The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

by Nella Larsen

  Gradually Irene’s thought slipped away from Junior and Ted, to become wholly absorbed in their father.

  The old fear, with strength increased, the fear for the future, had again laid its hand on her. And, try as she might, she could not shake it off. It was as if she had admitted to herself that against that easy surface of her husband’s concordance with her wishes, which had, since the war had given him back to her physically unimpaired, covered an increasing inclination to tear himself and his possessions loose from their proper setting, she was helpless.

  The chagrin which she had felt at her first failure to subvert this latest manifestation of his discontent had receded, leaving in its wake an uneasy depression. Were all her efforts, all her labors, to make up to him that one loss, all her silent striving to prove to him that her way had been best, all her ministrations to him, all her outward sinking of self, to count for nothing in some unperceived sudden moment? And if so, what, then, would be the consequences to the boys? To her? To Brian himself? Endless searching had brought no answer to these questions. There was only an intense weariness from their shuttlelike procession in her brain.

  The noise and commotion from above grew increasingly louder. Irene was about to go to the stairway and request the boys to be quieter in their play when she heard the doorbell ringing.

  Now who was that likely to be? She listened to Zulena’s heels, faintly tapping on their way to the door, then to the shifting sound of her feet on the steps, then to her light knock on the bedroom door.

  “Yes. Come in,” Irene told her.

  Zulena stood in the doorway. She said: “Someone to see you, Mrs. Redfield.” Her tone was discreetly regretful, as if to convey that she was reluctant to disturb her mistress at that hour, and for a stranger. “A Mrs. Bellew.”

  Clare!

  “Oh dear! Tell her, Zulena,” Irene began, “that I can’t—No. I’ll see her. Please bring her up here.”

  She heard Zulena pass down the hall, down the stairs, then stood up, smoothing out the tumbled green and ivory draperies of her dress with light stroking pats. At the mirror she dusted a little powder on her nose and brushed out her hair.

  She meant to tell Clare Kendry at once, and definitely, that it was of no use, her coming, that she couldn’t be responsible, that she’d talked it over with Brian, who had agreed with her that it was wiser, for Clare’s own sake, to refrain—

  But that was as far as she got in her rehearsal. For Clare had come softly into the room without knocking and, before Irene could greet her, had dropped a kiss on her dark curls.

  Looking at the woman before her, Irene Redfield had a sudden inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling. Reaching out, she grasped Clare’s two hands in her own and cried with something like awe in her voice: “Dear God! But aren’t you lovely, Clare!”

  Clare tossed that aside. Like the furs and small blue hat which she threw on the bed before seating herself slantwise in Irene’s favorite chair, with one foot curled under her.

  “Didn’t you mean to answer my letter, ’Rene?” she asked gravely.

  Irene looked away. She had that uncomfortable feeling that one has when one has not been wholly kind or wholly true.

  Clare went on: “Every day I went to that nasty little post office place. I’m sure they were all beginning to think that I’d been carrying on an illicit love affair and that the man had thrown me over. Every morning the same answer: ‘Nothing for you.’ I got into an awful fright, thinking that something might have happened to your letter, or to mine. And half the nights I would lie awake looking out at the watery stars—hopeless things, the stars—worrying and wondering. But at last it soaked in, that you hadn’t written and didn’t intend to. And then—well, as soon as ever I’d seen Jack off for Florida, I came straight here. And now, ’Rene, please tell me quite frankly why you didn’t answer my letter.”

  “Because, you see—” Irene broke off and kept Clare waiting while she lit a cigarette, blew out the match, and dropped it into a tray. She was trying to collect her arguments, for some sixth sense warned her that it was going to be harder than she thought to convince Clare Kendry of the folly of Harlem for her. Finally she proceeded: “I can’t help thinking that you ought not to come up here, ought not to run the risk of knowing Negroes.”

  “You mean you don’t want me, ’Rene?”

  Irene hadn’t supposed that anyone could look so hurt. She said, quite gently, “No, Clare, it’s not that. But even you must see that it’s terribly foolish, and not just the right thing.”

  The tinkle of Clare’s laugh rang out, while she passed her hands over the bright sweep of her hair. “Oh, ’Rene,” she cried, “you’re priceless! And you haven’t changed a bit. The right thing!” Leaning forward, she looked curiously into Irene’s disapproving brown eyes. “You don’t, you really can’t mean exactly that! Nobody could. It’s simply unbelievable.”

  Irene was on her feet before she realized that she had risen. “What I really mean,” she retorted, “is that it’s dangerous and that you ought not to run such silly risks. No one ought to. You least of all.”

  Her voice was brittle. For into her mind had come a thought, strange and irrelevant, a suspicion, that had surprised and shocked her and driven her to her feet. It was that in spite of her determined selfishness the woman before her was yet capable of heights and depths of feeling that she, Irene Redfield, had never known. Indeed, never cared to know. The thought, the suspicion, was gone as quickly as it had come.

  Clare said: “Oh, me!”

  Irene touched her arm caressingly, as if in contrition for that flashing thought. “Yes, Clare, you. It’s not safe. Not safe at all.”

  “Safe!”

  It seemed to Irene that Clare had snapped her teeth down on the word and then flung it from her. And for another flying second she had that suspicion of Clare’s ability for a quality of feeling that was to her strange and even repugnant. She was aware, too, of a dim premonition of some impending disaster. It was as if Clare Kendry had said to her, for whom safety, security, were all-important: “Safe! Damn being safe!” and meant it.

  With a gesture of impatience she sat down. In a voice of cool formality, she said: “Brian and I have talked the whole thing over carefully and decided that it isn’t wise. He says it’s always a dangerous business, this coming back. He’s seen more than one come to grief because of it. And, Clare, considering everything—Mr. Bellew’s attitude and all that—don’t you think you ought to be as careful as you can?”

  Clare’s deep voice broke the small silence that had followed Irene’s speech. She said, speaking almost plaintively: “I ought to have known. It’s Jack. I don’t blame you for being angry, though I must say you behaved beautifully that day. But I did think you’d understand, ’Rene. It was that, partly, that has made me want to see other people. It just swooped down and changed everything. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d have gone on to the end, never seeing any of you. But that did something to me, and I’ve been so lonely since! You can’t know. Not close to a single soul. Never anyone to really talk to.”

  Irene pressed out her cigarette. While doing so, she saw again the vision of Clare Kendry staring disdainfully down at the face of her father, and thought that it would be like that that she would look at her husband if he lay dead before her.

  Her own resentment was swept aside and her voice held an accent of pity as she exclaimed: “Why, Clare! I didn’t know. Forgive me. I feel like seven beasts. It was stupid of me not to realize.”

  “No. Not at all. You couldn’t. Nobody, none of you, could,” Clare moaned. The black eyes filled with tears that ran down her cheeks and spilled into her lap, ruining the priceless velvet of her dress. Her long hands were a little uplifted and clasped tightly together. Her effort to speak moderately was obvious but not successful. “How could you know? How could you? You’re free. You’re happy. And,” with faint derision, “safe.”

  Irene passed over that touch of derision, for the poignant r
ebellion of the other’s words had brought the tears to her own eyes, though she didn’t allow them to fall. The truth was that she knew weeping did not become her. Few women, she imagined, wept as attractively as Clare. “I’m beginning to believe,” she murmured, “that no one is ever completely happy, or free, or safe.”

  “Well, then, what does it matter? One risk more or less, if we’re not safe anyway, if even you’re not, it can’t make all the difference in the world. It can’t to me. Besides, I’m used to risks. And this isn’t such a big one as you’re trying to make it.”

  “Oh, but it is. And it can make all the difference in the world. There’s your little girl, Clare. Think of the consequences to her.”

  Clare’s face took on a startled look, as though she were totally unprepared for this new weapon with which Irene had assailed her. Seconds passed, during which she sat with stricken eyes and compressed lips. “I think,” she said at last, “that being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world.” Her clasped hands swayed forward and back again, and her scarlet mouth trembled irrepressibly.

  “Yes,” Irene softly agreed. For a moment she was unable to say more, so accurately had Clare put into words that which, not so definitely defined, was so often in her own heart of late. At the same time she was conscious that here to her hand was a reason which could not be lightly brushed aside. “Yes,” she repeated, “and the most responsible, Clare. We mothers are all responsible for the security and happiness of our children. Think what it would mean to your Margery if Mr. Bellew should find out. You’d probably lose her. And even if you didn’t, nothing that concerned her would ever be the same again. He’d never forget that she had Negro blood. And if she should learn—Well, I believe that after twelve it is too late to learn a thing like that. She’d never forgive you. You may be used to risks, but this is one you mustn’t take, Clare. It’s a selfish whim, an unnecessary and—

  “Yes, Zulena, what is it?” she inquired, a trifle tartly, of the servant who had silently materialized in the doorway.

  “The telephone’s for you, Mrs. Redfield. It’s Mr. Wentworth.”

  “All right. Thank you. I’ll take it here.” And with a muttered apology to Clare she took up the instrument.

  “Hello…. Yes, Hugh…. Oh, quite…. And you? … I’m sorry, every single thing’s gone…. Oh, too bad…. Ye-es, I s’pose you could. Not very pleasant, though…. Yes, of course, in a pinch everything goes…. Wait! I’ve got it! I’ll change mine with whoever’s next to you, and you can have that…. No.… I mean it…. I’ll be so busy I shan’t know whether I’m sitting or standing.… As long as Brian has a place to drop down now and then…. Not a single soul…. No, don’t…. That’s nice…. My love to Bianca.… I’ll see to it right away and call you back…. Good-bye.”

  She hung up and turned back to Clare, a little frown on her softly chiselled features. “It’s the N. W. L. dance,” she explained, “the Negro Welfare League, you know. I’m on the ticket committee, or, rather, I am the committee. Thank heaven it comes off tomorrow night and doesn’t happen again for a year. I’m about crazy, and now I’ve got to persuade somebody to change boxes with me.”

  “That wasn’t,” Clare asked, “Hugh Wentworth? Not the Hugh Wentworth?”

  Irene inclined her head. On her face was a tiny triumphant smile. “Yes, the Hugh Wentworth. D’you know him?”

  “No. How should I? But I do know about him. And I’ve read a book or two of his.”

  “Awfully good, aren’t they?”

  “U-umm, I s’pose so. Sort of contemptuous, I thought. As if he more or less despised everything and everybody.”

  “I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he did. Still, he’s about earned the right to. Lived on the edges of nowhere in at least three continents. Been through every danger in all kinds of savage places. It’s no wonder he thinks the rest of us are a lazy self-pampering lot. Hugh’s a dear, though, generous as one of the twelve disciples; give you the shirt off his back. Bianca—that’s his wife—is nice too.”

  “And he’s coming up here to your dance?”

  Irene asked why not.

  “It seems rather curious, a man like that, going to a Negro dance.”

  This, Irene told her, was the year 1927 in the city of New York, and hundreds of white people of Hugh Wentworth’s type came to affairs in Harlem, more all the time. So many that Brian had said: “Pretty soon the colored people won’t be allowed in at all, or will have to sit in Jim Crowed sections.”

  “What do they come for?”

  “Same reason you’re here, to see Negroes.”

  “But why?”

  “Various motives,” Irene explained. “A few purely and frankly to enjoy themselves. Others to get material to turn into shekels. More, to gaze on these great and near great while they gaze on the Negroes.”

  Clare clapped her hand. “’Rene, suppose I come too! It sounds terribly interesting and amusing. And I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

  Irene, who was regarding her through narrowed eyelids, had the same thought that she had had two years ago on the roof of the Drayton, that Clare Kendry was just a shade too good-looking. Her tone was on the edge of irony as she said: “You mean because so many other white people go?”

  A pale rose color came into Clare’s ivory cheeks. She lifted a hand in protest. “Don’t be silly! Certainly not! I mean that in a crowd of that kind I shouldn’t be noticed.”

  On the contrary, was Irene’s opinion. It might be even doubly dangerous. Some friend or acquaintance of John Bellew or herself might see and recognize her.

  At that, Clare laughed for a long time, little musical trills following one another in sequence after sequence. It was as if the thought of any friend of John Bellew’s going to a Negro dance was to her the most amusing thing in the world.

  “I don’t think,” she said when she had done laughing, “we need worry about that.”

  Irene, however, wasn’t so sure. But all her efforts to dissuade Clare were useless. To her, “You never can tell whom you’re likely to meet there,” Clare’s rejoinder was: “I’ll take my chance on getting by.”

  “Besides, you won’t know a soul and I shall be too busy to look after you. You’ll be bored stiff.”

  “I won’t, I won’t. If nobody asks me to dance, not even Dr. Redfield, I’ll just sit and gaze on the great and the near great, too. Do, ’Rene, be polite and invite me.”

  Irene turned away from the caress of Clare’s smile, saying promptly and positively: “I will not.”

  “I mean to go anyway,” Clare retorted, and her voice was no less positive than Irene’s.

  “Oh, no. You couldn’t possibly go there alone. It’s a public thing. All sorts of people go, anybody who can pay a dollar, even ladies of easy virtue looking for trade. If you were to go there alone, you might be mistaken for one of them, and that wouldn’t be too pleasant.”

  Clare laughed again. “Thanks. I never have been. It might be amusing. I’m warning you, ’Rene, that if you’re not going to be nice and take me I’ll still be among those present. I suppose my dollar’s as good as anyone’s.”

  “Oh, the dollar! Don’t be a fool, Clare. I don’t care where you go or what you do. All I’m concerned with is the unpleasantness and possible danger which your going might incur, because of your situation. To put it frankly, I shouldn’t like to be mixed up in any row of the kind.” She had risen again as she spoke and was standing at the window, lifting and spreading the small yellow chrysanthemums in the grey stone jar on the sill. Her hands shook slightly, for she was in a near rage of impatience and exasperation.

  Clare’s face looked strange, as if she wanted to cry again. One of her satin-covered feet swung restlessly back and forth. She said vehemently, violently almost: “Damn Jack! He keeps me out of everything. Everything I want. I could kill him! I expect I shall, someday.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Irene advised her. “You see, there’s still capital punishment, in this state at least. And really, Clare,
after everything’s said, I can’t see that you’ve a right to put all the blame on him. You’ve got to admit that there’s his side to the thing. You didn’t tell him you were colored, so he’s got no way of knowing about this hankering of yours after Negroes, or that it galls you to fury to hear them called niggers and black devils. As far as I can see, you’ll just have to endure some things and give up others. As we’ve said before, everything must be paid for. Do, please, be reasonable.”

  But Clare, it was plain, had shut away reason as well as caution. She shook her head. “I can’t, I can’t,” she said. “I would if I could, but I can’t. You don’t know, you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.”

  And in the look she gave Irene, there was something groping, and hopeless, and yet so absolutely determined that it was like an image of the futile searching and the firm resolution in Irene’s own soul, and increased the feeling of doubt and compunction that had been growing within her about Clare Kendry.

  She gave in.

  “Oh, come if you want to. I s’pose you’re right. Once can’t do such a terrible lot of harm.”

  Pushing aside Clare’s extravagant thanks, for immediately she was sorry that she had consented, she said briskly: “Should you like to come up and see my boys?”

  “I’d love to.”

  They went up, Irene thinking that Brian would consider that she’d behaved like a spineless fool. And he would be right. She certainly had.

  Clare was smiling. She stood in the doorway of the boys’ playroom, her shadowy eyes looking down on Junior and Ted, who had sprung apart from their tussling. Junior’s face had a funny little look of resentment. Ted’s was blank.