“You don’t know what you’re saying!” I cried.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think Ilsa’ll go.”
“Why?” I asked slowly.
She laughed again. “You see! You’re not above listening to someone, else’s eavesdropping. Personally, I think it’s better to do it deliberately, knowing what you’re doing.… God knows it’s not with malicious intent. I love Ilsa more than anyone in the world. All I want is for her to be happy. It’s funny. Most people have either a capacity for loving or a capacity to inspire love. She has both. And she’s right. She’ll be happier staying here than she would if she went with him.”
“But she loves him!” I cried, then added tentatively, “Doesn’t she?”
“Of course. Dear God in heaven, yes!”
“What did they say? I mean—I mean—just about her leaving?”
Myra went over to her wardrobe, took out a bottle from among her shoes, and poured a drink into her toothbrush glass. “Do you mind if I have a drink, Henry?” she asked. She didn’t offer me one. “I’ve discovered the only way to get over one hangover is to prepare yourself for another. I don’t have school till afternoon, so what difference does it make?”
“Go ahead,” I said, I knew there was no use trying to stop her though it was obviously not her first drink that morning.
“I suppose I ought to apologize to Ilsa for last night.”
“Why? We all had too much of that punch.”
“Yes.… Do you know, Henry, in all my life nobody’s ever loved me. And there’s been no one I could go to and say ‘I love you.’ One more penalty of being a woman. There’s even a theory now that if a man milks a cow he’ll get more milk out of it than a woman. Rot. Just let Ilsa try milking a cow. She’s got a will of iron. If anyone argued with me the way he argued with her last night, I wouldn’t need asking twice. I wouldn’t even stop to pack my bags. Did you know he was born in Budapest? His father was in a circus there.”
“Oh,” I said. “Did he tell you that?”
“Yes. He’s very charming.”
“You can have him.”
She drained her glass. “No, my dear, I can’t.” Her voice was suddenly sad. “He loves Ilsa. He said that it was only because he had a puny conscience that he let her go before. He said he’d ached for her, his whole body, until sometimes he cried with the pain of it. I know what he meant. Oh, God, I know!”
I turned away and stared out at the river. Soon it would storm.
“In his strange way,” she said after a while, going to the window and pushing aside the vines, “he’s the only one among us who is big enough for her.”
“What do you mean?” My voice was scornful.
“He’s the only one of us who’s had the courage to accept her blindness as she has accepted it. He didn’t insult her by pity, or by pretending to ignore it. That’s what she said. It’s a companion in the house just as much as that half-witted dog of hers. And with him only could she forget it because he was the only one who was willing to accept it, to realize it, and yet not make a barrier of it. Dear God knows there was no barrier between them.…” She tore at the vines for a moment, then turned abruptly from the window and took the bottle out of her wardrobe again. “Well,” she said, filling her glass, her hand trembling so that the bottle clattered against the rim, almost breaking it, “I turned to the Bible.… Do you remember, Henry,” Myra asked, “in Mark, I think it is, Jesus is hungry and He goes up to a fig tree and there aren’t any figs on it, because it isn’t time for the figs to be ripe yet. And He is angry and says that nobody should ever eat any fruit from that tree forever. And the tree is blighted and withered. That’s not fair. It wasn’t the fig tree’s fault that its fruit wasn’t ripe. And it seems to me that’s typical. God goes around blighting and withering all the time for no known reason.”
“Don’t, Myra,” I said gently.
“Why not?” she asked, her voice rising shrilly. “Why isn’t this as good a time to be hysterical as any? I went to the Bible for comfort. I needed comfort. I remember once walking on the beach, when Ilsa asked me down. And there was the imprint of a woman’s body stretched out like a crucifix in the sand; desolate, betrayed. That’s how I felt. That’s how I feel. But there’s no comfort anywhere. And my God, to what lengths we go to deny woman any power or positive goodness. If Ilsa were a man she could leave; it would be all right.… The Adam and Eve story is the most typically masculine one I know. Men can’t bear the knowledge, the indisputable fact, that woman gives birth to man—so the original woman had to come from man!” She laughed uncontrollably.
“Why won’t Ilsa go?” I asked.
“Oh, haven’t you enough intelligence to think of the reasons, Henry? Because of the girl. Because she’s blind. She knows she’d be a burden to him. He’s not a man who can support a burden. He’d hate her eventually. She knows it even if he doesn’t. And she won’t betray the girl.”
“Why would it hurt Brand?” I persisted.
“Are you a complete fool? Blind woman elopes with former lover. It would just rake up the old scandal. Her blindness and Monty’s death smothered it before but the embers are still alive. They could be married a hundred times over and it wouldn’t stop the tongues. The girl wants to make her life here. Why, God knows. If Ilsa went away, it would make it even more impossible for her here than it is already.…” She turned violently and took a book from one of her shelves. “Here. Give this to Joshua Tisbury for me, will you? Something for him to remember me by.”
“Why don’t you give it to him yourself?” I asked her.
“I’m not very good at giving things.”
“He’d be awfully pleased.”
“Are you going to give it to him or must I ask Ilsa?”
“I’ll give it to him.” I took the book.
“Do you remember Sidney Carton’s last words?” she asked. “‘It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done.…’”
“Why do you think of that now?”
“Because I choose to.” She went over and looked at a small snapshot of Ilsa she had stuck in her mirror. Then she looked at the threatening sky reflected behind her.
“It’s going to storm in a minute,” she said. “For heaven’s sake, go down to the dock and see that that damn rowboat is well tied.”
“All right,” I said.
I went downstairs, pausing a moment at the drawing-room door. Ilsa sat at the piano playing, cleanly and precisely, the music her student had been struggling with. Werner stood behind her, gently caressing her head and neck.
“That the last lesson for today?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ilsa answered, leaning back against him. “You know, when they’re gone I feel I have to wash the piano of them, play it clean and unfuzzy.”
I turned away from the drawing room and went out the front door instead of taking the short cut through the French windows.
63
I walked slowly down to the river. It was quite pointless to tie the boat. If the storm was bad, the boat would just float off and carry the flimsy old dock with it. But it gave me an excuse to go down to the river, and Myra had upset me. I stood on the dock, the sudden northeast wind blowing about me. The river seemed strange, so high from the summer rains that I felt as if it were choking and I should pull a plug out somewhere and relieve it. Everything was a dull dead black. Then a bar of sunlight came from behind the masses of clouds, and the black took on a glittering purple tinge. The trees shivering in the wind seemed to have a black veneer. Even the light seemed black, coming so eerily from behind the purple-black clouds. I expected such awesome weather to make the very squirrels peer timidly from behind their moss curtains, but everything was in a frenzy of activity. All the dogs in the neighborhood were racing around; jays and gulls were squawking and screaming, water bugs were scooting about. I tied the boat more firmly, and went back to the house, heading for the French windows to the drawing room. As I reached the terrace the wind began to blow vi
olently, sounding almost like rain as it swished through the dry leaves and dusty Spanish moss.
Ilsa and Werner were standing close together. As I stepped into the room she moved away from him and stood by the piano.
“It’s Henry, Ilsa,” I said. “I just went down to the dock to see that the boat was tied tightly.”
“Oh.” Ilsa nodded, frowning slightly. “Thank you, dear. I didn’t know you were here yet.”
“I was up in Myra’s room.”
“How is she this morning?”
“She doesn’t feel so well. Good morning, Werner.”
“Good morning,” he said. “Ready?”
I nodded. He put his arm around Ilsa and we went out to the car. I noticed that he was allowed to lead her when the rest of us would have been angrily pushed away because he did it with an utter lack of self-consciousness.
In spite of the heat we all crowded into the front seat. “Brand and Lorenzo got off at nine,” Ilsa said. “I don’t know what I’ll do without Lorenzo this winter but I’m glad he’s going.” Then after a moment, she added, “It feels like a northeaster.”
“It looks like one,” Werner answered.
“The ocean will be rough, then. Good,” she said.
I stopped my car at the edge of the dirt road near where Lorenzo had left Ilsa’s. If the northeaster did strike, the road would be washed out for about a week and we would be marooned. Werner held Ilsa firmly, almost carrying her when she stumbled in the loose shifting sand. I noticed that in spite of his shabbiness he seemed physically much stronger and firmer than he had eleven years before. There was no longer any softness about him; time and whatever his experiences had been had whittled his body thin and hard.
As we came up to the house the wind seemed to swoop down on us like an eagle. There was a great clamoring of mockingbirds quarreling, sea gulls screeching, palm branches rattling, and a piece of wood banging somewhere in the old empty stable. A branch snapped off the chinaberry tree and fell at our feet as we approached.
That musty sandy odor that belongs to houses at the sea when they have been shut up even for a few hours greeted us as we pushed in the screen door. Lorenzo, Brand, and Ira had evidently been hard at work. The floor had been swept; the windows and the front door were wide open; a fire had been laid in case the storm should turn the weather cold. As we came in, Brand and Lorenzo hurried down the stairs and Ira came out of the kitchen.
“Hello,” Lorenzo said. “We’ve got all the windows open.”
“Hello, Mamma; I think there’s going to be an awful storm. Ira says the warnings are out all along the coast. I’ve cleaned and filled all the lamps. Hello, Uncle Henry.” Brand nodded at me, kissed Ilsa, then threw an ungracious “hello” over her shoulder to Werner.
“Storm isn’t going to be bad. Just a plain old northeaster,” Ira said. “I’ve got a rabbit stew in the pot.” He nodded to us, looked searchingly at Ilsa, then went back out to the kitchen.
“Let’s go swimming now before the storm breaks,” Ilsa said, and we went upstairs to change to bathing clothes.
The waves were rough and wild. The shallow water was dirty, unpleasant, filled with sand and ground-up shells. The waves rolled over and pounced on us, trying to fling us down and grind us into fine dry particles like the sand and shells. Ilsa and Werner, Brand and Lorenzo, holding hands, stood up against the noisy buffetings of the waves, managing to push forward till they were beyond the sandy water. The only thing to do, then, when you saw a wave, was to dive under it in order to avoid being tossed onto the shore like a piece of driftwood. As each concave gray mountain approached, Werner would call out, “Wave!” and Ilsa would dive down, and as she came up on the other side of the churning water Werner would be there to take her hand.
Laughing and shouting, a few yards away, Brand and Lorenzo were diving and jumping, their skins pink and bright from the sharp impersonal slaps of the water. After a few minutes they came out and started walking up the beach, still hand in hand, but Ilsa and Werner continued to battle the waves, seeming to exult in their supremacy over the blind forces of nature, forces that could not cow Ilsa, supposedly as blind as they.
I stood at the edge of the water, shells and sand swirling about my ankles. There didn’t seem much point in going in when there was no one for me to protect and no one to protect me. I went back up to the house and dressed; when I got downstairs it was so dark with the approaching storm that I lit the lamps, though they would make the room warmer; and as I turned them up, their golden light brought color and life to the day. I picked up a magazine that the summer tenants had left and sat down to wait for the others. Ira looked in at me once, but he didn’t say anything. Except that his hair was shot with white, he seemed unchanged; he was part of the house, part of the beach, remaining, immutable; though the rest of us might grow old and die, Ira would stay as long as the coquina and cypress house, much of which he had built with his own hands, stood erect.
After about an hour Ilsa and Werner came up the ramp. They were laughing and singing; their voices were wild and excited almost as though they had absorbed some of the stormy abandon of the ocean. As they came in the door, Ilsa sniffed.
“The mantle on one of the lamps is burning,” she said.
I looked over at the big Aladdin standing lamp. The mantle was half blackened over with carbon and I turned it way down to give it a chance to clear up. I wouldn’t have noticed it till it was burned beyond repair.
Ilsa and Werner ran up the stairs. At the landing she paused. “Where’re Brand and Lorenzo?”
“Still walking on the beach, I guess,” I said, and turned back to my magazine though there wasn’t a word of interest in it. One of the shutters at the windows came loose and began to bang in the wind. I got up and went over to the window, pushed up the screen, and fastened the long rust-covered hook again. As I pulled the screen down I heard Ilsa on the stairs. I turned to watch her come down, hurrying, her fingers lightly touching the banister. She wore her usual beach garb of jeans and a bright shirt. Her strong slender feet were bare; they seemed to caress the boards beneath them as she crossed the room to her father’s chair.
“Have a good swim?” I asked.
“Wonderful. Children back yet?”
“They’re coming up the ramp now,” I said, looking out the window.
As Werner came down the stairs, Lorenzo and Brand burst in the screen door, shouting for food.
“All right, now, hold your horses,” Ira said, coming in from the kitchen. “Ilsa, you’ll have to move. I want to use the big table.” He thrust a handful of silver at Brand. “Here. Lay this. You, Lorenzo, get some napkins and put them out if you’re that hungry.” He went back to the kitchen and returned a moment later with a steaming fragrant earthenware pot of stew.
After eating three large bowlfuls, Werner suddenly said, “Ilsa—”
“What, darling?”
“The awful thing is that I have learned how to act.”
She leaned back in her chair. “Why is it awful and what do you mean?”
Werner fixed himself a piece of bread and sugar. “When I was here before, I played Hamlet, Cardinal Wolsey, all the leading roles. I was the star of the company, such as it was. Now, if I were ever in another production of Hamlet, the best I could hope for would be Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.”
“My two schoolfellows whom I trust trust as I will adders fanged,” Lorenzo said with relish.
Werner nodded, taking a large bite of bread and sugar. “Yes. And the unhappy part of it is that while I was playing Hamlet I didn’t have the faintest idea how.”
“And now you do?” Ilsa asked.
“Yes. I think I can come somewhere near playing it now. In the first place I have far less accent than I had. In the second place I’ve learned to act in the past eleven years. I’ve played all over the world, with all kinds of companies, to all kinds of audiences. That has helped. And I’ve lived and suffered during these years. There is more in me to come out. The b
est performances—and probably the last—of Hamlet that I ever gave were last year in Australia.”
“Tell me about them,” Ilsa said gently.
He put his bread and sugar down, pushed his chair back, and stood up. His eyes flashed; a light seemed suddenly to have been illuminated behind his face. “Do you remember in the very beginning of Hamlet,” he said, “in Hamlet’s very first scene on stage—Claudius, his father’s murderer, his mother’s lover, tells Hamlet that he does not want him to go back to the University. Hamlet pays only scant and scornful attention. Then Queen Gertrude says, ‘Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.’ When I did it here before, I had my queen simply lean forward and say the words lightly. And I answered just as lightly. I quite lost a very important moment.”
“How should it have been?” Lorenzo asked.
Werner turned to him for a moment, but it was not long before his eyes were back on Ilsa’s listening face. “You see,” he said, “I used to think of Hamlet as a role that could do something for me, rather than of myself as an actor who might be able to do something for Hamlet. It wasn’t so very long ago that I suddenly realized that Hamlet was more important than Franz Josef Werner.”
Ilsa leaned toward him. “Go on,” she said.
He was walking restlessly up and down. “The scene I mentioned may not be very important, but I think it is indicative of Hamlet’s main problem right at the outset of the play. He was hurt, I think, far more by his disillusionment in his mother than he was by the death of his father.”
Brand sat up erect in her chair. “What?” she asked sharply.
“It is Hamlet’s disappointment in his mother that overwhelms him,” Werner said. “He is lost in a horrible welter of inactivity and procrastination not because he is insane or because he is not brave enough to kill Claudius, but because there is no action he can possibly take that is large enough to express his horrible disillusionment. Killing Claudius would do to avenge his father, but it would do nothing toward clearing his mother.”
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