The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  Miss Keble, who had not experienced this aspect of life, was aware without resentment that she lived at second hand. Her friend had done things: their reminiscences, so often exchanged, allowed no doubt about that. Yet Miss Cotell, while seeming to lead the way, did not. Miss Keble, through listening and knowing what should be done, had years ago taken charge. “How little I would be, alone!” Miss Cotell had a way of saying, and Miss Keble loved to hear it. Accepting her lesser role, she knew that it was she, in the end, who ordered their lives and wielded power.

  She turned the pages of an old book she had never thrown away and knew almost by heart, Dr. Bradley Remembers. But her thoughts did not connect with the people it again presented to her. What innocence there was in the girl’s eyes! She closed her own and saw the unspoiled features still a child’s, the dark, dark hair, the blue-and-red blazer, the pleated gray skirt. Vividly, recollection refreshed for Miss Keble all that the day had offered, and the joy that should have been her friend’s became her own.

  Miss Cotell dreamed. When she answered the doorbell Father Humphrey was standing there, his back to her at first. “All done,” he said, his voice stern, his handshake firm. “Thank you,” he said, not opening the envelope she gave him.

  Because Cecilia was to be Thisbe, Mr. Normanton was given a seat in the front row. His daughter’s ambition, he knew, was one day to be an actress, a secret shared only with him. There had been such intimacies since Cecilia had gone away to Amhurst, as if each separation and each pleasurable reunion had influenced a closeness that had not been evident or felt before. He understood Cecilia’s reluctance to reveal to her friends the presumption of a talent, to keep from them her English teacher’s prediction that she would in time play Ophelia, and one day Lady Macbeth. It delighted Mr. Normanton that all this had come about, that his solitary child had been drawn out in ways he had not been able to find himself, that in spite of his awkwardness as a father she had turned to him with her confidences.

  Miss Watson took her place beside him, whispering something he couldn’t hear. The house lights dimmed, all chatter ceased.

  Afterward, Miss Cotell and Miss Keble talked about the evening, tickets for which Miss Keble had discovered could be purchased by the public when the requirements of friends and parents had been satisfied. They’d been at the back and more than a little cramped but hadn’t minded. They had noticed the honoring of Mr. Normanton, placed next to the headmistress, and when someone asked Miss Keble who he was she was able to say he was the father of the girl who had been enthusiastically applauded as Thisbe.

  It was almost midnight now, and in their bed-and-breakfast lodgings their beds were close enough to allow conversation that would not disturb if their voices were kept low. Tonight had felt like the height of what they could hope for, Miss Cotell reflected, the end at last of what had been a beginning, when, alone, she had visited what Father Humphrey called the priest house on a cold April afternoon a long time ago. “He’ll come to you when he’s ready,” a slatternly woman with a bucket and mop curtly informed her, and didn’t answer when Miss Cotell remarked on the weather. “Well, now?” Father Humphrey greeted her, when he came, a big, tall man who asked her how she had heard of him, and she explained that another girl in Pensions had mentioned him.

  Awake, Miss Keble also was drawn back to the memory of that afternoon, to the slovenly woman, to the priests who’d passed silently through the room where Miss Cotell waited. Both had thought it likely that tonight they would talk again about that time, but found they didn’t. A lorry clattered by on the street outside, somewhere a dog ceased to bark.

  Miss Cotell and Miss Keble slept then. Period costumes colored their unconscious, and the rhythms of period music were faintly there again; and Mr. Normanton’s dark-blue suit was, his polka-dotted tie, the hat he carried with his coat.

  “I cannot leave,” Miss Cotell confessed at breakfast. “I cannot without saying how all of it was wonderful. I cannot, Keble.”

  They bought two gifts, Miss Cotell’s brooch a circle of colored stones set in silvered plate, Miss Keble’s a selection of chocolates she was assured were special. They had become familiar with the bells of the school, the one that ended classes, the lunchtime summons, the roll-call bell at half past four, the hurry-up one five minutes later. They knew a clearing in the woods and brought the sandwiches they’d made there. They could see the path, but no one appeared on it all day.

  It had to be said, Miss Keble, impatient, told herself while they waited. It had to be, and Cotell was not the one to say it, for it was not her way. Cotell did not ever press herself, never had, never would. Too easily she went timid. But even so, and more than ever, Miss Keble could see in her friend’s eyes the longing that had so often been there since they’d first begun to come here. She could sense it today, in gestures and intimations, in tears blinked back.

  At twenty past four they walked to the school.

  Cecilia caught a single glimpse of the two women and looked away and didn’t look again. Whoever was on afternoon duty would surely ask them what they wanted, why they were here in Founder’s Quad, where visitors never were without a reason. She heard a prefect asking who they were, and someone saying she didn’t know. It was a relief at least that Elizabeth Statham was excused this roll call because every afternoon now she had to train for Sports Day.

  “We wanted just to say how much we enjoyed last night,” the taller of the women said, and the dumpy one added that wild horses wouldn’t have stopped them from coming back to say it.

  “These are for you,” the tall one said.

  They held out packages in different-colored wrapping paper, and Cecilia remembered the flowers they’d pressed on her, which she’d had to throw away. It was Miss Smith on duty, but she appeared to be unconcerned by the women’s presence, even acknowledging it with a hospitable nod in their direction as if she remembered them from last night. They murmured to one another, their voices low when the roll was called and while Miss Smith read out two brief announcements.

  “Cecilia, if you visited us, you would like our house,” the dumpy woman said then. “We’re not that far away.” She said that the packages, which Cecilia had not accepted, were gifts, that the address of their house was included with them, the phone number, too.

  No one was near enough to hear, and the curiosity about the two women had dissipated. Already girls were moving away.

  “They are for you,” the tall woman repeated.

  Cecilia took the packages, then changed her mind and put them on a nearby bench. “I don’t know you. It’s kind of you to give me presents, but I don’t know why you want to.”

  “Cecilia,” the dumpy woman said, “you’ll have heard of Father Humphrey?”

  “I think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”

  The tall woman shook her head. She had looked startled when the name was mentioned, had held a hand out as if protesting that it shouldn’t be, anxiety in her eyes.

  “Father Humphrey died,” she nonetheless went on. “Miss Cotell heard. And when she went back to the priest house she asked me to be with her for support. The same cleaning woman was there and I said that any papers left behind might concern Miss Cotell. The woman had her objections, but she let us peruse the papers for five minutes only and, truth to tell, five minutes were enough. Father Humphrey was a man who wrote everything down.”

  Cecilia wondered if the women were unbalanced, if they had found a way of wandering from a home for the deranged. For a moment she felt sorry for them, but then the smaller one began to talk about their house, about a cat called Raggles, and flowers in pots, and after a hesitation the tall one joined in. They didn’t sound then as Cecilia imagined the mad would sound, and the moment of pity passed. The cat had strayed into their backyard as a kitten. Their house was called Sans Souci. If she came she could spend a night, they said. They spoke as if they were suggesting she should come often and described the bedroom she would have, which they had wallpapered themselves.


  “How much we’d like it if you came!” Through the anxiety that had not gone away, the tall woman smiled as she spoke, her chipped tooth, crooked and discolored, sticking out more than the others.

  “My dear, Miss Cotell is your mother,” Miss Keble said.

  Cecilia went away, leaving the two packages on the bench, but she had gone only a few yards when she heard the women’s voices, raised and angry as she never had heard them before. She looked back once and only for a moment.

  They were not as she had left them. They confronted one another, trying to keep their voices down but not succeeding. “I gave my sworn word,” the woman who had been called her mother was bitterly exclaiming.

  The voices clashed in accusation and denial, contempt and scorn; and there was the sobbing then of the woman who felt herself deprived. She had wanted only to be near her child, all she deserved. “No more than that.” Cecilia heard the words choked out. “And in your awful jealousy how well you have destroyed the little I might have had.”

  Cecilia hurried then. “We cannot come back,” she heard, but only just. “Not once again. Not ever now.”

  There was a protest furiously snapped out, and nothing after that was comprehensible. Cecilia kept trying again to think of the women as unbalanced, and then she tried not to think of them at all. Afterward she told no one what had been said, not even Daisy and Amanda, who naturally would have been interested.

  That summer Mr. Normanton took his daughter to the Île de Porquerolles. In previous summers he had taken her to Cap Ferrat, to Venice and Bologna, to Switzerland, making time on each journey for a stay in Paris. It was on these excursions that Cecilia first came to know her father better. More of his life was revealed, more of a past that he’d thought would not interest her. His childhood added a dimension to his lonely father’s role; his young man’s world did, too. Every time Cecilia returned from school to Buckingham Street she was aware that melancholy disturbed him less than it had. On their holidays together it was hardly there at all.

  At Porquerolles, while every bay of the island’s coast, every creek, every place to swim was visited, Cecilia felt her company relished; and her father’s quiet presence was a pleasure, which it had not always been. Silences, a straining after words to keep a conversation going, uncertainty and doubt too often once had become the edgy feeling that nothing was quite right.

  It was hot in August, but a breeze made walking comfortable and they walked a lot. They talked a lot, too, Cecilia especially—about her friends at school, the books she had read during the term that had just ended, the subtle bullying of Elizabeth Statham. She hadn’t meant to say anything about the women who’d been a nuisance and when something slipped out she regretted it at once.

  “They wanted money?” her father asked, stopping for a moment on their walk along the cliffs to look for a way down to the rocky shore below, and going on when there was none.

  “No, not at all,” Cecilia said. “They were just peculiar women.”

  “Sometimes people who approach you like that want money.”

  He was dressed as he never was in London, casually, without a jacket, in white summer trousers, a colored scarf at his throat which she had given him, his shirt collar open. Cecilia, who particularly noticed clothes, liked all this much better than the formality of his suits. She said so now. The women were not mentioned again.

  But that evening when his whiskey had been brought to him on the terrace of the hotel he said, “Tell me more about your women.”

  Cecilia bit into an olive, cross with herself again. He was curious, and of course bewildered, because she’d left out so much—the women being there at the hockey matches and then appearing on the way through the woods, and how she’d thought they might suffer from a mental affliction. Now she described their clothes and the way they had of speaking at the same time, each often saying something different, how they related in detail the features of their house and spoke of their cat. Her father listened, nodding and smiling occasionally. She didn’t tell him everything.

  Shreds of the day’s warmth were gaudy in the evening sky as the terrace slowly filled and new conversations began. A dog obediently lay down beneath a chair and was no trouble even when the couple with him finished their drinks and went off to the restaurant without him. A Frenchman, relating an experience he had recently had, brought it to an end and was rewarded with quiet laughter. Cecilia, puzzled by jeu blanc, overheard several times, missed the point.

  “I played a lot of tennis once,” her father remarked when they were being led to their table in the restaurant. “I doubt I ever told you that.”

  “Were you good?”

  “No, not at all. But I liked playing tennis. Jeu blanc’s a love game.”

  On their last morning, walking to the harbor, as every day they had during their stay, Cecilia talked about becoming an actress and heard more than she had before about her father’s work and his office colleagues, about the house on Buckingham Street when first he knew it, about his being married there. Passing the farm that was the beginning of the village, he said, “The marriage fell to pieces. When we tried to put it together again we couldn’t. I let you believe as you did because it was the easier thing and sometimes, even, I pretended to myself that it was true. I was ashamed of being rejected.”

  Bougainvillea hung over garden walls. Across the street from the crowded fruit stall the café they liked best hadn’t come to life yet, their usual table not taken, as often it was. Their coffee was brought before they ordered it.

  “I thought that perhaps you guessed,” her father said. “About the marriage.”

  Old men played dominoes in a corner, the waiters stood about. A woman and a child came hurrying in. The girl who worked the coffee machine pointed at a door.

  “During all your life as I have known it,” Cecilia’s father said, “you have made up for what went wrong in mine.”

  On the quays they watched the slow approach of the ferry. There was a stirring in the crowd waiting to embark, luggage gathered up, haversacks swung into place. A ragged line formed when two ticket collectors arrived. The newcomers who came off the ferry trundled their suitcases to where the gray minibus from the hotel was parked.

  “We should call in at the Tourist Information,” Cecilia’s father said, but when they did they found they didn’t have to because the times of the early-morning boats to the mainland—on one of which they hoped to be tomorrow—were listed in the window.

  They bought a baguette and thinly sliced ham in the village, and peaches and a newspaper. They had another cup of coffee in the café.

  “I’m sorry,” her father said. “For hating the truth so much, and for so long.”

  On the walk back to the hotel Cecilia didn’t say what she might have said, or ask what she might have asked. She didn’t want to know.

  They rested in the shade, beneath dry dusty trees. People on bicycles cycled by and smiled at them and waved. Faintly in the distance they could hear the rattle of the minibus returning to the harbor.

  “Shall we go on?” her father suggested, his hands held out to her.

  She drew the curtains in her room, darkening the lit-up brightness of the afternoon. She thought she might weep when she lay down, and spread a towel over her pillow in case she did. Fragments made a whole: the photographs that were lies, the marriage that fell apart. No child was born, they’d hoped one would be. As best they could they had made up for that, but what had been was over. Suitcases instead were in the hall, coats and dresses trailing from hangers piled together. A taxi drove away. He watched it go, alone but for a child who, by chance belonging nowhere, now belonged to him.

  Maids came to turn the bed down. Cecilia said to leave it and thanked them for the chocolate they had put out for her on her bedside table. She called out, apologizing when her father knocked softly on the door. She had a headache, she would not come down tonight. He didn’t fuss. He never did. His footsteps went away.

  The n
ight didn’t hurry when it came. She did not want it to. Tomorrow he would finish what he had begun: she had no thoughts except that now. “I have to tell you this as well,” gently he would say, and ask to be forgiven when he did. She didn’t blame him for what he had withheld. She understood; he had explained. But still he would complete what wasn’t yet complete because he felt he should.

  They were early at Toulon for their train to Paris and took it in turns to walk about the streets so that their luggage wouldn’t be left unattended. Morosely, Cecilia gazed into the shop windows, hardly seeing their contents. Again the women hovered, as in reality they had. Their voices did, their clothes, the clergyman they talked about, their house, their cat. Her father’s silence would not hold; he did not want it to. He would tell her on the train.

  Or even now, Cecilia thought when they waited together on the platform. In a strange place, among hurrying people, there’d be a moment that seemed right and he would choose his words. He would say again her presence in his house made up for his unhappiness there, and tell her what she had to know.

  But when next her father spoke it was to praise the train they were waiting for. “The best trains in the world,” he said. “And we can have a croque for lunch.”

  They had it standing at the counter of the bar and their talk was about the island and how they would always want to return to the little bays, the clear deep water, their daily explorations, the café they had liked. Cecilia’s panic receded a little and then a little more; her father’s politeness was measured and firm, as if he’d been aware of her brooding and understood it. He drew the conversation out and kept it going. She could read in his face that he had changed his mind.

  Afterward, in an almost empty carriage, where their seats faced one another, they were on their own, and quiet. Her father read Bleak House, a book he liked to go back to, and she didn’t feel neglected by his absorption in it as on other journeys. His occasional smile of pleasure, his delicate fingers turning the pages, his summer clothes uncreased in spite of travel reflected the ease with himself that had been slow in becoming what it was. He had borne his bitterness well. Somewhere, today and every day, the wife he had not ceased to love enjoyed the contentment he had been unable to give her. With cruel fortitude he might have allowed himself to dwell on her life without him, but he preferred an emptiness, and made of it something better than the truth. Cecilia knew it; and emulating his skill in living with distress, abandoned stern reality for what imagination more kindly offered. Might it not be that the women in their lonely lives nurtured a fantasy that dressed things up a bit, befriending girls without a mother in order themselves to be befriended? Had they, together, discovered the excitement of a shadowland and kept it alive in the bluster of daring and pretense?