The Theoretical Foot

by M. F. K. Fisher

  “But, Nan! You said we’d only be here a little while, then we’d go to Fiesole and take a villa, just the two of us, and you’d write and I’d paint and . . .?”

  “I know. But you must remember that I wasn’t yet sure that Tim and Sara really wanted us here or that we’d be happy. It’s lovely here. I simply cannot leave for a little longer. I don’t want to. I’m happier than I thought I could ever be and I feel sure you can paint beautiful things and . . .”

  Lucy rose. Almost frantically she lit another cigarette and began to now pace. She saw herself in the little mirror above Nan’s washstand: Her hair was touseled, her face swollen, her dress both mussed up and half unbuttoned. She looked as if she’d been attacked. She laughed fiercely. She didn’t care.

  She didn’t care and Nan didn’t care either, Lucy knew. She turned, one trembling hand pushed hard against the wooden mantle of the fireplace, the other flicking her cigarette.

  “Work?” she asked, hearing her voice go high. “Work? Why you know I can’t work in a place unless it’s completely sympathetic to me, that it’s utterly impossible, which you do happen to know, Nan Garton. And yet you force me to stay in a place—and do not suggest again that I go on alone to Italy as I refuse to leave you in such a place as this alone. You force me to stay here where the atmostphere is so hostile, so foul, with all the insults and petty suspicions and digs and sly remarks, that I could never hope to paint well. And nobody should know that better than you. Why, you’ve seen me do some of my best work, Nan. You do know what I’m capable of, you know the reviews I got from that last show. Nobody understands me as you do, as you used to, I should say.”

  Her voice caught on a hard, quick sob that softened into tears. She saw that Nan’s large eyes were filling too. She waited, breath held. Had she at last made Nan see?

  For a moment the silence deepened. The two women looked at one another as Lucy began to feel hopeful, then—and suddenly—happier. She watched as her friend’s hands relaxed and lay limply against the covers of the bed and heard the sigh that escaped Nan’s pale lips. She felt young again, young and beautiful and full of hope and desired by all men, and she raised her proud head.

  “Lucy,” Nan said, when she finally spoke. “I can’t tell you how terribly sad I am that this summer has been painful for you. For me—even if you say I’m deluding myself, that I’ve been duped and flattered—it’s felt perfect. I know we planned to go to Fiesole, Lucy, but I’m not going.”

  Neither spoke so Nan went on. “You paint beautiful pictures, Lucy. I know you can paint them here if you will let yourself. Some of the flowers you’ve done this summer are beyond lovely. Won’t you try to paint, Lucy dear? Won’t you forgive me and try to paint? You mustn’t feel left out, Lucy dear. We all love your work, just as we all love you. But,” and Nan went on more firmly now, having wiped a single tear from her cheek. “I am not going to leave Timothy. I’m not going to Fiesole. I’m not leaving here until our boat sails.” She finished speaking and closed her eyes.

  Lucy stared for a moment, seeing as clearly as she’d ever seen anything in her life the fine almost dusty eyebrows, the faint lines around the mouth of her beloved. She listened to Nan’s slow and now exhausted breathing. Never would she forget that sound, nor those faint lines nor the fine arch of her brow. Never would she forgive this small woman, never, she thought, and sobbed once more.

  “Oh,” Lucy cried out, as if she’d been struck. “Nan Garton, you are cruel! You’re selfish. You love no one but your own brother!” And she rushed from the room, the door slamming behind her.

  Nan’s face changed not at all.

  3

  For the next eleven days the two of them—the man and his wife—watched his left leg die.

  At first he was dazed. Then he began to wonder about the cage that was over it and at last to lift his head a little and to peer down at the leg when the nurses shifted the covers.

  It lay, white and beautiful, on many small sandbags. To the woman, who knew, it seemed to be no longer a part of the man, but to him it was still his own leg, even as it was a wolf that tore and foamed bloodily in every vein, and it was a long twisted red-hot cable and at the same time a drop of ice-cold color. He looked at his leg reproachfully.

  When the doctors came in and tapped and pressed at, say, the knee, he would smile and tell them joyfully that they were pressing on his ankle or his toes. The woman would try to swallow, but it was difficult.

  He grew more cunning as the days passed. He tried every wile of his wily, cunning nature to get her to help him die. Of course bribery could not touch her, but he sometimes felt sure that she might easily bribe his sister or her brother and sister, someone. He remembered where his every cent was banked and offered it all for poison. Then he threatened, then cajoled, then wept and even tried to kiss the woman with some passion to get her to give him a razor blade or a knife or to help him to the window ledge. This went on for many days and nights and at strange times the woman longed to help him but she could not.

  She watched quietly while the dead leg rotted on its pillows. It was true, what she had read, that the toenails of corpses grew prodigiously as these before her sprouted like curving yellowish shells from the withered toes, as, with time, the flesh around them turned an ardent brown. There were one or two red blotches on the inside of the calf, which spread slowly over the cold white flesh. Above the knee, on the inside, a greater blotch widened hideously, looking as if it would turn to jelly at the touch of a finger.

  On about the eighth day she told the nurse to put gauze soaked with cologne water on the leg. The man looked at her and though he never spoke of it, she felt his gratitude and his fearsome humiliation, for he was the most fastidious person she had ever known and the most sensitive to smells.

  On the tenth day, while she stood by the bed remembering with a kind of muted anguish his light agile dancing figure and the way he knew that his legs were his best feature, and wondered how to tell him, he told her. Yes, she said, it must come off. Soon, soon, he said.

  On the twelfth day—after an hour’s delay while a growth was taken from someone’s brain—it was amputated: it was the worst hour so far. But finally he could go once more into the operating room and he smiled again, dreamily, wearily, as the stretcher took him away from her and for one dreadful moment the iron band loosened and she almost cried out with agony. Only two tears were shed and it was soon over. There was a cold sweat on her forehead. She prayed fearfully that it would never happen again.

  She laid herself carefully down, once more, and waited for the doctors, who, this time, hardly even raised their hands.

  She hurried past them as the stretcher hissed familiarly along the corridor, then watched without expression while the man’s wasted body was lifted onto the bed. The stump of his leg, swatched now like a Turk’s head, bobbed and quivered heavily for a moment, then his enormous blue eyes opened once in his grayish face, and then he was sick. But both he and the woman were uplifted by the miraculous sense of feedom and of relief and even cleanliness.

  i

  When Nan Garton turned in her bed and woke up enough to feel their warmth, it was still so early in the morning of August 31 that the rays were almost horizontal. She kept her eyes shut, almost smiling at the brightness behind her lids.

  A little girl again, her mind dreamed. I’m little and am lying in the sun in the sewing room and if I open my eyes I shall see Mother’s basket with my new plaid gingham school dress spilling out of it and the gold thimble with “Stratford-on-Avon” written around it. It’s exciting to awaken not in my own bed and in a moment Father will climb slowly up the stairs and stop outside the door, then he will come in quietly and look at me, with my pretty hair upon the pillow and my eyelids held softly shut. And he’ll be surprised when I open my eyes, his sudden weight beside my couch making the floor creak.

  “Nanny,” he’ll say. “My little Anne.” He’ll whisper it. “You have a brother, now, and I have a son,” and his full
and beautiful mouth will tremble, the drop of whiskey caught in the soft hair of his beard flashing with little rainbows.

  Older now and today school starts, the Misses Huntington’s Academy for Young Ladies and Gentlemen, and Timothy will go with me. What a lovely day. I shall hold his hand tightly and all the girls will say, “Oh, your darling little brother! Let me have him, no, me!” But Timothy will look only at me and we’ll walk through the sunlight of this warm and sparkling day safe together, my new Ferris waist feeling stiff and curvy, almost like a grown-up woman’s corset.

  Mother will be watching for us and will cry a little and say, “If your dear father could only have seen you!” but inside I know Timothy will never really miss Father because I’m there to protect him and nurse him in a white dress like an angel’s when he is ill and he will need only me.

  Now I’m sad. Timothy, promise me you’ll never hide from me again. I won’t tell Mother this time but don’t sneak cigarettes in the old piano box. Love me or I’ll tell. Tea at the Parker House, and, oh, he’s grown, he’s older, will college make him leave me? He loves that girl, no this one. He’s home again, sad and thin and he needs me. War and he’s strange and when he’s wounded he calls for me and I’m the one who nurses him more gently than a man was ever nursed. I am the one who understands him so the ugly woman in the cape can stay away.

  Nan stirred and squinted her still half-shut eyes against the brightness of the sun and its growing warmth. She wanted to stay in bed yet awhile in dreams, though they seemed empty ones. She hated waking up yet something inside her felt she was right on the brink of a great surprise that would bring enormous joy.

  She savored the excitement delicately, her mind growing more clear as the overlapping dreams receded.

  Nan opened her eyes slowly, thinking, Yes, I’m here in my brother’s house and I’m happy. I should be sad, I suppose, that he’s so completely himself and satisfied without me. Maybe I am a little sad but I also feel like the most wonderful thing is about to happen and I am breathless.

  A light morning wind blew suddenly into the room, lifting one long curtain silkily across her face. It was the color of Chablis, pungent, frail, and she looked through this color curiously as it brushed over her cheek and slurried over her fair loose hair. The room seemed far away.

  The white wall seemed to shimmer and pulse like yellow water in a crystal vase and the dark green curtains were as straight as rose stems, the pale curtains between them as invisible as smoke seen through smoke.

  Rich browns in the chairs, the books on the mantlepiece, browns and greens in the rug transmuted into dim blurred shadows both strange and beautiful to her. I am not me, she thought. I’m a fish.

  Then the thin silky curtain drifted off her face and she closed her eyes against reality.

  In the next room was the sound of Lucy getting up so vigorously, running water, making noise of swirling, gargling, that she was already sounding disapproving. Perhaps I have a guilty conscious but why should I, it’s not yet eight and we all agreed to stay in bed later today.

  Nan then reproved herself. What had come over her to lately find fault with everything her poor Lucy did? It hurt Lucy almost physically to have to loll about, as she put it. Why then should Nan be so impatient, comdemning her for what was only an act of self-denial?

  Oh, please, dear God, she thought, help me be more patient and loving, to see clearly and with an open heart.

  She lay for a moment, praying lazily but intensely, and then relaxed. The day, she decided, would be one of pure selflessness. She saw that she had grown too demanding lately. She must try to understand why other people acted as they did. She would think with their brains, act with their bodies.

  She smiled at the picture of herself sitting and acting as Honor Tennant would. What would it be like to be a great smooth cool statue, slow moving, silent, impersonal? Did Honor really feel and suffer? Could anything so big and goddess-like know ordinary emotions, enjoy mortal pleasures such as washing and brushing her hair?

  No, I’d rather be me. I’d rather be me than Daniel, too; he’s so young, so awkward, so trusting still. He makes me feel at least three hundred years old. And yet I like to feel old, because I know that you and Daniel think I am beautiful. Yes, beautiful! His eyes gleam with delight when I come into the room, and he sees every change in my hair, my dress. I like that. It makes me feel attractive. It can’t matter to him: it won’t hurt him to fall a little bit in love with me and I need it.

  That’s it: I need to be noticed, flattered. Perhaps Lucy is right. Perhaps I’ve grown a little silly and flighty this summer, hoping that a boy will notice the flower in my hair, hoping that he will leap to his feet when I come near him, hoping I will hear his breath grow shorter. But Timothy, Timothy—and here Nan felt her mouth droop—it’s you I really wait for. You notice, you flatter, you smile as before but all you really live for is your Sara. And I’m glad and it’s right and I like her. Even if I wanted not to I do like her but . . .

  There was the sound of light steps on the balcony. Nan’s mind flashed into blankness and on her face was a moment of gentle innocence.

  If Lucy calls me I simply won’t answer, I will not. I told her I wanted to sleep in this morning. I cannot stand another scene, another of her early-morning orgies of blame, tears, repentance, the weeping, every morning, the weeping. Oh, Timothy, why don’t you hide me from all this? If Lucy calls Nah-han in that insufferable bleating voice of hers, I will scream.

  “Nah-han!” Lucy’s shadow fell darkly across Nan’s face.

  Nan saw red circles against her eyelids. Her throat stiffened with the effort she had to make not to swallow. She breathed softly, thinking dispassionately, How pretty I must look, in here with my hair spread out on the pillow, like a princess in a fairytale. I’ll think of flowers. That will keep me from opening my eyes. Yes, petunias, dark purple velvet ones with silver in their folds. Petunias just opened, and under their sticky leaves I’ll have one zinnia, brick-red, heavy, cruel. I will find one poppy in the meadow and put it in the dim leaf shadow. Shall I use wheat, to lift it high above? Would harebells be too blue?

  The big woman sighed sharply, then the shadow slid off Nan and moved away, heading toward Lucy’s room again.

  Suddenly Nan now felt much ashamed of herself. How can I? she moaned. What makes me so selfish? I have so much. And my poor friend is so alone! What makes me act this way?

  Nan started from the bed, pulling her light silk robe about her with a vague desire to rush to Lucy, to embrace her and beg her forgiveness.

  But François’s steps could now be heard as they slapped flatly on the terrace. It was later than she thought. She was silly. Breakfast would soon be up and Lucy would still love her.

  She walked to the mirror above her washstand and looked at herself coldly before she threw back her shoulders, lifted her outstretched arms and began to count: one and two and three, as she began to touch her toes with a series of birdlike swoopings.

  ii

  Nan felt tears trickling like ants behind her eyes; she tried desperately not to yawn. She wanted to cry out, “Oh, Lucy, my poor stupid Lucy, can’t you even see how boring all this grows? Don’t you even care how ugly weeping makes you?”

  Instead she heard herself murmuring consolingly, trying to help her friend pour out the long stream of bitterness that was in her. However did Lucy think of all these things? Nan wondered. What part of her brain invented such a fantastic parade of cruelty and insult? Has she always been this way? And am I so especially dull, Nan asked herself, that I, too, do not see these slights and deliberate taunts that Lucy says are all about us, here at La Prairie?

  Nan tried to remember about Lucy. Everything before the summer seemed remote. There was this summer and then there was being a child again, helping dress Timothy on a cold morning, wrapping his cut knee. Oh, my brother, do you remember . . .?

  Lucy was weeping. Poor Lucy. What was it really about Nan’s saying the word bastard? It was funny,
it remained funny until she saw Lucy’s haggard eyes and listened to the real shock in her voice. There’s no use to feel happy with that face in front of her.

  There was a ray of sunlight on the edge of the pillow that lay like hollow ice, and its edge gleamed with blue and scarlet. If she closed her eyes Nan could see the colors merging, dancing, shattering themselves and coming together again, dancing in and out too fast to follow with anything but the mind’s eye.

  “Your dear brother . . . Sara . . . Those two . . .? Oh, that Sara . . .”

  Nan sighed and heard her own voice sounding gentler than usual, while inside she saw again the dazzling happiness that had looked up at her such a short time ago, when she’d called from her balcony down to Timothy and Sara. She’d stood there longing to speak, hearing his deep voice and wishing that she dared call, dared force him to stop talking with his love. I must not, she’d told herself fiercely.

  But I want him to look up at me, standing here in my soft silk with my hair blowing. Sara is so young, so happy, no wonder he looks only at her. I’m old with the beginnings of wrinkles around my eyes. Sara’s hands are thin while mine are like little claws.

  Nan had gone to the mirror and stood there saying, Don’t be a ninny, Nan, don’t be a ninny. Be strong. Go out on the balcony, Nan Garton.

  And so she had indeed gone out and at the memory of their loving thoughtless faces that lifted up to her so trustingly she felt warmed again. They love me, Nan thought. They want me to call down to them. Perhaps Timothy was willing me to call out to them to say hello to him.

  What was Lucy saying now? Nan must try to be more attentive. Now it was something about their age and she heard herself replying, her voice gentle and sincere, “Why, Lucy darling, I . . . I . . . I never think about it at all. We are a little older, but what difference does it make?”