Strange Sisters

by Fletcher Flora

  Jacqueline liked ivory. The color, that is. Pale, cold ivory. She surrounded herself with it in the restricted places of her private life, and added a touch here and there, wherever it was possible, in the public areas. For instance, except for the slightest relief of more vivid colors, which only served to emphasize the preponderance, the bedroom of her apartment was entirely in the pale tone—woodwork and walls and rug and drapes and furniture. Entering it was like walking into a kind of sanctuary, a strange temple in which the decor was possessed of esoteric significance for the instinctively initiate.

  Kathy stirred and lit another cigarette, waiting for the occupant of the booth to complete his conversation. She watched him through a narrow glass panel in the door. He sat bending forward from the little swinging seat beneath the instrument, his soft felt hat pushed back on his head, smoke from a cigarette that was pasted with dry saliva to his lower lip swirling around his face and clogging the booth with a thin, blue haze. When he talked, the cigarette bobbled so sharply that it seemed about to shake loose. His voice undulated, rising now and then to the level of intelligibility, a word here and there standing out nakedly. He was apparently trying to persuade someone to meet him at a certain place at a certain time, and it seemed to be very important.

  Kathy moved away a few steps to eliminate the sound of his voice. She was all at once unreasonably angry with him for delaying her own call, for being a stupid man with a dull problem that was probably no problem at all.

  Trying to eject him from her mind, she began again to think of Jacqueline, following her in imagination through the routine of the day thus far. In the beginning she arose from ivory sheets and stood beside the bed on ivory broadloom, and she was herself ivory, black-and-ivory, tall and superbly proportioned by the standards of classic beauty, as if she had been carved by an ancient Greek artist from a giant tusk. Propelled by Kathy's mind, she moved in a remembered order. First to the kitchen, where coffee was started in the automatic silver percolator. Next to the bathroom for a shower and then back into the bedroom for the swift and simple rites before the mirror of the dressing table. These rites, however simply and quickly done, seemed almost superfluous, because there was about her an appearance of fastidiousness that survived even the usual ravages of a night in bed. Her hair, black and sleek and pulled back to a knot from a center part, looked undisturbed. Her eyes were as bright as if they had been chemically flushed, and the muscles of her face did not sag in tired need of an astringent. Whatever there was in her of deterioration and slow decay existed in secrecy beneath unaffected flesh. This physical impression was supported, was perhaps in some degree established, by a more subtle quality, a kind of emotional purity impervious to violation, and even in passion and the act of passion she seemed to burn with a pure white cauterizing flame.

  At the closet, she selected one of the severely tailored suits she invariably wore to work. Which one this morning? The navy pin-stripe? The gray chalk-stripe? The hard brown gabardine? It really didn't matter, because whichever one it was, it was precisely the right one. It was the very one for this particular day, and no other one could possibly have been quite so appropriate for what the day would bring or for the places the day would take her. Fully dressed, a black string tie at the collar of a tailored blouse, she returned to the kitchen where the coffee was brewed and hot in the silver percolator.

  She drank the coffee black and unsweetened, and then she left the apartment, locking the door behind her and going down in the elevator to the lobby and through the lobby to the street, and now she was behind the blond desk with the ivory telephone that would be ringing in desperate supplication just as soon as this man, this Goddamn vindictive, deliberately perverse man, got through with his stupid conversation in the drug store booth.

  And he was through. He had finished and gone while Kathy wasn't looking. The jointed door was folded back, and the thin smoke of his cigarette drifted out. Acting quickly, before she had time to reconsider in fear of Jacqueline's reaction, she slipped into the booth and closed the door and dialed the remembered number. She got a central switch board, of course, and had to wait for a connection. After a bit, she got it, and Jacqueline's voice, a cool, measured modulation, was saying, "Miss Wieland speaking."

  Kathy answered with a rush. "Jacqueline? This is Kathy, Jacqueline."

  There was a pause in which something grew, and Jacqueline's voice, when it came back on, had subtle undertones, like the voice of a woman speaking casually to her lover when her husband was present. "Oh, hello, Kathy. How are you this morning?"

  "I want to see you. I went to your place last night, but you weren't home."

  "I had an engagement, I'm afraid. Sorry you made the trip for nothing."

  "I must see you, Jacqueline."

  "Well, I have a rather full schedule today. I'm not even having lunch out."

  "Please, Jacqueline."

  The pause again, a slight alteration in the undertone. A kind of soft wariness. "You sound urgent, Kathy. Is something wrong?"

  "Yes. I can't tell you about it now. Not over the telephone."

  "Very well. I'll leave here about five o'clock. Meet me in the Bronze Lounge, and you can tell me over a cocktail. I'm sure it can't be too serious."

  The line went dead, and Kathy sagged against the side of the booth, fighting again the dark compulsion to hysterical laughter. Not serious, Jacqueline had said. Not too serious. Just the bad end of a good idea.

  Outside the booth, she looked again at her watch and was astonished to see how few degrees the minute hand had progressed. Five o'clock seemed remote in time, an improbable prospect in her own life. It was not yet ten. Over seven hours before five. She wondered how she could ever get through them to the Bronze Lounge and Jacqueline, and the appointment, now that it had been made, had assumed in her mind the character of a goal to be reached at any cost, a kind of terminal point of danger, beyond which she would be once more quite secure. She understood, actually, that there was no good reason for this, no reason at all to think that anything would be better after she had seen Jacqueline, but that there was, on the other hand, a good possibility that everything would be worse, depending upon Jacqueline's response. But though she understood this very well, it would have been ruinous to acknowledge it, and so she continued to think of the hour of five as an established haven toward which the hands of her watch crept with unnatural slowness. It was only necessary to survive, somehow, the intervening time.

  If only she could sleep. If she could sleep away the time, waking just soon enough to keep the appointment, all her trouble would be resolved. But she would never be able to sleep. If she tried, she would lie staring with hot, dry eyes into a past that offered no consolation and a future that offered no hope, and this was something to be avoided beyond all else. But there were inducements to sleep. What about a sedative? A barbiturate of some kind. Perhaps it would be possible to take just enough of something to let her sleep five or six hours, but not enough to prevent her keeping the appointment with Jacqueline. It would be a risky business, and she would have to be very cautious in the amount she took, rather too little than too much, for it would be the culminating disaster if she failed to be in the Bronze Lounge at the stipulated time. She held desperately to the blind, irrational conviction that Jacqueline would somehow have the solution to her problem that her ills could be cured over a cocktail.

  Turning with a jerk, she walked over to the prescription counter and stood drumming with her fingers until a bale man in a tan linen jacket came up from the rear and asked her what she wanted.

  "I'd like some sleeping medicine," she said, and added redundantly because her nerves were taut: "Something to make me sleep."

  The pharmacist looked at her, lifting his eyes from her drumming fingers to her face. "Have you a prescription?"

  "No. I... I didn't realize that it was necessary to have a prescription. Can't you sell me something without one? Surely there's some kind that doesn't require a prescription."


  He shook his head. "Sorry, lady. Law's pretty strict about it. You go see a doctor, get a prescription and come back. I'll be glad to serve you if you get a prescription."

  "Yes. I guess I’ll have to. Thanks very much."

  She turned and walked rapidly up the aisle between counters and out onto the sidewalk. She had the feeling all the way that the bald pharmacist was watching her suspiciously from behind his counter, that she had in some way given him a clue to her guilt simply by asking for sleeping medicine. It required a tremendous exertion of will to keep from running, and she felt icy sweat gather in her arm pits and trickle in thin lines down across her ribs. Turning left on the sidewalk, she walked for several blocks with the same accelerated pace with which she'd left the drug store. After a while, she saw a small park on the opposite side of the street, just one square block with trees and shrubs and scattered benches and the cast-iron figure of a man with an axe in his hands. Crossing the street, she went into the park and sat down on a bench, staring straight ahead past the cast-iron man and breathing deeply with a slow, measured rhythm.

  Most doctors are men, she thought. This in itself was insignificant, but she was disturbed by the probability that no doctor would give her a prescription for what she wanted just because she asked him for it. He would want to know why. He would ask her questions. He would want to assure himself by his own diagnosis that the medicine was proper and necessary. He would want to examine her, and though she might suffer all the other elements of a consultation, this she certainly couldn't. She might find a woman doctor, of course. But they were fewer than men and would be more difficult to locate. She would probably have to travel quite a distance to reach the office of one, and even after she had gone to so much trouble, she couldn't be sure that she would get what she wanted. Trouble and the chance of failure combined to weigh heavily against the effort.

  Still, it would be sweet to sleep. To sleep and to waken and to go at once to Jacqueline. Sleep was the balm of hurt minds. Who had said that? Surely someone had said it. It was not something that had just come into her mind. It had the nice, round sound of something that someone had said before. The balm, the balm, the balm of hurt minds. Oh, yes! Oh, God, yes! Who else but old Macbeth? Who but the bloody old Thane of Cawdor himself? The Thane had committed a murder, too, though it was a long time ago and for a different reason, so murder gave them a sort of common denominator, and it was right that she should now remember something he had said. But if you wanted to be technical, it wasn't really Macbeth who had said it at all, but Shakespeare. Shakespeare had written a play about Macbeth, and he had made Macbeth say that bit about sleep being the balm of hurt minds, so it was really Shakespeare himself who had said it. Not that one needed to quibble. It was a fine line, a true line, a line big enough to divide its credit among all the people in the world who had ever said it—among Macbeth and Shakespeare and Dr. Vera Telsa. There was probably no line Shakespeare had ever written that Dr. Vera Telsa hadn't repeated sometime or other, and most of them many times. Dr. Vera Telsa loved Shakespeare. She had once settled an old argument by telling Kathy in confidence that

  Shakespeare was neither Shakespeare nor Sir Francis Bacon. Shakespeare, she'd said, was a woman.

  Dr. Vera Telsa was a teacher of literature in a college Kathy had once attended for a very short while. Her class in Shakespeare had an excellent reputation on the campus, but Kathy had never been in the Shakespeare class, because Shakespeare was not open to freshmen, and Kathy had never got to be anything else. She had been in Dr. Telsa's freshman survey class, however, because the college, Burlington College for girls, was small and select, and that was one of the advantages of a small, select school. Even when you were a freshman, you got good teachers, really top-drawer teachers with Ph.D.'s who had written books and maybe some articles for scholarly and literary magazines, and not someone who was working his way to a degree by teaching a class or two. And even in a survey course, if it happened to be a survey of English literature, you got some Shakespeare. Just one play. Just a taste. Just enough to make the receptive students want more. Dr. Telsa was interested only in the receptive students. It was her mission to make them want more.

  Dr. Telsa was tall and fairly young to have a Ph.D., and she had ash-blond hair and a deep, husky voice that was wonderful for Shakespeare and made you forget entirely that she was much too thin and that her hip bones were sharp protrusions under her clothes. Kathy had taken a rear seat in the classroom on the first day, but later she moved up front, and her feeling for Dr. Telsa became more and more intense after Beowulf, and by the time Shakespeare came around, she was thinking of Dr. Telsa as Vera and was even forgetting for short periods of time that Stella was dead, that Stella was nowhere on earth and would never be again.

  Vera had intimate little extra-curricular sessions in her own home for those who responded adequately. One sat on a cushion and had refreshment and talked about whatever poet or essayist or critic happened to be most on one's mind. There was a delicious freedom in it, a brave baring of soul, and you could smoke even if you were a freshman. Vera herself smoked. She smoked cork-tipped cigarettes in a long holder that seemed, when you thought about it, to make the cork tips rather superfluous. She waved the holder when she talked or recited, and she blew smoke at the ceiling when someone else was talking or reciting. Kathy was invited to attend because she had moved up front, because her intense concentration on Vera was mistaken for absorption in what Vera was saying, and because, for reasons of her own, Vera would have eventually invited her anyhow.

  She had been attending the sessions for about a month when she arrived one night to find that no one was there. No one but Vera, who stood framed in the doorway against a wash of soft light and said, "Have you come for our little session, my dear? I'm afraid it's been canceled for tonight."

  "Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't know."

  "It's quite all right. It is I who should apologize. I must have forgotten to tell you."

  This was a lie. She hadn't forgotten at ah". And Kathy knew intuitively that it was a lie, though she didn't specifically categorize it then or later, and she knew also that she was supposed to recognize it as such and was expected to make a decision on the basis of it. She stood quietly outside the door, making no move to leave.

  "Aren't you going to the dance?" Vera asked.

  "Is there a dance?"

  Vera laughed softly. "Well, I can see that you aren't going. The boys from the University are down tonight, you know. It's a standard fall affair."

  "Oh, yes. I'd forgotten all about it I never go to dances."

  "Is that so? In that case, why don't you come in for a while? We can have a nice, cozy chat all by ourselves."

  She stepped back out of the doorway, and Kathy walked past her into the room. She removed her coat and stood for a moment holding it, and Vera said casually, "Just drop it anyplace, my dear."

  She laid the coat over the back of a chair and moved farther into the room to drop, from habit formed in the sessions, onto a thick brocaded pillow on the floor by the sofa. Vera sat on the sofa itself and fitted a cigarette into her long holder and lit it with a silver table lighter. She leaned back and stretched her long, thin legs in front of her. She blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling in a blue plume and laughed gently.

  "Yes," she sighed, "when there's a dance with boys available, I'm afraid stuffy old Dr. Telsa and her stuffy old literature must take a back seat. I'm deeply touched that you remembered me under the circumstances. Tell me, why don't you like to dance?"

  "I don't know. I just don't care for it."

  "Such a simple reason for such a pretty girl? Oh, no, my dear, I'm sure it must be much more complex than that. Are you sure it's the dancing you don't like?"

  Kathy looked up from her position on the floor, and Vera looked down through a gossamer drift of smoke, and though Kathy was young, she was no fool, and she thought that there comes a time when it is necessary to recognize and accept whatever is inside you and whatever i
s apparent inside someone else.

  She said clearly, "I guess not. I guess it's really the boys."

  Vera's pink lips, wide and flexible and rather too thin, curved very slightly in the merest trace of a smile. "Shall I tell you something? We can make it a little secret just between the two of us. I don't like boys, either. Or, in my case, perhaps I should say men. Isn't it odd of us?"

  She stood up then and walked across the room to a radio-phonograph combination. Looking back over her shoulder, she said, "Shall we have music tonight with our talk? What would you like?"

  "Whatever you'd like."

  "Chopin? Some of the waltzes?"

  Kathy had no feeling at all for Chopin, because appreciation of fine music was one of the things she had never learned from Stella, but she nodded in agreement, and Vera placed a stack of records on the spindle of the phonograph and continued to stand by the machine until the captive sound of a piano under talented fingers was released to lilting freedom in the room. Then she returned to the sofa and sat down again in her previous position. Her voice, against the background of Chopin's music, was as light and lilting as the music itself.

  "You have sad eyes, Kathy. That's the first thing I noticed about you when you came into my class. Why are your eyes so sad, Kathy?"

  "I didn't know they were."

  "They are, Kathy. They're very, very sad. Come and sit beside me and tell me about yourself, and then perhaps I'll understand. You must call me Vera and talk with me as if I were the very best friend you have in the world, because I have a feeling that that's just what I'm going to be."

  And so Kathy sat on the sofa beside Vera and told her all about the significant events from the smell of lilies on, how she lived with Stella and loved Stella and how Stella was now dead, but she didn't tell, not quite yet, how Vera was someone who might fill the terrible emptiness that Stella had left or how she loved the touch of Vera's fingers on her hair and face as she talked. Always after that, the music of Chopin meant one thing, and so long as that thing was fresh and beautiful in the way she looked at it, she would listen breathlessly to the music of Chopin, but after the thing withered and grew ugly, she wouldn't listen to the music of Chopin at all, but would go away as quickly as she could, out of hearing, whenever it was played.