So that is the snapshot I still hold of him, arresting him for an instant as he was, holding him complete to view. A snapshot of something that’s gone now.
We had a minute or two when we got there. We sat in the car, out in front of the administration building, in pale watered sunwash. I didn’t even turn the motor off, I remember, because this was just a brief stop. I was going on again. It never occurred to either of us that I should get out and go in with him. What for? This was nothing. He’d done this so many times, it was just like taking a taxi to go downtown.
“Are you going over to the Ainsleys’ tonight?” he asked humorously.
“God, no!” I grimaced. “I’m glad of the excuse to get out of it.”
“Oh, by the way,” he said, “if Ben Harris phones, tell him I’ll play him a week from Sunday. He should get the same fellows we had last time, if he can. I liked them.”
I touched a finger to my forehead, then out.
“Well, I guess I’ll get in.” He got out, swung the door, and kissed me over the top of it.
“Fix your tie,” I said petulantly. “Can’t you ever get the knot centered right?” And did it for him.
“Is there some law about that?” he wanted to know dryly.
Suddenly I smiled in recollection. I’d only just remembered it. “Oh, here’s something I forgot to tell you. One of the maids came upstairs to me last night—you know, that Eileen McGuire—and tried to tell me that you shouldn’t come back on the Monday plane. Some friend of a friend of a friend of hers read the tea leaves—I wish you could have seen how she took on, she practically got the carpet damp in places.”
He couldn’t even place her for a minute. Well, after all, that wasMrs. Hutchins’ job, not his. “McGuire? Which one is that?”
“The new one.”
“What’s supposed to happen?” he grinned.
I snapped my fingers. “I forgot to ask her that.”
He laughed. I laughed with him. There wasn’t any more time now for conversational stopgaps.
“See you Tuesday morning,” he said cheerily, and turned away with his brief case.
“’Bye, pops.”
I threw the clutch and sidled off without waiting even to see him get to the entrance doors. It was nothing. He’d gone on many such little whippersnapper trips before. Besides, I had an appointment, with my hairdresser, I think it was, and I didn’t want to be late.
She waited on me at dinner that night. I ate alone.
She didn’t say anything, but her face was grave, and each time our eyes happened to cross paths, she lowered hers troubledly. I hadn’t thought of it until I saw her again, but now that I saw her again, I thought of it.
I could sense that she was aching to have me broach the topic of my own accord, in order to give her an opening, and I was determined not to. Why should I encourage her in her nonsensical ideas?
But those commiserating, downcast eyes finally got the better of me. If she’d only kept them down. Or kept them up. But the way they dropped each time, as though afraid to look at me.
“Look, Eileen, do you mind not creating quite so soupy an atmosphere in here with me? I’m trying to have my dinner, you know.”
She retreated submissively to the pantry door. But then she couldn’t hold it back any longer.
“He left, miss?”
I flung my hand impatiently toward his chair. “You don’t see him, do you? Then naturally he left.”
She was going to withdraw, now that she’d unearthed the subject once more. She had the typical stab-and-run courage of the craven. But I held her a moment, to scotch the thing once and for all. “Eileen, that wasn’t even amusing the last time. Tonight I’m not in the mood in the slightest. Just coffee, please, and then that will be all.”
“I’m sorry, miss,” she mumbled, and the hinged door effaced her.
I shook my head, in a sort of incomprehension, and lit a cigarette.
I ate dinner alone Saturday night too. Again the troubled face. Again the downcast eyes. Again the eloquent silence.
I pushed a plate back from in front of me a violent inch, swung half around in my chair.
“Eileen, I’m sorry to say it, but you’re getting on my nerves.”
“I haven’t said anything, miss.”
That was true, she hadn’t. Only “Good evening,” in a tearful sort of way, when I first entered the room.
“You don’t have to. You keep looking at me. It’s the same thing.”
“I have to look at you sometimes, miss, to see where I’m going, to watch what I’m about—”
It would have been splitting hairs too fine to follow the thing out any further. I had a dissatisfied feeling of having been worsted, in a contest I hadn’t even known I was in. You can’t order people not to look at you. You can’t order people not to think.
But she kept reminding me, reminding me. She’d planted something. All I had to do was look at her, have her about me now, to remember the thing. Belief, credulity, had nothing to do with it; it was just awareness, but that was annoying in itself.
I got up and left the room without waiting for my coffee.
I called Mrs. Hutchins to me in the upstairs hall, well out of earshot. She’d been housekeeper for us for fifteen years. She’d started to tack on “miss” before my name about the time I was sixteen, and I’d stopped it again almost as soon as it had begun. She had none of the earmarks of a professional housekeeper, which perhaps was why she was so excellent at it. She always reminded me of someone’s gentle, elderly, slightly faded aunt, a band of black velvet ribbon around her throat, speaking low, never raising her voice, nothing tyrannical or domineering in her makeup. You scarcely ever saw her about, and yet the house ran itself like clockwork, not a grain of sand clogged its works. It was an art. I couldn’t have done it.
“Enjoy your dinner, Jean dear?” she asked me.
“Grace, will you do something for me, please—” I started out volubly. And then I stopped. And didn’t know how to go ahead. What could I say? What could I have her do about it? “Make that maid stop being so ominous”? It didn’t sound right. It just wouldn’t work.
“I—I—Oh, never mind, forget about it, I’ve changed my mind,” I said lamely, and abruptly turned away and left her.
The next was the Sunday night meal. In the mornings I just took a cup of coffee in my room, and there was someone else who brought it. And at midday, almost always, I was out in the car. So the evening meal was the only time I encountered her.
I came into the room telling myself firmly, Now, we’re not going to have any of that stuff. I’m almost as much to blame as she is; I’m playing it back to her all the time. If I stop doing that, then it’ll stop by itself. It takes two to create that sort of tension.
I said to her with almost militant cheerfulness as she drew my chair out for me, “Good evening, Eileen. Some day, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, lovely, miss,” she said fervently. “Did you enjoy your drive?”
“Very much. You should see the flowers I brought back.”
She went out, brought in something, went out again.
She came back again, after due pause. She began speaking, with a sort of forced garrulity, almost from the pantry doorsill, before she had reached the table. “I never saw such a grand day in my life. The sun was just pouring down the whole time—”
“We already agreed about that,” I said mildly. I was going to add, Just wait on me, you don’t have to entertain me, but it seemed too cutting.
She set a plate down before me, and it vibrated the whole way down, though it wasn’t very heavy or very hot.
I took it from her before it had reached the tabletop, and set it down unaided, so that it would come to rest gently and not the way it had threatened.
“Your hand is shaking so,” I said quietly. “You mustn’t let it shake so.”
It was almost as though Mrs. Hutchins had read my mind, and dropped a word to her that she must be cheerful when waiting on me. The pendulum had
swung to the other extreme. She was keyed up, overanxious lest she fall into a silence, and I wasn’t sure but that this was the worse of the two.
“And it’s so seldom that you get days like this, this time of the year. If it was that nice around here, imagine what it must have been like on the links; just the right kind of a day for your—”
She stopped short, almost with a body lurch, that threw her whole frame violently like a hiccup. As though that weren’t enough, her hand had flown up, palm to mouth, before she could stop it, and pressed tight there. Her eyes rolled quickly sideward in the direction of his chair, then she quickly curbed them. She dropped her hand again, trying to undo what she had done, but now nothing would come, she had throttled herself into numbed silence. She began to falter away from me, a backward step at a time. Her face was aghast.
I could feel a constriction in my own throat, but of another kind. Of anger. I didn’t let it creep into my voice; I made that very steady, very quiet-spoken.
“My father is not dead. There is no reason why you should not refer to him, without going through a shocked pantomime.”
I sighed and distanced my chair from the table. I’d never fired anyone yet in my life.
I said, “Get out of here. I can’t stand it any more. Do me a favor and get out of here. Take a month’s wages from Mrs. Hutchins and—and please go.”
I saw tears gloss her eyes. Her lips trembled. “I haven’t done anything, miss. You’re not being fair.”
I looked the other way.
“I’m sorry. You’ve started something that—that I can’t seem to control any more. I’m not angry at you, if that’ll do you any good. I’m not blaming you. It’s just that—it’s better for the two of us if you go.”
She ducked her head sharply, I suppose to keep me from seeing the red, weeping scowl beginning to form. Then with her head already bent, she turned around. Not in one place, but in a circular little track, that carried her forward and around while she turned, the way you turn a small wheeled vehicle. Then she ran out of the room on little shuddering chop-steps, the way Japanese women are conventionally supposed to run.
It was the most ludicrous little exit I’ve ever seen. And it made me feel cheap and mean and heartless. But yet I’d acted according to the way I’d felt, and what else is there you can do if you’re to be honest with yourself?
I dismissed her from my mind as I’d dismissed her from the room and from the house. She went from all alike, and I thought that was the end of it.
Monday came, and glowed to its noon, and waned toward its appointed night. Security, safety, confidence, are habits not quickly broken; it takes time to break any habit, good or bad, and their hold was still strong on me. There was no fear in the world, no such thing as fright. The car rode smooth, and the sun was warm on the shoulders of my loose cashmere coat, and the little breeze I made for myself was cool in my face. I stopped for gas, and I gave the chap who waited on me fifty cents for a tip because his eyes smiled back at me in such a friendly way. It was the reflection ofmy own I was looking at, most likely, but that didn’tmatter.
“That’s some boat,” he said admiringly.
“She’s a good girl,” I admitted. “Never talks back to me.”
A little girl waved to me from a village crossroads as I skimmed by, and I threw up my arm full length and waved back. I’d liked to wave to moving things like that too when I was a little girl, I remembered, and I’d felt bad when I didn’t get any answer. I didn’t want her to feel bad.
I looked at my watch, and it was nearing six. “I’d better turn and go back,” I said to myself. “No point in getting in too late and giving them trouble in the kitchen.”
I thought of him for the first time all day. Nearing six, our time. That meant it was nearing three Pacific Coast Time. Three hours difference. He still had six hours in San Francisco. Take-off was at nine, their time.
And then I thought of her; or—shall I say it?—what she’d been trying to say. The smile came, and then it went again, and she was still there, knocking at the door of my mind. I wouldn’t open it and let her in. But once at the threshold, neither would she go away again and let me be.
The sun was lower now, and it was no longer warm on my skin; but that was due to the lateness of the hour and not my own thoughts. I drew my coat a little closer around me, and snuggled a little lower in the seat, to expose less body surface to the new sharpness of the wind.
I passed a Western Union office, and for a moment watched it recede in my rear-sight mirror. Then suddenly I had slanted in to roadside, and gone into reverse, and was trundling along backwards to recover the ground I had just discarded.
I stopped and got out and went in. I had no conscious thoughts at the moment, I am sure of it. Such as: I am going in here. I am going in here to do such and such. I just went in.
I sat down at a desk, and drew out a pad of blanks, and took up one of their chained pencils and began to print:
HARLAN REID
C/O REID & SEWELL
MARKET STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
COME BACK BY TRAIN INST—
Then I slackened, and I stopped, and I looked around me. Without thought of the things I was looking at. The large, milkwhite light bowl in the ceiling, already lighted though it was still daylight out. The undersized messenger, he looked about twelve but must have been older, in the olive-drab uniform, sitting dangling his legs from a bench over at the side, waiting for the next message to go out. The man standing behind the counter, pecking away at a message with the point of his pencil, automatically counting the words without reading them. The bulky cube of white tabs on the wall, forming a leaf-by-leaf calendar, the topmost one with a beetling black “16” on it.
I looked down again and crumpled up the message and dropped it in the basket, and started over.
HARLAN REID
C/O REID & SEWELL
MARKET STREET, SAN FRANCISCO
TAKE TUESDAY DAY PLANE INSTEAD OF TON—
That was even worse.
I said to myself, What am I doing this for? and I couldn’t find any answer. Am I uneasy? No, of course not. Am I afraid? No, of course not. Do I really believe that twaddle? Don’t be absurd! Well, then, what other reason is there for doing this?
You know what he’d say, don’t you? He’d only laugh. He’d be the first to laugh. He’d never quit kidding you about it afterwards.
No, you’d better not.
I chucked the pencil back, and the little beaded chain that secured it formed an intricate Arabic tracery as it fell to the glass slab.
I got up and went toward the door. Came back and peeled off the uncompleted message, so that the address shouldn’t fall into the hands of any unauthorized person; crumpled it and threw it after the first one, then went out for good.
The drive back was chill. The sun was gone, and the road was dusky, and the wind had teeth; I was glad when I’d got back. And that was a frame of mind I seldom concluded my solitary drives in.
Mrs. Hutchins had a buxom, friendly Swedish girl to wait on table tonight, and she seemed to warm up the room every time she came into it, even though, being new, she was all thumbs. I wondered why I should be conscious that the room lacked warmth. There must be that same atmosphere in it. And since the other one had gone, and it was I who remained, it must be emanating from me. I must be at fault this time.
I said, “What did you say your name was?”
“Signe, miss.”
“Would you go over there and throw that switch? The one by the door. That’s it.”
“Throw it, miss?” she said, nonplussed, with her hand out to it. I suppose she thought I meant pluck it bodily out of the wall and fling it away.
I smiled a little, but not as broadly as I would have at another time. “Tip it up with your finger, that’s what I mean. That’s it.”
The room was suddenly bright, and I leaned forward and blew out the damned candles. I’d never realized until just now that I didn’t like candles.
And perhaps I hadn’t, for all I knew. I wondered why I should suddenly begin to dislike them now, in the middle of their burning, in the middle of a meal.
She nodded approvingly. “Is better so. Is gude for churches, them little t’ings, not for house. Make too gloomy.”
The rest of the evening comes back to me now in vignettes. Each one separate, yet all of them linked together to form the strip of film, the continuity, that was the evening. I see myself sprawled back against a puffy overstuffed chair in the living room, in a posture of outrageous indolence, such as I would never have dared assume had any second person—any second person but him—been in the room with me. The greater part of my body a cantilever between chair seat and floor, I was so far down in it. My shoulders almost down to the seat level, my head very little above it. My clasped hands a cushion behind it. My crossed feet, far out from the chair, bucking up and down as one single limb, beating time against the floor on the heel of the undermost one. To percussion music stifled behind a lighted gash across the face of a hardwood cabinet there to one side of me. My shoes standing off by themselves, like a pair of little boats drawn up on a beach after their occupants have left them. A cigarette speared into the break in the rolled-up brim of a little crystal saucer at chair side, and sending up a tenuous unbroken skein that looked like an unraveling thread of very fine gray cotton, sometimes one-ply, sometimes two, to a vast height above itself.
Just an evening at home, like hundreds of others there had been before, like hundreds of others there would be to come. Contentment, vacuity; nothing that can be described, a mood, a state of being, rather than an active happening.
When you’re at peace you sing. When there’s music there already, you join it. I’ve never had a voice. When I bring it out at ordinary speaking pitch or over, it becomes musically unmanageable. But if I hum below that, I can stay on key. And there was no one in the room anyway. I joined the man who was singing, matching him word for word.
And then suddenly, a quick spring out of the chair. The shoes stayed where they were. The wispy gray thread bent way over flat for a minute, and only slowly got back to where it had been, and started upwards once more. I flicked something, and the livid crescent in the cabinet went out, and it was just a piece of furniture, dark and silent once again.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 5
