Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  But Charlotte could not return Patrick’s compliment. At this point there were still enormous gaps in her musical education in spite of—or because of?—years of piano lessons. “Well, what about her? Where is she?”

  “In Portugal at the moment, though she lives most of the year in London. She used to do a lot of touring when she was younger, but she’s had to cut it down. She manages a lot of recording.”

  “It’s still not a very clear picture,” Charlotte said. “With a father in South America and a mother in Portugal or England I don’t see where you come in.”

  He laughed again, but there was a certain amount of tension in the laugh and in the pose of his body as he said, “Quite a number of years ago she was on an American tour and she was playing with the Boston Symphony and she got a chill that turned into pneumonia. My father was resident at Massachusetts General then, and he pulled her through and fell in love with her while he was doing it. And she fell in love with him. But Violet’s not cut out for a permanent union with anyone except her harpsichord. I don’t say she’s right or wrong. I don’t feel in any position to judge Violet. And Dad couldn’t have been an easy man to live with.”

  Echoing Ursula, or the influence of Ursula, Charlotte said, “What man is?”

  But Patrick did not hear. “If Violet was in love with music, Dad was in love with medicine. Their hours didn’t jibe. He was up at the crack of dawn and she practiced half the night and slept until afternoon. He wanted her to give up playing professionally when she got pregnant. She promised she would. She did. She tried. Then when I was six months old she walked out of the house and went back to England. Dad didn’t go after her. He brought his mother to live with us as housekeeper. When she died last year it seemed his chance to go to South America. He’s a bug on tropical diseases. Not much chance for field work in that in Boston. He’s a great guy, and so was my grandmother. Gave me a great childhood. Okay, Charlotte, let’s get off the subject of parents. It seems to be an upsetting one to both of us. I’ll feed us now.”

  “Let me finish my drink.” She took a sip and suddenly she was on the verge of tears. Everything was wrong. Everything about the entire evening had gone wrong. She wanted to go home.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Patrick said. “What do you do all day?”

  “I go to school.”

  “My God, I keep forgetting how young you are.”

  “I graduate this spring.” The easiest thing, the thing she wanted to do, was to walk out of Patrick’s apartment and go home. But she’d told her father, she’d told Reuben and Essie, that she was going to Ursula’s apartment, and that she would be there late doing homework. So she couldn’t go home. Not for a long time yet.

  “Patrick,” she said, “let’s have another martini.”

  “I think you’ve had enough.” Patrick stood up and went to his cupboardy kitchen.

  “I’m old enough to know whether or not I’ve had enough. I certainly don’t feel anything. If I’d had enough I’d feel something, wouldn’t I?”

  “We’re having wine with dinner,” he said. “And I don’t want your palate to be too jaded. Nor my dish to burn. Do you want to wash up or something?”

  She was curious to see Patrick’s bathroom, having learned that people reveal a lot about themselves by their bathrooms. But Patrick didn’t really have a bathroom, not of his own, not in his apartment. She had to go out to a dark closet all the way down the hall for which Patrick gave her the key, since it was shared by all the tenants on the floor. In Europe she had stayed with her father in inns where the only bathroom was a semiprotected hole in the ground, but this had not given her nearly the sense of discomfort and dis-hygiene as the idea of a group of people all having keys for one small, dank toilet on Bleeker Street.

  Patrick was stirring his stew when she got back and it smelled wonderful. “I’d like to wash my hands, please,” she said, and looked around because she couldn’t see any place to wash them. In that refrigerator down the hall there had been nothing but the toilet, and she began to think there wasn’t any water, except that he’d obviously washed the lettuce hanging in the basket.

  He took a red Persian cloth off what she had thought was a table, then lifted up what looked like the tabletop, and there was a big tub. It was big enough to take a bath in, with a certain amount of discomfort. Patrick gave her soap and handed her a beautifully embroidered linen towel. “Made for my mother by some order of nuns in Portugal she gives a benefit concert for every year,” he told her.

  In some ways perhaps he was even more interesting than she’d expected.

  She washed her hands while he ladled out the dinner into two brown willow-ware bowls. The bowls were slightly chipped, but brown willow ware, unlike blue, cannot be bought at Woolworth’s. Patrick had the table covered with a brown cloth; all his materials were odd and foreign-looking and went along with the Patrick she thought she’d come to have dinner wth instead of the Patrick he was turning out to be.

  She did not understand him at all.

  The wineglasses were beautiful. They weren’t mates, but each one had a delicately shaped bowl and a long, slender stem; the wine was a Chambertin. The knives and forks and spoons, like the wineglasses, didn’t match, but they were real silver, even though they needed polishing. And the stew—was it stew?—was superb.

  “Cotty—I mean Charlotte,” Patrick started.

  She finished her glass of wine and looked at him kindly. “You may call me Cotty after all,” she said, “even if you’re not the way I thought you were.”

  “How did you think I was?”

  She felt herself growing a little pink. “Oh—just different.” She changed the subject. “That big picture—who painted it?”

  “Oh, that? I needed something huge and splashy for that wall, so I bought a hideous old picture in a junk shop for a quarter for the canvas.”

  “You mean you painted it yourself?”

  He grinned at her. “I spent a couple of afternoons in the Museum of Modern Art and came home and imitated four or five different artists all at once. Miró more than anybody else.”

  “But—you’re a medical student!”

  Patrick laughed and absent-mindedly poured her some more wine. “That doesn’t mean that I have to close my mind to the rest of life. And painting relaxes me at the same time that my subconscious goes on studying.” He got up and went to the kitchen part of his room.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making us some coffee. Want some more stew?”

  Usually there was nothing wrong with her appetite, but that evening she seemed to have nothing but a terrible thirst. “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, I’ll bring on the salad.” Patrick whisked their bowls off the table and put on two plates. These weren’t brown willow ware. Chippendale, and very good Chippendale, Charlotte thought, then realized a little fuzzily that Chippendale is not china, it is furniture—isn’t it?—and how was it that she could be getting china mixed up with furniture, and what kind of furniture was she confusing the china with anyhow? She drank the wine and shook her head to clear it, but that didn’t help, so she picked up the plate to look underneath to see what kind of china it was, though she hated using a dictionary rather than being able to think of the word all by herself …

  She looked at the bottom of the plate and before she could see the faint lettering it slipped through her fingers and she could hear it break as it crashed onto the floor, because of course Patrick had no rugs to cushion anything. And then suddenly she squawked out, “Patrick, I have to have the key, quick,” and Patrick leaped out from behind the screen and had his arm about her and she was out of the room with him and down the hall and he had the key in the keyhole and was opening the door without a fumble and she could never have found the keyhole at that point and she flung up the lid of the toilet and vomited out all of Patrick’s martinis and stew and wine and he held her head and stroked her damp pale hair back from her forehead.

  She was qui
te tidy about throwing up and was conscious enough of what was happening to be grateful, although her face was damp with an odd, cold perspiration, and she knew that she must look quite ghastly. For the moment she could not bring herself to care, and she hardly realized it when Patrick took her back to his room where the fire was leaping gaily in the pink marble fireplace, and helped her to lie down on his couch and put a cover over her. She lay there looking up at the ceiling, and the ceiling began to swoop around her in slow, graceful ellipses. Her stomach gave a flipflop but she shut her eyes and things quieted down. Patrick was so full of apologies he was almost cackling in his anxiety like an old mother hen.

  Finally she said crossly, “Please do shut up, it wasn’t your fault at all. I sneaked a lot of wine you didn’t know about. It was entirely my own responsibility. Just fix me some good black coffee and I’ll be all right.”

  She knew that she couldn’t go home until she was all right, perfectly all right. Why was it that it would be even worse to go home to her father when she’d helped Reuben and Essie fix black coffee for him many a time, or had ordered it for him herself during vacations in hotels, than it would have been if he never drank anything at all, like (presumably) Patrick’s father and grandmother? Now she understood why, if he fixed his own martinis, he was apt to cheat: you just don’t realize it until it’s too much.

  “Your plate,” she moaned faintly. “Oh, Patrick, I’m so sorry about the plate.”

  His voice came quite close to her and she opened her eyes and he was kneeling beside the couch holding out a big, delicate cup of coffee. The china was so thin she could see the lovely dark liquid through it. “It’s all right,” he said gently. “Just drink the coffee. Don’t worry about the plate. I have nothing but dribs and drabs of china, anyhow.”

  “Yes, but everything is beautiful,” she wailed, “and the plate was beautiful. What kind of a plate was it?”

  “Staffordshire,” Patrick said. “Drink some more coffee.”

  She drank, propped up on one elbow, then managed to sit up, though the entire room shuddered before it steadied and settled. She drank all the coffee and Patrick filled her cup again. By the time she had finished she felt almost all right. She thought of her father standing for long minutes under a hot shower if he’d been out late at the club the night before, and then coming out and dressing in clean clothes and smelling all fresh and of soap and after-shave lotion, and then going down to the library and being absolutely silent for a while; then at last she would hear the sound of his typewriter clacking away and know that everything was all right.

  “Patrick, my father would murder me, I mean really, if I came home and he thought I was drunk. I think I’d be okay if I could have a bath and then one more cup of coffee. Do you think I could take a bath in your tub?”

  “Well, sure, Cotty, it’s pretty primitive, but if you think it would help …”

  “And you wouldn’t mind sitting out in the hall? I mean, it’s so cold out there and everything, you wouldn’t mind too much?”

  “No, sweetie, I don’t mind a bit sitting out in the hall,” Patrick said, and fixed the tub for her, folding the cloth and leaning the board against the wall, and putting in one of those flat rubber things to cover the drain hole. From a drawer he got out a towel and a face cloth and a brand-new cake of soap—how nice of him—and then he took a large kettle from the stove and emptied it into the tub, then ran in some cold water. “Okay, Cotty, yell when you’re through.” He took a large medical tome and left the room, shutting the door briskly behind him.

  She looked after him at the shut door, and noticed that there was rather a large keyhole, so when she took off her skirt and sweater she hung them over the knob, though she didn’t think that Patrick was the kind of person who would consider looking through a keyhole.

  He had put a chair by the tub and actually she needed it to help her climb in. There wasn’t very much water and it wasn’t as hot as she would have liked it to be. She had forgotten when she’d asked Patrick if she could have a bath in his tub that he lived in a cold-water flat, and that this meant exactly what it said: cold water. The tub was a bit of a squeeze, too, so that her knees were hunched up under her chin. It wasn’t going to be at all like her father standing and steaming himself under the shower, but she thought perhaps she’d feel better if she washed, so she got the face cloth full of lather and began to soap herself all over.

  Then she heard the whistle. A long, low wolf-whistle.

  She sat rigid in the tub. She’d been so worried about Patrick being in the room or even looking through the keyhole that she hadn’t thought about his windows, his two, big, bare painter’s windows. She grabbed the towel off the back of the chair and looked out through the window and there, across the court, was a big man in a sweatshirt leaning out his window despite the cold, looking in at her as hard as he could, and grinning from ear to ear.

  “Pull down your shades!” she yelled, though he would not hear through Patrick’s closed windows. “Stop looking at me!”

  He leaned farther out the window and roared with laughter.

  “Patrick!” she shrieked. “Patrick!”

  Patrick opened the door, his finger marking his place in the heavy medical book. “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s a man in that window! He’s looking at me!”

  Almost as quickly as he’d put the key in the keyhole of the water closet, Patrick took the screen from his kitchen and put it in front of the tub. Charlotte burst into tears.

  “Don’t be upset,” Patrick said kindly. “He’s never seen anyone as beautiful as you are in his life. It will be something lovely for him to remember always. Now finish your bath and call me when you’re dressed.” And he went out again.

  What had she expected him to do? Certainly not to tell her that she’d brought light into that man’s life. She’d expected that he’d at least shout at him. Or perhaps go plunging down the stairs and over to the next building and up to the man’s apartment and grab him by the scruff of the neck and beat him up.

  She managed to get the soap off her in the inch of lukewarm water in the bottom of the tub, deciding to have a proper bath as soon as she got home. When she was dry she realized that she would have to get out from behind the screen to get the clothes that she’d hung over the keyhole. She’d certainly called her shots all wrong. She wrapped the towel around her as best she could, darted out from behind the screen, snatched the clothes off the doorknob, dropped her slip, bent down to pick it up, and was rewarded by another wolf whistle from across the way. She slunk behind the screen, dressed, and called Patrick.

  “Is it because you paint that you don’t have curtains at your windows?” she demanded. “Couldn’t you have shades?”

  “I’m aiming for them one of these days,” he said. “There always seems to be something more important to get instead, like something to eat.”

  “You bought that canvas for your painting, and you didn’t buy ten-cent-store china.”

  Patrick shrugged. “What I pick up at junk stores can’t be bought for the same money at the five-and-dime any more. Woolworth is no longer for us of the proletariat. I could take Violet’s money but I prefer to do things on my own. You know what, Cotty? I think you should go home now, and we should make another date, a brand-new one, and start all over again. I have a feeling you’d like to forget this evening entirely, and though there are moments of it I’d like to treasure I’m willing to go along with the gesture. What do you say we pretend you never came here tonight, and that we make a date for—perhaps next Friday evening. Maybe I’ll blow us to artichokes and take you to a French movie. In any case I think I ought to call for you properly. Okay? Now I’ll take you home.”

  Didn’t she ever think? Why was she surprised when Patrick took her to the subway instead of calling a taxi? Perhaps it was because her father always whistled and waved his cane at a taxi automatically. If Patrick had asked her when her father had last taken a subway she wouldn’t have had the
faintest idea.

  She said goodbye to Patrick at the foot of her street. She didn’t want him walking up to the house with her, she explained, not when she’d lied about going to Ursula’s house to do homework.

  It was only as she was walking up the brownstone steps and fumbling in her bag for her latchkey that she realized that not only had she not sacrificed her innocence on the altar of Patrick’s sophistication, but Patrick hadn’t seemed in the least interested in her doing so.

  Was it because she had sneaked too much of Patrick’s wine and thrown up and everything or was she really as much of a failure as she seemed?

  I am very unhappy and the result of what started with such happiness is tears and deathly despair and I see no help anywhere

  … no, Antonio was not coming to the room for her, she was to meet him downstairs. That was what Dr. Ferreira had told her to do. She looked with anxiety at her watch. By the time she had put on makeup and tidied herself, the required hour would have passed and Antonio would take her to the Convento de Nossa Senhora da Conceição—

  To her surprise the doctor came with him (was Antonio sulking?) and both men tried to shelter her under huge dark umbrellas, Antonio holding her arm tightly and guiding her as though she were blind. They spoke in French, the doctor’s as felicitious as his English, making hers and Antonio’s sound like schoolchildren’s. In both languages Dr. Ferreira spoke with a perfection not heard in one born to the tongue.

  “I am jealous of that brat Joaquim,” Antonio was saying, apparently continuing a conversation with Dr. Ferreira. “She doesn’t care anything about me. Only about Joaquim.”

  She?

  The doctor asked, “It isn’t Jacopo himself, is it? It is his music.”

  Antonio’s face was brooding. “Is there any difference?”

  Charlotte realized that “she,” then, was Violet.

  “No, I suppose not,” the doctor answered. “But you are not being very rational.”

  Antonio burst out, “I am being completely rational!”