My American

by Stella Gibbons

  “Smart Alecs,” murmured Lou. “So clever they fall right down and go boom. I know.”

  “But it’s quite easy to talk to you because I like you,” Amy ended.

  “That goes for me too,” said Lou cheerfully, turning to smile at her.

  “I’m so glad! I’ve never had a friend of my own age.”

  Lou felt a little as if she had stepped into the pages of Melbourne House, but her inward smile only added a glint of her dry humour to a situation which she found oddly moving. Amy Lee certainly was a funny little number! But she was very likable. The unexpected thought crossed Lou’s mind that Amy was like Bob. She had the same lack of sophistication, yet the same unaggressive confidence in herself. He used to be like a nice kid, thought Lou, and she’s rather the same.

  It seemed to Amy that there was no pause before she answered:

  “I’d like to be friends with you, too.”

  She instinctively chose the simplest words, and was rewarded by Amy’s expression.

  “Oh, I am glad! Because a lot of extraordinary things have been happening to me, and I want to ask your advice about them.”

  “I’ll certainly be pleased to do what I can, Miss Lee.” Lou answered, with the formality which gives sometimes a quaint attraction to the speech of educated American girls. She added, unable to resist her curiosity:

  “Is it something to do with your ‘special reason’ for wanting to come here?”

  “Yes, it is.” Amy clasped her hands together. “Only the whole thing sounds so absolutely barmy—crazy, you know—that I don’t like to tell you about it. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m going mad, or else telling lies.”

  “I promise I won’t.”

  Amy sighed. “It is such an extraordinary business—and, of course, there may not be anything in it, after all, and then you will think I’m mad.”

  “I won’t. I promise I won’t. There are few things I enjoy more than a really extraordinary business. Go on, Miss Lee! Shoot!”

  “Well——” Amy hesitated. “Will you promise not to ask any questions about what I’m going to tell you until I’ve asked you some questions?”

  Lou nodded.

  “No matter how much you want to?”

  Lou nodded again.

  “All right, then.” Amy took one rather desperate glance around her at the vacant lots where children were playing past which they were now driving. Then she pressed both hands tightly together and asked quickly in a low voice:

  “Have you any brothers?”

  “Two,” answered Lou quickly, glancing at her, her face suddenly alarmed.

  “Oh, please don’t look like that! Did either of them ever go to England?”

  “Why, yes. My youngest brother Bob did, about ten years ago. In 1928, I think it was, or thereabouts.”

  “Oh!” Amy gave a little gasp. “And—and did he go to London, do you know?”

  “Surely. My mother went on the trip too, and my Aunt Carol Viner. We were all very thrilled about it, because it was the first time any of the family’d been to Europe since my father’s people sailed from Holland in the seventeenth century.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m sure it must have been your brother I met outside Kenwood House in London when I was a little girl. He gave me a shilling for my birthday. At least, he thought it was a shilling, but it was really five cents. I’ve still got it. And I’ve never forgotten him. That’s all.”

  She was so agitated by this time that she could hardly get the words out, and Lou had to incline her head towards her to hear the end of the sentence.

  “But——” began Lou.

  “I thought you must be his sister, you see, because you’re so like him. You are like him, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. We’re so alike it’s a family joke. But how could you possibly have remembered——”

  “Well, that’s what’s so queer,” said Amy faintly. “You see, I did remember what your brother looked like as a little boy. I’ve always remembered his face perfectly. But, of course, I couldn’t know what he looked like when he was grown up, because I’d never seen him. But—but just before I came to America I—I did see him. In a kind of dream. Only I wasn’t really asleep, I was just resting.”

  “You saw Bob? But how?”

  Amy nodded. “He was asleep, with his head against a red cushion, and he looked so ill.”

  Lou, looking utterly bewildered, could only shake her head. She had stopped the car under a group of trees on the edge of a field, and she now turned to Amy and demanded:

  “But how could you know it was Bob in the dream?”

  “He was so like the little boy I remembered, only grown up, of course. And—and I saw him another time, too, in a real dream, that time. His face—was quite close to mine, and he was—smiling.”

  “See here,” Lou started the engine again, “Miss Lee, we can’t go to Roselands, we shall only meet half Vine Falls there. Shall we go home? We can hunt in the ice-box for something to eat, and then we can talk this out.”

  “Oh, yes, let’s go to your home! You’re not angry, are you?” she added timidly.

  “Of course not. But I am just a little bit scared. It’s all so creepy. And I suppose you must have heard what Miss Cordell said. You see, Bob isn’t with us any more. We don’t know where he is. Oh, we can’t talk here! Let’s get home.”

  For some moments they drove in silence. Then Amy said:

  “You see, when I saw you at the party, you looked so like him that I knew you must be some sort of relation.”

  Lou nodded.

  “And—and I was sort of worried about that picture of him I saw on the cushion. I felt I must tell you about it. And when Miss Cordell said he was running around with gangsters, I felt awful.”

  “We don’t even know if he’s still with the gangsters. We don’t know if—we don’t know anything,” said Lou, accelerating. “That’s what’s so hard.”

  “You see, the only time I ever saw him, he was so kind.” Tears came to Amy’s eyes. “My mother had died about a year ago and it was my birthday and I told him about it, and he said, ‘Gee, I’m sorry. That’s bad’.”

  Lou smiled.

  “That sounds just like Bob. He was the nicest kid. Until three months ago, he was the swellest guy around, too.” Her soft high voice played ironically yet tenderly on the slang words.

  “Then he had a car smash and killed a little girl and put a boy’s eye out. He was acquitted, but my Dad made the mistake of getting a crooked lawyer to help him get off and—and I think some of the jury were fixed too, and that sent Bob quite crazy. He just went off.”

  “Ran away, do you mean?”

  “He told my cousin he was going off with a small-time gangster, a man we used to know when we were kids. She drove him out to a hotel in the mountains where he said he was going to meet this man, and we’ve never seen him since.”

  “How can you bear it?” cried Amy, so violently that Lou glanced at her, startled.

  “It is pretty bad. But I can bear it because I’m sure he’ll come back.”

  “Are you? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just am. I’m not at all a suggestible type, Miss Lee, and I never get hunches. But I just do have a hunch about this. I know Bob as well as I know myself, and I know he’ll come back.”

  Amy was silent. Her feelings were so confused, and she was so troubled by the dread that had haunted her ever since she had seen the blurred newspaper photograph, that she was glad to lean back for the rest of the journey without saying another word, and to let her mind play over what Lou had just told her. But the situation had developed so uncannily, one piece of it fitting into another like a puzzle with such strange precision, that she could not think clearly nor come to any conclusions, except that she was sorry—so sorry for the trouble that had overtaken her happy young American, and longed to help him. He was now a real person, not a kind of ghost, and so much had her feelings about him deepened and changed since earlier in the afternoon that she no lon
ger remembered, as they drove through Vine Falls, that she had longed to wander through the streets dreaming about the little boy that he had been. Now she was on her way with his sister to the house that had been his home. Had anyone told her as she stepped out of the train at Vine Falls that this was to happen to her, she would have been overwhelmed with excitement and happiness. But now it only seemed the natural thing to be doing. At Lou’s home they could talk quietly and perhaps think out a way to help Bob. She thought of him now as Bob, not as My American. The ghost was rapidly becoming real, and with every moment he grew dearer and more important to the girl who had seen him once when they were children.

  “Here we are,” said Lou, and drove the car between two low banks covered with long grass, where two opulent bushes laden with snowball flowers made a natural gateway to the drive. The house was white, with graceful portico approached by three shallow circular steps, and its proportions were so pleasing and so admirably set off by the shady trees grouped at either side of it that Amy could not help exclaiming:

  “Oh, what a lovely house!”

  “My great-grandfather built it,” said Lou, shutting off the engine, and glancing up at the shabby, charming façade with affection. “We like it. It’s falling to pieces, but we wouldn’t live anywhere else. There are only one or two houses like this in Vine Falls; my cousins, Helen and Stebby Viner, live in the one down the hill. Maybe you noticed it on the ride up.”

  She opened the front door, and motioned Amy into a wide entrance hall with a small but graceful staircase. An atmosphere at once elegant, shabby and affectionate greeted Amy, which seemed familiar to her. It reminded her of the flat at Five Highbury Walk, and she immediately felt at ease.

  “There’s nobody home,” said Lou. “Do come upstairs. My mother and father are away on a trip, to get mother better from worrying about Bob, and our handy-man’s out. Just a minute——” They were now crossing the landing, and she went into a room on her left. “I’d like to have you see something.”

  It was a small room, with books piled on the floor in one corner, a bed stacked with folded blankets, college pennants crossed on the walls. The white frilled curtains hung straight at the closed windows. It looked like the room of somebody who had died. And Amy, who was standing at the open door, suddenly realized with a shock whose room it was.

  “Look.” Lou came towards her holding out a photograph which she had taken from the wall. “Miss Lee—which of these boys is Bob?”

  Amy took the photograph in a trembling hand, and looked at it.

  It was a group of young men in rowing dress assembled outside a college building. Amy’s eyes moved eagerly over the smiling young faces and stopped at last at the young man on the extreme left of the group. She put her finger gently on the picture and said faintly:

  “This one.”

  Lou nodded. “Yes. That’s Bob. But he doesn’t look nearly so like me in this picture as he usually does, and that’s why I wanted to have you see it, to see if you’d know which he was. Miss Lee” (she turned away to re-hang the picture on the wall, followed by Amy’s rather wistful gaze; Amy would have liked to look at the photograph for a little longer) “this is the strangest business, isn’t it? What do you make of it, anyway?”

  Amy shook her head helplessly.

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s frightening, somehow, and I do feel—so dreadfully sorry for your brother. I do wish I could help.”

  “That’s lovely of you,” said Lou, over her shoulder as she led the way to her room, and meant what she said, for with every moment that they spent together she liked Amy more, feeling beneath her child-like manner a true sweetness and strength, like the taste of honey, which had nothing to do with the determined “loveliness” that she, Lou, had always despised in women.

  Both girls felt too disturbed in mind to talk much while they were freshening up, and their silence lasted while they made coffee and salad in the kitchen and carried two trays into the drawing-room.

  It was nearly eight o’clock, and the neglected garden outside the long open windows was beginning to render up fragrance to the evening coolness. Amy’s eye was taken by a trellis just outside the window covered with a tapestry of convolvulus (morning glories is the pretty American name), and she continued to stare at the delicate mass of tiny red, white, blue and purple horns while she ate and drank; they were all twisted in sleep now, looking so crumpled among their long pointed leaves that it was difficult to picture them as they would be to-morrow morning, unrolled, without a crease in their fragile petals.

  She was also very taken with the room, where old Colonial furniture was blent with pleasant modern pieces, and the whole set off by a wallpaper striped in soft grey and patterned with flowery medallions in green and rosy lilac. The curtains, the chintz on the chairs, matched the wallpaper. White-painted shelves of books, and sketches and paintings of vigorous American faces with old-fashioned collars and out-moded hairdressings gave dignity and a sense of the Past. A grand piano, its shape shown to advantage by the long low shape of the room, shared the musical honours with a radio cabinet. It was a charming room, but its charm was not due to the silent presence of flowers whose strange fringed faces stared out at the evening light, nor to that light itself, nor to the peaceful silence. Here was a room where people had been content, had danced on the shining floor, laughed and made plans for the happy summer, the gay fall, that was coming. In this room, brisk aunts had made plans for the undoing of graceless nieces or the welfare of worthy nephews; the arrival of new babies had been announced, and people had waited to hear of deaths. There had been a proposal or two blurted by the fireplace, and young faces had turned away to the window to hide tears. Amy, sitting in silence, was almost happy—in spite of the vague dread lurking in her mind—to be where she was. This is his home, she thought. He grew up here. I’ve never been in such a lovely room before. No wonder he was a happy little boy.

  And then came the desolate recollection that he was happy no more.

  Lou was sitting opposite to Amy in silence, also staring out of the window, and wondering if the whole story were a lie arranged and carried out for some reason which she could not imagine.

  Perhaps Bob had met this girl at some place, and they had decided. …

  What had they decided? What could be the reason for telling such an unconvincing lie?

  No, I’m sure it’s true; it’s too queer not to be, decided Lou. Her doubts had only been the natural response of a sceptical nature to an unlikely tale, and she now had no reservations as she turned and said:

  “Miss Lee——”

  “Do call me Amy, please.”

  “I’d love to have you call me Lou, too. Well, Amy, then. What do you think all this means? You must have some notion.”

  Amy shook her head.

  “No, I haven’t. I just think it’s queer and frightening.”

  “Me too. The only clear thing about it is that you seem mixed up with Bob in some way.”

  “Oh, yes!” breathed Amy, charmed in spite of her anxiety by this thought.

  “You aren’t psychic, are you?”

  “Oh, no. These pictures of your brother were the first ones I’ve ever had. That’s why I was so frightened.”

  “You see,” Lou leant forward, with her elbows on her knees and stared at the carpet, “it’s so maddening because we can’t get at anything! There doesn’t seem to be any reason why you should see Bob in a dream.”

  “Unless it was meant to show me he was in danger,” said Amy in a low tone.

  “But what could you do, even if you did know he was in danger?”

  “Well, I’ve told you, haven’t I? And you’re his sister.”

  “Yes, but I already knew he was in danger. At least, I’m afraid he probably is. He mayn’t be in danger of being killed, but it can’t be doing him any good, knocking around with those rats.”

  “I’m sure he’s in danger,” Amy said in the same low voice, speaking as if to herself. “It’s always
been in the back of my mind, I know that now. I’ve been sure of it ever since that night when I saw him asleep on the red cushion.”

  “That red cushion!” Lou got up and walked round the room, lighting a cigarette. “Why red? Why not green or blue or yellow?”

  “Perhaps it was in some special place,” suggested Amy. “Do you know any rooms where your brother might be where there’s a red cushion?”

  Lou laughed.

  “America’s mighty large,” she said, and sat down.

  “No, but I meant a room in some house or flat, belonging to someone you know where your brother might naturally go,” explained Amy.

  Lou shook her head.

  “Maybe I do, but I can’t think just now. I feel all balled up.” She got up again and walked over to the window and looked out at the darkening garden, where the trees were giving their usual impression of nature’s indifference to human affairs. “All I know is, you’ve made me feel much more worried about Bob than I was before.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Amy earnestly, “but I felt so bad about it that I had to tell you.”

  Lou said nothing for a moment, and in the silence Amy made up her mind not to tell her about the picture she had seen only that afternoon, the blurred newspaper photograph. It had frightened Amy, but it might have nothing to do with Bob, so there was no point in letting it frighten Lou; Amy would keep it to herself.

  Nevertheless, as she made this decision, she wished that she could tell Lou. Her loneliness and fear were increased by keeping this secret.

  “You see,” Lou said suddenly, “I don’t like feeling helpless. And I do feel helpless about all this. What can we, you and I, do about it?”

  “Well … I can keep in touch with you,” said Amy after a moment’s thought.

  “I hope you’ll do that anyway.”

  “Oh, I will! I want to. But I meant that if I have any more queer pictures I can let you know at once.”