Take Me Home

by Fletcher Flora

  “I’d like to know. Just to hear it. The sound of it.”

  “Her name was Mandy.”

  “Was she very young?”

  “We were both young. In college.”

  “What happened to her? Did she die?”

  “No. She married someone else.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “You needn’t be. It got to be all right long ago. I only think of her now once in a while.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “I guess so. Pretty’s a vapid word. You don’t think pretty about someone you love.”

  “Tell me what she looked like.”

  “I can’t. Most of the time I can’t see her myself. Only now and then for just a moment.”

  “You could tell me the color of her hair and eyes. How tall she was and how she walked and held her head.”

  “That wouldn’t be telling you what she looked like. You reminded me of her tonight, when you were sitting by yourself on the sofa with your knees together and your hands folded.”

  “Did she sit that way?”

  “No. It was something else. I thought it was a kind of intensity.”

  “I wish I could love you. If I were able to love you, would you love me in return?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “It would be wonderful to love you and be loved by you.”

  “I’m happy that you think so.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Toward morning she awoke on the sofa and lay in the precarious peace between sleeping and waking, while the ceiling receded, and the walls withdrew, and the room became spacious and vaulted and filled with sunlight and music and the scent of flowers. She sat erect on the edge of a hard bench of dark and polished oak in the posture of primness that she would never lose, and the sunlight slanted in through high Gothic windows of stained glass and touched with transparent flame the arrangements of lilies and carnations and white, white roses that were massed in woven baskets before a pulpit.

  She was in church, and someone must have died and been buried, for it was only after a funeral, unless it was Easter, that so many flowers were displayed before the pulpit. Yes, yes, she was in church, and the music she heard was coming from the great pipes of the organ, which were concealed by the lattice behind the choir loft, and there was a beautiful man in a frock coat standing below among the flowers in the slanting sunlight. The music was something by Bach that she could never remember, and the man was her father, whom she could never forget.

  The music stopped, and there was a long silence disturbed by no more than the merest whisper of movement, and then the man, the minister, her father, began to read from an enormous open Bible, and his rich voice, sonorous and penetrating, was like a golden resumption by the organ that had become quiet, and his head in the soft and shining light was massive and leonine, its tawny hair swept back like a flowing mane.

  Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

  She sat quietly on the oak bench beside her quiet mother. The beautiful words in the beautiful voice of the beautiful man seemed to reach her from a great distance and a remote time, from the Mount itself and the day they were spoken there. The adoration of the woman beside her, the wife and the mother and the worshiper, was a tangible emanation that could be felt like the air and smelled like the scent of the flowers. Ivy had learned long ago that her mother did not come to church for the same purpose that other people came. Other people came to worship God, but her mother came to worship the minister. This had at first seemed to Ivy a fearful defection, a flagrant incitement of God’s wrath, but she had later lost her fear with the loss of her belief, not in God, but in the power of her father to incite in God any responses whatever. Thereafter, in the presence of her mother’s adoration of her father, she felt only a terrible sense of inadequacy and isolation, as if she had been excluded from their love by the same passion that had created her.

  She listened uneasily, with a feeling of shame, to the text her father read. She always felt, when he talked of meekness and humility, that she was a passive part of an enormous hypocrisy, for he was not meek, nor was he humble, and he was in fact the vainest man she had ever known or would ever know. Not only was he vain in petty matters, the effects of his voice and hair and every studied pose, but also in his utter inversion, a narcissistic absorption in himself which made impossible any awareness of the pain that others might suffer, or any genuine compassion if he had been aware.

  He was not really a good man, but he gave the impression of goodness, nor was he a brilliant man, but he gave the impression of brilliance, and so he exploited the illusion of being what he was not, and he was extremely successful in the ministry of God and Church. There was in Ivy’s life from her earliest memory a succession of churches in a succession of towns, each of them better than the one before, and so she sat now in the last and best and listened in shame to the golden words of an ancient sermon, but then she was suddenly not sitting in church at all, but was standing before her father’s desk in his paneled study at home, and his voice continued from church to study without interruption, although it was saying in the latter place something entirely different in an entirely different tone.

  “Ivy,” he said, “this is your Cousin Lila, whom we have been expecting. She has come to spend the summer with us. We hope she will like us so well that she will want to come every summer for a long time.”

  Ivy turned to face her cousin, and her life, which had seemed until that moment to have a certain orderly purpose that could be traced in the past and anticipated for the future, had in an instant no purpose and no past and no future at all. There was only this moment of awakening at the end of an emptiness that had no meaning because it had no Lila. Lila was slim and shimmering, beginning and end, and she held out her hand in an aura of light. The hand was cool and dry and wonderfully soft, and its touch to Ivy was an excitement.

  “Hello, Lila,” Ivy said. “I’m so happy you’ve come.”

  “Thank you,” Lila said. “I’m sure I shall enjoy my visit very much.”

  This was, Ivy thought, only a politeness, and she had a feeling that Lila had no certain expectation of enjoying herself, and that she had, in fact, come unwillingly to spend the summer. Ordinarily Ivy would not have been particularly concerned about the attitude of a guest in the house, especially a relative, but now she felt that it was desperately imperative that Lila, this shining cousin, should truly enjoy herself so much that she would never want to leave, or leaving, should long to return.

  “I’m sure you girls will find a great deal to talk about,” the Reverend Dr. Theodore Galvin said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll ask you to excuse me now, as I have some work that must be done. I’ll see you at dinner, if not before.” Ivy and Lila left the study and the house and sat down together in a glider that had been placed under an elm tree on the side lawn. Lila was wearing a white silk dress without sleeves, and her skin above and below the silk was a tawny gold. Her rich, curling hair was black and full of shimmering light. Looking at her, Ivy felt all edges and projections, an awkward assembly of ugly bones. This wasn’t true, for she was almost as attractive in her own way as Lila was in hers, but Lila had already, as she would always have afterward, the unintended effect of making Ivy feel plain by comparison.

  “How old are you?” Lila said.

  “Sixteen,” Ivy said. “Almost seventeen.”

  “Are you? I’m nineteen, almost twenty. I wanted to work this summer until time to return to school, but my father wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t want me at home either, however, which is why he packed me off out here.”

  “I’m very glad he did. What kind of work did you plan to do?”

  “Modeling. I was promise
d a place in a shop for the summer. It wasn’t a very good job, to tell the truth, but it would have been experience. I think I’d like modeling.”

  “You’d be certain to be successful, you’re so lovely.”

  “Do you think so? Thank you very much. You’re pretty too, you know.”

  “I’m not really. You’re only being kind.”

  “Kindness is not one of my virtues, and you shouldn’t be humble. A pretty girl who knows it, is prettier than a pretty girl who doesn’t know it. The knowledge does something for her. It lights her up inside.”

  “Well, anyhow, I’m pleased that you think I’m pretty, whether I am or not. I wonder why we have never met before. Don’t you think it’s odd?”

  “Not particularly. Why?”

  “I mean, your father and my father being brothers and everything. I’ve never seen your father at all. My father hardly ever even mentions him.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t.”

  “What do you mean? Why shouldn’t he?”

  “They never got along, you know. Uncle Theodore’s a minister, of course, and Father’s a kind of black sheep. He likes good living and whiskey and women and things like that. One of the reasons he sent me out here, I’m sure, was simply to get me out of the way. With me gone, he can bring a woman to the apartment any time he pleases. I’m too old to go to the kind of camps he used to send me to in the summer, and he had this ridiculous notion that I should not be permitted to work and live alone, and so here I am. I think, besides, that he thought it would be good for me to spend two or three months in the house of a minister. The Christian influence, I mean. Every once in a while, he gets to feeling guilty about the kind of atmosphere he’s subjected me to. It’s silly, of course, and it never lasts long, but here I am, anyhow, and we shall have to think of ways to make the most of it and enjoy the summer together.”

  “What do you like to do? Do you like to swim?”

  “I love to swim, and I love to lie for hours on the warm sand. Is it far from here to the beach?”

  “Not far. We can drive the distance easily in half an hour. I don’t drive yet, though. Not without Father in the car. Do you drive?”

  “Of course. I had a car of my own, but I smashed it up, and Father is punishing me by making me wait until I’m twenty-one before I get another.”

  “We’ll drive to the beach every day, then, if you wish. I’m sure Father will let us have the car unless he needs it, and he doesn’t very often. Not for a whole day at a time, at least.”

  “Won’t I be a nuisance to you?”

  “Oh, no. Why should you think so?”

  “Well, you’re pretty and almost seventeen. I should think in the summer that you’d be wanting to go places with boys. Do you have lots of boy friends?”

  “Not many. Father is very strict about such things, boys and dates and such things, but I don’t really mind. I’m not very interested in boys anyhow.”

  “Aren’t you? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Just not. You’re older, though, and may go out as often as you please, I’m sure. After you’ve been seen, there will be all kinds of boys wanting to take you out. Almost all the college boys are home for the summer, of course.”

  “I can’t say that I’m terribly excited about it. College boys are a bore, mostly.”

  “Do you like older men?”

  “I can take them or leave them alone.” Lila looked at Ivy from the corners of her eyes and her lips curved slightly in a strange little secretive smile. “I think I’ll prefer to spend the summer with you.”

  Sitting on the glider, watching with an air of abstraction the patterns of sun and shade on the green grass of the side lawn, Ivy had the most delicious sensation of pervading warmth, as if she were sinking slowly into a warm bath. It was the best of good fortune to have acquired her lovely Cousin Lila to love for a whole summer, but to be granted already the implications of being loved by Lila in return was the most incredible fulfillment. She stirred and lifted one hand to her breast, feeling there a sudden and pleasurable pain.

  “Is there anything in particular you would like to do now?” she said.

  “Your father said that your mother would not be home until this evening. Is that true?”

  “Yes. She had to attend a meeting of one of the women’s societies. Of the church, you know. Apparently it was quite important, something she couldn’t miss, and she said to tell you she was very sorry she couldn’t be here to meet you when you arrived.”

  “I don’t mind. I quite understand. I wonder what it would be like to have a mother. My father divorced my mother when I was a child. Perhaps you’ve been told about it. I haven’t seen her for years, although in the beginning, right after the divorce, she came to visit me once in a while.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t be. I’m not. I suppose she was unfaithful, since Father got the divorce and custody of me. I’m glad it turned out that way. I doubt that Father would be considered a proper parent, but being in his custody has proved interesting for the most part, even though he has often considered me a bother and sent me away, to school or camp or someplace, to be rid of me.”

  “Why did you ask about Mother? When she would be home, I mean?”

  “I was just thinking that we might go for a walk. It’s pleasant to walk along the strange streets of a strange town. They change, somehow, after the first time, and are never the same again. But I wouldn’t want to be gone when your mother gets home. She might think it was rude.”

  “We have plenty of time. We could walk for an hour at least. Would you like to go?”

  “Yes. Let’s go. Will it be necessary to tell your father?”

  “No. He’ll never miss us. He pays very little attention to anything unless it is brought directly to his attention.”

  They had begun to walk, and they continued to walk for an hour under arcs of branches on tree-lined streets, and at some special second in the course of the hour their hands happened to meet and cling, and it was at once a sign of acceptance and a shy beginning of exploration. When they returned to the house, Ivy’s mother had not yet returned, but she did soon after, and after another hour, perhaps longer, they all sat down to dinner and sat with bowed heads while the Reverend Dr. Theodore Galvin said grace with subdued sonority. Ivy looked through her lashes at Lila across the table, and Lila was looking at her at the same moment in the same way, and it seemed to both that they shared an ineffable secret, and they smiled secretly.

  If there was any symbol of the summer, it was that secretive smile. It seemed to develop a separate and somnolent existence of its own, so that it permeated the atmosphere and became a quality of the sunlight, the whispering rain, and the silent, moonlit nights. It was always present, the quality of the smile, and it had, Ivy thought, both scent and sound. The scent was the essence of a delicate perfume that was caught only now and then in a favorable instant, and the sound was the softest sound of a distant vibration, like the plucked string of a conceit harp, that could be heard only in the depths of profound stillness. Sometimes in the middle of doing something, of reading or making her bed or playing tennis or coming down the stairs, she would suddenly smell the scent or hear the sound in a brief suspension of all other scents on earth, and she could never remember certainly when she smelled and heard the scent and sound of the secretive smile for the first time, but she thought it must surely have been the first night Lila came to her room, which was a night not long after Lila’s arrival at the house.

  She had been asleep, and she ascended slowly from the deep darkness of sleep into the moonlight flooding the room through open windows, and the smile was in the room with the moonlight, the sense and scent and sound of it, and Lila was there too, beside the bed. Spontaneously, with the ease of instinct, Ivy held out a hand, and Lila took it in hers a
nd sat down on the bed’s edge.

  “You were sleeping,” Lila said. “I’ve been watching you.”

  “Did you speak to me or touch me?”

  “No. Neither.”

  “I must have sensed you here to have wakened as I did. Do you hear something?”

  “No.” Lisa sat listening, her face lifted to the moonlight. “No, nothing. Do you?”

  “I think so. Perhaps I’m only imagining it, though, it’s so soft.”

  “What kind of sound? Someone in the hall? Someone outside?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. It’s more like music. A string vibrating.”

  “It’s the moonlight. Didn’t you know that moonlight makes a sound? Haven’t you ever heard it before?”

  “No. It’s lovely, though. I love the sound of moonlight. Why do you suppose I’m hearing it now for the first time?”

  “Because I’m here. I make you aware of things. Isn’t that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can make you aware of many things you never knew about before. Are you glad I came?”

  “Yes, I’m glad, and I’m glad you wanted to. Why did you want to?”

  “I was lonely and wanted to be with you. I’d rather be with you than anyone else. I couldn’t sleep. I kept looking at the moon through my window and wanting to be with you, and so I had to come. Do you think your mother and father would be angry if they knew?”

  “I don’t think so. Why should they?”

  “Perhaps they wouldn’t think it right for us to love each other. We do love each other, don’t we, Ivy? Didn’t you feel it immediately? Haven’t you known it right along? We are the truest of lovers with the best of love.”

  “Yes. It’s true. Our own true love.”

  The words were spoken with a strange, instinctive ease and they were a prelude to a kind of delirious and sensuous excitement such as Ivy had never experienced. As if in a dream she shifted in the bed to permit Lila to slide in beside her. And in a continuing dream she felt herself enfolded in Lila’s arms, and the warmth and intoxicating softness of Lila’s body, the sweet pressure of her lips on her mouth and throat transported her into a world of dizzying sensation. For the first time her own body seemed to come fully alive. There was a wild singing in her blood, a delightful trembling in all her nerve ends and suddenly her arms and her lips and her whole body were as eager and demanding as Lila’s.