Victorine

by Maude Hutchins

  He straightened up, he had shared his tenderness with her, the tenderness that after a night of passion with Magda hung over him, as if he were a woman. And Victorine did not exactly know the answers, any of them, but that something had happened to her brother and that he longed to share it with her she felt, and that is why she did not repulse him or speak lightly or callously.

  “Okay, Vic?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She turned on her side and drew up her knees, her fists against her face, as she did when she felt a little insecure. She was almost asleep when it came to her that Costello was fully dressed at dawn, where was he going? No! Where had he been! . . . Woman! It was the smell, the smell of, the smell of . . . woman . . . love. She lost consciousness—and it was reburied in her consciousness because how could she know really, how could she recognize the smell of woman, of love?

  Next morning at breakfast she glanced at her brother and wondered again what the secret perfume had been. She guessed she’d wander over to Green Acres; the woods were full of arbutus.

  •

  Smith didn’t send a wire, paving his way, asking forgiveness, he just arrived in Gardiner and told the only taxi to drive him to Mrs. Smith’s cottage. It was the day before Labour Day and no one was surprised the next night when no lights shone in the little house Magda had rented, the only one for rent that summer. And next day the newspaper lay on its side in the walk and two bottles of milk stood on the porch. The screen door without a hook slapped lazily back and forth and the shades were unevenly drawn in the windows, careless, rather sad, as if no one cared. It was clear to everyone that Magda had gone, everyone but Costello. The little children, with new clothes and new haircuts and new books for school, accepted the fact that the gay summer was over, as usual, and gone with it was Magda; it didn’t matter, something else would turn up.

  It was two evenings later that Costello, at the dinner table, became aware that he would go to Magda’s that night, it was time. He never knew ahead when he would go because they never planned their love trysts; neither had any other engagements. After their first delirious and mercurial abandonment, Costello had not thought of going back for a whole week. It simply had not come to him, it was as if it was over. He had realized suddenly that he could go again and he had and then it continued, the series of collisions, the rest of the summer. Just as he didn’t realize he could do it again, he didn’t realize that he couldn’t, that it would end, he hadn’t thought of its ending.

  “Understand Smith came and got his wife,” said Homer.

  “I’m glad for her,” said Allison. It was just by chance that her eyes were on Costello, she was thinking how beautiful and manly he looked, her heart was touched at his beauty and it sang at his manliness. Costello looked as if an invisible ray had got him in the guts. He stood up and his face was pale as death.

  “Costello!” Victorine cried.

  Allison was at his side, “Are you ill, darling?”

  “No,” said Costello coldly.

  Homer stared at his son.

  “Cothtello’s sick,” said Dennis, and went on with his pudding.

  “If you don’t feel well, excuse yourself,” said Homer, he was amazed. Was it possible? Smith’s wife? Magda was much too hot for him to touch. (Is that what he was thinking behind his impassive brow?) Well—good boy—the family thought he was ill but they would not, not a person in Gardiner, would suspect his affair with Magda. He had listened to the old man after all. He was the soul of discretion.

  “Ha!” said Homer out loud, not meaning to. “Well, I’m off,” he said as usual, and Allison noticed the tic as he came towards her to brush her cheek with his goodbye kiss, it was rather becoming.

  The blood seemed to have been drained from Costello’s heart as well as his charming face, but he reached Magda’s cottage where he found the inside door locked; he easily forced a window and leapt over the sill. All the while he was trembling spasmodically and saying to himself, “Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ.” He tore upstairs to the only bedroom and the tiny night-light was burning looking like a pale early star. They had forgot to put it out. They? Everything else was neat and tidy, the linen had been taken off the bed and the ugly striped ticking of the pillows offended him. “Christ,” he said again. He couldn’t think. He ran his hand over the glass top of the bureau and looked at the palm of his hand—nothing. He opened the little drawer of the night table, it shook all over and resisted but it was empty, new paper lined it. Desperately, he went to the frilled white cotton curtains at the window and gathered them to his face and smelled them, they smelled only of starch. He stepped to the narrow closet but only a row of hangers from the cleaners hung there. “Her toothbrush,” he thought, and opened the cabinet in the bathroom but there was only a glass bottle marked “toilet water,” he sniffed it—it was musty. “Good Christ, there must be something.” He closed his eyes and invoked her image—naked—her legs slightly apart—the dark shadow of her hair on the pillow.

  “Magda!” He shouted it. He was startled at the sound of his voice, so loud. “Magda,” he pleaded, he whispered it. “What am I going to do, what am I going to do?” He lay down on the hard bed and cried, as if he were no bigger, no manlier, than Dennis.

  Exhausted, he slept, but upon awakening almost immediately, he became distracted again, the yearning for Magda, for the violent carnal embraces, for the sight of her nakedness, and the feel of her mouth in his, made him feverish with desire. But again he slept, some mechanism inside not letting him die of it, putting him to sleep. He woke to see the white streak of dawn low against the horizon, as he had seen it so often before from that same window with those ruffled curtains stirring. But the room was cold, it smelled damp, musty, the house was an empty house. How could it smell like that so fast, wouldn’t you think the perfume of Magda, her hair, her body, would have lasted a little longer, clung to the curtains, or something? Dearest Costello, he gently closed the bedroom door and tiptoed down the stairs and walked home from his lone clandestine tryst in the little cottage, where the two milk bottles would remain all winter long on the porch for stray cats to nose and lick at, and the screen door, too, would flap back and forth aimlessly.

  •

  It is not for us to say whether Magda’s heart of gold gave her any trouble, or to judge her, nor to try to imagine what sort of a person Smith was who could take it or leave it and begin again where he left off, or what he had done with the colourless blonde, much less who she was or what her ethical code or cipher was.

  But Costello suffered. His impetuous infatuation had uprooted him, torn him away from everything that had taken so long for him to become and, then, full grown in Magda’s arms, of age, it was as if she stepped back and let him fall over a cliff into nothingness. It did not enter his head that there might be some place else to go than the cottage.

  Smith? Which Smith? Who Smith? What city? He made and unmade plans, he counted his savings, he consulted time-tables, maps, telephone books. Then, all of a sudden, he had not expected it, he received a letter :

  “Dearest Costello,” it said, the handwriting was big and firm and clear, the letters round and frank, it was less than a page, so that he saw the precious name, Magda, at once, “I couldn’t help it.” That was all, and just, “Magda.” “Dearest Costello, I couldn’t help it, Magda.” Costello kissed the funny little missive from his darling and put it in his pocket. Then he walked to the cottage and sat on the porch beside the milk bottles and read it again. He sat there a long time, his head bent, thinking, but nothing came of it. “Tomorrow,” he said, shaking his head. What about tomorrow? The frantic urge to see and possess Magda became less intense, the letter had done something; was it balm? It soothed him, almost made him happy, a certain contentment lodged in his heart where the pain had been. And his adolescence was like a weight in his heels as in an anxious dream; he made no plans, he did not go in search of Magda, he simply clung to the little note that said—what? But it was enough and only M
agda could have written it.

  Chapter XVI

  Homer’s Jump

  “Cotton, Coffee Futures Rise; Cocoa Sinks.” That was the headline only a column wide in the financial section of the New York Times on January 30th.

  New York cotton rose on a substantial increase in the mid-January cotton parity, cocoa again dropped the limit, and coffee rose in commodity future prices yesterday.

  New York cotton closed higher by 80 cents to $1.20 a bale. Chicago wheat was off 5/8 to 1 cent a bale.

  Cocoa, after Thursday’s rise, slumped the cent-a-pound limit, resuming its previous trend. Coffee rose 0.15 to 0.65 cent a pound.

  Soybeans were up 1/4 to 1-1/4 cent sa bushel and lard was higher by 5 to 40 cents a hundred pounds. Both oats and rye were unchanged to 1/2 cent a bushel lower.

  Wool futures dropped 0.3 cents a bushel and lard was were down 0.4 to 0.8 cent a pound. Higher were cotton-seed oil by 0.05 to 0.11 cent a pound, soybean oil by 0.05 to 0.09 cent a pound, hides by 0.13 to 0.16 cent a pound, rubber by 0.20 to 0.30 cent a pound and tin by 0.25 to 0.50 cent a pound.

  Sugar was narrowly mixed. Lead slipped 0.05 cent a pound. There were no sales in zinc, and copper was unchanged.

  The above is given in full exactly, typographical errors uncorrected, because it was the only evidence, if it was evidence, the police found on Homer’s body.

  “Give us a hand, Bud,” said the cop on the beat, “it’s a leaper,” and, “Think they’d think of the passers-by,” he added, looking up at the rows of windows dotting the big flat business building. He squinted, as if he anticipated another one would step out on a ledge. “Nice-lookin’ Joe,” he said. Homer’s hair caught the sunlight and stirred in the cold wind, his cheeks were pink. He was impeccably dressed in one of his pin-striped suits, and a fresh linen handkerchief, the kind you can read through, was still folded in the top pocket over his heart. He looked calm and sure of himself and the tic had been stilled.

  A quick search of the body at the homicide bureau revealed absolutely nothing more than the clipping quoted. At his office on the fifteenth floor, another clipping was impounded, taken from the same newspaper, but in neither clipping did the police find any tragic implication or reason for a handsome successful businessman to take his own life. The second clipping read:

  Woollen Director explains Stand. L—— J—— C——, Boston textile publisher, who was chosen a director of —— Woollen Company Wednesday said in a statement yesterday his election will “in no way” affect an attempt to enjoin retirement of the company’s $4 prior preference stock. Mr. C—— himself was vacationing in the Maine woods beyond the reach of a telephone. Coincident with Mr. C——’s election Homer Wilmerding L’Hommedieu was elected chairman of the board of —— Woollen. He strongly opposed management’s plan to call the company’s $4 prior preference stock and its 7 per cent preferred, at an estimated cost of $20,000,000.

  Not a single letter, note or memorandum could be found in Homer’s handwriting in his big handsome English desk, or in any of the numerous cabinets or filing cases. Needless to say there was no diary and no little black book, no telephone numbers, and no one called within forty-eight hours to question his not keeping an appointment. The police, from experience, but without insight into this particular corpse, discreetly questioned secretaries and other female help in the huge office building for a hint of a woman in the case. The chief, himself, just perceptibly raised a rugged eyebrow upon discovering in Homer’s watch, inscribed “Homer L’Hommedieu on the occasion of his graduation from St. Paul’s from his loving father, Pope L’Hommedieu,” a little photograph of a very pretty girl, but his face resumed its tranquil patient expression upon learning that it was the corpse’s wife, Allison.

  Allison, called upon at noon by the chief himself, a lieutenant and the cop on the beat, could give no reason for Homer’s jump, which was not surprising. His suicide was one of those jumps that leave women cold, for business reasons, some sort of financial shame, a crack-up based on the unknown as far as they are concerned. She could only shake her head as if they had given her a problem in higher mathematics, she might have suggested, “Have you tried Mr. Einstein?” In some way it could not, the jump, touch her. Again and again she had read without understanding of big business taking that last plunge to an unyielding sidewalk below, had noted in each case that the director or president of the company had been impeccably dressed and, oddly enough, the weather fine, meaning, one supposes, that no sirocco or moody west wind had suddenly affected his blood pressure and saddened him, and, she had thought, “No woman driven him to desperation, so distracting, that he had forgotten his tie or wore mismated socks.” Indeed she had smiled when Homer had reported two years ago the suicide of a Chicago meat packer who had, after a pleasant dinner with friends, where he had not distinguished himself as he never did, gone directly to his office in the Loop and after apparently putting “his affairs in order,” gone to the window and jumped to his death. She had smiled because Homer, not sensing the sine qua non, said, “His brother, Earl, absolutely refuses to accept the fact that Fred committed suicide, although it is clear that he did; he was ruined, as we all knew, wiped out. But Earl says he knew his brother and he would not have jumped in his shirt sleeves.” “It’s a point,” Homer had added. “What is it,” Allison had thought later, “that Homer understands and I don’t? He did not think that what he said and the brother said was strange at all!” “What a queer snobbishness,” she had thought. “What in the world would keep a desperate person, man or woman, from jumping nude!” Perhaps Allison, in fact, certainly Allison, could not understand the orderly precision of the successful businessman’s mind, she understood the heart and she believed all things happened for deep and loving reasons. There was evidently something tidy about jumping out of a window, one adjusted his tie and glanced at his watch and made a note of it. (Remember the cop who said, “You’d think they’d think of the passers-by,” but such men don’t think of the man in the street, they don’t exist.)

  It was typical of Allison to think that it was she who didn’t understand, but Homer had equally been confounded when someone reportedly destroyed himself for love and that is what Allison understood perfectly. “Naturally, who wouldn’t, poor thing.” But on the other hand, what was in the brother meat packer’s mind and in Homer’s, too, when he agreed that he had a point? That Fred perhaps had jumped . . . but in his shirt sleeves like that? They said nothing, but did they suspect that only a deranged person would untidily kill himself and a man certainly is crazy or a fool to die because of a woman; only a poet, or a kid, but a man!

  “It’s odd he should do it,” said the lieutenant shyly, as if he shouldn’t express himself before the chief had time to solve the case, “on such a beautiful day—and in the morning.”

  The chief scratched his head.

  But Allison remembered that Homer had said it was a matter of metabolism. Homer always felt ambitious in the morning when she, Allison, didn’t, and she felt fine in the evening about the time Homer was through for the day. So naturally Homer would jump in the morning, he would be too sleepy at night.

  “A beautiful woman,” said the chief as the trio left.

  “Yes,” said the lieutenant.

  “Funny,” said the cop, “she takes it mighty cool.”

  •

  All the brothers came and it was clear that they were disgusted. Each handsome full-lipped mouth curved down at one side and contempt registered on their even brows. Homer had disgraced something deep and hard and unforgiving in them, something they had worked overtime on. But whatever they thought, they said nothing; and the stone they chose for Homer’s grave said nothing either, Homer was really dead, except, perhaps, the make-believe Homer that Allison loved.

  Only the little telephone operator mourned for Homer, but she didn’t have a thing to remember him by, Homer’s contraceptive being, as has been stated, “Put nothing in writing”; he really did believe, it appears, that the pen was mig
htier than the sword, and that is why he left no progeny other than his legitimate children, Victorine, Costello and Dennis, and only Midtown Manhattan knew, and did not choose to tell, why Homer jumped, impeccably dressed, on January 30th, weather seasonably cold and fair.

  Chapter XVII

  What About Millie?

  “ ‘Spring is here . . . I hear,’ ” Lydia had perfected her act and she beat out the sweet and haunting little tune with her toes and sang the simple verse, the only one she knew, again. She was concentrating, her head on one side, and she looked as pretty as she did the spring before and the spring before that. Victorine stood again in the doorway admiring her, and Costello, and this is the only reason for repeating the scene at all, which has been described before, leaned forward in his chair, his book hanging from his hand, and stared at her, too. A very thoughtful, almost ex post facto, if one may use such a phrase to tell about a smile, smile, curved his sweet and sensitive mouth upwards, just a little, the lips parted hardly at all. It was as if he were thinking backwards over the years, the years of Lydia, with his mouth. His eyes, apricot colour, today, shone softly and as steadily as two lamps, and the twin eyebrows, etched delicately on his quiet forehead, his shining russet hair, gave him the look, Victorine thought, of an angel guarding someone’s tomb.

  Lydia was not surprised at Costello’s gradual new interest in her, because she had the makings of one of those very persistent women who hang on, who never really despair, who know perfectly well that they are going to get the man they want, and the tantrums and the insults, the pain and the punishment they endure, is really no different than any other protracted sex-play, although it may go on for years and years, unrelieved. Costello watched her and she was aware of it and left him alone; she let him think and feel it all out, she hoped it would take the entire summer and it did. Dearest Costello, his sufferings were nearly over and Lydia was mildly jubilant.