Beauty and Attention: A Novel

by Liz Rosenberg

  A week passed. Then two. It was always just the three of them, sitting downstairs in silence for a few hours in the evenings. By day, they lived separate lives, but for this time each evening it was necessary to behave as if nothing had changed in the household. Osmond made it clear that he expected this. The radio played music in the background, very softly. This was Libby’s doing. Soft as it was, it irritated Osmond and he threw it a glance of annoyance now and again as if it might turn itself off.

  Viola had not been eating or sleeping well. Libby mentioned the fact to her husband, and proposed also, not for the first time, that he might consider allowing the girl to have flute lessons outside of the house, perhaps at a music conservatory.

  “Stay out of this,” Osmond warned his wife. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  “I disagree,” said Libby. She had tried everything she could think of: flattery, reason, bargaining, silence, begging. None of it had worked, and each approach had to be carefully timed and paced to avoid raising his temper. Above all, that. For Osmond had one of those cold angers, which, once roused, never lost its capacity to feed on itself. Libby had seen enough to know that much. She had been walking on eggshells for days, guarding her every word and movement. She had dressed comme il faut and had changed her hairstyle to suit her husband’s taste—he preferred the short Italian cut popular just then, though it didn’t really flatter Libby’s heart-shaped face. She changed to a paler lipstick and had her nails done. She trained herself to sit more quietly, to walk more softly, to keep his hours. All of this met with a kind of cool appraising notice, a nod, the way a passenger might look at a train that finally pulls into the station several minutes late.

  “She is not your child, Elizabeth. She is mine. I know what’s best for her.”

  “Undoubtedly,” said Libby. “I was only suggesting—”

  “I detest suggestions,” said Osmond. “Especially regarding Viola. She must learn not to defy me.”

  “When has Viola ever defied you?” asked Libby.

  “Resistance is a form of defiance,” said Osmond. “And she won’t stop crying. That irritates me. It makes me feel I am being accused. Am I cruel to her? Have I starved her? Beaten her? Thrown her out into the street?”

  “Of course not,” said Libby, trying to make her voice soothing.

  But Osmond bristled. He stroked his chin. “I begin to think the two of you chased Lord Warburton away. Deliberately and maliciously.”

  “We did nothing of the kind. He has a mind of his own.”

  “Have you heard from him?” Osmond’s head came up suddenly, snakelike.

  “Only the note I showed you two weeks ago.”

  “That was nothing.” Osmond let his head and hand fall.

  “I was thinking,” Libby ventured after a long silence. “Of a trip. For me and Viola. Perhaps to Paris, to buy some spring clothing. It might do her some good.”

  Osmond considered this, his light-hazel eyes on his wife. Then he shook his head regretfully. “No,” he said. “I don’t trust you.”

  “That is an unkind thing to say,” said Libby.

  “The truth is sometimes unkind. Besides, I prefer you both here beside me. And I see no reason to reward her for her petulance. A journey would be ill timed. She must come around on her own.” He allowed himself a small smile. “Hasn’t she read any of the current articles? A woman must smile and show a cheerful disposition if she is ever to find a proper mate. There’s some truth in that, however fatuous the source.”

  “It’s hard to smile when your heart is broken. When everything you care for has been taken away.”

  “Her heart has no right to be broken!” he exclaimed, casting his newspaper aside. “What has she lost? A flute and a cat! I am not above sending her back to the convent. Another year in confinement might do her good.”

  “For the love of God,” pleaded Libby. “Don’t send her away.”

  “I only say it could come to that.”

  “Please, Osmond.”

  He retrieved the newspaper and bent his grizzled head over it. It seemed to her he had gone grayer of late. She could almost pity him—almost. “Then drop it,” he said. “Tread lightly, Elizabeth.”

  “You must be patient,” Libby told Viola upstairs in the girl’s room. “And be prepared to be brave. I will do all that I can, and more. Perhaps, at least, we can get you your flute lessons.”

  “I am not brave,” said Viola tremulously. “But I can be as patient as you like. I still have the flute, in its case.”

  The two women sat a long time together then, in silence, just holding hands.

  Libby was asleep, dreaming of her old home in Rochester. She did not hear the telephone ring in Osmond’s room. In her dream, a back wing of the house had fallen off and she and Henry were trying to glue it back on. A muffled knock at the door woke her from the dream.

  “Phone,” Osmond said in an irritated voice. He too had been awakened. “It’s Ireland.”

  A few minutes later Libby came downstairs looking pale and drawn, wearing a robe purchased on her honeymoon. Osmond was sitting in his favorite chair, reading a history of Rome and drinking a cognac. He looked up and watched his wife come slowly down the stairs. She looked at that moment more beautiful than she had in many months, he thought, almost like a painting come to life. Almost as she had appeared when he first met her.

  “My cousin is dying,” she told her husband. Then she looked like her usual self again, only even more unhappy. It was a disappointment. Nearly everything about her was a disappointment to him.

  “I never understand why people make these phone calls in the middle of the night,” he said. “What is one expected to do at this hour?”

  “I must go to him,” she said simply. She sat with her hands in her lap.

  He placed a bookmark carefully in the pages of his book and closed it with a sigh.

  “I don’t see why,” he said. “If he is dying, let him get on with it. I don’t see what good you can do. It’s not as if you are a nurse.”

  “I need to go,” she said, clasping and unclasping her hands. She felt the almost physical presence of a storm there in the room with them, over their heads.

  “It would be very inconvenient for me. I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “I am sorry for that,” she said.

  “Don’t be.”

  “I must always be sorry when I upset you,” she said.

  “I didn’t like it when he came here,” said Osmond, “but I tolerated it. I won’t tolerate your going and sitting by another man’s bedside. It’s indecent.”

  “He is my cousin. How can there be anything indecent in my going to him now, when he is dying?”

  He picked up a newspaper and rattled it, unfolded it, but did not read it. His words, when he spoke, sounded like words he had gone over many times in his own mind. “I am your husband. When we married, we made a solemn promise to stand by one another. I take that promise seriously—apparently more seriously than you do.”

  “If I didn’t take that promise seriously, do you honestly believe I would still be here today?” Libby’s voice was low but intense.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he answered. “I’m simply asking you to behave as anyone would in a normal marriage.”

  “Our life together is not normal,” she said.

  “Your place is here, with me.”

  “Don’t you understand? I have to go to my cousin Lazarus. I must and I will. “

  “I forbid it,” Osmond said flatly.

  “I see.” She stood. They locked gazes.

  “At least we understand each other,” he said.

  “No. We do not understand each other,” she said. “We never have. And we never will.”

  By the time Libby had booked a car to the airport, arrangements had also been made to send Viola back to the convent for an undefined period. Osmond wasted no time. No one could accuse him of lassitude. He had packed the girl’s trunk himself. Libby was distraught, b
ut Viola looked like a prisoner being sent to execution, her face small and frozen and white.

  “Of course you must go,” she whispered to Libby, holding tight to both her hands. Her father had locked himself into his study, once the packing was done.

  “I will come for you,” promised Libby.

  Viola nodded.

  “Prepare yourself for that,” said Libby. “I hope you will come with me.”

  Viola’s eyes were wide and frightened. The rest of her face didn’t move. It was as pale as a marble statue.

  “To go where?” she asked at last.

  “Anywhere!” said Libby.

  The next half hour passed with interminable slowness. Then suddenly, it seemed, the taxi driver was at the door, hoisting Libby’s bag over his slender shoulder.

  “I wish I had my cat,” said Viola, her voice shaking. “And my music. But it’s asking a great deal.”

  The door to Osmond’s study opened. There was no more that the two women could say in his presence. He watched his wife take her coat from the closet and button it from throat to hem. He said nothing. Libby embraced Viola tearfully, but the girl kept her eyes closed, as if she could not bear to watch her stepmother leave.

  “Be brave!” Libby whispered in her ear. “I will come for you soon!”

  She could not tell if the movement she felt was Viola nodding or trembling with fear.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Night was falling fast, moving from inky blue toward black, as Libby’s plane descended into Belfast. The checkered green squares of Ireland below were wrapped in a shining mist, but as soon as the wheels touched down Libby felt a sense of relief, as if she had come home to a place she had never before known was home. The comfortingly familiar Northern Irish accents of the men handling the luggage and checking her through; the wool tweed cap of the taxi driver who drove swiftly and surely over the looping roads into the Ards—all of it gave her the illusion of safety, at least till she pulled into the driveway of Gardencourt and knocked on the front door, shivering in the damp air.

  Her aunt opened the door wordlessly, and wordlessly led her into the house. She walked before her niece up the stairs and gestured wearily at the guest room door.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” she said. “But the doctors all say the same thing. It is a hopeless case.” She spoke in a dry voice, devoid of emotion.

  “I am grieved to hear it,” said Libby.

  “I know you are,” her aunt said. She looked a decade older than she had the last time Libby had seen her—more than two years ago, before her marriage. Angry words had been exchanged then. But the old woman standing before her did not look angry, only pale and stooped.

  Just then Lazarus rasped from down the hall, “Send her in, for God’s sakes!”

  And then her aunt did smile, if grimly. “Go ahead. You can do no harm.”

  The man who lay on the bed was recognizably her cousin, yet he had a look Libby had seen before, as if he did not lie alone in that room. There was already a grim presence beside him, and Libby recognized it as much by its smell and flavor as by its shadow. Lazarus rolled his head to the side to greet her with a wide smile and followed her entrance with his eyes. His lips seemed even thinner, his teeth more prominent. She kissed his cheek and sat on the bed beside him. She had combed out her hair on the plane; it was back to its natural looseness. Perhaps it was better suited to the 1940s than to nearly the end of the 1950s, but she was past caring for all that, and so was her cousin.

  “I was afraid your husband would object to your coming,” he said.

  “He did,” she said.

  Lazarus nodded.

  Libby sat in silence for a few moments, holding his hand between both of hers. “You were right about him, of course,” she finally said. “In every way. I am sorry I ever lied to you.”

  “There’s surprisingly little comfort in being right,” he said. “The monster.”

  “No,” she said. “He isn’t a monster. He’s simply a human being. Not an especially nice one. I chose badly.”

  “I’m not convinced you chose him at all,” said Lazarus. “I blame myself.”

  Her eyes widened. “You? But you had nothing to do with it!”

  Lazarus lifted his one free hand and let it fall. He gazed at it as if it were a foreign object.

  “You were only ever kind and wise,” she said. “You gave me my first beautiful place to come to. A place of independence.”

  “That place brought you nearer to this,” said Lazarus. “That was neither kind nor wise.”

  “The strangest thing,” Libby went on, in a low voice, “is that my husband never lied to me. He never deceived me or pretended to be anything other than what he was. I did all that myself. He told me he preferred his own company to that of boring and shabby people—and he does. He warned me he was fastidious. He never tried to hide his distaste of what I call the world. I wanted to believe it all meant something nobler than it did. All my cleverness didn’t keep me from being a fool.”

  “I know about cleverness,” said Lazarus.

  “I’ve had two miscarriages. Both times they explained that the baby had no heartbeat. After the second time I needed surgery. So that’s over as well.”

  “Oh, Libby. I am so sorry,” said Lazarus.

  “Don’t be. At least—not for that. Osmond never said he wanted more children. He already has a daughter. He likes only one-of-a-kind things.”

  “Leave him,” Lazarus said. “I’ll will Gardencourt to you. Mother doesn’t want it. You can live here, simply.”

  “It isn’t so simple,” said Libby. “I wish it were. But here I’m upsetting you. I’m supposed to be keeping you calm and happy so that you can get well.”

  “I’m past all that,” said Lazarus. “All I can look forward to now is a slow, lingering death. You’d do me a favor to help me make a quick exit. But why can’t you leave the man? There’s every reason you should.”

  “Every reason but one,” said Libby, unsmiling.

  “And that is—?”

  “My stepdaughter. I can’t abandon her. I love her. And Osmond doesn’t. He is incapable of that emotion. It’s my job to protect her. And I can only protect her as long as I remain married to him. So you see . . . it isn’t simple at all.”

  “Bring her here,” said Lazarus stubbornly.

  “She wouldn’t come.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Well, she’s locked away in a convent at the moment, for one thing. And she has been well trained all her life to be obedient. To be dutiful. It will take time to convince her.”

  “Locked away in a convent,” said Lazarus, shaking his head. “How gothic. The poor kid.”

  “She is sweet to the core,” said Libby.

  “I could see that.” Lazarus’s face twisted.

  “Are you in pain?” asked Libby.

  “It’s not fun,” he said. “The fun’s over. I may even need you to help me.” His eyes fastened on hers.

  “I will do anything,” said Libby. “Whatever you need.”

  “What will you do—with yourself?” he asked.

  “I’ve started a small charity,” she said. “I have a little money of my own. Osmond doesn’t know about the charity, he needn’t know. I go into the city often. He thinks I’m going to museums. There’s so much need. I wish I could do more.” She helped her cousin to sit up and then rubbed gentle circles on his back. Slowly, gradually, she could feel his muscles relax a little, and he closed his eyes.

  “We all wish that,” he said.

  “It’s a relief,” she admitted, “to be able to tell someone the truth. The truth at bottom. I feel as if I have been waiting for that, all my life.”

  “What about that other man, Caspar?” he said. “The stern American. The inventor. Do you know I’ve kept in touch with him?”

  “Have you? How funny of you! I hear he’s working on computers.”

  “I made a small investment in his company,” said Lazarus. “I s
hould have advised you to do the same. It’s done very well.”

  “You often tried to be my guide. I didn’t always listen.”

  He winced. “There’s a bottle of pills in my bureau,” he said. “Yellow tablets. Will you get me one, please? They help me sleep.”

  She did as he asked. He swallowed it without water, then added, “Some guide . . . Virgil. Leading you into hell.”

  “I’m not in hell, entirely,” said Libby. “And in any event, you didn’t lead me there. I got here on my own.”

  “One man loved the pilgrim soul in you,” he said. He took another minute to catch his breath. “That inventor.”

  “He is long gone,” said Libby gently.

  “I doubt it,” said Lazarus.

  “No, I only wish—” she said, and stopped.

  “Wish what?”

  “I wish my husband didn’t hate me,” she whispered.

  Lazarus leaned forward then and took her hands in his. He looked into her eyes, as if to memorize something, or as if there were something he wanted her to memorize. “Just remember,” he said, “if you have been hated, you have also been loved. Deeply loved, Libby . . . loved like fire. Blood and bone.”

  She fell into his arms, allowing herself to weep relieving tears. “My brother!”

  There was only one person Osmond disliked even more than Lazarus, and that was Henrietta Capone. Henry flew into Ireland as if she had been waiting for the call, almost before Libby could remember making a request. Henrietta looked as gaunt, upright, and elegant as ever. The eternal Mr. Pye hovered in the background or discreetly took himself off elsewhere. He always had someplace useful to go, someone to see.

  Henry was not as impatient as she had once been; Libby could feel that difference. When her friend sat with her now, she was able to stay seated; one long leg wasn’t always jumping up and down, her feet weren’t tapping on the floor, ready to dash off to the next thing. There was a new stillness and thoughtfulness in the way she looked at Libby.