by Anya Seton
“It’s all right,” she answered, not looking at him.
He leaned back against the knobbly brass head rails and crossed his legs. “Take your bonnet off, Hesper, so I can see your hair. Take that hideous dress off too, for that matter. We’re married now and it’s quite proper.”
She looked at him then. The narrow dark face, the heavy-lidded eyes, the full mouth with its ironic half-smile. He wasn’t like this at Castle Rock.
She turned quickly away. She took off her bonnet, a dish-shaped yellow chip straw bought by Susan at Miss Hattie’s little shop near the Town House. It was trimmed with buff ribbons to match the heavy brown moire dress hastily run up from a length Susan had been saving for years in the lumber room.
Hesper hung the bonnet on a wooden knob behind the door and sat down on the slippery mohair chair by the only window. She held herself tight, staring through the dusty window out over the city. It was hot here under the roof. Two flies buzzed around her head and, wheeling, settled on the cracked marble washstand.
Evan looked at her profile against the window. The straight nose and firm chin overbalanced at the nape of her neck by the waterfall of bunched red hair. He looked at the brown dress buttoned up to her throat, bunched at the sleeves and bunched out by horsehair over the hips. It encased and distorted her like a coat of armor, and the color of the dress—of swampwood, of imitation walnut—threw muddy light onto her white skin.
He looked more intently, savoring his revulsion, using it as a shield against her who would come too close, and he saw tears shining on her cheek.
He shot out his breath in mingled annoyance and contrition. “Good God, my dear—don’t cry.” He knelt down beside her chair and began to kiss her. At first she would not respond, but he was patient and gentle. He unloosened her hair. His deft fingers unbuttoned her collai and removed the disfiguring dress. Gradually, as the sense of her beauty returned to him, he made love to her with compelling passion and she followed him blindly into the timeless moments where there is no space for doubt.
For three weeks Evan was a fervent and intuitive lover. The days and the nights to Hesper swam together. Outer discomforts, though many, became negligible or even interesting, infused as each was with the spirit of shared adventure. The day after the wedding they took the cars to New York, a day-long trip of racketing wheels, glaring heat, and soot from the engine stack.
In the city they went to Evan’s old room in the boarding-house; then Evan rented a skylighted loft on Fourth Street near Broadway, paid two months rent in advance, and spent the remainder of his capital for a few pieces of second-hand furniture.
They set up the bedstead, and the washstand, hung a curtain across the sleeping corner of the loft, stacked canvases and easel in the other corner, placed a table, two chairs, and a cupboard near the rusty little wood-burning stove, and left the rest of the moving in for later, intent only on their physical concentration with each other.
When they became hungry they went to a small German saloon on the Bowery where for a few pennies they found beer, sausage, and strong rye bread. In the evenings they wandered around the city, down Broadway to the Battery to sit and feed the pigeons near the cylindrical bulk of Castle Garden, or up Fifth Avenue to Central Park, where they sat on a rustic bench near the Mall.
They talked very little. Hesper tried once or twice to speak to him about his painting, and always he eluded her, cutting through her tentative questions with the weapon of physical contact, pulling her close to him, his hand on her breast while her swift-answering blood pounded, and she forgot her question. She had his whole mind and attention during those three weeks, and she glowed into a new loveliness. Evan had bought her a green silk dress, a bargain from Stewart’s basement, marked down because the style was dated. Evan made her wear it without the crinoline. Neither of them cared that it was unfashionable, since the delicate moss green was extremely becoming.
The first time she had worn the dress she had posed proudly against the baize curtain, arms outstretched. The clinging silk made her slender as a fern, and her hair was loose as he liked it, streaming in red-gold strands down her shoulders.
“Ah, Hesper—” he said, half whimsically—“you’re like a fountain of fire on a jasper column.”
“Am I, darling—” she whispered, throwing her arms around his neck—“Don’t you want to paint me like this, then? Don’t you?”
“Someday,” he said lightly, kissing her.
She persisted, baffled again by his withdrawal. For what else had first brought them together except his wish to paint her? “Or—the other way. Without my clothes, if you never let anyone see it.” Color ran up her face, and yet it was amazing how soon she had become accustomed to nakedness, when at first she had been miserably self-conscious.
“You’re very nice, either way—my Marblehead beauty,” said Evan and she heard again an echo of the ironic detachment which he had used on their wedding day.
Her arms fell to her sides, she turned from him, and at once he wooed her back, laughing at her, rumpling and tumbling her at last onto the bed.
The change came abruptly. One evening, it was now late July, they walked further afield than usual for their supper. Evan, who had seemed as indifferent to food as she, suddenly suggested that he was tired of beer and they might try a little French café on Broome Street. Hesper was pleased and later surprised when they entered a tiny tile-floored room to find that the proprietor greeted Evan as an old friend and an epicure.
“So long we have not seen you, Monsieur Redlake—” he cried, bowing, his hands massaging his spotted apron, his moon face beaming. “And we have rognons en brochette tonight, just how you like them.”
“Good,” said Evan, flashing his quick charming smile. “Yes. I’ve been away. This is—” he stopped for a full second, “my wife.”
Hesper forgave his hesitation which had looked almost as though she weren’t, in the shock of hearing the phrase for the first time. They had so far talked to nobody but each other.
“Enchanté, madame—” said the proprietor, and added familiarly to Evan, who had picked up a good deal of French in Martinique, “Elle est vraiment belle.”
Evan nodded, and did not translate. He plunged into an intensive survey of the menu. Hesper sat back and tried to look interested.
The dishes when they arrived were very queer indeed. Imagine serving kidneys, not hidden in a stew to piece out the honest meat, but baldly in their natural shape. Ma would’ve died of shame before she’d serve such a thing to a customer. And here was that sour red wine again, something like the stuff Evan had given her the first day they met, when he pulled her out of the ocean.
“This reminds me—” she began softly, putting down her glass, and looking across the table with loving eyes—“Oh, Evan, do you remember—”
But he was not listening, he was looking at two young men who came through the door, and as they neared his table he rose. “Hello, La Farge—” he said. “I was hoping to find you here.”
The men returned the greeting and at Evan’s invitation pulled up the next table and sat down beside them. Hesper was introduced, accorded a dual stare of interest, a polite sentence, and then forgotten.
The men were artists, it seemed, called John La Farge and Homer Martin, both around thirty, a couple of years older than Evan.
Their talk at once became nearly incomprehensible to Hesper.
Mr. Martin had been to a place called the Adirondacks, where he thought he had succeeded in catching a crispness o£ tonal quality. He then spoke of someone called Corot whom he admired, someone in France. Mr. La Farge also said a great deal about France, which he seemed to know well, and he mentioned ateliers and schools and the “Quarter.”
Evan listened mostly, but with an expression of thoughtful interest. Sometimes he asked a question, and these involved more obscure words. “Gouache,” “Under-glaze,” and “stretchers.”
They finished eating and all sat sipping with apparent enjoyment some
nasty thickish fluid in no way resembling the coffee served at the Hearth and Eagle. In tiny cups too, so it hardly seemed worth while.
Now they were discussing art galleries in the city, and Evan said, “I haven’t much ready, but I hope to hold a sale at Leeds and Miner’s, I need some money.” He smiled, and for the first time since the others had joined them his glance included Hesper. The other men smiled too, and Mr. La Farge turned to Hesper with courtly gallantry. “I’m afraid this painter talk has been very dull for you, Mrs. Redlake. Unless of course you’re used to it?”
“No—” she said and blushed, feeling ungracious. “That is, I don’t mind.” She shoved the tiny coffee cup nervously away from her and some of the black fluid sloshed into the saucer. Her pleading eyes flew to Evan.
“Hesper’s a Marblehead girl,” he said. “Never been away from there before. The kind of talk she knows is fish, and innkeeping and the sea.”
He had not failed her, and his tone was one of affectionate amusement, but she knew a dull hurt all the same, for neither had he been with her. He had the air of stating facts in whose reception he had no personal involvement.
“But that’s most interesting,” said La Farge warmly, “a charming town, I’ve heard,” and Mr. Martin chimed in, in his rougher twangier voice and said he wasn’t any good at marines but he’d always admired the sea coast.
Hesper could think of nothing to say. Was Marblehead a “charming town”? The two words repeated themselves meaninglessly in her head. Dingle Dong, like a bell buoy. She gave a tentative half-smile and looked down at the tablecloth.
La Farge was kind and sensitive and his perceptions were heightened just now by persistent ill health. He saw the girl’s discomfiture. “Forgive me for being personal, Mrs. Redlake, but your hair is pure Venetion. It reminds me of Titian.”
Hesper felt the kindness and she looked up gratefully, but what answer was there to that, either? “Ma had red hair—” she said after a moment. “All her branch of the Dollibers have. I—I used to hate it—but then Evan—” She stopped, feeling that she was being too childish, too confiding.
Evan cut in, “As a matter of fact I married her for her hair.” And the men laughed. La Farge said, “I doubt if even you can reproduce just that tone,” and went on easily to talk of some Japanese prints he had imported.
Hesper crept into herself as the talk washed by her. There was a cold place around her heart. Yet how could he say to those two strange artist friends of his, “I married her because I love her.” Bufflehead, she said to herself in Susan’s astringent voice, you’ve not got the sense of a flounder. She had an instant vision of home, made up of little whirling colored bits like a kaleidoscope. Susan’s grim, capable face bent over the wooden mixing bowl, Roger standing backed up to the bright fireplace and the andirons behind him. Gran’s ship and sunset hooked rug vivid on the floor, though she hadn’t really noticed it in ages, the smell of fog and burning cedar, the lap of water in the cove, the feel of wet salty spray on her face. All these little bits whirled, then went gray. I’m so glad I’m here, she thought, here with my husband. I wasn’t a bit happy at home.
But would they never have done talking? She ached to be back alone with him in the wide bed, Evan’s arms around her and the baize curtain shutting out the day shine and the star shine through the skylight.
Still, when at last they left the stuffy cafe and said good night to Mr. La Farge and Mr. Martin, she found that she was not to be alone with Evan. He left her at the foot of the brownstone steps of their building.
“Go to bed, Hesper. I’m going for a long walk.”
He waited for neither acquiescence or protest, put the key in her hand, and turning on his heel strode east along Fourth Street.
She stood on the sidewalk clutching the key. He walked fast, his body bent forward a little as though he were breasting the wind, though there was no wind. At the corner he passed under a street lamp and she saw the gleam of his wavy dark hair. In the parts of the city where it would not excite comment he always went hatless, but his dress was not eccentric. He wore a dark blue suit which he kept neatly brushed. She watched him until his figure dwindled to a shadow amongst other shadows, then she mounted the four flights of stairs to their studio loft.
He had returned in the very early morning, and she, broad awake at once, turned on her side in the bed, and held her breath waiting for him to come to her. But Evan did not kiss her, he did not even touch her. He stretched himself out on the edge of his side of the bed. In a moment she heard the even, deep breathing of sleep.
When she awoke again, Evan was already up, shaved, and dressed in shirt and pants. She raised herself on her elbow and smiled at him. He did not respond. He was crouching on a three-legged stool, holding a large palette on his knees and rubbing at it with a rag. His lips were tight and indrawn. The room was filled with the pungent smell of turpentine. “Oh, you’re awake,” he said. “Hesper, get up and do something about this place. It’s a pigsty.”
She swallowed, pulling the coarse cambric sheet around her naked shoulders. She looked about the loft. For nearly three weeks it had been their bower and lovers’ retreat. None of its details had come through to her conscious attention.
Now she saw that the loft was cluttered and dirty, the drawers in the deal bureau which they shared were bulging with miscellaneous articles of clothing, and her small cowhide trunk was but half unpacked.
Hesper got out of bed and pulled on her calico wrapper. “I’m sorry,” she said faintly. “I’m not much of a housewife, I guess.”
He gave a short laugh, stacked the cleansed palette against the pile of canvases. “Well, you ought to be, with all that staunch Yankee tradition. I’ve got to have room for my work. I’m not used to living with anyone—” he added in a blend of apology and irritation.
Hesper was dressing rapidly. “I know. I’ll try not to be in the way. I’ll get us properly settled here today.”
“Be quick about it. I’m going to get out some more paints. Then as soon as I get my easel set up, I want you to pose.”
“Oh, darling—” she said, the worried frown clearing from her face. “You know I’d love to.”
That morning began a new régime. She carried up pails of water from the next-floor landing and attacked the loft with remorseful energy. She unpacked and allocated their belongings, washed the accumulated laundry in a basement tub, and learned the vagaries of the tiny wood-burning stove. In an hour, it produced acceptable coffee, and by keeping the pot pushed away back and resting against the stovepipe there was room for one more saucepan. In this Hesper cooked pot roasts, stews, and fricasseed chickens. She discovered that through the years of watching and helping Susan she had become a capable cook.
Evan abstractedly ate what she gave him, for now he refused to go out at all. She knew that his money was nearly spent, but that was not the only reason. His existence had narrowed to an interior preoccupation. He ate, he slept, he painted, and he spent a good deal of time hunched on a chair and brooding. When she spoke to him he answered her with masked annoyance, or did not answer at all. He did not make love to her. At night he went to sleep. It was as though he had withdrawn behind a nearly opaque curtain, through which Hesper and their life together in the loft appeared blurred and meaningless.
Nor was it better when she posed for him. She had expected him to go back to the Marblehead canvas, but he did not. She sat on the high stool until her muscles twitched and her head throbbed while he made sketch after sketch in charcoal, in water color, in oil. And each one he discarded, saying nothing, giving no reason.
One August afternoon, she at last rebelled. The loft was stifling; through the open skylight the sun glared down on them. Pearls of moisture gathered on Hesper’s upper lip and ran salt into her mouth. Evan was working on a large study, full length, and she was wearing the green dress. Wet patches had soaked through under her arms and across her shoulder blades. Her back ached. Their supper simmered on the stove which added its sm
oky heat to the room. Kidney stew, since Evan loved kidneys stewed in red wine, and they were cheap. The heavy smell of kidneys and onions mixed with the ever present odor of turpentine.
She broke her pose to look at him. His face too was dripping with sweat which he wiped off with a painting rag.
“Evan,” she said sharply, “how is it going?”
He made the quick impatient noise through his nostrils and stuck his brush in the crockery mug. “Rotten. I can’t paint inside four walls. Lighting’s all wrong. It’s all stale and set.”
“Well, I can’t pose any more either. It’s too hot.” She came down off the overturned box which served as platform, and stood beside him looking at the half-filled canvas. “Why, it’s real pretty, Evan, I think it’s wonderful,” she cried, astonished. Usually he tore up or painted over the studies before she saw them at all.
“Bah—” said Evan ripping it loose from the easel. “A cheap chromo, might as well be china painting. Can’t you see there’s no truth to it?” he added angrily.
He picked up another canvas from the wall stack and put it on the easel. This was a small oil of a schooner in Boston Harbor. He had painted it before reaching Marblehead. He squinted at it, took his palette knife, and began to scrape very carefully at a blob of Chinese white in the ship’s wake.
Hesper watched him a minute. Her throat closed and she clasped her hands tight together. “Evan, for the love of God, can’t you leave that stuff alone for a moment. I—” Her voice thickened and broke. “Don’t you love me at all any more—” she whispered. She ran behind the baize curtain and flung herself face down on the bed. Sobs tore at her, and she tried to control them, until suddenly she did not wish to control them.
She felt him sit down on the bed beside her, and a touch on her shoulder. She kept her face buried in the pillow. The grasp on her shoulder dug into her flesh. “Stop it—” he said roughly. “Turn around.”