The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

by Nella Larsen

  Though, she admitted reluctantly, she herself didn’t feel the proper Christmas spirit this year either. But that couldn’t be helped, it seemed, any more than the weather. She was weary and depressed. And for all her trying, she couldn’t be free of that dull, indefinite misery which with increasing tenaciousness had laid hold of her. The morning’s aimless wandering through the teeming Harlem streets, long after she had ordered the flowers which had been her excuse for setting out, was but another effort to tear herself loose from it.

  She went up the cream stone steps, into the house, and down to the kitchen. There were to be people in to tea. But that, she found, after a few words with Sadie and Zulena, need give her no concern. She was thankful. She didn’t want to be bothered. She went upstairs and took off her things and got into bed.

  She thought: “Bother those people coming to tea!”

  She thought: “If I could only be sure that at bottom it’s just Brazil.”

  She thought: “Whatever it is, if I only knew what it was, I could manage it.”

  Brian again. Unhappy, restless, withdrawn. And she, who had prided herself on knowing his moods, their causes and their remedies, had found it first unthinkable, and then intolerable, that this, so like and yet so unlike those other spasmodic restlessnesses of his, should be to her incomprehensible and elusive.

  He was restless and he was not restless. He was discontented, yet there were times when she felt he was possessed of some intense secret satisfaction, like a cat who had stolen the cream. He was irritable with the boys, especially Junior, for Ted, who seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of his father’s periods of off moods, kept out of his way when possible. They got on his nerves, drove him to violent outbursts of temper, very different from his usual gently sarcastic remarks that constituted his idea of discipline for them. On the other hand, with her he was more than customarily considerate and abstemious. And it had been weeks since she had felt the keen edge of his irony.

  He was like a man marking time, waiting. But what was he waiting for? It was extraordinary that, after all these years of accurate perception, she now lacked the talent to discover what that appearance of waiting meant. It was the knowledge that, for all her watching, all her patient study, the reason for his humor still eluded her which filled her with foreboding dread. That guarded reserve of his seemed to her unjust, inconsiderate, and alarming. It was as if he had stepped out beyond her reach into some section, strange and walled, where she could not get at him.

  She closed her eyes, thinking what a blessing it would be if she could get a little sleep before the boys came in from school. She couldn’t, of course, though she was so tired, having had, of late, so many sleepless nights. Nights filled with questionings and premonitions.

  But she did sleep—several hours.

  She wakened to find Brian standing at her bedside looking down at her, an unfathomable expression in his eyes.

  She said: “I must have dropped off to sleep,” and watched a slender ghost of his old amused smile pass over his face.

  “It’s getting on to four,” he told her, meaning, she knew, that she was going to be late again.

  She fought back the quick answer that rose to her lips and said instead: “I’m getting right up. It was good of you to think to call me.” She sat up.

  He bowed. “Always the attentive husband, you see.”

  “Yes indeed. Thank goodness, everything’s ready.”

  “Except you. Oh, and Clare’s downstairs.”

  “Clare! What a nuisance! I didn’t ask her. Purposely.”

  “I see. Might a mere man ask why? Or is the reason so subtly feminine that it wouldn’t be understood by him?”

  A little of his smile had come back. Irene, who was beginning to shake off some of her depression under his familiar banter, said, almost gaily: “Not at all. It just happens that this party happens to be for Hugh, and that Hugh happens not to care a great deal for Clare; therefore I, who happen to be giving the party, didn’t happen to ask her. Nothing could be simpler. Could it?”

  “Nothing. It’s so simple that I can easily see beyond your simple explanation and surmise that Clare, probably, just never happened to pay Hugh the admiring attention that he happens to consider no more than his just due. Simplest thing in the world.”

  Irene exclaimed in amazement: “Why, I thought you liked Hugh! You don’t, you can’t, believe anything so idiotic!”

  “Well, Hugh does think he’s God, you know.”

  “That,” Irene declared, getting out of bed, “is absolutely not true. He thinks ever so much better of himself than that, as you, who know and have lead him, ought to be able to guess. If you remember what a low opinion he has of God, you won’t make such a silly mistake.”

  She went into the closet for her things and, coming back, hung her frock over the back of a chair and placed her shoes on the floor beside it. Then she sat down before her dressing table.

  Brian didn’t speak. He continued to stand beside the bed, seeming to look at nothing in particular. Certainly not at her. True, his gaze was on her, but in it there was some quality that made her feel that at that moment she was no more to him than a pane of glass through which he stared. At what? She didn’t know, couldn’t guess. And this made her uncomfortable. Piqued her.

  She said: “It just happens that Hugh prefers intelligent women.”

  Plainly he was startled. “D’you mean that you think Clare is stupid?” he asked, regarding her with lifted eyebrows, which emphasized the disbelief of his voice.

  She wiped the cold cream from her face before she said: “No, I don’t. She isn’t stupid. She’s intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvelous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn’t made the mistake of being born a Negro.”

  “I see. Intelligent enough to wear a tight bodice and keep bowing swains whispering compliments and retrieving dropped fans. Rather a pretty picture. I take it, though, as slightly feline in its implication.”

  “Well, then, all I can say is that you take it wrongly. Nobody admires Clare more than I do, for the kind of intelligence she has, as well as for her decorative qualities. But she’s not—She isn’t—She hasn’t—Oh, I can’t explain it. Take Bianca, for example, or, to keep to the race, Felise Freeland. Looks and brains. Real brains that can hold their own with anybody. Clare has got brains of a sort, the kind that are useful too. Acquisitive, you know. But she’d bore a man like Hugh to suicide. Still, I never thought that even Clare would come to a private party to which she hadn’t been asked. But it’s like her.”

  For a minute there was silence. She completed the bright red arch of her full lips. Brian moved towards the door. His hand was on the knob. He said: “I’m sorry, Irene. It’s my fault entirely. She seemed so hurt at being left out that I told her I was sure you’d forgotten and to just come along.”

  Irene cried out: “But, Brian, I—” and stopped, amazed at the fierce anger that had blazed up in her.

  Brian’s head came round with a jerk. His brows lifted in an odd surprise.

  Her voice, she realized, had gone queer. But she had an instinctive feeling that it hadn’t been the whole cause of his attitude. And that little straightening motion of the shoulders. Hadn’t it been like that of a man drawing himself up to receive a blow? Her fright was like a scarlet spear of terror leaping at her heart.

  Clare Kendry! So that was it! Impossible. It couldn’t be.

  In the mirror before her she saw that he was still regarding her with that air of slight amazement. She dropped her eyes to the jars and bottles on the table and began to fumble among them with hands whose fingers shook slightly.

  “Of course,” she said carefully, “I’m glad you did. And in spite of my recent remarks, Clare does add to any party. She’s so easy on the eyes.”

  When she looked again, the surprise had gone from his face and the expectancy from his bearing.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Well, I guess I�
��ll run along. One of us ought to be down, I s’pose.”

  “You’re right. One of us ought to.” She was surprised that it was in her normal tones she spoke, caught as she was by the heart since that dull indefinite fear had grown suddenly into sharp panic. “I’ll be down before you know it,” she promised.

  “All right.” But he still lingered. “You’re quite certain? You don’t mind my asking her? Not awfully, I mean? I see now that I ought to have spoken to you. Trust women to have their reasons for everything.”

  She made a little pretense at looking at him, managed a tiny smile, and turned away. Clare! How sickening!

  “Yes, don’t they?” she said, striving to keep her voice casual. Within her she felt a hardness from feeling, not absent, but repressed. And that hardness was rising, swelling. Why didn’t he go? Why didn’t he?

  He had opened the door at last. “You won’t be long?” he asked, admonished.

  She shook her head, unable to speak, for there was a choking in her throat, and the confusion in her mind was like the beating of wings. Behind her she heard the gentle impact of the door as it closed behind him, and knew that he had gone. Down to Clare.

  For a long minute she sat in strained stiffness. The face in the mirror vanished from her sight, blotted out by this thing which had so suddenly flashed across her groping mind. Impossible for her to put it immediately into words or give it outline, for, prompted by some impulse of self-protection, she recoiled from exact expression.

  She closed her unseeing eyes and clenched her fists. She tried not to cry. But her lips tightened and no effort could check the hot tears of rage and shame that sprang into her eyes and flowed down her cheeks; so she laid her face in her arms and wept silently.

  When she was sure that she had done crying, she wiped away the warm remaining tears and got up. After bathing her swollen face in cold, refreshing water and carefully applying a stinging splash of toilet water, she went back to the mirror and regarded herself gravely. Satisfied that there lingered no betraying evidence of weeping, she dusted a little powder on her dark-white face and again examined it carefully, and with a kind of ridiculing contempt.

  “I do think,” she confided to it, “that you’ve been something—oh, very much—of a damned fool.”

  Downstairs the ritual of tea gave her some busy moments, and that, she decided, was a blessing. She wanted no empty spaces of time in which her mind would immediately return to that horror which she had not yet gathered sufficient courage to face. Pouring tea properly and nicely was an occupation that required a kind of well-balanced attention.

  In the room beyond, a clock chimed. A single sound. Fifteen minutes past five o’clock. That was all! And yet in the short space of half an hour all of life had changed, lost its color, its vividness, its whole meaning. No, she reflected, it wasn’t that that had happened. Life about her, apparently, went on exactly as before.

  “Oh, Mrs. Runyon.… So nice to see you…. Two? … Really? … How exciting! … Yes, I think Tuesday’s all right.…”

  Yes, life went on precisely as before. It was only she that had changed. Knowing, stumbling on this thing, had changed her. It was as if in a house long dim a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.

  Chatter, chatter, chatter. Someone asked her a question. She glanced up with what she felt was a rigid smile.

  “Yes … Brian picked it up last winter in Haiti. Terribly weird, isn’t it? … It is rather marvelous in its own hideous way…. Practically nothing, I believe. A few cents.…”

  Hideous. A great weariness came over her. Even the small exertion of pouring golden tea into thin old cups seemed almost too much for her. She went on pouring. Made repetitions of her smile. Answered questions. Manufactured conversation. She thought: “I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.”

  “Josephine Baker? … No. I’ve never seen her…. Well, she might have been in Shuffle Along when I saw it, but if she was, I don’t remember her…. Oh, but you’re wrong! … I do think Ethel Waters is awfully good.…”

  There were the familiar little tinkling sounds of spoons striking against frail cups, the soft running sounds of inconsequential talk, punctuated now and then with laughter. In irregular small groups, disintegrating, coalescing, striking just the right note of disharmony, disorder in the big room, which Irene had furnished with a sparingness that was almost chaste, moved the guests with that slight familiarity that makes a party a success. On the floor and the walls the sinking sun threw long, fantastic shadows.

  So like many other tea parties she had had. So unlike any of those others. But she mustn’t think yet. Time enough for that after. All the time in the world. She had a second’s flashing knowledge of what those words might portend. Time with Brian. Time without him. It was gone, leaving in its place an almost uncontrollable impulse to laugh, to scream, to hurl things about. She wanted, suddenly, to shock people, to hurt them, to make them notice her, to be aware of her suffering.

  “Hello, Dave…. Felise…. Really, your clothes are the despair of half the women in Harlem…. How do you do it? … Lovely, is it Worth or Lanvin? … Oh, a mere Babani….”

  “Merely that,” Felise Freeland acknowledged. “Come out of it, Irene, whatever it is. You look like the second gravedigger.”

  “Thanks for the hint, Felise. I’m not feeling quite up to par. The weather, I guess.”

  “Buy yourself an expensive new frock, child. It always helps. Any time this child gets the blues, it means money out of Dave’s pocket. How’re those boys of yours?”

  The boys! For once she’d forgotten them.

  They were, she told Felise, very well. Felise mumbled something about that being awfully nice and said she’d have to fly, because for a wonder she saw Mrs. Bellew sitting by herself, “and I’ve been trying to get her alone all afternoon. I want her for a party. Isn’t she stunning today?”

  Clare was. Irene couldn’t remember ever having seen her look better. She was wearing a superlatively simple cinnamon-brown frock which brought out all her vivid beauty, and a little golden bowl of a hat. Around her neck hung a string of amber beads that would easily have made six or eight like one Irene owned. Yes, she was stunning.

  The ripple of talk flowed on. The fire roared. The shadows stretched longer.

  Across the room was Hugh. He wasn’t, Irene hoped, being too bored. He seemed as he always did, a bit aloof, a little amused, and somewhat weary. And as usual he was hovering before the book-shelves. But he was not, she noticed, looking at the book he had taken down. Instead, his dull amber eyes were held by something across the room. They were a little scornful. Well, Hugh had never cared for Clare Kendry. For a minute Irene hesitated, then turned her head, though she knew what it was that held Hugh’s gaze. Clare, who had suddenly clouded all her days. Brian, the father of Ted and Junior.

  Clare’s ivory face was what it always was, beautiful and caressing. Or maybe today a little masked. Unrevealing. Unaltered and undisturbed by any emotion within or without. Brian’s seemed to Irene to be pitiably bare. Or was it too as it always was? That half-effaced seeking look, did he always have that? Queer that now she didn’t know, couldn’t recall. Then she saw him smile, and the smile made his face all eager and shining. Impelled by some inner urge of loyalty to herself, she glanced away. But only for a moment. And when she turned towards them again, she thought that the look on his face was the most melancholy and yet the most scoffing that she had ever seen upon it.

  In the next quarter of an hour she promised herself to Bianca Wentworth in Sixty-second Street, Jane Tenant at Seventh Avenue and 150th Street, and the Dashields in Brooklyn for dinner all on the same evening and at almost the same hour.

  Oh, well, what did it matter? She had no thoughts at all now, and all she felt was a great fatigue. Before her tired eyes Clare Kendry was talking to Dave Freeland. Scraps of their conversation, in Clare’s husky voice, floated over to her: “…
always admired you … so much about you long ago … everybody says so … no one but you …” And more of the same. The man hung rapt on her words, though he was the husband of Felise Freeland, and the author of novels that revealed a man of perception and a devastating irony. And he fell for such pishposh! And all because Clare had a trick of sliding down ivory lids over astonishing black eyes and then lifting them suddenly and turning on a caressing smile. Men like Dave Freeland fell for it. And Brian.

  Her mental and physical languor receded. Brian. What did it mean? How would it affect her and the boys? The boys! She had a surge of relief. It ebbed, vanished. A feeling of absolute unimportance followed. Actually, she didn’t count. She was, to him, only the mother of his sons. That was all. Alone she was nothing. Worse. An obstacle.

  Rage boiled up in her.

  There was a slight crash. On the floor at her feet lay the shattered cup. Dark stains dotted the bright rug. Spread. The chatter stopped. Went on. Before her, Zulena gathered up the white fragments.

  As from a distance Hugh Wentworth’s clipped voice came to her, though he was, she was aware, somehow miraculously at her side. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Must have pushed you. Clumsy of me. Don’t tell me it’s priceless and irreplaceable.”

  It hurt. Dear God! How the thing hurt! But she couldn’t think of that now. Not with Hugh sitting there mumbling apologies and lies. The significance of his words, the power of his discernment, stirred in her a sense of caution. Her pride revolted. Damn Hugh! Something would have to be done about him. Now. She couldn’t, it seemed, help his knowing. It was too late for that. But she could and would keep him from knowing that she knew. She could, she would bear it. She’d have to. There were the boys. Her whole body went taut. In that second she saw that she could bear anything, but only if no one knew that she had anything to bear. It hurt. It frightened her, but she could bear it.