The two mothers were thin and hard. The new difference between them was physical. Paola’s mother had stopped tinting her hair, as a sign of sorrow or of desperation. It was half mahogany, half dull grey. Renata’s mother was blonded white, and her head sleek and neat as a boy’s. Paola admired her large glossy red earrings and her brown shoulders and her quick tongue. She admired her rings and her sweet hypocrisy and her temper and her car. None of those attributes had come with marriage. She was born with some and inherited the means to have the rest. Renata’s mother was kind to Paola – so obviously not a threat – and took no notice of her own grieving girl, except when the sunglasses and the accusation they concealed seemed a reproach too great to ignore. Then she lost her temper. Once she lost her temper seriously and knocked the bowl of water in which grapes were cooling, half silver coated, half submerged, on to Renata’s lap. Renata jumped up, screaming, with her dress ice cold and pasted against her thighs. Her mother tried to hit her across the face with her napkin, but missed.
“There will be no engagement,” her mother cried. “You impertinent monster! There will be no engagement.”
Paola was laughing so that she could scarcely understand Renata’s hysterical answer (probably a suicide threat) from the stairs. Presently Renata returned in a starched peignoir, with a white ribbon around her hair, and they had their coffee in peace on the terrace, beneath the trellis of green grapes and black wisteria branches and white roses that suddenly dropped petals like secret letters. The two mothers played gin rummy under a light surrounded by moths, and the girls listened to records of Anthony Perkins singing in French. The songs did not disturb the mothers; no one cared about the people sleeping in hotels on either side of the house, and little Anna could slumber through earthquakes.
The only person distressed by the tears, the lamentations, and Anthony Perkins’s voice was the frightened young Austrian girl who had been employed as Anna’s nurse for the summer. She was spending the most miserable summer of her life. Not only did she hear Austrians insulted in this house from morning till night, but she was bitten and spat upon by little Anna. When Anna spat the girl asked, “Are you doing it on purpose?” and Anna said, “Yes.” Anna’s hair had to be brushed and fastened with an elastic in the morning before they went down to swim. Just when the nurse had the hair brushed and ready, and the elastic stretched on her outspread fingers, Anna would shake her head and send the pony-tail flying. The nurse would then have to roll the elastic back on her wrist, clutch Anna, and begin again. She needed several hands: one for Anna, one to hold the brush, one to grasp the pony-tail, and one for the elastic band. When Anna’s mother came to see what was keeping them, Anna clasped her mother’s knees and bent her head meekly, so that her mother could slide the band on without trouble.
The Austrian girl had tears in her eyes. “Anna has bitten me again,” she said, and held out her hand with the small crescent.
“If I had known you did not like children I would never have brought you here,” Anna’s mother said.
“HOW I HATE CHILDREN,” said Renata, lying on Paola’s bed. It was a hot day and neither of them had dressed.
“Oh, so do I,” said Paola, with something in her voice that resembled Renata’s in a rage.
“That cow expression people have when they look at Anna. It makes me vomit.”
“You will have children if you get married,” Paola said.
“I know. I’ve thought about it. Guilio hates children too.”
“There are things you can do so as not to have them.”
“I know. But I don’t know what they are.”
Paola would have said, “Guilio knows,” but that was going far, even between Paola and Renata.
Renata sighed, with her chin on her hands, and contemplated the pictures on the wall above the bed: Anthony Perkins, Evtushenko, and Mrs. Kennedy. The fourth and most important picture lay beside her. It was a photograph of smiling Guilio, glassed over, surrounded by an imposing silver and leather frame. His name was signed obliquely across one corner. He lay smiling between the two girls. Renata had tried sleeping with the picture, but was afraid of rolling on it and smothering Guilio. Also, she shared Paola’s bed, and Paola had not been hospitable. She did not object to Guilio, but to the heavy silver corners of the picture frame. She was not frightened of stifling Guilio, who was not a newly born kitten, but of hurting herself. Renata’s engagement to Guilio had to do with the picture in its frame, with her red eyes and sunglasses, her scenes at dinner, and her remote hair drifting on the lake. There were also Guilio’s letters.
Renata was permitted to write one letter to Guilio every week. This letter was read by her mother, who then took it to the post office and sent it by ordinary mail. Guilio was in Switzerland for the summer, quite close by, but a letter despatched by ordinary mail took as long as four days to reach him.
Renata wrote to Guilio every morning. Paola carried the daily letter downstairs to Spirella, the cook, who gave it to the groom in one of the hotels next door. The letter went out with the hotel post, marked “Most Urgent,” and was in Guilio’s hands a morning later.
“Where are you going?” Paola’s mother asked her.
“To the kitchen, to get lemonade.” Renata’s letter was in the pocket of her shorts.
“Don’t keep running to the kitchen. Don’t bother Spirella. Tell Spirella to bring lemonade out for all of us.” These were the contradictory orders of a widow in distress. Paola’s disobedience was of little importance. She had no dowry and no prospects and was not even nearly engaged.
Renata was watched more closely than Paola that summer because the talk of her engagement, even the assurance that it would never come to pass, made her important, tricky, and furtive. She was more important than she had ever been. She might be up to anything. Renata’s mother looked as if she were trying to smuggle a forbidden object over a frontier. All summer she said, “Renata, where are you?” and “Where are you going?” and “Who was that on the telephone?” and “Wait for Paola,” and “Wait for us.”
Renata lay on the bed and looked at Guilio while Paola slipped down to the kitchen and gave the “Very Urgent” letter to the cook. Guilio’s letters were sent to Spirella in care of the hotel next door, and came up in the morning with Renata’s breakfast, under a napkin. “There is no law against posting letters,” Spirella told Paola. Paola knew it was the cook’s weapon against two mothers. What could the mothers do confronted with the smooth and guileless faces of Paola, Renata, Spirella, and the groom next door?
About once a week, a letter arrived for Renata, correctly addressed, in care of Paola’s mother. Paola’s mother gave it to Renata’s mother, who read it in her room. In these official letters, Guilio doubted Renata’s love, asked if she were reticent or simply pure, and insisted that he would marry her if she were penniless and in rags. Renata’s mother sat on the edge of her bed with her legs crossed and the letter spread on one knee, and she bit the side of her thumb as she read. She kept the letter until evening so that she could read it over the telephone to her husband in Milan, who called every evening at eight o’clock. Renata was given the letter the next day. Weekends, when Renata’s father arrived from Milan, he asked to see the letters and read them as if he had not understood his wife on the telephone. “There are no others?” he would ask. Renata looked at her hands, her mother shrugged.
The official letters, intended for parents, Renata read aloud to Paola in an affected voice. Paola, racked with laughter as if in pain, pressed her pillow to her face. Renata kissed the teeth on Guilio’s smiling picture and put the picture away with the unofficial letters. His real, his clandestine letters, which she did not read aloud, were tied and hidden in Paola’s old toy cupboard. There were perhaps twenty of them, less than half the number she had written him. They were ranged and marked in such a way that Renata would know instantly if anyone had touched them. Knowing that the packet of letters was full of snares, Paola let them be. Renata’s mother, determined as
the police, but less thorough and calm, ransacked the room but missed the cupboard of toys. Renata knew, or felt she knew, when her mother was up to a search, and it was her private pleasure to leave the cupboard door ajar, revealing stuffed animals and a wicker sewing basket. She imagined her mother, impatient and tough, banging the door shut, missing the treasure in her impatience to find it. The official letters were tied with ribbon and in a drawer. The mother untied the ribbon and counted the letters and flung them back between nightgowns. She said aloud, alone, that she wished God had never given her a daughter. Blessed was a mother with an only son!
Towards the end of August, Renata’s father went to Geneva on business, and called casually on Guilio’s family in their Swiss summer home. A few mornings later Renata was summoned to her mother’s room.
“I have a letter here from Guilio,” her mother said. “How many letters have you had from him?”
“You should know.”
“One came this morning, and not in the usual way.” She kept the letter face down, with her hand over it. Renata’s eyes met her mother’s and held the gaze. Neither stared the other down, but each moved, slightly, to break the deadlock.
Renata had saved face. “May I have my letter?” she said.
“I haven’t decided. You know what it will mean if you have had a secret correspondence.”
Renata did not know, but a threat was a threat. “Guilio is honorable,” she said. “So am I. You make me wonder what you were like when you were young.”
She was braced for a slap, but her mother said only, “I promise not to tell your father if you give me the others.”
“What others?”
“The letters, you impudent monkey. The other letters. There is no question of an engagement now. A man who would lie to his mother-in-law would lie to his wife. If you give me the letters I won’t tell your father.”
“I haven’t had any letters except the letters you have seen,” said Renata.
The mother was looking away, watching Renata in a mirror across the room. The girl sat quietly and emptied her expression of unhappiness or reproach. She was a novice supreme in her innocence and decision. From Paola’s mother’s sitting room came the sound of half a conversation: “A good girl, but without imagination, and too severe. My Anna has been a martyr to discipline all summer. Apart from that – yes, honest enough.”
“Is the nurse leaving?” said Renata.
“How should I know?” said Renata’s mother. “Who cares about her?”
Renata suddenly smiled. “I shall marry Guilio when I’m twenty-one. It’s only four years.”
“Four years ago you were a monster of thirteen,” her mother screamed. “A horror! Skinny, tall! Why couldn’t I have had a son? Why couldn’t I have a daughter like Paola? I’m glad to be rid of you. There will be an engagement. Do you hear? There will be a wedding September twenty-seventh and Guilio is taking you with him to the United States. God help you, with a husband who tells lies and rushes the wedding. We have barely five weeks to get ready. We are leaving for Milan tomorrow. Now you know.”
SHE CREPT INTO PAOLA’S ROOM and sat stiffly on the edge of the bed.
“I’m being married September twenty-seventh.”
“You wanted to be engaged.”
“Yes, but I’m not being engaged. I’m being married. There isn’t a real engagement.”
When she began to pack she said, “You can keep the letters.”
“What do I want with Guilio’s letters?” They were not friends as before.
After Renata and her mother had departed, distraught and waving scarves from the sky-blue Guilietta Sprint, Paola looked in the toy cupboard and found Guilio’s picture and the secret letters. Renata had taken the official letters and would probably keep them and reread them all her life.
Paola unfolded one of the letters, but it was not a message of secret love; at least not as she had imagined it. It was about Guilio and waterskiing. She picked out another at random but it was about Guilio too. She tore the others up without reading them and got rid of them by swimming quite far out in the lake with scraps of paper in the top of her bikini. It was not as exciting as smuggling letters to the kitchen had been, but she relived the feeling of summer and secrecy, and the unrevealed act. She put the picture aside in case Renata should ask for the frame.
PAOLA AND HER MOTHER were alone on the beach with Anna. The Austrian girl had left without regret, and it required both of them, Paola and her mother, to look after Anna. The mother said nothing about going back to the city, and there seemed to be nothing waiting there, except Renata’s wedding. By the time all the letters had been torn up and dispersed, it was almost too cold for swimming. Paola shuddered and rubbed her arms and legs with a rough towel as soon as she came out of the water. In less than a week the climate changed. They dragged their towels and cushions away from the shade of the bamboo fence and followed the sun. When they sat on the beach – Paola, and her mother, and little Anna – Paola was conscious of them as a family without men. She did not miss Renata.
“I wish something would happen,” she said.
“You’ll be engaged later,” said her mother. “Seventeen is too young.”
“Can’t anything happen without an engagement?”
“Don’t be meaningless and clever,” said her mother. “Don’t be clever at all. Men don’t like women who are too clever.” She did not scream, like Renata’s mother. Her voice was quiet. The girl shivered in the breeze from the lake as her mother said, “Renata would never have caught Guilio by being clever. Do you think it was her brains he admired? Her face? He was waiting for the marriage settlement. That was all.”
Anna had taken off her bathing suit and was dancing in shallow water.
“Come here instantly,” her mother said, without the hope of being obeyed. Anna splashed them. “Very well,” said the mother. “Don’t come. Break my heart. You’ll regret it when I am dead.” Anna took no notice, knowing perfectly well that nothing ever came of threats.
“I wish I were Anna,” Paola said.
ACCEPTANCE OF THEIR WAYS
(1960)
PRODDED BY A REMARK from Mrs. Freeport, Lily Littel got up and fetched the plate of cheese. It was in her to say, “Go get it yourself,” but a reputation for coolness held her still. Only the paucity of her income, at which the Sunday Express horoscope jeered with its smart talk of pleasure and gain, kept her at Mrs. Freeport’s, on the Italian side of the frontier. The coarse and grubby gaiety of the French Riviera would have suited her better, and was not far away; unfortunately it came high. At Mrs. Freeport’s, which was cheaper, there was a whiff of infirm nicety to be breathed, a suggestion of regularly aired decay; weakly, because it was respectable, Lily craved that, too. “We seem to have finished with the pudding,” said Mrs. Freeport once again, as though she hadn’t noticed that Lily was on her feet.
Lily was not Mrs. Freeport’s servant, she was her paying guest, but it was a distinction her hostess rarely observed. In imagination, Lily became a punishing statue and raised a heavy marble arm; but then she remembered that this was the New Year. The next day, or the day after that, her dividends would arrive. That meant she could disappear, emerging as a gay holiday Lily up in Nice. Then, Lily thought, turning away from the table, then watch the old tiger! For Mrs. Freeport couldn’t live without Lily, not more than a day. She could not stand Italy without the sound of an English voice in the house. In the hush of the dead season, Mrs. Freeport preferred Lily’s ironed-out Bayswater to no English at all.
In the time it took her to pick up the cheese and face the table again, Lily had added to her expression a permanent-looking smile. Her eyes, which were a washy blue, were tolerably kind when she was plotting mischief. The week in Nice, desired, became a necessity; Mrs. Freeport needed a scare. She would fear, and then believe, that her most docile boarder, her most pliant errand girl, had gone forever. Stealing into Lily’s darkened room, she would count the dresses with trembling hands. Sh
e would touch Lily’s red with the white dots, her white with the poppies, her green wool with the scarf of mink tails. Mrs. Freeport would also discover – if she carried her snooping that far – the tooled-leather box with Lily’s daisy-shaped earrings, and the brooch in which a mother-of-pearl pigeon sat on a nest made of Lily’s own hair. But Mrs. Freeport would not find the diary, in which Lily had recorded her opinion of so many interesting things, nor would she come upon a single empty bottle. Lily kept her drinking to Nice, where, anonymous in a large hotel, friendly and lavish in a bar, she let herself drown. “Your visits to your sister seem to do you so much good,” was Mrs. Freeport’s unvarying comment when Lily returned from these excursions, which always followed the arrival of her income. “But you spend far too much money on your sister. You are much too kind.” But Lily had no regrets. Illiberal by circumstance, grudging only because she imitated the behavior of other women, she became, drunk, an old forgotten Lily-girl, tender and warm, able to shed a happy tear and open a closed fist. She had been cold sober since September.
“Well, there you are,” she said, and slapped down the plate of cheese. There was another person at the table, a Mrs. Garnett, who was returning to England the next day. Lily’s manner toward the two women combined bullying with servility. Mrs. Freeport, large, in brown chiffon, wearing a hat with a water lily upon it to cover her thinning hair, liked to feel served. Lily had been a paid companion once; she had never seen a paradox in the joining of those two words. She simply looked on Mrs. Freeport and Mrs. Garnett as more of that race of ailing, peevish elderly children whose fancies and delusions must be humored by the sane.
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