Victorine

by Maude Hutchins

  Victorine had felt the reproof. “He’s naughty,” she murmured crossly.

  “Aye,” said the lighthouse-keeper, “I, too.” He smiled.

  Behind Costello’s voice, as he read Scott’s Life of Napoleon, in back of it, like woodwinds and drums in an orchestra, she heard the pounding of the sea ten miles across the Bay, and she saw the strip of dazzling white sand and the light blue lighthouse. She watched the big ocean gulls with great bent wings wheeling and soaring and dropping in dizzy descent. She watched them, as from aloft they opened their mouths and let fall the round hard clams and then dropped after them like plummets to eat them out of their broken shells, their shrill and strident calls softened by the booming of the big water; and the tremendous lead-coloured waves that broke into sparkling spray as big as tear drops that soaked her hair and stung her cheeks and tasted so good in her mouth, bitter with salt. When she came home the dried salt whitened her chin and her eyebrows and her ears. She longed for the fierce tides and the pulverized rocks and the sliding coarse sand below her, the dizzy spells, the peculiar vertigo as the wild foaming waters washed away the land from under her feet that were carnation red from the freezing cold, only to find it was an illusion, as the water rushed back to the sea, leaving her ankle-deep in rosy sand, safe as if she were on the carpet at home. Then the spotted sandpipers, the bird ballet began, each allotted a tiny gaping hole, a tiny colourless sandflea; as far as you could see the little nervous running birds with as many little hurrying blue shadows, their timing so perfect that none got his feet wet as the next giant roller hit hard and the curling water rose higher and higher along the beach. Victorine took a great gulping breath of the sweet fishy air, the perfume of all sorts of seaweeds and sea-shells (limpets and lampreys), flora and fauna of the ocean in her nostrils.

  “Costello, we never found any ambergris.”

  “Oh, Vic, you aren’t listening!”

  “Oh yes I was, but we never did find any.”

  Victorine sensed it was nearly over, her nostalgic memories were like the lacy Valentines in her bureau drawer from way back.

  “Why can’t we have cinnamon sticks any more?” she said; she sounded like an old lady bemoaning her hard peppermints (“They don’t make them the way they used to!”). She loved the feel and taste of cinnamon sticks; curly, like dehydrated oak leaves; they dried up her mouth with their aromatic astringent flavour and, “They’ll dry up your blood,” her grandmother had warned. And hard lumps of glistening sugar that made her mouth bleed had been another of her strange tastes, spiced as it was with her own blood.

  Was it, had it all been, a myth? Had she been aware of her childish happiness when it was present, or only now, when it was gone, did it look pretty? She couldn’t for the life of her remember the present, or feel the present, or imagine the present in the future, so maybe it didn’t really exist. It was a myth! Childhood was a myth! How about Dennis? He was in it, headlong in it, but you couldn’t get anything out of Dennis, he was crazy (twee toads, twee toads, twee toads and fwogs, bad Elthie, it’s my duck, here we go round the mulberry buth!).

  The sea and the pale blue lighthouse and the carnival and the bird ballet disappeared as if down a stairway in her mind, and for no reason the sailors from the quay walked through her head with the village queens hanging on their arms. Each sailor looked exactly alike in front and behind, like litter brothers. The same height, the same build. Except for their square ruddy faces and big mouths they could have been girls masquerading as boys, girls with flat chests and round behinds, the tight sailor pants hugging their buttocks, nearly cutting them in two, but broad at the bottoms, flapping like two tubular skirts around their brown ankles. And the black four-in-hands, black in mourning for Lord Nelson, how shining and pretty they were. The village queens gazed longingly into their sky-blue eyes and their scarlet mouths hung open with desire, their hips pivoted with the expectancy of pleasure, and their blouses fluttered over hearts beating fast with the thrill of it. It wouldn’t be long now when not a sailor or a girl could be seen. Like a mirage distracted by the reality of the morning sun they would disappear. Maybe they were in the corn; in somebody’s hayloft; two by two, perhaps in the hencoops, icehouses, warehouses, and old windmills, or in the squire’s hunting shack by the lake, but maybe just in the lee of a handsome yacht laid up at the boatyard or in the dark shadows of the big sugar maples. Neither the parish, nor the busybodies, nor the sheriff, and least of all the parents of the village queens, could do anything about it, and a new lot of pink-cheeked sailor boys replaced the old lot every six months so that only the queens got older, but not much.

  Now where had Victorine picked up such a vision? It wasn’t child’s play, but Victorine, without appearing to pay attention, seemingly lost in dreams, well, her mind made a recording of essential stuff, nevertheless, just as she could quote word for word what Costello had been reading, and it looked as if, all of a sudden, the pretty flat parade like cut-outs of blue-clad sailor boys and multicoloured girls was three-dimensional.

  “What was I reading?” demanded Costello.

  “ ‘Old John of Gaunt is grievous sick, my lord,’ ” said Victorine without any hesitation whatever.

  But then, sometimes, once in a while, not too often, in the middle of it, with the smell of cinnamon in her nostrils, a vision of grey gulls against a grey sky, the circular fragile stairs of the lighthouse reaching up and up into Heaven and the old keeper sucking up his hourly cup of pungent coffee as the white and steady big light revolved everlastingly beside him, why did she tremble and turn cold? And see tombstones and smell dampness and hear the hollow sound of the hooves of the two livery stable horses that had preceded the hearse that had taken her grandmother away and every ten days in the village took the selfsame highway so that people turned aside their faces and “the joker” whistled, a clear and penetrating blasphemous trill, but who could blame him, didn’t he, too, feel the chill?

  “Costello!”

  “Vic, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, nothing!”

  And it was nothing, just a momentary, perfectly sensible fear of nothingness, and the yellow light of the lamp shining down on Costello’s russet-coloured thatch of hair, the well-known twin arch of his eyebrows, his charming tender smile, the peach-like down on his cheeks, even his old brown suit, his long legs, his narrow feet, comforted her, and the fear of death seemed no more than pricking your finger with a pin or stepping on a thumbtack.

  Then Dennis screamed in terror; in the grip of his nightmare, he moaned and yelped like a poor woman in labour, and the sound of footsteps converged from every corner of the house, Elsie’s, Allison’s, even Homer’s solid tread, and there was quiet again. The two children went out on to the screened porch, and the fog, like wet cobwebs, covered the screens. The moon and stars were gone; far away, perhaps, they shone in a jet-black sky but the L’Hommedieu house stood still as if the captain of the ship had ordered the engines reversed. There was nothing to do but wait. The wail of the fog-horn seemed as close as if it were in the kitchen and the bell buoy that marked Helen’s Reef clanged like a dinner bell, but slow and easy as if the sea were calm as glass. Victorine thought of thousands of little limpets and lampreys safe in their cobalt-blue tents clinging to the rocks for ever and ever.

  •

  And so a year passed, a full year. Nanny had long since produced her cream-coloured calf with dark eyes as big as saucers and was pregnant again, and Big Tom whinnied and coughed and stamped in his stall and Joe curried him and polished him and pedicured him as if he were going to be in a show, and he had a new friend now, a stray cat, one of those cats that step out from behind a tree and nobody has any idea where it comes from; smiling mysteriously, they never explain. She was black as ink with white eyes and she slept night and day in the very centre of his back.

  Victorine was as tall as Allison and Costello topped his father by an inch, Dennis had lost some of his baby fat and some of his crazy charm. Allison always
said that her children didn’t grow up, they grew down, and it was true, it was their legs that got longer and longer, they looked exactly the same from the waist up. Allison was reading the eighteenth-century novelists and Homer had developed a slight tic.

  Costello, so good-looking and manly, nearly eighteen, was playing a lot of tennis with Squire Johnson’s granddaughter who had been to a girls’ boarding school in Rome and spoke both French and Italian, and Lydia was beside herself. Victorine, too, felt a return of the old painful jealousy, but a gain in self-respect over the past year taught her to hide it and almost control it (and didn’t she have a lover of her own!). Costello’s flannels had a pinkish tinge, his sneakers were snowy white, his T shirt spotless, but it didn’t have anything to do with the Squire’s granddaughter who spoke more languages than she could understand. There was a little of Homer in his elder son, as we have suggested before, and with but one sexual mishap behind him he proceeded cautiously with women. So it is not clear whether it was heredity or environment. Millie was probably just an unfortunate coincidence. And it would be a long time, this story well over, before Costello would love anyone as much as he had, and did, his little sister. If it could be discovered by some wondrous miracle that they were children of different parents he would take her up to his room and make her his very own and then he would have given her a present of all his treasures and waited on her the rest of his life and combed her hair and dried her tears. There are things Costello could not express but the fear of incest seemed born in him and the recollection of his swooning little sister terrified him. The mysterious swamp, treacherous and dark, he forbade himself.

  He did not long for the glamorous tomboy although he coolly admired her, would have preferred her as his sister, Victorine as little mistress. But all this simply leads up to the affair of the tennis court where Costello was spending a lot of time.

  It was the same old tennis court where Flora sat on the sidelines and was not thrilled at the sight of her men leaping and running in the hot July sun. Here the boys and girls still met and waged that war of the sexes that their grandparents had, too, and showed what they were made of against stiff competition. The littler children chased balls and waited for their chance to pop them over the net at each other and even a sprinkling of babies sat in their perambulators and mooned, waiting patiently to grow up and have fun.

  But something had been added this particular summer and it had its attraction, although it was difficult to put your finger on what exactly the attraction was. Anyway, it was extra. Her name was Magda (“Do call me Magda, kids”). Like the stray that slept on Big Tom’s back, no one, none of the parents, or the children, knew where she came from. It is kinder to say that she was an original than to say that she was “not our sort,” which is the way a number of parents put it to their children in speaking of her. The fact that her married name was Smith did not give much of a lead either. Lydia’s mother forbade her to see her, which was absurd, but Allison felt that the newcomer should not be ostracized simply because no one knew who she was and just because she had such a strange face and preferred, at least was seen with, no one except the very little folk, was no reason for being cruel. Homer picked it up in the club car that she was sitting out her divorce, but no one knew Smith or Smith’s father or Smith’s grandfather.

  Magda Smith came every day to the tennis court but she never played tennis. She came in a battered old Ford that the children loved and wrote their names on in chalk. She drove them all in lots of seven or eight or more to the village for sodas and cokes and candy and gum and it was a strange mad sight. Magda had big square teeth and heavily mascara-ed eyes. Her hair was very short and coarse and thick, black as charcoal. On her naturally pale cheeks she painted a circle of rose-madder rouge and her mouth was almost purple. She was as thin and undeveloped as a boy, with knobby knees and big ankles; bare-legged, she wore childish sandals with a single strap and her toenails were scarlet. She wore a blouse that was low showing a bony chest, and rather short straight skirts. Enormous pearls clung to her ear-lobes and a triple strand of them hung at her neck, and her skinny long fingers were crowded with rings that were loose as if on a cadaver. The children loved the sweet expensive smell of her, the sound of her rings and bracelets, her noisy laugh, her generous affectionate manner. They were all attracted to the strangest sight ever seen in this country town, they were mad for her. At the base of her neck, where one supposes her overanxious thyroid had nestled, was a slippery scar, whiter than her white skin, that half encircled it as if someone had tried to chop off her head. Little Beany Wycoff longed to caress it.

  “How does it feel?” he whispered, as if it were a secret between them.

  “Shut up!” said Lydia’s sister’s little girl, blonde as hay and pretty as a doll. “It’s rude,” but she wished she had just such a scar half-way round her neck.

  “It’s where my other head was!” shrieked Magda and the children trembled with monstrous pleasure. Dennis believed it and wet his pants from sheer ecstasy. Not old enough for tact, not yet having developed any sensibilities except his very own, he said to Allison, “I wish Magda was my mamma”; he meant the emotional thrill of Magda, the minute-by-minute surprise of her. Allison, so well bred, so gentle and reassuring, bored him. Allison wept. It was one of those times when her intelligence didn’t help, that all mothers experience, even the smartest.

  “Magda! Magda! Magda!” You could hear the childish voices all day long up until dark, when parents and nursemaids hustled them in, big brothers and sisters went in search of them (Beany come home, Florrie it’s dark). They didn’t call her Maggie or Mag or pet names, they loved the hard sound of Magda. They snapped their teeth down hard on the wild name, bit into it as if it were a green forbidden fruit. She lavished herself on girls and boys alike and Gifford Hammond gave her his best aggies and Frederika Parsons saved her bloody little incisors for her. They would have robbed and pilfered and committed murder for Magda. She brightened their summer with primary colours.

  And yet, poor Magda. Surrounded, adored, by other people’s children, childless herself, unloved and abandoned by that mysterious Smith who appeared to have neither father nor grandfather but who had sucked her bloodless, caressed her and passionately robbed her, and gone away with a colourless girl who reminded him of his aunt—well, this isn’t his story—but Magda was sick with frustrated anger and crazy with grief and that’s why she laughed so loud and surrounded herself with very little folk who reminded her of absolutely nothing, a funny kind of Heaven, if we are insensate in Heaven.

  At night quantities of sleeping pills did not censor the insidious return of him, that Smith, who had despoiled her and left her to rot, and she moaned and tossed in a nightmare of ambivalence, love and hatred, spellbound as a spider helpless in a shining web made of her own spittle, crucified and naked. Exhausted in the late morning, she drank three cups of black coffee and repainted her cheeks, looked at herself in the mirror and said out loud, “Manslaughter!”

  She turned the corners in her Ford by slamming on the brakes and the children hung on for dear life. Her savage crazy jokes made them scream with laughter.

  But it was at the beach that she excelled, now that she no longer wished to excel. No longer timid, absolutely fearless, she climbed the shaky ladders to the highest platforms that were only used by the professionals in August during the water carnival. She wasn’t showing off, if that is what it was called, she was angry and sensation dulled her grief. Christ! She entered the water like a rocket, making no more sound than a golf ball dropped from the same height. The water boiled but there was no splash; not giving a damn, the dives, that had been only fair when she was happy and unconsciously afraid of losing that happiness by sudden death, were perfect, and the parents gasped and the children cheered as her wet head popped up exactly where her ankles a second ago had disappeared, so straight as an arrow were her dives. Furious, she whipped out of a jack-knife, longing for the dullness of oblivion she twisted herself o
ut of a half-Nelson and with tears in her eyes spiralled dizzily from a back flip. And after an hour of it she did feel better, almost human, and quieted down a little. “To hell with it,” she laughed, and her waterproofed cheeks shone. Even the parents had to admit an attraction, the attraction of someone who didn’t care, someone who was finished with all that, she didn’t give a damn! Everyone else was in fetters; bourgeois, that was it, all of them. (It was they who felt it.) One of the first things to leave Magda which hadn’t been inherent in the first place, at the shock of Smith’s vulgar abandonment had been, as a matter of fact, class consciousness. She splashed, as she leapt out of the Bay, colonial dames and clerks’ wives alike, old guard, and the squire’s wife, and she smiled widely, flashing her square white teeth at them all, and apologized to none. And it rather impressed them, as if she were the nobility. Fearless, too, as has been pointed out, because she had nothing to lose—she had lost it!

  Chapter XIV

  Magda Smith

  Magda slipped on the narrow boardwalk. “Christ on a mountain!” she said and everyone heard it. But the sudden pain in her ankle was little compared to the constant pain in her guts and was a meagre excuse to use strong language, which did relieve her all over. It was Lydia who helped her up and she said, sotto voce, “Jesus Christ.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone dive like you,” said Lydia. Magda looked somehow less of a freak in a bathing suit and, dripping wet, her muscular thighs, lightly golden from the sun, shining, and water sliding off her in big drops, nearly naked in an elasticized black velvet suit that left her shoulders bare and scarcely covered her buttocks behind and cut into her in front, Lydia felt her attraction and envied her her prowess.

  But who would guess that it was Costello on the sidelines, seemingly engaged in a summer flirtation with the talented and pretty Squire Johnson’s granddaughter, who felt Magda’s crazy appeal the hardest. He didn’t, like the little children, respond, as they did, to the sideshow side of her alone. He didn’t, as they seemed to, thrill to the Three Legged Horse in her, or the Bearded Lady or the Thin Man; it was as if a hand had reached inside him and grasped his timid heart and as if another softly stroked and caressed him all over. The desperate necklace of scars at the base of her throat filled him with pity and tears came into his eyes. He hung his head when she swore, and suppressed a sob when she plummeted into the icy water.