“What would Lucy say?” she asked suddenly and they looked at each other and the darkening air and they laughed and laughed. Oh, he was charming, such an adorable boy! She had such fun laughing with him in the meadow there, and everywhere, about La Prairie!
She was brought up short, surprised when he stopped and said, “Nan, here’s the flower.”
He bent down and pulled up one stock of Queen Ann’s lace, root and all, and thrust it into her hand. Then without looking at her, he said in a stiff voice, “Will you dance with me tonight?” then,
“Do you mind if I run up to the house instead of walking back with
you?” and he was gone.
She looked after Daniel loping away as if he’d been bee-stung under the tree toward the path. Here I was wishing he’d go, wondering how to tell him to, and now he’s gone! And I am a little hurt; really, he’s odd. And I do love him for going. Maybe he felt me telling him to go. Or maybe he suddenly needed to go to the toilet. Anyway, thank you, Daniel.
She smiled dreamily, instead holding the coarse stem of the flower in both her hands, looking down at the root of it all filled with the earth against the stiff yellow of her dangling hat.
I must stand very still, she thought.
viii
The little brook was louder now but the birds were silent. One bee whizzing through the cool sweet air made a strong sound that lasted in Nan’s ears long after it had vanished. She stood, as if naked, feeling the currents of the evening flow around her as tangibly as silk. And her eyes saw as they had never seen before.
They saw the lake that she’d often looked down into and the far blackness of the French shoreline and the old trees bending close above her. They saw grass about her knees and the spires of wild sage disappearing with their blue blossoms into blue air. The frosty web of lace in her hand, dry and alive; the bell of her yellow skirt; the soft curves of her own breasts—she looked down at all this as she had done and as she would do again and knew that never before had she seen and never again would she see. She knew, too, that all her life from this moment would be different.
At last she was seeing clearly as she had so long prayed to see, her whole being transfigured, lifted up in revelation. She knew now with the knowledge that poured through her like mighty music, that to see clearly means to love without demand. It means to love selflessly.
She knew that all her life she loved possessively, hungrily, absorbingly, and that now such foul destructive hunger was gone from her. She knew her tormenting love for Timothy and her preoccupation with their past together had been a long escape. And escape would never more be necessary for now she was free, unhampered by a greedy soul. The love and gratitude of other people was no longer food for her. Demanding nothing, she would never more be lonely.
She felt light, bodiless almost. The trees, the air, the far mountains seemed to vibrate above and around her in a kind of ecstatic dance. She sank to her knees. She was as empty as a shell.
Finally she began to think again, but more easily than ever before in her life. She knew she must tell Timothy what had happened. He would be glad. He would give thanks with her, to see her at last free from him, as he’d always been free of her. Now she knew that until this moment in the meadow he loved her more truly than she’d been capable of loving him, and he would rejoice to know her liberated.
Yes, she must tell him. At last she knew what she had been waiting for all this beautiful, difficult summer in the strange peace she’d found here. Her feeling of gaiety and easiness and health, stronger than since she was a child, had been a preparation. She must hurry and tell her beloved brother that she’d cast out the devil of loving him the wrong way. She was free of him. At last she loved him, and all things, truly.
ix
On the darkening stairs Nan then heard music from the living room, but faintly. She hurried up them and it seemed natural that her feet should make no sound at all upon the stone. In her head and quite without sacrilege ran the first measures of “Es ist vollbracht.” It is consummated, she told herself. I must tell Timothy as soon as I can. I must tell him that I’ve cast him out, that I am free now to live and love without asking for return.
She sped silently down the hall toward her door.
Honor Tennant stood beside it, her hand raised. To Nan, who in her present state had forgotten the actuality of people and how they looked and sounded, and how they took up space, Honor looked like a creature from some other world. She loomed in the dim light larger than possible, her face seemed white as eggshell, her eye sockets deep as symmetrical caverns out of which she peered. Honor’s hand, still and shapely, had a momentous quality about it as it hovered, ready to knock for Nan.
“Oh, Nan,” she murmured, “I wanted to ask you . . . but you’re out of breath.”
“Am I?”
They stood for a moment without bothering to speak or to wonder much, looking at each other. Nan knew that Honor would now keep her from seeing Timothy before dinner but that did not seem to matter. She could tell him what happened later—even tomorrow would do. Perhaps, perhaps he knew anyway. But no she must tell him. In the meantime she felt kindly and rather drunk.
Nan smiled meaninglessly.
“But come in and tell me,” she begged earnestly. “What do you want? Tell me what I can do.” She grasped Honor’s warm smooth arm. “Please do.”
It seem very important to Nan, suddenly, to do something to test out her new freedom.
Honor was looking at her the way all the Tennants could. Sometimes Nan thought it was because they were so tall that their faces often wore an expression of almost haughty amusement and sometimes she wondered crossly if they were mocking her. But now she knew that the quiet smile in Honor’s sad dark eyes was full of compassion and instead of resenting it she felt pleased to realize at last they were friends, loving each other without qualification.
“Come in,” she said again. When they were in the room she turned on one of the lights and held out a box of cigarettes with a trembling hand that was vibrating like the wings of a moth.
“No, I can’t stay. It’s late. But Nan . . . what can we do about Susan?”
“Susan?”
For several seconds now Nan could not remember who bore that name nor why Honor should ask her what to do. What did it matter what they did, and for whom? Then she saw again the strange tiny blonde woman with her hair in a knot on her proud head and the large gray eyes watching over the rim of the beer glass at lunch, and suddenly Nan heard with a rush of warm amusement the blissful squeak in Susan’s voice when she had cried out, “Why, it’s Nan Garton Temple!” It seemed so long ago but so pleasant.
“Oh, Susan,” she cried. “Of course! Why, is she ill? She looked rather dauncy at lunch, I thought.”
Honor laughed softly. “Dauncy! That’s a nice word. I’ve never heard it before, but I know what it means. Like loppy. My mother says loppy. No, it’s about supper.”
Honor then sat down on the edge of the wide dark bed. She moved like many people who are large, with deliberation and in flowing sections. Her white robe fell open and now she was left with this passion to look at the long sweep of her legs, brown and slender, and the flat softness of her girl’s belly.
“It seems sort of a party, kind of. Nice, I think. Sara figures it will keep Lucy amused, probably, and it’s fun. And do you know . . .?” And Honor looked soberly at Nan, her voice suddenly vehemant.
“Do you know that Susan Harper, that poor little kid, has walked clear from Munich and hasn’t a dress to her name? Tim and Dan and that fine conceited young man of hers are all right in slacks and coats but after all, we all planned vaguely to wear long dresses and I don’t know . . . I just don’t know . . .”
As her voice trailed off into silence, she sighed. Nan looked curiously at her. Honor’s face was composed, her eyes were watching something more interesting than life, something up near the corner of the ceiling but beyond it.
I feel passive, Nan thought. I don�
��t care. I am through worrying about being good or thoughtful or generous or making people admire me. Let Honor tell me what she wants. I may listen or I may not as I am free now from caring about her caring what I think.
Again they did not speak for what seemed like several minutes, a silence in which they were strangely easy. Honor lay on her side once again and said as if they hadn’t stopped talking at all, “So I wondered if you’d let her wear something of yours. I don’t like to ask you, I’d hate to have someone ask me to lend a dress to a stranger . . . but she seems awfully clean and everything . . . Maybe that blue and green housecoat sort of business that you’ve been wearing . . .?”
Nan knew that she must answer but for a moment she was too peaceful to speak. It did not matter if she was rude or if Honor thought she’d gone daffy. She was so filled with ease and contentment, now that at last she was free of all the years of hunger and vain longings, she could not bear to speak.
“Of course I could lend her something or I could ask Lucy.” Honor was apparently not entirely conscious of Nan’s silence. “But I think we’re either a little long up and down or a leeeeetle, leeeeetle big around and Sara says you have simply the most beautiful nighties. Why not a nightie for Sue?”
Nan jumped up as if she’d been stung or started up from a dream and left with what sounded to her own ears like that of foolishness and said energetically, “But of course, Honor darling! She’s a sweet child. I want her to wear a dress of mine. She’s so young and lovely and . . .”
And now she hurried across the room to the great dark armoire and pulled its door open dramatically.
“Here,” Nan cried and thrust into Honor’s arms a cloud of fragile yellow, all shot through with golden threads. “Take it,” she cried again. “I want Susan to wear it. She will be beautiful in it.”
Honor looked at the pile of stuff she held, then smiled. “No,” she said slowly, “you’ve never worn this, Nan. I know, because I know everything you’ve worn this summer. You have such beautiful clothes . . . I like to look at them. And you’ve been saving this. No, it’s too lovely.”
“But I want Susan to wear it. I think it . . . Well, it’s too young for me. She should wear it. Take it to her, Honor. Please. This is a wonderful idea.”
Nan laughed excitedly. She did not feel empty and exhausted anymore but strong with delight instead. Part of it made her want almost violently to see Susan in the dress that she had saved all summer for Timothy’s surprise. It seemed essential to her somehow to look at that billowy gleaming dress on another woman. It was right that Susan, Joe Kelly’s light-o’-love, should be the entrancing one.
Honor rose slowly and stood in her stately way. Above the glimmer of the beautiful dress her eyes glowed as she looked down at Nan, then she moved toward the door.
“Let me!” Nan cried. “I’ll open it!” She brushed against the tall girl and was conscious of the sharp smoothness of her hip bone.
Honor turned suddenly toward her. The girl’s face was honey colored in the soft light from Nan’s room against the darkness of the hallway; her mouth looked infinitely sweet.
“Permettez-moi, chere Madame, de vous embraser,” she murmurred laughingly.
Honor leaned down and in the most intimate gesture that Nan had ever received from another woman, kissed her delicately on either cheek.
“Nan,” she said. “You are beautiful.” Then Honor hurried down the long hall.
Nan, still feeling the moth-like touch of the girl’s lips and hearing again the tiny crackle of the pile of gold-shot cloth between their bodies, stood looking after her.
“Me?” Nan wondered. “I am beautiful?” She spoke aloud, incredulously. She had often been told so but now it seemed as if she had never really heard this being said until the present moment. She knew that Honor had not said it only in gratitude over Susan’s present.
Am I? Nan thought.
She went into her room and closed the door softly. I must tell Timothy, she thought. Not ask him: tell him.
She pulled off her clothes swiftly and got out the blue and green housecoat and laid it on the bed. It was not until she was brushing her hair, still damp from her quick bath, that she saw that someone had put a vase of flowers on her mantelpiece. It was the vase she’d meant for Honor’s room and she laughed to see it there before her. It was a tall square hollow crystal, an old battery glass with a partition down the middle and she’d put a little ring of late field daisies stuck in pebbles in the bottom of one side. In the other was a tiny naked pink china Kewpie doll with “Made in Japan” marked across its buttocks. Then she’d filled the vase with clear water from the fountain knowing it was silly and maybe a little bit malicious.
Someone is playing jokes on me, she thought contentedly. I must tell all this to Timothy. I have so much to tell him.
I am beautiful, she thought. She said this seriously to the woman she saw looking at her in the mirror. Aloud she said, “Yes.”
4
As soon as the anesthetic wore off, the wolves and the wires and the frozen colors came back, more intense, more intolerable. Ah, my foot, my foot! And the toes . . . Christ! My big toe, and all the others! How many toes? Six? Of course.
He looked down, the third day. His head pulled up from the pillows as if it were a sick tooth lifting itself, root and all, from its bleeding jaw-bed. He saw that he had no foot, no knee, never more a loin to ache with passion, and his great eyes widened with the secret laugh: The foot was still there, and all his leg, and only he to know it? He lay back, listening with sly amusement to the cries that were torn out of him by the flaming wires and the cold nails that wrapped around and pounded into his lost foot.
The fourth day he waited until the doctors had finished and the nurse and his woman. Then he lifted off the cover and looked down at the white turban that lay beside his visible leg, and with a clean ferocity he cut the air, once, sharply just below it. For a second, a second as sweet as death and as long as God, his lost foot was without pain. Then it rushed back. He heard his cries again, and his eyes grew cynical.
He tried it once more, the next day, and once he got the woman with her own long cold hand to cross the air above his invisible knee, but it never worked again.
Soon the mice began. They nibbled hungrily, bloodily, at the little pads of flesh under six toes, and occasionally rats came and tore at the whole foot. The bed was always tidy afterword: theoretical flesh does not make messes.
There was the leather shoe, like a doll’s shoe, that was put on wet, and as it dried it twisted, twisted, twisted, until the foot curled under like a Chinese lady’s, and the whole leg was pulled into a corkscrew-shape. Then when he would feel a scream bubbling behind his teeth, and ready to burst, the dried doll’s shoe and all the flesh under it would be torn off, and mice, hundreds of mice, would rush in from all the cracks and creases of the bed and suck and nibble at the raw meat and the twanging, string-like muscle.
About two weeks after the amputation, he awoke from a nightmare of running, to find the white turban bobbing and flapping against the mattress, and suddenly he found that his poor foot had only five toes now, and that it was up almost under his knee. He sighed with relief, for he believed that if all that calf had finally gone, there would be much less to hurt. He was wrong, though. His leg only folded like an accordion and in every pleat red ants now scurried and stung, at least ten thousand of them burrowing and laying eggs and feeding themselves in the succulent creases.
He grew used to not seeing his leg anymore except in his dreams, but the ants never left him, nor the boot, nor various other things like having his nails pulled out slowly, nor especially the mice, and although he grew able, finally, to lie without noises most of the time, the presence of his theoretical foot was more real now than food or sleep or his love, and he would never lose it.
i
That morning, August 31, Daniel Tennant heard all the knocks on the door. The first was so gentle it had a kind of coyness about it. He woke almost be
fore the knock began and lay there without moving even his eyelids.
The next was somewhat louder, although it still sounded covert, as if a conspirator or even a thickly veiled adventuress was signalling to him. He chuckled to himself and lay waiting for the next, which he knew would follow after a short but tense pause, and now it came: three dramatic pounding blows, echoing with painful force everywhere in the quiet house. Daniel winced, opened his eyes just enough to see the bottom of the door and the floor between it and his bed.
There was now a sharp sigh out in the hall. Then the door swung open noisily. François’s large grimy tennis shoes stood on the green tiles.
“What?” the man asked. “Still asleep, my God!”
Daniel closed his eyes imperceptibly and—as a slight change in the morning routine—snored once.
“Ah, youth,” he heard François mutter just as Daniel’s toes were being seized and shaken from side to side, his eyes becoming wild as he stared up now into François’s face.
“Arsjanashbousyen,” Daniel gabbled thickly as recognition seemed to flood back in. He sank upon his tousled bed, panting slightly. “It’s you,” he murmurred in his vile French. “Thank God! For one terrible moment, one minute, I thought I was back in the dungeon in Istanbul.”
François cackled, eyes shining, almost dropping the tray he had balanced rather expertly along one forearm.
“Oh, Monsieur Daniel,” he said, “Yesterday morning you said Cairo.” He cackled again and leered down, with a roguish look, his face creased darkly under his four-day bristle.
“Cairo? Istanbul? What does it matter? I’m safe now that I’m here.” Daniel sighed brokenly, then asked, “What is there for breakfast?”
François’s face fell for an instant at Daniel’s abrupt shift from romance to reality, then brightened as he picked his way daintily over rumpled clothes and books and shoes to the bedside. He rested one end of the tray on the edge of the little table as he pushed the lamp, ashtray, more books, and a pile of sticky peachstones casually onto the floor.
The Theoretical Foot Page 12
