When Iva had gone and Barbara was sitting down again, she said, “Does Iva speak English?”
Mary Emerson shook her head. “No, not a word. But she understands everything. She’s like me and Italian. Can’t speak it, but understand—” she laughed — “enough.”
“What about Catherine?”
“Oh Catherine understands and speaks it. She makes it sound like gibberish, but then I guess she thinks it is — she thinks English is, too. I honestly don’t think she realizes there’s any difference. Everything’s a foreign language to her. So, anyway, my dear, how are you?”
They had agreed on terms in London. Barbara was to come five days a week, for two hours a day — from four to six. She could do exactly as she pleased with Catherine. She was to be paid ten dollars an hour. If she couldn’t live on that money, Mary Emerson would see if she could find her similar work with someone else — but Barbara said she would try, in the beginning at least, to live on what she earned with Catherine.
Sitting side by side on the sofa, Mary Emerson asked Barbara if she planned to stay on at the hotel or find an apartment.
Barbara said she would move to a pensione near the Colosseum, which would be cheaper, and more convenient for the bus.
Mary Emerson lay back on the sofa and lit a cigarette. The big woman smoked as if smoking were the most voluptuous thing in the world.
“Do you take Catherine out much?” Barbara asked. She realized that Mary Emerson made her feel prim.
“No.” Mary Emerson shook her head and smiled. “Never. I was thinking that perhaps, when you’ve settled in, you might take Catherine to the ballet or the cinema or something.” Then she added quickly, “Of course I’d pay you for your time, but I really can’t take her out myself.” She pulled herself up on the sofa and leaned toward Barbara. “Catherine depresses me.”
Barbara felt embarrassed. “Who was here before me?”
“Another English girl. But she didn’t actually do anything with Catherine, if you know what I mean. She just took care of her.”
“Did she live in?”
“No. I don’t like people living here. It makes me feel I have something between a nurse and a guard around. She used to come in every day, but she would just hang around, sitting with Catherine.” The woman laughed. “It was like having two mad girls in the house. So I got rid of her — oh, just before I went to London. I left Iva to look after Catherine then. But I do think that two hours of actually doing something will be better for Catherine.” She looked at Barbara and said, “Besides, Deborah was such a dull creature, even Catherine was bored by her. And silly. She used to thumb through Vogue and all these fashion magazines all day, saying to Catherine, “Oh, you’d look nice in that.” Catherine knew perfectly well that she wouldn’t, but it didn’t make life any easier when we came to buying clothes.” She laughed. “That’s the one thing that Catherine and I do together — I really quite enjoy it. I have to use my imagination, you see. It’s not easy to get her something that doesn’t make her look too hideous around the house all day, but at the same time that won’t get her stared at, or get her pinched by any of these wretched boys or old men here if she ever does go out. Not that Catherine would mind, I don’t think, but I would. I mean — it just wouldn’t be very nice.” She wrinkled her nose and laughed again. “I’m not really to blame if Catherine depresses me, am I?”
She didn’t expect an answer, so Barbara said, “What does Catherine do the rest of the day?”
“She gets up about ten. Then — oh, I don’t know. She doesn’t actually read, I guess, because she generally holds the book upside down. Let’s just say she spends part of most mornings with a book in her hands. Then sometimes she goes outside and prays to the goldfish in the fountain.” Another laugh. “And she goes to bed around eight.”
“How big is the garden,” Barbara asked.
Mary Emerson waved her hand. “As endless as it looks.” She stood, lazily, and walked over to the window. Barbara followed.
“We keep up this little bit of gravel and rock here, and there are a few flowers and things in the spring. Oh, and lilies in the fountain, besides the fish. But all that beyond the little hedge is ours — it stretches right over to Via San Sebastian. It’s pretty useless. No one’s allowed to build on it, of course, and we couldn’t possibly keep up a garden a mile long. So you see it’s just a sort of wasteland. We call it the wilderness. It’s full of vipers and scorpions and things.” She wrinkled her nose. “I never go in there.”
“Does Catherine keep out of it?”
“No. Sometimes she gets tired of praying to the fish, so she takes herself off in there to pray to the grass and the nettles and the snakes, but —” she turned to Barbara and smiled, “I really think she goes because the local boys climb over the wall at the other end and Catherine goes out to meet them. But boys or snakes, I wouldn’t go out there if I were you.”
“Do you have any serum in the house, in case anyone gets bitten?”
Mary Emerson looked surprised. “No,” she said. “Do you think I ought to?” But before Barbara could reply, she took her arm and led her back to the sofa. “Do tell me something about yourself,” she said. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Barbara did mind. “There’s not that much to tell,” she said. “I think I told you more or less everything in London.”
“Oh, no! You didn’t tell me anything in London. What about your marriage? You said you were married, didn’t you?”
“I was. My husband died.”
“Recently?”
“About three months ago.”
“Mine died about eight years ago,” Mary Emerson said with a smile. “What did your husband do?”
“He was a professor of history at Oxford.”
Mary Emerson looked shocked. “Good heavens,” she drawled. Then, quite abruptly, she said, “What made you come to Rome?”
Barbara heard a noise in the hall and thought it must be the myna, or someone about to come in. But no one appeared, so she went on, with a frown, “You asked me to.”
“I know I did, my dear, but that’s — incidental, isn’t it? You could have found a job in London.”
“Yes, I know. But —” she paused. She didn’t want to explain to this woman, but she felt helpless, “I wanted to get away.” Mary Emerson was looking at her, unconvinced. “And then my mother is getting old, and when my husband died she wanted me to go home and live with her and — oh, I don’t know. I thought it was better to get away. And then, when I met you — I’m just thirty-four,” she said quickly. “I was sure that if I went home to live with my mother I’d never have another chance.”
“Of what? Getting married again?” Mary Emerson stood up as she asked the question, and began to walk, very slowly, across the room toward the door to the hall.
“No. I don’t know if I ever want to get married again.”
Mary Emerson, in the middle of the room, laughed. “Why, didn’t you like it the first time?”
Barbara blushed. “Oh, yes. I was very happy. But — I don’t know. I suppose that now, afterward, it seems it wasn’t really quite enough. But then I suppose it’s too soon to say, isn’t it?”
“I agree with you,” Mary Emerson said. She pulled the hall door open, and behind it there was a pale girl with short fair hair, with her head bent and her mouth open. She had a brace on her teeth, and she was crying.
Mary Emerson laughed, a loud, almost coarse laugh, and taking the girl by the arm she led her into the room. “This is Catherine,” she said. “Catherine, this is Mrs. Michaels.” She looked at Barbara with a frown and said, “Are you Mrs. Michaels?”
Barbara shook her head. “No. I’m Miss Michaels. I was Mrs. — something else.”
“This is Miss Michaels, Catherine.”
The pale girl didn’t look up. She was still crying, and wiping her eyes and her nose with the back of her hand.
“Hello, Catherine,” Barbara said.
Mary Emerson touched her he
ad and said, “I must go and wash my hair. I’ll let you two get to know each other.”
After she had left the room Catherine looked up at Barbara and said, “I hate it when mother washes her hair. She uses raw eggs.”
Barbara didn’t know what to say. She had imagined that Catherine was almost unable to speak. But she said her two sentences quite clearly, even if with difficulty and without color. It sounded as if her voice were trudging, on a gray winter’s day, through snow.
*
She never did discover how much Catherine had heard, standing at the door, or how long she’d been standing there. She never asked, and Catherine never told her. But, for the first three months, that was almost the only secret they had from each other. Catherine loved working with Barbara, and Barbara loved teaching Catherine. They did their exercises and they danced and they talked, and sometimes they went to the ballet or the cinema together.
One day Mary Emerson said, “Barbara, my dear, you have made enormous progress with her. I can’t tell you. She looks like something new that’s come up with the spring. Well — you can see what you’ve done, can’t you? Catherine’s thin now, she keeps her mouth closed, she never hides behind doors.” She laughed. “Honestly, to look at her you’d think she’s normal. At least she passes for normal now. It’s just a shame you can’t get inside her head and teach movement there. I’m afraid that inside she’s as mad as ever.”
Catherine wasn’t mad though. She simply wasn’t, as Barbara put it to herself, all there. It was difficult to tell what was missing, what was wrong — but there was something, and sometimes the girl would retire into the part of her that was missing, and sit looking at a book that was upside down, or stand in the rock garden staring at the fish, or stand in the hall gazing at George, the myna bird, who laughed at her with the deep laugh that Barbara recognized as Mary Emerson’s.
However — when she sat with her book she kept her back straight, and when she stood in the garden or in the hall she looked as though she were studying the fish or the bird, keenly and intelligently. Mary Emerson was right. Catherine did, now, pass for normal. Barbara didn’t know why she felt slightly bitter about it, whether it was the idea of Catherine merely passing for normal that upset her, or the idea of normalcy itself; but she told herself that in either case her feeling was stupid, sentimental, and to be ignored.
If she loved teaching Catherine, she also loved talking to her; because she could talk endlessly, saying anything and everything she pleased, and Catherine sat and listened and in some way took it all in, making strange little comments, or suddenly asking acute little questions. Barbara sometimes felt that she was almost pregnant with the girl — as if Catherine were a fetus that was being created, cell by cell — and she wondered whether the end result would be a new Barbara, or a new Catherine.
She told Catherine about her fat, sad mother, and Catherine said, “I think you were very right not to return to her after the death of your husband.”
She told Catherine about her husband; she discussed him again and again, until she felt that she had learned things about him that she had never known while he had been alive and they had been married.
Howard had been twenty years older than she, and after they were married she had never considered the possibility, as a real possibility, that they might not spend their entire lives together. She loved him, she liked his friends, she liked the university life. She read a lot, she listened to music, she went to London to the ballet as often as she could, and they entertained a lot; they had a house and a dog, they were not hard up, and they enjoyed themselves in bed. They had what Barbara considered to be a perfectly normal life and she was happy with it.
Then something abnormal happened. Howard got cancer and died. The six months he took to die almost killed her, too. Without thinking about it she had staked her whole life on him, and the gamble hadn’t paid off. She was left no money at all; they had always spent everything. She had nothing but a house and a dog; the dog was old and she had him destroyed; the house, she sold. Then she had nothing but her freedom; far more than she would have believed possible, a year before, to bear. She knew that millions of people were in the same situation as hers, but that changed nothing.
Two months after Howard died she was invited to a party; she accepted, and went, and met Mary Emerson.
Now, slowly, she told Catherine, she was getting herself together again. “So, you see, you’re helping me far more than you know.” Catherine nodded and said, “I’m glad.”
She asked Catherine about her father, but Catherine shook her head, which meant either that she didn’t remember him or that she didn’t want to talk about him.
But later that same day, she said, “My father hated mother, too. Do you hate her?”
Barbara did, but she shook her head no. In fact, by the spring, she had come to hate Mary Emerson not only for her cruelty to Catherine, but for her whole presence — for her thick, luxurious red hair, for her laziness, for her soft handsomeness. When they were together, which luckily was not often — Barbara often wondered whether their dislike was mutual — the big lady from the South made her feel widowed; made her feel thin and colorless and ended. It was partly for this that she longed to be able to get through to Catherine; if only she could find what was missing, she would have her revenge; if she could save Catherine, Mary Emerson would vanish; she would be destroyed. For Barbara couldn’t help feeling that the mother had stolen something from the daughter, and that her richness and life were dependent upon Catherine’s loss.
“Why must Catherine wear that brace on her teeth?” she asked Mary Emerson one day.
“Why? You don’t think she’s self-conscious about it, do you?”
“Yes,” Barbara said slowly, “I think she is. Really, she’s quite an attractive girl, but that thing across the front of her mouth is so ugly.”
“But her teeth were all sticking out before. If she wears that thing for a couple of years, well —” Mary Emerson laughed. “I don’t know that I’d go as far as saying that she’ll be attractive — who to, God knows, unless it’s the boys down the end of the garden, and I’m sure they don’t care about Catherine’s teeth — but at least she won’t look imbecilic. No, Barbara, I think that, between you and the brace, wonders are being done to Catherine. And now, my dear, I must rush, I have to go out, and I haven’t washed my hair yet.”
*
April. May. June. July. But there was no change in Catherine after the first three months. She had learned to pass for normal, and that, it seemed, was as far as she was going to go.
Only once did Barbara feel they had made some further progress. One blazing hot day in August, when they had finished doing their exercises, they went out to sit on a bench by the fountain. Barbara held Catherine’s hand and said, “Listen, Catherine — I got a telegram from my mother this morning. She’s had a heart attack and is very ill. I’m going to have to go back to England. But I won’t be gone long, I promise. I’ll come back as soon as I possibly can.”
Catherine started to cry, quietly, and said, “But your mother was here last month.”
Barbara nodded. “Yes, I know. But I think she got tired here. The heat was too much for her. She was rather unhappy here.”
“Then why did she stay so long?” Catherine asked.
“I don’t know. But please don’t cry. I promise I’ll be back as soon as my mother’s better.”
Catherine cried and said nothing. She let her mouth fall open, pushed herself off the bench, and sat down in the gravel.
“I’ll write you a letter as soon as I arrive in England,” Barbara said.
“I can’t read.”
“You can read. You know you can.”
Catherine shook her head.
“Look,” Barbara said, “I swear I’ll be back. I love you.”
Catherine looked up from the gravel, “Why do you love me?” Her voice was strange.
Barbara shook her head. “I don’t know.” She looked down at C
atherine and shook her head again, and the girl stared up at her with an expression, almost, of malice. Barbara wondered if, perhaps, they had made some progress.
*
And now Catherine had phoned her to say she knew where David was. Barbara felt both frightened and relieved. She didn’t know if Catherine was telling the truth, but it was something to go on. And as she thought about it, there seemed to be hope in the fact Catherine, rather than her mother or Marcello, had told her. But Catherine’s air of secrecy frightened her, and made her feel that David’s disappearance had no ordinary explanation.
She arrived at the villa at three-thirty, hoping to find Catherine alone. But Mary Emerson met her at the gate, handsome, tanned, and sympathetic.
“Have you found him, my dear?” she asked.
Barbara shook her head. “No. I —” she shrugged. “I think he must have gone away. Having a belated summer holiday, I suppose.”
“Yes, I’m sure that’s it.” Mary Emerson put her arm around Barbara’s shoulders, and smiled. “Anyway, welcome back, my dear. We’ve missed you so much, even though I must say Catherine has been pretty good while you’ve been away. I was afraid she was going to collapse again as soon as you left, but she really liked David. He’s the first man I’ve ever seen her talk to.”
Barbara gave a small smile. “Is that to his credit, or mine?”
Mary Emerson laughed. “Oh, to both of you, my dear.” Then her manner changed. “Why don’t you go and do your things with Catherine now,” she said. “I have to go out, but I’d like to talk to you when I come back. I have a proposition to make.” She let go of Barbara and called, “Catherine! Barbara’s here. Are you ready?”
There was no reply. “She’s ready,” Mary Emerson said. “Well, my dear, I must run. But please don’t go before I come back.” She walked toward the garage, and then turned and almost ran across the gravel, kissed Barbara on the cheek, and said, “Welcome back to Bedlam, my dear.” Then she went back toward the garage. Barbara went into the warm house, wiping her cheek where the big mouth had touched her.
She changed into the body stocking that she worked in, and then sat in the living room and waited until Catherine came down, in shorts and a T-shirt. She looked shyly at Barbara and said “Hello.” Then she lowered her eyes and said, “Can we do a lot of dancing today? I haven’t done any dancing for three months.”
The Girl Who Passed for Normal Page 4