by Belva Plain
“Don’t say that. You have no reason to be, and you never will have,” she answered, giving him a long, steady look.
“I believe you. Darling, it’s time to go. We can’t take any chances. Hurry.”
When instantly she stood and reached for her clothes, he caught her hand and kissed it. And when he raised his face, she saw a film of tears in his eyes.
“That’s a beautiful jacket, that coral,” he said as they were leaving, “but don’t you need another one, too, a new one?”
“No. It’s my good-luck jacket, and I love it. And somehow I don’t have that mad love of clothes anymore. I have another love. Larry has even noticed that I’m not extravagant now. I hardly ever bring anything home anymore.”
L.B. winced. “Please never mention Larry. Please.”
“I’m sorry. It was unthinking.”
She must be more careful, must remember—and of course she did remember—that his relationship to Larry was immensely different from hers.
The car was rolling away down Lane Avenue before L.B. spoke again. “Don’t I know on every one of our wonderful days, as well as in all the time between, how wrong this is? With all my soul, I know it. But tell me, are we to stop?”
“We’ve been over this often enough,” she cried in distress.
“Yes, and we know we’re not able to stop it. Neither you nor I. Not able,” he repeated. “Oh, I feel so helpless sometimes. I would like to stand free and open before all the world with you. I would like to do the things a man does. I would like to bring you a gift other than an innocuous book—”
She interrupted. “I love books.”
“Or meet you and make love to you without having to hide in a hole down here where no one can possibly find us.”
“But that’s why it feels so good, don’t you see? It feels safe, and permanent. That’s what people—I speak for women—want when they are in love. They want permanence.”
“Many men do, too. At least this man does.”
Driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other hand clasped over Amanda’s, L.B. took them slowly by unfrequented routes toward home. As always, he let her out five or six streets distant from her house and quickly drove away.
“When?” he asked as they approached the parting.
“Not this Saturday. It’s my time to work. Call me on my car phone around Thursday or Friday. Then I’ll know about the next Saturday.”
There was no need to be more specific, it being understood that if Larry were to have his tennis game, she could say she was going to the gym.
“If I could only take you home with me,” he began, and stopped.
She knew what he would have said: We’ll take a walk before it gets dark, we’ll go out to dinner, or take our plates into the sunroom at home, we could—but it would have been no use, and besides, they had gone as far in the car as they dared. So she stepped out quickly, he drove as quickly away, and Amanda walked rapidly back to arrive before Larry could.
* * *
“Another book?” Larry, stretched on the sofa after supper, yawned and reached for the remote control. “Nothing decent on tonight. Let’s see the book.”
“It’s poetry,” she said, handing it to him. “American poets. I bought it secondhand, but it looks new.”
After riffling the pages, he handed it back. “Nice. You get a lot of pleasure out of this stuff, don’t you? I always think poetry is a very feminine pleasure.”
“That’s odd, considering that most of the world’s major poets since long before Shakespeare have been men.”
She had not intended to speak sharply, but too often when he made a statement that she found irritating, words like these came out of her mouth. So now she made amends with a friendly question and a smile.
“How was your game today?”
“Okay. Phil and I make a great team, so it was good except for interruptions. I feel like a doctor, being tracked down even at the tennis court. The lawyer for the buyer wanted to ask about the closing. Couldn’t wait till Monday to ask.”
He yawned again. He never covered his mouth, so that the whole wet, pink interior, almost as far back as the tonsils, was exposed. Norma would never do that. How different these siblings were, she a walking encyclopedia, and he what he was! L.B. would never do it, either. How was it possible that father and son were so utterly different? Of course it was possible. Larry had had a mother, too, hadn’t he? I married too young, L.B. said. They might have been fairly miserable together. They must have been.
“Lord, I’m tired,” Larry groaned.
Only a short while ago, it seemed, he had been a sturdy man, filled with energy. Vigor and cheerful good humor had been his attractions. Something had happened to him; sprawled here like this, he seemed to have turned into somebody vulnerable, a child or a very old man, arousing pity.
True, she thought, he works very hard. People say that he brings in more than half the business. He’s smart, they say, innovative, with a head for business.
“Sometimes,” he said, breaking into her thoughts, “I feel that you really don’t love me.”
There was a sickening flutter in her stomach. The room shrank close, entrapping her. Yet she managed to reply.
“That’s ridiculous. What on earth do I do to make you think that?”
“I can’t say exactly. It’s more what you don’t do, I guess.”
“I’ve never been a touchy-feely person, you know that. I can’t help it. But I show my feelings in many other ways, don’t I?”
“Yes, you’re very good to me, very kind. It’s just—oh well, drop it. Forget I said it. I guess I’m tired tonight, not making sense … You’re looking especially beautiful right now, Amanda. Flushed, as if you’d been out in the fresh air all day.”
“I took a long walk.”
“Good. By the way, I was thinking, we never see Dad anymore, except when I see him at the office, I mean. And not often, even then. He keeps me way out in the branches practically all the time now, not that I mind. But wouldn’t it be nice to get up a dinner with him again? And with Norma and her date? It’s getting to look a little bit serious between her and that fellow Lester, I think. What do you think?”
“About Lester? She hasn’t said anything definite, yet I do get a feeling when she mentions him.”
“Great! She deserves a good man, a life. So what about the dinner?”
It would be unbearable, impossible! L.B. had exclaimed when Amanda had once before transmitted this message from Larry.
“Well, sometime soon,” she said now, “but not just yet. I don’t think Norma and Lester are quite there yet.” Her stomach still fluttered, and she stood up.
“You never sit still. Where are you going now?”
“Outside. I forgot to fill the birdfeeders.”
“Well, do it, and then come upstairs. I feel like going to bed early tonight.”
In the little yards and houses all along the street, lights were going out, but the sky above glittered. She stood and gazed. “Universe” was a misnomer: There wasn’t one; there were many. There were unknown numbers, for with each telescope more powerful than the previous one, still another universe was revealed. Beyond, she thought, always beyond. We know nothing. We do not even begin to know ourselves, let alone the galaxies. We do not understand why we do the things we do.
Surely some other woman would have been much better for poor Larry. Yet he wanted me. Surely he’s forlorn now and depressed, very probably through my fault. I understand what he wants, yet his touch is almost more than I can bear. But leave him, he who has always been so good to me? Impossible. Unless, unless L.B. and I—but L.B. never would. He’s Larry’s father.
Lacking a handkerchief, she wiped a few tears on a fallen maple leaf and went indoors. On the kitchen counter lay the rose. Still damp, it was barely starting to wilt. So she put it into a bud vase with cold water, carried it upstairs, and stood it on the table beside the bed. When she opened her eyes in the morning, it would
be there, and with joy—oh, with what joy!—she would remember who had given it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Norma, too, was marking a date. It was just half a year ago that, stricken by what she had seen or thought she had seen on Lane Avenue, she had taken shelter in the vacant theater building at school and been discovered there by Lester Cole.
“You broke the ice that day,” she said to him now.
He had indeed. Their dinner on the following evening had begun a train of events and marked a colorful new era in her life. Many candlelit dinners, concerts, and lectures had come after it, enriching their friendship. Both of them were introverted and reserved people, which probably made them very comfortable with each other. They looked at life in the same way.
Sometimes she asked herself whether she was in love with him, and found herself unable to answer her own question. She did not even know how it would feel to be “in love.” Too many of her acquaintances were in and out of intense relationships all the time; angry and brokenhearted when one ended, it never seemed to take very long for them to be equally “in love” with someone else. So what could you make of that kind of thing? Of course, there was always the case of Peter and Cecile to prove the exception.
For the present, she was enjoying herself. On this particular evening, the famous country restaurant near Cagney Falls, a favorite of theirs, was particularly enjoyable. Under the stone mantel a fire burned, not for warmth on this mild spring night, but strictly for rural atmosphere. Miniature hothouse roses were a pleasing change from the usual daffodils or tulips.
“Broke the ice, did I?” Lester asked.
“Yes, I had a very bad problem that day, as you know. I don’t think there is anyone else to whom I could have admitted that I even had one.”
“You haven’t yet told me what it was.”
It was a cloud, one of those that hover in the bright sky and threaten the day’s events; then when the events are about to be canceled, the cloud disappears beyond the horizon and the sun returns.
An impression is not enough, Lester had told her on that awful afternoon. Every day people swear to the truth of what they have seen and are proven wrong. She remembered that. He made sense. He always did. There was a firm, quiet wisdom in Lester. You would never go wrong by listening to him. So she must cleanse her mind once and for all of that lingering cloud, that taint.
“I can’t talk about it,” she said, shaking her head.
“Okay, I won’t ask you to. But as to breaking the ice, I hope you won’t mind too much if I break a little more of it.”
“I won’t mind. Go ahead.”
“This ice may be a bit thin, so I’m going to order a refill of my coffee cup to fortify me.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, what’s it about?”
“About your legs,” Lester said flatly.
She could not have described her reactions. She felt that her eyebrows had risen, that her forehead was wrinkled, that her cheeks were hotly flushed, and that brutal embarrassment was draining through her. She had been caught naked on the street. She wanted to get up, run and hide from his eyes; she was furious. And she could think of nothing to say.
“I don’t mean to hurt you, but it’s time that something be said,” he went on. “Do you suppose that in all these months I haven’t noticed how you try to pull your skirt down to hide them? Or that you surreptitiously keep glancing at them?”
Still she was unable to speak. No one had ever talked about her legs—no one except Amanda and Cecile in the intimacy of that flat on the campus—since early adolescence, when she had been taken to doctors, none of whom had been able to do anything for her.
“Why are you cringing?” he asked. It was almost as if he were angry. “So you have bad legs! Look at yourself, at your fine, sensitive face and your beautiful eyes. What if you had Pinocchio’s nose? Or my ears?”
Involuntarily, she glanced at Lester’s ears as he continued.
“For a while at school, I was called Taxi.’ Somebody started it by saying that I looked like a taxicab going down the street with the doors open.”
It was true when you looked carefully. His ears grew out of his head at an angle and were too large, anyway, for the size of his head.
“What? You never noticed them before?”
Well, yes, and then again, no. He was an otherwise attractive man, so probably one didn’t notice his ears so much.
“Well, yes, and then again, no,” she said.
“These ears haven’t stopped me from forging ahead in the world, nor have your legs stopped you.”
Little did he know about the ordeal of school and college dances. Even now on occasions when she had to sit on a podium, or worse yet, pose for a group photograph there, it was an ordeal.
He spoke indignantly. “Okay, I’ll amend that. Women do suffer more over things like this. Yes, they do, and they shouldn’t have to. They feel inferior when they have something wrong that makeup can’t hide. It’s unfair, but that’s the way it is.” Shaking an admonitory finger at Norma, he continued his lecture. “Don’t be like Elizabeth Jenkins! Remember her, going home to Mama every day after school? She was a prisoner of her mother, and you have been a prisoner of your legs. I’ve been waiting for months to tell you, but I haven’t had the nerve until now. You’re not too angry at me, Norma?” he asked wistfully.
She was, and yet, should she be? He had been blunt and he had been clumsy, but she saw in his eyes that he had meant the best for her and would never willingly hurt her.
“You’re a lovely woman. You’re a remarkable woman, Norma.”
Wiping her eyes, she sniffed. “It’s only that life would be so much easier at school if Dr. Griffin would let us wear trousers.”
“Listen, he’s a marvelous person, although in some ways he’s from the year one. But the hell with hiding under trousers, Norma. Wear your skirts freely. Wear a miniskirt! People be damned. Let them look. Do you know what? Ninety-nine people out of a hundred care too much about their own affairs to care about your legs. Come on, let’s get out of here. Let’s go home now that we’ve cleared the air. We can sit on your porch and watch the moon come up. That is, if you’re not too angry at me.”
“I’m not,” she said softly, and took out her compact to powder her red nose.
He had indeed shocked her, but he had done it with honest emotion, and as the minutes passed, her own honest shock receded. Along with it any self-conscious discomfort that she had ever felt while in his company was suddenly gone. Her legs, at least as far as Lester was concerned, would no longer be a problem.
She had never, she reflected as they sat on the old swing, heard him speak on any subject with such vehemence. Even when at a faculty meeting he expressed himself, as he often did, with unmistakable firmness, the effect had not been like this.
“A comfortable old house,” he said as the swing creaked. “How long have you lived here?”
“I was born here. But I’m making plans to leave it fairly soon.” She did not know why she was saying this, yet she went on, “I’ve been feeling that it’s time to be on my own. It’s true that my father will be alone here when I leave, but I can’t help that. There are some really nice new apartments not too far from the school, so that’s what I’m considering. It’s been in my mind for quite a while, and now it’s time for some action.”
He made no comment, which did seem odd, so she continued to cover the pause. “I still won’t be too far from Dad. I don’t want to desert him. But I’m earning more than enough to take care of myself, and I’ve suddenly been seeing myself as a spoiled teenager living here on his bounty.”
“You’re hardly spoiled, Norma, but easily able to pass as a teenager. You probably haven’t changed a bit since you graduated from college.”
There now came another pause during which he made a sound like a forced cough and said, “It’s a good enough idea, yet I wouldn’t be hasty if I were you. I wouldn’t sign anything until I was sure. What I mean is, that’s a bi
g change, and you should be absolutely certain before you make it.”
Puzzled, she waited while, after coughing again, he proceeded to talk about himself.
“Yes, you should always be absolutely, one-hundred-percent sure. Now confidentially, I must tell you that Dr. Griffin is going to retire at the end of the school year. In May, that is,” he explained as if she did not know. “And he tells me that I’m almost certain—in fact he used the word unqualified—’you’re certain,’ he said, ‘to take my place.’”
“Why, that’s wonderful!” Norma cried. “Really wonderful, Lester.”
“And so I thought that perhaps you and I, I thought that maybe you would, that we could talk about—”
“About giving me a promotion?” she said eagerly.
“I don’t know whether you’d call it a promotion. Actually, it wouldn’t, in certain circumstances, be suitable for you to remain on the faculty at all. It could lead to complications: I to be the headmaster of the school, while—should you accept me, and I hope to high Heaven you will—my wife works there, too.”
In the summer, the Balsan yard underwent a transformation. An enormous air-conditioned tent striped green and white, a dance floor and first-rate orchestra, tables clothed in pink and garlanded with dark red roses—all these evidences of gaiety and celebration were the products, not of the bride’s brain, but of her father’s. Everything inside and outside of the tent, from the newly planted floral border leading to the latticework gazebo where the marriage ceremony was to take place, was in the best taste; nothing was overdone; it was perfectly splendid, and yet it had an elegant simplicity.
If that isn’t a contradiction, thought Norma as from an upstairs window she observed the preparations.
She, if given the choice, would certainly have preferred a small family gathering, a fine dinner for the same few, and maybe, in some bow to the tradition that both her father and her brother seemed to want for her, a scattering of rice as the bride and groom departed for the airport and their flight to Greece.
