“There are no strings attached,” shrugged Lida, “if that’s what’s holding you back. I’m sure, if you had the money and I had to have it for Petra and for Joseph, you would make me the same offer.”
That was true, thought Kitty, and felt easier.
“I want this to be the beginning of something new.” Lida pulled up her chair so closely that their knees nearly touched. “I want this family to be as it was. I want Joseph and Thomas—”
She broke off. She could be emotional, all right, although the work she did and the wares she sold and the figures she dealt in were not conducive to sentiment on an average day. She went to a bookshelf and returned to Kitty with a heavy buckram-bound volume in her hands.
“Do you know what this is, Kitty? It’s Thomas Benda’s collected works—I’d say that not even you have so complete a collection—every article he ever wrote, the manuscript to every speech he ever made. Joseph saved and treasured every line. Thomas was very dear to him, and still is—perhaps because Thomas was the baby in the family. And when Thomas became famous, Joseph was so proud of him....”
Kitty took the big book and opened it carefully, lovingly. From every story, every scrap, symmetrically pasted on large Manila sheets and annotated in Joseph’s fine, small handwriting, the Thomas of the past spoke to her—the boy with his troubles, the lover, the man who had taken her to the wide land across the ocean and to the much wider land of his dreams.
“Those were good times,” said Kitty, still holding the book open on her lap, “but so much has happened meanwhile.” She didn’t know whether it had happened to her, or to Thomas, or to everybody, and whether it had been bound to happen.
“Nothing has happened between Joseph and Thomas,” Lida asserted, “that couldn’t be settled by one good talk.”
A money grabber...! It echoed through Kitty’s mind. A self-centered, self-imagined giant with feet not even of clay but of pigeon dirt!
She closed the volume and handed it back to Lida. Her nostalgia vanished. She knew how much of Joseph’s ideas, transmuted, lifted to a new level, reshaped, and with the unmistakable luster of Thomas’s words, had ended in these yellowing clippings. That’s why Joseph had collected them. But she also knew that Joseph’s term as spiritual regent over Thomas was a thing of the past. There was, of course, Elinor the pretender. Thomas had bellowed when she asked about that. He had called Elinor a presumptuous ass. If he wrote about freedom, he had said, it was because he was free of Elinor, too....Kitty frowned. What mattered was that he was writing again, and that this fragile effort must be protected.
“One good talk!” repeated Lida. Her eyes were small, now; she looked at Kitty the way she would scrutinize a salesman. “You still love Thomas, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course!” Kitty said quickly. “What makes you ask?”
Lida hugged her elbows as if she felt cold. “It must have occurred to you,” she said, “that when Joseph and Thomas were close to one another, things were a lot cozier, too, between you and Thomas. Or am I wrong?”
The spoon with which Kitty tried to stir her lukewarm tea chattered against the thin china. “If I went to Thomas—No, he would refuse pointblank.”
“In all these years,” remarked Lida, “you should have learned to handle your husband.”
Kitty laughed uncomfortably. “He’s not a run-of-the-mill husband.”
“Then—who has some influence over him? Karel?”
Kitty had thought of Karel before. She had hoped Lida would forget about him; but now it seemed as if all of Lida’s oblique and not so oblique thrusts had verged toward this point. But Karel, and everything connected with Karel, had to be left out of this.
“Do you think I should go and see him?” asked Lida, innocuously enough.
“No....” Kitty hesitated. Karel, in the kindness of his heart, might do just what Lida wanted him to do. Perhaps it was right and proper that he should try to reconcile his brothers—but if it meant throwing Thomas and subverting his work? Perhaps, thought Kitty, she was exaggerating Thomas’s sensitivity and seeing complications where there were none.
“You say No.” Lida’s lower jaw was set. “Then how about you? I’m sure you’re the better person to swing Karel, and I know you can be quite subtle when you want to. Will you do it?”
“I don’t know....”
It has to be done,” said Lida. “Something has to be done about this family!”
“I’ll try my best.” Kitty was unable to hide her anxiety, and again suffered under Lida’s scrutiny.
“More tea?” asked Lida.
“Thank you, no.”
Later, in the doorway, Lida seemed suddenly to remember. “How much money will you want, Kitty, and when?”
“Oh, that!” said Kitty. “Don’t even mention it; I hope to get along without it. It was very kind of you—”
“You call on me when you need it! Promise me—you won’t have any compunctions about it?”
Then Lida closed the door slowly and went back into her house. She relaxed control over her face and let it show her worry. Gradually, the worry resolved into satisfaction. Nobody could blame her for preferring the kind of investment which cost her nothing.
*****
It had been a full day for Karel. He had spent the morning in the dispensary at the Benda Works, examining some fifteen men. There were no previous records; he had to start from scratch, taking their medical histories, listing their complaints, giving each one a thorough check-up, beginning with blood count and urinalysis.
After lunch, he had gone to his office—or to that part of his flat which served as an office—and had put in another five hours. When the last patient had been sent home, he sat down and wrote out his reports for the National Health Insurance people. His head ached, the lettering on the badly printed government forms swam before his eyes, and by the time he was through he had no appetite left. He had been able to give each of his office patients precisely eight and three quarter minutes of his time. He needed another doctor in Rodnik, and there was none to be had. A nurse might do. He needed Kitty.
Out of his desk drawer he pulled a short, stubby pipe and an old tin box filled with some sort of dried leaves which were being sold as tobacco. Pipe smoking was better than no smoking; cigarettes were too difficult to get and too expensive. With his thumb he pressed the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, lit it, and coughed from the first drag. It would be so easy to ask Kitty and to get her to say Yes; she had a sense of duty, and she’d probably jump at the chance of spending a few hours outside the cage on St. Nepomuk.
He sucked at his pipe and held down another urge to cough. He was growing stronger; sometimes he woke up at night and the loneliness of his bed was oppressive like the clouds of a thunderstorm that failed to break. The bodies in his dreams were no longer the bloody carcasses with the ragged, bluish scars of the whip or with the fresh, straight incisions of his scalpel. The bodies had healed and were alive and voluptuous, though faceless.
The bell rang shrilly. All day long, it rang that way. It was time to have a man look at it and repair it. The landlady was opening the house door. People should have more sense than to come at this hour. Maybe it was Stepanek whose wife was expecting a child, or someone to call him to the pensioner Tyl whose heart was beyond doctoring.
The late visitor was coming up the stairs. Karel groaned, got up, and went into his hallway.
“Kitty!”
The dim bulb of the stairwell cast soft shadows over her face. A second or two went by before he said hoarsely, “Come on in! Come in!”
He switched on all the lights in the flat so as to have their sober glare bring back the sharp lines of chairs and table and poverty and drabness. She took off her hat and coat and hung them on the secondhand clothes tree Kravat had procured for him; too late he reminded himself to help her and stood uneasily, running his hand through his hair.
“Well!” she said with forced gaiety, “let me see how you live! I should have come weeks
ago, but what with Thomas’s new book—and the house...”
Glad of the diversion she offered, he led her through the flat. He told her of his looting trip with Kravat to the mountain spa. He showed her his instruments and his machines. He watched her interest come awake and grow to admiration; he agreed to a few practical suggestions she made for rearranging this or that, which led to some desultory chitchat about his work and ended with his showing her several slides he had prepared with smears taken from glass-mixers who had lead in their blood. By this time, he had regained his composure and called himself a fool for having let himself be caught off balance and for his latent feeling that it might be impossible to establish between them a perfectly normal and inconsequential relationship.
From his office rooms, he took her to his living quarters. Without the least self-consciousness he smiled as she inspected everything and seemed to note what was missing and what should be improved and that a thorough cleaning job was needed and how shabby and poor this room was—the checkered wax cloth on his table, the straight-backed chairs that must have come from some small town restaurant, the spotted ceiling, the wood of the window sills grooved by weather and age.
“Quite nice, isn’t it?” he asked, inviting her to sit in the leather arm chair with the doilies. “What can I offer you?”
She wanted nothing, but finally accepted some mineral water. He found glasses in the kitchen sink, and she joined him to help him wash and dry.
“The charwoman comes tomorrow,” he explained. He took the dish towel from her and threw it over a hook.
“It’s my fault, really,” she said. “I promised myself to come down here regularly and see to it that you live like a human being.”
He put bottles, opener, and glasses on a tray and preceded her back to the living room. “Why should you?” he said, letting the water spout into the glasses. “I picked my bed, and even though I have to make it up myself, I sleep fairly well in it.”
She sank into the creaking chair and pressed her hot palms against the cool roundness of the glass. She knew that they had exhausted the impersonal subjects and that only two topics remained: themselves, and what had brought her here.
He was waiting, his long hands motionless.
“I gave Thomas his dinner,” she said, like a child accounting for her time, “and he is back at work. I had nothing else to do, and I wanted to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Thomas.”
He looked at her and then up at the ceiling, at a splotch shaped like a woman’s back.
“Thomas and Joseph,” she elaborated.
The voluptuous back turned into the ordinary result of a bad painting job. He fetched his pipe and concentrated on getting it going.
There were tiny, kittenish wrinkles on her nose as she said, “That’s horrible tobacco!”
“A cross between hay and potato leaves,” he nodded seriously, “or something similar.” He felt suddenly ringed by the heavy air of futility. The sooner she went home, the better. “Thomas and Joseph,” he asked—“yes?”
“You’re not very encouraging,” she said restively. “Shouldn’t I have come?”
“Good Lord, Kitty, I don’t even know what’s on your mind. You must forgive me. I’m rather tired after the kind of day I’ve had.”
“Could you use me?” she said immediately, her eyes lighting up. “I could manage to get off part of the day—not regular hours, you know, but an hour here or there. I could do your lab work and take that off your shoulders, or other things. I think I’m still good at being a nurse.”
“No, thank you, that won’t be necessary,” he said more harshly than he had intended.
“Or do something in your flat,” she went on, her courage petering out. “It could stand some touching up....”
“It could; yes. But I don’t want to take advantage of you. Has anything new happened between Joseph and Thomas?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. The opportunity to establish the intimate atmosphere she needed for disentangling the whole complex of Thomas’s feelings, or of her own, was gone.
“He is working on his book?” asked Karel.
“Oh, yes.”
“Working well?”
“I haven’t read any of it. He rarely shows me anything not yet finished,” she said defensively.
“I can understand that.” Karel dismissed the matter lightly. “And I’m very glad for you—for both of you!”
“I knew you would understand!” she said eagerly. “He has a wonderful mind and a great talent and I won’t let anyone threaten his work, because his work—”
“Yes?”
“His work is all that matters!”
Her eyes had darkened, and the hope in them had given way to fear. She was clutching at the idea of Thomas’s work as the trapeze artist, hurtling through space, clutches his partner’s outstretched hands. Well, who was threatening this work? Karel asked himself. Elinor? Joseph?
“Do you think, Karel,” she went on as if driven, “that Joseph’s influence would be good for Thomas?”
“What brings that up?”
“Never mind what brings that up! What do you think, Karel?”
There was only one answer. “You and I certainly know better. We both heard Thomas express himself on his opinions about Joseph!” But she had touched on so many angles that he was quite lost as to her motives; or perhaps she was not clear about them herself. “I know that the two of them used to be very close,” he continued carefully, “and I presume that some, though not much, of Joseph’s essence slipped over into Thomas’s work, for better or for worse. What about Elinor Simpson—”
“She has nothing to do with the Essay! I asked him.”
“Well, if Thomas is able to dispense with crutches and is finding himself—that’s all to the good!”
“Don’t you believe,” she fidgeted, “that you three brothers—”
She was off again. He spread his hands. “Kitty,” he pleaded, “I’m getting mixed up! Either you make yourself clear, or—”
“I’m like a squirrel in a treadmill,” she said dejectedly. “I’m moving and I arrive nowhere. To myself I say I must have lost my touch.” Nervously, she rubbed her wrists. “Do you know how Thomas and I met?”
“Well—yes! In the Limberk Hospital, wasn’t it, when he had pneumonia or something? You nursed him through that—”
She laughed softly. “It goes back farther than that, much farther. He must have been about eleven, and I was close to fourteen, and I was a tall girl for my age. Do you remember that copse behind the burned-out farm they used to call the ghost house?”
“With the huckleberries?” he asked.
“Yes, with the huckleberries. What huckleberries they were, big and juicy!”
“Huckleberries don’t grow that big any more, it seems,” he said.
“I’d been in the berries. I was barefoot. I wore an old calico dress, with a large gray patch at its side, and I think I was smudged all over....”
The strange thing was that he could see her exactly as she must have looked, with the thin rays of light falling through the trees and adding more patches, golden and yellow, to that calico.
“He came running up the small path to the copse, his arms flailing—” She smiled. “Thomas was never much good at running. And behind him was a pack of boys, yelling and laughing and pursuing him. Dressed as I was, and all blue with berry juice, he must have thought I belonged to the gang. He stopped, poor kid, and tried to make off into a thicket. And he got caught in the underbrush.”
“He should have fought back,” said Karel. “They wouldn’t have killed him.”
Kitty disregarded the comment. “I’ll never forget his eyes as he stared at me. I don’t think there was real fear in them, rather—well—bewilderment.”
“What happened then?”
“I drove the pack off. I scratched up the face of the biggest bully, and then I pulled Thomas off the thorns.”
; “And?”
“He was still bewildered; it took me some time to make him feel at ease. He came back to me, after that, whenever things went wrong, and I always knew what to do to get him off the thorns....Now I don’t know any longer.”
Karel rose. The pattern was clear. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, walked around the table toward the leather chair and stopped in front of Kitty. “This is very difficult,” he said. “It makes me feel rotten to see you troubled. What do you want me to do, Kitty?”
“I don’t know,” she said wretchedly, “I don’t know. Lida wants me to patch up matters between Thomas and Joseph; and if I can’t, she wants me to get you to try.”
“Lida?” he said.
“But couldn’t she be right? Maybe what’s wrong between Thomas and me grows out of his isolation from Joseph, and from you, too.”
“What’s wrong between you and Thomas?”
“Nothing.” She saw Karel look up. “Perhaps it’s actually nothing. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Do you love him?”
Lida had asked that. Kitty saw the deep lines around Karel’s mouth, the fleshless skin over his sharp jawbones, the heavy, graying brows. “I do love him! Why do you question it? Why does everyone? I’m his wife!”
He nodded. “But do you believe you can make things over? And would you, today, want Thomas as he was before the war?”
“Those were good times....” It was the only answer she could think of, because she had given it to Lida, too. “If Thomas can feel again that he isn’t alone, he might stop shutting himself off from me, from all of us.”
Karel felt a dull ache. He knew it did not come from any part of his anatomy; it was a pain he felt for Kitty’s pain and confusion. What a bundle of illusions she tried to preserve for herself!...
“Lida told me that Joseph is just as disturbed over the rift,” Kitty said half-heartedly.
Joseph might be, at that, thought Karel. But Joseph was quite self-sufficient and was becoming busier and busier as he picked up more balls to juggle. He had kept Thomas in limbo as their father had tried to keep all three of them; he had used Thomas as an outlet for his ambitions and ideas and as a reason for sacrificing himself to the Benda Works. And now, fighting this political battle, he needed Thomas more than Thomas needed him, and Lida’s injecting herself into the situation made it more sordid.
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