The Moment of Tenderness

by Madeleine L'engle

Fiona turned to me. “At this point we’ll try anything, but this looks like A House, not a hotel.”

  We went into the lobby. The floor was tiled with the kind of small white tiling you usually find only in bathrooms. A few exhausted-looking soldiers and sailors were sprawled in chairs whose springs sagged through the torn upholstery. Both Fiona and I did a double take when we looked at the man behind the desk; his face was the color of parchment; he looked as though he’d been embalmed and then they’d decided he wasn’t dead after all. On his head he wore a wig, which was pale pink. I suppose it was meant to be blond but it had faded to baby pink. Out from under it strayed a few damp grey hairs. Touché looked at him and growled with great disapproval. I closed my fingers firmly around her muzzle and she stopped.

  “Do you take dogs?” Fiona demanded bluntly of the man in the pink wig.

  He just grinned foolishly. “Do I take dogs?”

  I held Toosh out towards him. “Do you take this dog?”

  “Do I take dogs?” he asked again. “How many beds? One? Two? Three? Four?”

  “One bed is cheaper than two?” Fiona asked. He nodded. “All right. How much for a double bed for one week?”

  “Six dollars apiece for the young ladies. The dog can share it with you.”

  “Okay,” Fiona said brusquely. “Let’s see it.”

  The little man took us up in the elevator himself. I don’t think they had anyone else to run it. It was one of those elevators where there aren’t any doors and only two walls. They make Touché and me nervous.

  “What do you girls do?”

  “We work in the theatre,” Fiona said.

  “At the Gaiety?” the little man asked—as usual.

  “No.” Fiona was very indignant. “We’re playing Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at Ford’s Theatre with Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut.”

  The little man looked disappointed, but then his eyes flickered hopefully. “Either of you by any chance Eva Le Gallienne?”

  Fiona and I imagined Miss Le Gallienne staying in that particular hotel and laughed heartily.

  The little man looked hurt and took us down a dim and dirty corridor and flung open a door with a flourish. “Some sailors been sleeping here today,” he said, “but we’ll change the sheets for you.” He made this sound like a great favor.

  Buff wallpaper with a spider design was peeling off the walls. The ceiling was about to fall. A lumpy-looking tumbled iron bed stuck out from one corner, a wardrobe huge enough to hold any number of murderers or skeletons from another. There was a chair that had evidently actually become so shabby it had to be taken out of the lobby, and a three-legged desk. The floor was covered with cigarette butts, matches, ashes. Touché pressed closer to me so that she would not be contaminated by coming in contact with anything. Fiona and I looked at each other and our hearts sank.

  “Let me see the bathroom,” Fiona said bravely. We were astounded to find the bathroom reasonably clean and reasonably modern. We thought of our bottle of Lysol and nodded.

  “We’ll take it,” Fiona said to the little man. “Please see that the floor is properly swept. We’ll go down and sign the register now.”

  While the little man was carefully studying our signatures Fiona said, “Now we’ll go get our suitcases.”

  “Suitcases!” the little man with the pink wig said. “What would two pretty girls like you want with suitcases?”

  I was about to make an appropriate remark but Fiona pushed me out the door. Fortunately it wasn’t far to the Lord Baltimore. We picked up our bags and they felt as though they were filled with lead. We thought of Hugh and Bob, having had dinner, asleep in comfortable twin beds, and felt very sorry for ourselves and not very kindly disposed towards anyone else who had not shared in our troubles. We knew we’d never be able to stagger back to the hotel with our suitcases, so we stood and flagged a taxi.

  Fiona did a last act of Camille for the driver, coughing pathetically and looking beautiful; I stood and glowered, and Touché held up one paw and tried to lick it, limped a few steps, and finally stood on her hind legs and pressed her forepaws together as though in prayer, and the driver succumbed, whether to the histrionics and beauty of Fiona and Touché or to both combined, I’m not sure.

  It was after one when we finally got up to our room. Normally this is pretty early for us, but that night it didn’t seem so. We were far too tired, hungry though we were, to think about dinner. Besides, what would have been open in Baltimore so late on a Sunday night?

  Fiona got out the Lysol and we wearily scrubbed the bathroom and the foot- and headboards of the bed and all the doorknobs. We opened one bureau drawer and found it filled with more dirty cigarette butts and a handkerchief that Fiona said had been used for not very nice purposes, so we decided to live out of our suitcases.

  They had put clean sheets on the bed while we were fetching the suitcases, but the blankets and spread hadn’t been changed since the opening of the hotel a couple of centuries before. I knew Touché would never consent to sleep on that dirty floor, or even on the counterpane, so I spread my coat out on the foot of the bed and put her blanket over that.

  We took baths and then I took Touché’s dog biscuits out of my suitcase and the three of us each ate several and fell asleep, counting, instead of sheep, the days till we could leave Baltimore the next Sunday morning for seven weeks of one-night stands.

  Julio at the Party

  Now Julio was trying to balance the knife on the tip of his nose. He was being very clumsy about it and everybody was laughing, everybody was shouting and encouraging him.

  “Julio, will you be careful!” Rebecca cried, but she was laughing so hard that the tears were running down her cheeks and nobody heard her.

  Thank God Julio was drunk at last. Not drunk from alcohol, because Rebecca had seen him pouring most of his drinks into the big glass aquarium of tropical fish that she and her husband, Johnny, had inherited from the last tenants; but drunk from excitement, from adulation; drunk because with Julio it was a question of the wildest gaiety or the most complete agony of brooding.

  John passed by with more drinks, his glasses slipping lopsidedly down his nose. “Johnny,” Rebecca said, still laughing, automatically pushing his glasses back up for him, “all the fish are going to be dead tomorrow morning.” She laughed and laughed at the thought.

  “That’s fine,” John said, “and tomorrow morning you’ll be in tears over them. Why will they be dead?”

  “Julio’s drowning them in alcohol.”

  John looked over at the aquarium just in time to see Julio surreptitiously pour two-thirds of a high ball into the aquarium. “I thought the water level was getting rather high. Well, thank God Julio’s high at last, too, even if he’s getting it vicariously from the fish. That first hour when he sat around like the tragic muse and everybody else sat around respecting his mood…” He stroked her hot dark hair back from her cheeks. “Listen, sweetheart, go speak to old Lindstrom, will you? He’s looking lost.”

  “Oh, darling, of course!” She started to move away from John, drying the tears of her laughter and remembering her duties as a hostess.

  The apartment was a cold-water walk-up. They paid twenty-two dollars a month for it and they had five small rooms, the largest of which was the combined kitchen and bathroom. This was sometimes difficult when they gave a party but they always managed, and when there were complications they contrived to keep them funny, even the time when they had the very serious party (if you could call it a party) for some of John’s colleagues at the university and one of the professors’ wives burst open the easily yielding bathroom door and found her husband happily sitting in the bathtub with one of the young art instructresses. Rebecca rushed in and turned on the cold water and everybody laughed and somehow it became funny instead of serious, and the evening became a party.

  Now Julio was sitting on the floor by the piano, still trying to balance the knife on his beautiful nose, his delicate and aristocratic nose
, led on by the applause of the group around him. Oblivious to the laughter and the noise, Leda Oliver, Rebecca’s sister who had the apartment under Rebecca and John, was standing by the piano in gold lamé pajamas and an orange Chinese blouse, singing Lakmé. Her upswept blond hair was beginning to come down, her nose was shiny, and her lipstick was smeared; but the notes poured from her quivering throat as delicate and cool as the fountains at Versailles. As she finished her song, the group on the floor, still with their attention on Julio, clapped heartily. Leda smiled with her gently vacant eyes at the applause, those very round, very light blue eyes with the small pupils that never changed their mild, slightly bewildered expression.

  “No, never,” Walter had said once. “Leda’s eyes never change. Not even when—”

  “Walter, shut up,” Rebecca snapped. “Let Leda keep her private life to herself. And you keep yours, too.”

  Now Walter was clapping loudly for Leda and egging Julio on. Julio was beginning to look very silly (though even silliness could not destroy the passionate beauty of his face), sitting there, his feet stuck out in front of him, trying to balance the cumbersome knife. The grey-haired man at the piano ruffled through the music, found something that interested him, and placed it on the music rack, looking at Leda. She smiled obediently and prepared to sing.

  Walter had said, “Leda is much too obedient. I don’t like obedient women. That’s why you once held such charms for me, Rebecca darling. You never did anything I told you to, or anything I expected you to do. Nobody’d know you and Leda were sisters. Even I wouldn’t know it.”

  The grey-haired man struck the opening chords and Leda opened her mouth. When she was singing she always seemed a little surprised that the effortless crystal music pouring from her throat was hers; she sang whenever possible, even at parties like this when the smoky air tore into her throat, not caring whether or not anyone listened. Often Rebecca and John would wake at three or four in the morning to hear Leda, in the room below them, singing, singing.

  Rebecca picked her way through the rooms, heading for the furthest and smallest one, which John used as a study, and where she had last seen Dr. Lindstrom, John’s old professor; but she was stopped by a couple who had pulled a volume of John’s stories out of one of the bookshelves and were arguing over it.

  “I never interpret Johnny’s writing. I just feel it,” she said. “You’ll have to ask him, if you want to know anything about it. He’s in with the tropical fish, I think.”

  A red-headed girl who had appeared from nowhere but was presumably somebody’s friend clutched her arm. “Do tell me about your Spanish friend—what’s his name? Hoolio?” She fumbled for the Spanish pronunciation.

  “Julio, that’s right,” Rebecca said.

  “Yeah, but, is he really the one who wrote that wonderful poem?”

  “Did you like it?” Rebecca asked eagerly.

  “Well, I haven’t quite read it yet, but I’m going to get it tomorrow. Now that I’ve met the author it makes it so much more thrilling. Besides, he’s so divinely handsome.”

  “Johnny—my husband—translated it,” Rebecca could not help adding.

  “But why didn’t you tell me before! Now of course I shall get it. What did you say his name was? His first name?”

  “John, or Julio?”

  “Oh, either one would be divine. I must go talk to him!” the red-haired one cried, and rushed away, stepping on fingers, on peanut butter sandwiches, overturning drinks as she went.

  Now at last Rebecca sat down on the sagging arm of Dr. Lindstrom’s chair. “Hello, darling,” she said, stroking his sleeve, because he was more like a father to them than an ex-­professor or even one of Johnny’s colleagues. “Have you read Julio’s poem?”

  Dr. Lindstrom jumped. He had been napping. “Truly magnificent!” he exclaimed, waking up with enthusiasm and smiling into the cloudy night of Rebecca’s eyes. “An honest blend of the poet’s art and the reformer’s zeal without the latter intruding, killing the poetry and weakening its own message by its protuberance. How on earth did you find him?”

  “I’ve known him for years, in an odd sort of way,” she explained, as Horace somebody, one of John’s students, approached. “Mostly through letters, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’d like to see those letters,” Horace said. Rebecca remembered that Johnny always called him “Horrors.”

  “I have them all,” she answered. “Now that his long poem’s such a success I think Julio ought to bring out a volume of letters. They’re wonderful.”

  “I admired his poem,” Horrors said pompously. “I thought it was terrifically politically sound. You know, I couldn’t think of a thing to say against it except that it hasn’t any sense of humor.”

  Dr. Lindstrom spoke, his pipe clenched between his teeth as he waved a match over the bowl and sucked both at the pipe and at his words. “A sense of humor in that poem would have weakened its intensity, but we’ll go into that another time. How did you meet him, Rebecca?”

  “We spent a year in Barcelona when I was ten. I met Julio then and we decided at once that we were going to get married. He was eleven, and he’d written reams of poetry already. He used to read it to me and I thought it was wonderful. But he always burned it because he said it wasn’t good enough.” Through the open door she could see Julio still seated on the floor by the piano. He had put his knife down and was no longer trying to clown. “Oh, good Lord, now he’s looking miserable again. I’ll have to go cheer him up.”

  “That large friend of yours, I think his name is Walter,” Horrors said, “is arguing with him.”

  Julio raised his voice excitedly, and they heard him saying in faltering English, “But you cannot say you are anti-fascist and then say you were a Francoist. That is a—a—contraception.”

  The group on the floor roared with laughter. Julio looked wounded.

  “Hoolio, Hoolio darling,” the redhead said. “You mean ‘contradiction.’”

  Julio looked bewildered. “But that’s what I said.”

  “Honestly,” Rebecca said, giggling, “I could shoot that big hunk of a Walter. He has no right to upset Julio with his reactionary talk, especially when the poor guy can’t speak English well enough to fight back properly.” She shouted over to Leda in the golden trousers and the orange shirt, “Leda, my swan, sing ‘Caro nome’ for us.”

  Walter broke off arguing to call back. “Leda wasn’t the swan. You’ve got your mythology wrong.”

  “Or your anatomy,” the redhead shrieked, flinging herself against Walter with choking hiccoughs of laughter.

  “Horrors, darling,” Rebecca said without thinking, “would you be adorable and get me a drink? Rhine wine and seltzer, please.”

  John’s student looked startled for a minute, but he smiled politely. “Of course.” He hurried through the rooms. Rebecca saw him burst into the kitchen-bath, and then withdraw, crimson with embarrassment.

  Leda began to sing, and Walter continued to talk quietly, smiling at Julio, but she could not hear what he was saying. But she remembered that the only time she had been afraid of Walter was when he had that look of ineffable tenderness on his face.

  The redhead was lying with her head in Walter’s lap, pulling at one of his ears. Rebecca wondered how long he would stand for it; Walter did not like having his ears touched.

  “Excuse me for a moment, darling, will you?” Rebecca asked Dr. Lindstrom, and started to pick her way towards the piano. No political arguments at parties; that was the rule.

  “I am a very strong, very firm Catholic,” Walter was saying in his quiet, beautiful voice.

  John signaled to Rebecca. He was standing by the aquarium. He looked pleased and excited, his glasses askew again. “Beck, the fish are all stewed. What do you bet they won’t be dead tomorrow if we change the water? They’ll just have terrific hangovers. Have you ever seen a fish with a hangover, sweetheart?”

  She looked at the fish and started to giggle, too. “No, but I’ve seen
you with one.” The fish were swimming drunkenly, bumping into each other and bumping into the glass sides of the aquarium. “Walter!” she shouted, remembering again Julio’s distressed face. “Come and see the fish! They’re drunk!”

  People began to cluster about the aquarium, but Walter remained seated on the floor by Julio. Now the red-headed girl was stroking the back of his neck, but Walter did not seem to notice as he said, “It is because you are blind, because you are an idealist. It would have been better if you had died in Spain because you are living in a dream.” His voice was gentle, loving.

  “If I am living in a dream, then the only decent people in the world are living in a dream and everybody else is trying to make it a nightmare,” Julio cried, waving his hands excitedly, his hands that had once been as soft and as sensitive as his face but which were now hardened and scarred.

  “Perhaps not all of us are asleep,” Walter murmured. “Perhaps some of us are awake.”

  The red-headed girl came surprisingly into the argument, sitting up with a jerk. “But Walter, darlingest, if you are a Catholic how can you be awake? Do you believe in Adam and Eve? All that stuff about Eve and the apple?”

  “When I look at you, my sweet, I do,” Walter said, and she flung herself into his lap again.

  A delicate-looking woman, someone Rebecca remembered vaguely as being from the French department, pointed an accusing finger at Walter. “It is a crime that people like you are Catholic. You blacken a religion that should bring only comfort and joy to people. It is not for me, but why should you take it away from those it can help?” She looked at Julio for corroboration, but he was staring with dark fury at Walter’s placid face.

  “The dream again,” Walter said to the girl, then turned back to Julio, laying one of his strong, beautifully kept hands on the Spaniard’s knee. “Wake up, Julio. Wake up, boy.”

  “If I were awake,” Julio started to grind between clenched teeth, “I would—”

  Rebecca finally managed to cross to them and cut him short. “Walter, I shoot you. You’re dead. Bang bang.” She made a pistol of her fingers. “Go home, you louse. This is Julio’s party, not yours.”