re a Cubist.”

  “Won’t you come and see? A friend of mine is coming from the West on Friday and Charlie and Bedelia are having dinner at my house. Perhaps you girls would come, too.”

  “We’d adore it,” Abbie said before Ellen had time to offer an excuse.

  Afterward they sat in the small room, which had been known for generations as “your father’s father’s study,” but which Bedelia had renamed “Charlie’s den.” Bedelia brought ashtrays for the men.

  “Probably you’d like one, too,” she said, and fetched another for Abbie.

  “How did you know my guilty secret?”

  “You smoked at the Waldorf-Astoria that day.”

  “Were you shocked?” sighed Abbie hopefully.

  Bedelia shook her head. “When you’ve lived among artists, you’re not shocked at anything. But at the Waldorf the people look so respectable that I was afraid you were making yourself conspicuous.”

  Charlie had filled his pipe and was about to light it when he remembered Ben’s gift. He ought to smoke a cigar, he reflected bitterly, to show appreciation. As he went off to fetch the box, he wondered at Ben’s thoug
htlessness. They had often smoked together and Ben ought to have noticed that Charlie cared only for his pipes.

  He offered the box to Ben, who took a cigar. “That’s funny,” Charlie said to himself, “he doesn’t usually smoke them either.” Both men clipped off the ends and lit their cigars as if it were a regular habit. The room became fragrant with the smoke.

  “I do admire your taste, Mr. Chaney,” Abbie said. “Those are grand cigars.”

  “How do you know?” Ellen asked tartly.

  “If you’d been with men as much as I have, dear, you’d recognize the smell of a good cigar. Isn’t that so, Bedelia?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Bedelia sat stiffly at the edge of the leather chair, her hands gripping the arms. All the color had been drained out of her face and her eyes had become wary. They were all looking at her and she seemed to be defending herself against their scrutiny. Her voice, giving answer to Abbie’s simple question, had been sharp with terror.

  BEDELIA CAME INTO the bedroom. Her hair hung loose. She had on a dressing-gown of royal blue challis printed with roses and bound in rose-colored ribbon. Charlie caught her in his arms and embraced her.

  “You smell so sweet. Your skin smells like honey.”

  Every night Charlie said this and every night Bedelia told him it was her skin cream. The repetition did not irritate them, for they were still in love. Every trifling incident had either the charm or novelty or the comfort of repetition.

  “Well, Christmas is over,” she said.

  “A happy Christmas?”

  “Yes, honey, of course.”

  The blank look had come into her eyes again, and Charlie wondered if she was thinking of Raoul Cochran. There were times when he suffered keen jealousy, when he resented all of her past life, every experience which had not been shared with him, even the poverty and mourning.

  “Better than last Christmas?”

  Bedelia’s eyes met Charlie’s and she said reproachfully, “Oh, darling.”

  “Last Christmas you were picking roses.” She was silent and he went on. “My mother was ill,” as though he were angry with Bedelia for having enjoyed the sunshine and flowers and breakfast on a balcony while his mother suffered in this very room.

  His wife untied the rose-colored ribbons and took off her challis robe. Her corset cover and knickers were of fine muslin, lightly starched, embroidered and run through with pink ribbons. Charlie watched with pleasure as she untied the bows and whisked the tiny pearl buttons through minute buttonholes.

  As she loosened her corset laces, she walked toward the pier glass. “I am getting stouter.”

  “It’s becoming.”

  “In a few weeks I’ll begin to show.”

  Charlie went off to the bathroom to wash and brush his teeth. When he came back, Bedelia was in bed, her hair loose on the pillow. His mother had always braided her hair at night, straining it back from a bulging forehead. For Charlie, his wife’s careless tresses had sluttish charm. Her bedroom slippers were of rose-colored satin with French heels. Her pretty lingerie, ribbons, embroideries, and scents delighted him. Before his marriage he had, like every other respectable man, known a number of wantons. Looking back upon their seductions and comparing them with his wife, he saw the poor girls as drab unfortunates. Bedelia’s easy pleasure gave to the marriage bed a fillip of naughtiness without which no man of Puritan conscience could have been satisfied.

  He was glad he had married a widow.

  “Charlie!” She sat upright and let the covers fall off her shoulders. Her voice was dramatic. “Your powder! Did you bring the water, dear?”

  “I’ve forgotten. It doesn’t matter, though, I feel all right.”

  She insisted that he take the powder. For his own good, of course. He had eaten a lot of rich food that day and drunk a number of eggnogs.

  “All right,” he agreed, sighing and stamping off to the bathroom. The show of martyrdom was purely a show. Bedelia’s concerning herself about his health and keeping powders for him in the drawer of her bed table pleased Charlie. This was another proof of her love for him. The powders, folded into blue packets, were highly effective. She had learned the remedy when she worked as a companion to a dyspeptic old lady.

  “Drink it fast and you won’t notice the taste,” she always said when she had spilled the powder into the water for him.

  As he took off his bathrobe, Bedelia regarded him with shining eyes. “You’re so tall,” she said, and height became the final standard of perfection. “And your shoulders are so broad. You’ve got a wonderful physique. That’s what your mother always said. ‘My boy’s not handsome, but he has a fine physique.’”

  Charlie could not enjoy the full flavor of flattery without disturbing the ghosts of Puritan ancestors. To appease certain stones in the churchyard and the bronze figure of Colonel Nathaniel Philbrick, mounted on a bronze horse in the small park downtown, he pretended to reject her admiration. “Too skinny,” he remarked. Having made this gesture, he laughed and asked, “Who told you that? Abbie?”

  “Ellen.”

  “Oh!” Charlie said.

  “Poor Ellen.”

  “Why do you pity her?” Charlie asked as he got into bed. “It’s no disgrace for a woman to earn her own living.”

  “It’s not that. I’ve worked myself. That’s not what I mean.”

  “I must say I admire Ellen’s spunk. She’s doing well on the paper. I met Clarence Green the other day and he told me she had real aptitude.”

  “I’m sorry for Ellen because she’s still head over heels about you.”

  Charlie tried to deny it. Bedelia insisted. Ellen’s every look betrayed a broken heart. “But she’s a wonderful girl, Charlie. She tries her best to like me.”

  Charlie lay on his side, studying the tilt of his wife’s nose and the jolly curve of her cheek. He felt unworthy because he was loved by this enchanting woman and by Ellen, who had a strong character. What had he ever done to deserve all this devotion? He was no Casanova. If he had been hard, compact, and wiry, with abundant dark hair and a knowing smile, he might have accepted feminine admiration more complacently. But he was thirty-three, bland, undistinguished, going bald. The virtues he admitted were commonplace, the virtues of an unromantic man, the sort of fellow to whom a nickname like Charlie-Horse could stick for life.

  “What about the light?” he asked. “Shall we try again?”

  Without hesitation she replied, “Yes, dear. We’ll really do it tonight.”

  He stretched out his hand and the room was dark. Immediately a great variety of noises took possession of the night. The river seemed to rush along faster and to chatter in a wilder voice, the wind wailed, the black walnut tapped its skinny fingers against the windows, the shutters trembled, the panes rattled, and there were scratchings as if an army of rats had invaded the attic.

  “Oh, Charlie!”

  He took his wife in his arms, held her tightly, whispering. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, Biddy. You’ve got me here, my sweetheart, my wife, my little love, you’re not alone now. I’m here, nothing can hurt you.”

  Her tears wet his cheek.

  “Just what is it you’re afraid of?”

  “I don’t know,” she wailed.

  They clung together. Bedelia made herself small against him so that he should feel larger and more necessary to the frail woman. Since their wedding night he had been trying to help her overcome her fear of the dark. Her efforts had been so sincere that Charlie had never scolded nor laughed at her for the childishness of her terror.

  Gradually her fears had infected him. In the daytime he resolved to harden himself against contagion, but when she clung to him in the dark, weeping, his mind filled with strange fancies and his flesh, under the blankets, chilled. By day his wife was earthy, a woman who loved her home and had a genuine talent for housekeeping. In the dark she seemed entirely another sort of creature, female but sinister, a woman whose face Charlie had never seen. It was absurd fo
r a man of his intelligence to let himself be affected by these vague and formless fantasies, and he tried to account for his wife’s fear of the dark by remembering that she had lived a hard life. Her girlhood, according to stories she had told them in bits and pieces, a stray anecdote here, a fragment there, had been shadowed by so much misfortune and disillusionment that it would have been abnormal for her to not have been affected.

  None of this reasoning did Charlie the slightest bit of good. The phantoms dwelt there as if they had taken a lease on the bedroom. On every other night he had weakened and relit the lamp. Tonight he was determined to prove by disapproval that the darkness was uninhabited and that he had no sympathy for her irrational, childish terror.

  A quivering scream rent the blackness. Cold winds swept through the room. Under the blankets Charlie shivered.

  “What is it, my dear?”

  Bedelia did not scream again. After a silence so deep that she seemed to have stopped breathing, she whispered faintly, “Did you see it, too?”

  “See what?” His voice was crisp with disapproval.

  “It moved.”

  “Now, Biddy,” he began firmly and coolly.

  “I saw it.”

  “There’s nothing in the room, nothing. It’s absurd for you . . .”

  She pulled away from him and moved to the edge of the bed. The pillow did not muffle her sobs nor the mattress conceal her tremors. The house was filled, quite suddenly, with small terrible sounds that were closer and more distinct than the rushing fury of the river.

  In the ten seconds that passed while he stretched his hand toward the lamp, Charlie recognized the weakness that had taken possession of his spirit. It was a newly acquired quality. Charlie Philbrick Horst had been trained in the school that rejects idle whims and scorns self-indulgence. Morally slothful, his mother would have called his present state of mind.

  “Oh, Charlie-Horse, darling, how good and sweet you are,” his wife murmured. Her tremors ceased. She relaxed, wiped away tears with the back of her hand, offered a dimpled smile.