“Why can’t you?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Just let it out, that’s all. You’ve got it all choked up inside of you. Just—just let it come.”
“It won’t go into words. It can’t be passed on to anyone secondhand. You have to live it. You can’t be told it.”
“There isn’t anything you can’t be told. I’ve listened to some of the strangest stories—”
“This is just a lot of little things, like grains of sand or drops of water. You can’t tell about grains of sand or drops of water; it doesn’t sound like anything. They don’t know what you mean.”
“Maybe if I help you. Maybe if I get you started. Try to forget I’m sitting here in front of you. Tell it as if you were telling it to yourself, out loud, with no one else around.”
She couldn’t even do it that way, she couldn’t get started.
He waited. Then, patiently, “You’re afraid tonight. Right?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Yes, I’m afraid tonight.”
“There was a time you weren’t afraid.”
“There was a time I wasn’t afraid.”
“Well, begin there. Tell it that way. Tell it from then.”
He watched her eyes slowly change; film, not with present substance, but with retrospect; stray past him, down the night, beyond it, into distant vistas of the past.
“There was a time I wasn’t afraid—”
2
The Telling
IT BEGAN IN SUCH A little way. A drop. Yes, that was it, a drop. But not of water. A drop of hot consommé on a white evening frock, worn for the first time. There is no littler way in which a thing can begin than that.
A drop of spilled consommé. A parenthetic look of reproof, a sideglance, between two phrases of the conversation in progress at the moment. Signs of distress on a face glimpsed at one’s shoulder. Distress because of that one spilled drop, most likely. The face withdraws. The drop evaporates. The conversation goes on. But something has begun.
Death has begun. Darkness has begun, there in the full jonquil-blaze of the dinner-table candles. Darkness. A spot no bigger at first than that spilled drop of consommé. Growing, steadily growing, by the days, by the weeks, by the months, until it has blotted out everything else. Until all is darkness. Until there is nothing but darkness. Darkness and fear and pain, doom and death.
I am Jean Reid, as I told you, and Harlan Reid is my father. God put it into our hearts that we should love our fathers, and God put it stronger into the hearts of daughters than of sons. But then God forgot to give us anything that would take away the pain that love can sometimes bring. Above all, God permits us to look backward, but God has forbidden us to look forward. And if we do, we do so at our own risk. There is no opiate that can precede the pain; only one that can follow, called time.
I lost my mother when I was two, and so I really never knew her. It was always just my father, my father and I. Sometimes I think that is the strongest of all loves; the full strength of natal love, to which has been added all the aspects of romantic love but a forbidden few. That is the way it has always been with us, and maybe it is not good, but still we should not have been punished this way.
I first found out when I was eight or nine that there was something different about me. About us. Until then I hadn’t known. Children don’t know those things, if they’re left to themselves. It might have been a bad thing for me. My father saw to it that it wasn’t. Just as—well, as when you fall and skin your knee or bark your shin on the sidewalk, and go to your father about it, he puts you on his knee and in his superior wisdom dabs something on it that prevents it from festering. So he did with this thing I found out. Cauterized it. Sterilized it. Made sure it would leave no mark or mar.
A little girl planted herself before me in the playground at school, looked at me wide-eyed, cocked her head a little, and said, “You’re beastly rich, aren’t you?”
I backed away a little, defensively. “No, I’m not,” I said, not sure of my ground. It sounded like being accused of swimming around in some sort of greasy, unpalatable gravy.
“Yes, you are,” she insisted. “You’re rich. They told me so. You’re rich.”
When she wasn’t looking, I stole a glance down at my own frock. It looked clean and neat enough, I seemed to be all right. But I was troubled.
I went home that night and I said, “What does it mean, when you’re rich?”
He spoke slowly, and a little sadly, and very wisely. “Listen close. And tomorrow don’t remember this. But remember it some other day, when you’re eighteen or you’re twenty. You’ll need it more then. It means you’ll have a hard time of it. It means you’ll always be a little lonely. Reaching out, with no one there to clasp your hand. It means no one will ever love you. And if they do, you won’t be able to tell if it’s meant for you alone. It means you’ll have to be careful. There will be traps laid.”
“What do I have to do?” I asked, sucking in my breath.
“There is only one thing you can do. Act as though you didn’t know. Act—and live, and think—as though you weren’t rich. And then maybe the world will let you forget it.”
The next day I’d forgotten. Or surely, the day after. And then it came back again, years after, when I needed it more, as he’d said I would. Like something you throw into the water. That stays down at first, for a long time, then finally shows up again at the top. He gave me it for a creed. And I’ve lived by it ever since.
I don’t remember much about the days immediately before this little, this single drop, fell on me and started darkness. I had my little missions and my errands and my interests. Life was sheltered, life was safe. I had few friends my own age, because I didn’t share their interests. I was a funny, retiring sort. I didn’t like parties, and clothes didn’t interest me much. I liked to read a good deal. I liked to walk alone, bareheaded, in the rain, hands deep in my pockets, and turn my face up and feel the drops come down. But at least there wasn’t fear in the world yet.
And then one night at dinner—this must have been a day or two before the drop fell—my father mentioned quite casually: “Jean, it looks as though I’ll have to go to San Francisco Friday.”
“For long?” I asked. He’d made these business trips before. He was always making them.
“Two or three days,” he said. “Just out and back.” And then something about a consignment of silk from Japan being in difficulties.
I cocked an inattentively warning finger at him and went ahead spooning my dessert. “You’d better make it Monday instead. You know what Friday is? The thirteenth.”
He gave a comfortable little chuckle, which was all that I’d hoped to elicit by the remark in the first place, and we went on to talk of something else, and the maid stood pouring our coffee over at the buffet.
Then a night or two after—and that would bring it to Thursday, the night before—we had some people in, as I remember. The candles of state were lit, and we dined a little more formally. Which meant, as far as he and I were concerned, a little less comfortably. We’d confessed that to each other long ago. But it was a thing you had to endure every so often. I had this new white dress on, and there was everything about it I didn’t like. First, it was new; secondly, it was white; thirdly— well, yes, the fact that it was a dress at all. I hated that dressedup feeling, with one end low and the other end long, and a lot of material following you around wherever you went. I liked the comfort of jumpers and tweeds. But that too was a thing you had to endure every so often. I kept it down to a minimum.
Tonight I sat in trappings of grandeur, and talked with people I didn’t care about, of things I wasn’t interested in. I think it was an opera singer, at the moment, who was to be put up for private display.
“Then you must come,” the dowager with the overabundance of diamonds who was sitting opposite me was saying. “We’re counting on you. Tomorrow evening.”
“Oh, wait; tomorrow did you say?” I rememb
ered something with a secret and vast sense of relief. “We can’t come then. Father told me he expects to fly out to Frisco.”
I turned and looked up the table toward him for confirmation. Abetment might be a better word.
There was a soup plate descending in front of me at the moment, and the hand that held it seemed to give this slight hitch. A drop jumped out and fell on my dress, and I could feel the sting of it for an instant through the gauzy material.
There was my parenthetic look of reproof, and there was the appropriate expression of distress on the face of the maid, lowered close to mine by the act of serving. Or perhaps overappropriate; it would have been more tactful to ignore the trivial mishap, as I was prepared to do.
The conversation had rolled along without me and I hurried to overtake it. “No, it isn’t a very propitious date for a plane trip,” I agreed. “But then, is it any the better a one for an aria?”
“I’m sorry, miss,” a voice breathed close beside my ear.
This time I didn’t turn to look. “It’s quite all right,” I said briefly. And then went on: “Father pretends he detests these little jaunts of his, but I think he secretly likes them.”
“Oh, yes,” he said with mock ruefulness. “There is nothing I enjoy more than trying to shave over an air pocket. It’s quite exhilarating. I mean, you leave the razor up here and your face has suddenly gone down to here.”
And so on. The stain the drop had made was already drying. I doubt I would have remembered it an hour later. But it was brought back before me again. Printed on my awareness, so to speak.
I went up the moment they’d gone, and got out of harness. I was sprawling in a woolly robe, browsing through a book, when there was a knock on the door, and the maid looked in.
It almost took me a moment to remember where I’d seen her before; and she was now in a plaid blanket coat and pulled-down little hat for the street.
“Yes? What is it?”
“Could I speak to you a minute, miss?”
“Why, yes, of course. But how is it you’re still here? I thought you’d gone home long ago. Why, it’s almost twelve.”
“I know, miss. I waited purposely, so I could tell you how sorry I am.” She went over to the dress, which was still blanketing a chair—I never hang things up properly—and pretended to look it over to see if she could find where the damage was. “I hope you’ll excuse it, miss. I can’t forgive myself.”
I can overlook having things spilled on me, even a great quantity at a time, but I detest having anyone brush at me or clean me off afterwards. And it seemed to me that was what she was trying to do, even if only verbally.
“It’s no great tragedy, Eileen,” I said. “Don’t lose any sleep over it. I look like a charlotte russe that’s burst out of its container in that particular dress, anyway. A little wetting down might help it, for all I know.”
She came away from it, then, but she still didn’t leave. My hand was getting tired holding the same place in Hemingway.
“But, Miss Jean, it isn’t that. It’s what caused it. My hand is usually so steady.”
“Well, then, for a moment it wasn’t. That’s what caused it. And now are we through discussing it?”
We weren’t. There’s nothing more terrible than the persistence of the meek. Or shall I say of the seemingly meek?
“It’s that airplane trip.”
“What airplane trip?”
“Of Mr. Reid’s, miss. I heard him say he was going tomorrow. I was right there behind your chair, you see.”
I didn’t quite get it for a minute. I closed the book, looked at her puzzled. “Oh, the thirteenth. Is that it? Good God, Eileen, grow up.”
She shook her head. “No, miss. A date by itself can’t hurt you. It’s just a number.”
“I’m glad you told me,” I said ironically.
“But it’s that p’tickler plane that leaves, out there, that—” She saw me looking at her. “I know it isn’t up to me to—”
“No, go ahead,” I consented evenly. “I want to hear this.”
She wrung her hands surreptitiously, as though it were from themshe were squeezing out the reluctant words. “It’s not good for him to take that plane. If—if he’d go later, he’d come back later.”
“Oh, I see,” I said dryly. “You know ahead of time?”
“It’s not good,” she repeated defensively. “Don’t let him, Miss Jean. It’s not good. If he leaves tomorrow—”
“Yes?”
“That means he’s going to take the night plane back from there Monday night.”
“That’s the schedule, yes. What about it?”
She blurted out with a sort of desperation, as though afraid to say it, but at the same time even more afraid not to: “That’s the one. The eastbound one. Something’s going to happen to it.”
“Oh, something is?” I queried. “These things are known before they happen?”
“No, miss, they’re not,” she said reproachfully. “You know they’re not.”
“Look, Eileen. I don’t mind your having a drink or two downstairs, but I do object to your coming up here and giving me the dubious benefits of it.”
“I don’t drink, miss,” she murmured almost inaudibly.
I could tell by looking at her she didn’t. She had a wan, peaked face, and a thin, scrawny body, and one good drink would have floored her.
“Did you ever hear of Cassandra, Eileen?” I said, a little more kindly. “I don’t imagine she was very well liked. You don’t want to be like that, now, do you? Going around casting a damper on people. They’ll start to avoid you, you know.”
She seemed properly penitent. “I’m sorry, miss,” she said. “I didn’t mean to annoy you—” And then, on her way toward the door, “It’s not me, miss. It’s a friend of mine.”
“I see. In the fortunetelling business, is she. Well, thank her for me, and tell her I don’t need any assistance along those lines.”
Her eyes opened as though I’d uttered a sacrilege. “Oh, no, miss. I wasn’t supposed to tell you a word—”
“Well, now you have.” I was getting a little tired by this time. “Good night, Eileen.”
She swallowed the dismissal. It made a lump going down her scrawny throat. “Good night, miss,” and closed the door.
I went back to Hemingway, and read him with a smile on my face along a place that wasn’t supposed to be funny.
II
I drove with my father to the airport the next day. I took a snapshot of him on the way, with my mind I mean. We were talking as we rode along, and I turned and glanced at him—oh, not for any reason, with no thought in mind of cataloguing or perpetuating him as he was at that moment—but simply as you turn and glance at anyone when the two of you are sitting side by side in a car and talking as you skim along. And out of it came this print.
I still have it, in my mind, that snapshot; fresh and clear as of today. It’s lasted, just as a real snapshot would, printed on paper. It’s of something that’s gone now.
He looked so virile and so handsome, sitting there beside me. Perhaps it was that his almost-glistening white hair acted as a sort of counterpoint to all the other things that were so youthful about him, setting them off all the more by contrast; that I don’t know. But I do know that he gave an impression of far greater spruceness, haleness, clean-cutness, virility, call it what you will, than almost any dark-haired man you see about you, once past twenty-five. His complexion had always been high, ruddy, fullblooded, and against this was set the shocking whiteness of his hair, brushed so trim, scissored so immaculately at all times at the back and sides of the head, the way young men wear theirs. Looking at him, seeing what it did to him, I could understand only too well why the young in the eighteenth century, both men and women alike, had powdered theirs white.
He had a magnificent jawline, you could see the clean line of the bones, none of these drooping, puffy jowls. And when he talked it moved, you could see it move under the copper-pink ski
n of his cheeks, and you thought of strength. You thought of strength—perhaps even a dash of stubbornness too, but that didn’t dominate—and of common sense; and above all, oh, above all else, of sincerity. I don’t know why, I don’t know what sincerity has to do with the jaw, it should be of the eyes rather, but you thought of itwhen you sawthat clean jawline, at rest or inmotion.
The eyes were clear, crystalline with unabated life, the eyes of youth that never grew weary of looking, that never grew tired of what they saw. They were of a blue that was almost gray at times. They were full of kindness and gentleness, and the little crinkles about them, when they came into play, expressed more than anything else a perfect understanding. At least for me they did, but then, you see, I did not see them when they looked at others, only when they looked at me, so I cannot press this point.
He had the collar of his camel’s-hair coat upended at the nape of his neck; he always wore his coats that way, just as the younger men do. He was sitting so effortlessly, just as he moved; all his joints fluid, relaxed, not rusted with age. He was holding a brief case on his lap, looking in to make sure it had all the right papers in it, as we went along and as he talked with me. I can see it now; creamy-smooth pigskin, with a tartan-plaid lining. I’d given it to him myself a year or two before.
He had one glove left on and one taken off, because he was smoking a cigarette on the way. His fingers were strong and compact, the way a man’s should be; none of these tapering, spindly things. He had a green-gold signet ring on one finger. It was the only piece of jewelry he’d ever owned or worn, since I could remember.
He was through shuffling through the papers in the brief case. He brought the flap back upon it, and his thumb went down and pressed upon the little chromium latch shield, fastening it. It was oblong, and bright as a mirror. I remember noticing how it clouded, as his thumb left it, to clear again, as a mirror does when you breathe upon it. Sometimes I think that’s all the impress we make upon life, a misted, evanescent finger mark like that, that evaporates again even as our touch is removed from it.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 4
