The Puzzleheaded Girl

by Christina Stead

  She said slowly, “And Laura, you had some red velvet slippers, the rest was gold and there were golden bells on them, real bells that rang; and you said they came from Paris.”

  “Oh, yes. That was a mystery. I lost them that day.”

  “I know. I stole them.”

  A pause. Then: “And what happened to them?”

  She shook her head vaguely. Then she said, “I was going to get married just before I came over. They fixed it all up. Mother planned the reception at the Plaza, we bought things, father furnished the apartment.”

  The Deans laughed; then they saw she did not think it was funny. “Mother and I got tired running about buying everything at Bonwit’s and Saks and—other places.”

  The Deans held their breath. She continued, “Mother just raided the bank account. And Dad got mad at us. He spent a lot on the furniture. It was all ready. Then a week before, I couldn’t do it. Not to get married for that reason. I just couldn’t sleep with the man. He was all right. My father liked him and Mother liked him. Dad said I let him down,” she said resentfully. “I was in disgrace. I was angry. He was angry. He went off to Canada on business. Mother went with Aunt Mary to Buenos Aires to get back Uncle Ted, I was left there in the office.”

  “Uncle Ted ran away again?”

  “Yes. They went to Buenos Aires and found him. You can always find a baker. Dad had to pay for that trip too and for bringing Uncle Ted back. He lost his hair over that. I thought they were all doing anything they liked and leaving me there in the office. So I took the money out of the cash drawer and the bank account and I sold my coat and I came over.”

  Since they said nothing, she explained gently, “But Mother was right. They had to get Uncle Ted back.”

  “Why?” said Martin. “Your Aunt Mary—” he paused.

  “He has to stand by his family,” she explained nicely. “A man must.”

  Laura expostulated. “But you know Aunt Mary herself ran away—I know you know.”

  She said innocently, “But a woman is different, isn’t she? My mother explained it to me. A woman is always right because that is nature; she is the mother and a man has to stand by her. What a woman does is never wrong, because she has to survive. She has to live her own life because she is there to give life. If she has a strong feeling about something it’s instinct, and with women instinct is always right. It is a protection.”

  They were silent.

  They had come to the verge of the great forest. It was still fine and very mild in the forest, in which could be seen at a distance faint clouds of leaves just settling on the trees; patches and tatters of colour, people’s clothes, bluebells, little children. There were villas with tea-gardens.

  “Will you have tea, Linda?”

  “I like tea. They send me tea-bags and I make it in my room.”

  “Will you have some now?”

  “No, not now,” she said in her reserved manner.

  “You oughtn’t to live at St. Germain-des-Prés,” said Martin. “It’s the golden mile; they see the golden Yankees coming.”

  “Hm—they’re very nice to me—they almost—treat me like a daughter; as if they—thought—I had to be watched over. He’s very strict with me, doesn’t let in people who come. A boy came and he told him I’d gone out. The boy waited for me and I was upstairs all the time.”

  She laughed slightly: was it in a troubled way? “But I’m looking for another hotel not so dear and I did think of getting out of the American quarter, getting one near the Champs Elysées. I haven’t been up there except by taxi. I’m working in a night club there! Le Faisan d’Or. I sing there.”

  “What do they pay you?”

  “Oh, I’ve only sung there two nights. They promised me a thousand francs a night, but I don’t know if I’ll get it. You see,” she continued with a clear laugh, “I can’t drink. It’s lucky. I was just sitting in the night club when the waiter told me to go to the bar. A man wanted to drink with me. When I went over and he asked me what I would have, I said a roast beef sandwich and some milk. So they sent to the kitchen for it. I think he was surprised though. And I’m hungry. That’s how I have my supper. Perhaps they don’t like it. The sandwiches are good.”

  “Lin, are you short of money?” asked Martin.

  “Oh, I have plenty of money,” she said indifferently. “The night club pays me. I get two or three nights there and at other places, the Vieux-Colombier. I’m auditioning for the Rose Rouge. And I have money from home. I sold my fur coat. A boy friend of mine brought his mother and sister and my sheepskin was hanging on the peg. The sister said, I wish I had one like that. I said, You can have it: thirty-five thousand francs. Without thinking. He said, Okay, and I got the thirty-five thousand francs. I have about seventeen thousand francs left. Not enough to go home.”

  “Do you want to go home?” She was silent.

  They walked around a while before dinner. With a long balanced step she walked through the splendid setting, looking nowhere but ahead, in her indifferent beauty and fastidious youth.

  “We were worrying about you, in the strikes,” said Laura.

  “No, I wasn’t there.” After a pause she explained, “My mother wrote to me to keep out of it. She said, Be a vegetable.” Linda gave a low laugh.

  “Be a vegetable—in Paris!” cried Martin.

  Linda laughed. “Yes, I know; but Mother is right.”

  “What does your father say?” inquired Martin.

  After a pause, she answered quietly, “My mother left all that behind her after Peekskill. She walked in the procession and she saw people on both sides talking at them, looking at them like enemies; and some of them were beaten afterwards. They laid for them just like dogs. Here comes another, let’s get him. They were badly beaten. They waited for them in the dark,” she said in her strange light thoughtfulness. She laughed in her way, troubling and troubled. “Then they wanted to get to the children’s hall and some wanted to get to the cars; but they waited for them there, too. There was a banner welcoming Paul Robeson. Oh,” she said laughing mildly, “they stirred up the whole town against them. They thought they were traitors, enemies and they were out to get them.”

  “The papers said they were in a lynch mood.”

  A pause. Then: “Mother said she’d been mistaken all along. Mother thought communism was a popular movement, that they were a sort of national movement. At the Beach everyone was a Communist. You said hello to anyone, because he’d be one of us. But then Mother saw how they were hated, that they didn’t correspond to any national aspiration or any popular feeling, and she left. She said what was the purpose of belonging to something that wasn’t a part of the American people.”

  “Didn’t she understand the election returns?” asked Martin sharply.

  Linda said, “Mother saw that it didn’t mean what she thought it meant. It wasn’t American. They were trying to impose foreign ideas. It didn’t spring from the people. Everything must spring from the people, she explained.”

  “Didn’t your mother ever realize she was in a minority?” said Laura thoughtfully.

  “Out at the Beach, everyone was with us: we were in and out of each other’s houses all our lives. It was a community.”

  “Yes,” said Laura, “it was a happy life. You understood each other.”

  Linda did not reply.

  “And your father—Alfred?” said Martin impatiently.

  “My father?”

  “I know him. He hasn’t given up his beliefs. He’s an old fighter.”

  “Oh, Dad is doing business. He has offices in Montreal and in Mexico City. He has one in New York. I was working there.”

  “When you took the money from the cash drawer and left?” said Martin angrily.

  Laura pulled his sleeve. Linda laughed. “Yes. I could take anything I wanted. We all shared always.”

  Outside a restaurant in the forest stood the cars of rich customers.

  “Are those American cars?” she said.

&n
bsp; “Some are. The German High Command lived here, and now the Americans are here. You can see why some of the French call them the Occupant.”

  “Who?” She did not understand.

  Laura said, “The forest is in bad condition, you see. The Germans didn’t look after it. The trees need care.”

  “I didn’t know you had to look after trees.”

  Like a living frieze, riders in coloured coats, on various horses, passed along the rides among the bushes.

  “Let’s go riding,” said Linda.

  “Do you ride?”

  “No; but it’s nice. I could come out here and learn.”

  “I can’t ride,” said Laura.

  Coming home, they passed one of the numerous riding stables in town. It had stiles around a paved yard strewn with fresh straw. The gates were open and fowls were pecking in a heap of dung at the gate. In the air of this cobbled street hung the piquant odour of fresh horse urine. Down the street rode two schoolgirls, one in breeches, one in slacks, on brown mares.

  “Yes, I should like to do that. I’ll come and live here and we’ll do that.”

  “Linda, I can’t do it.”

  Linda laughed. “Just get up and go. Horses like me. Animals like me.”

  Martin began to talk about Island Beach where they had known her first. “Your mother used to talk to the neighbour while they were both cooking. The houses were so close, you could step from one backstep to another, never touch the ground. The door-steps were like running-boards. It was sand underneath. The houses were like beached boats.”

  Linda reflected with a smile.

  “I remember,” said Laura, “that everyone loved Alfred. Even the bad boys, the handbag snatchers and razor-boys. They used to gather near your father’s store and wait about for him. When he came out they argued with him. They wanted him to run for Congress. They said they’d work for him for nothing, go around slashing, get out the vote.”

  Linda suddenly had a delightful smile and said, “Did they? I never knew that.”

  Martin said, “Alfred was always the popular boy. I would have made speeches for him myself.”

  Linda said, “Mother always said that with the people he knew, our background, he ought to have got on. Mother said he wasn’t doing himself justice. And she said at a certain time, after a woman has worked hard and brought up her family, she wants to relax, she expects certain comforts. She said a man who always knew fine people, artists and leading revolutionaries and writers and Congressmen, ought to be making more money, move to a better district. It’s the right thing. You get a start among your own people and then you move on.”

  “By your own people, you mean the poor people, do you?” asked Laura.

  “The poor people?” She was surprised. “Were they poor?”

  Laura laughed. “You mean the gangsters who wanted to get out the vote for your father weren’t poor?”

  “They had plenty of money to spend. There were places they used to rob every week; and other places paid them protection money. A few went for labour goons when things were bad, but they didn’t like it. It was dangerous. They never touched—the Doc, they called my father. They never hurt anyone they knew. They were all right.”

  “And so they weren’t poor,” persisted Laura.

  “But there aren’t any poor in America. Look at those cars we saw. They’re all American cars. Look at all the money we send over. We have to help everyone.”

  “Why do you think?” said Laura.

  She reflected and then said slowly and naively, “I don’t know. Europeans are poor, I suppose.”

  “Why did you come over here, Lin?” Martin asked.

  She did not seem to hear, musing. Then she said, very lively, “The Doc has taken up sculpture and he’s good at it. Some gal of his got him into it; she said he had good hands and she was right.”

  She continued, “He used one of the candlesticks on the mantel-piece for an armature for a figure. He did me. He learned casting at the school. He attends classes and he has had private instruction. You know he has beautiful hands. I have a photograph of his hands dripping with clay. He was casting. The instructor stopped the class and took a photograph of the Doc as he turned to listen. The Doc did the first casting at home in the kitchen and he called out, Lin, come and look. I didn’t come and he was bringing it to show me when he dropped it. He burst into tears.”

  They were all three silent.

  Linda suddenly said, “Mother’s dropped all her nonsense now. She’s very good and she runs the business along with him: she gets along with everyone. Everyone likes her.”

  “I heard your mother was ill.”

  Linda became very chatty. “Oh, it’s a thing, an operation. It’s in the family both sides. All the families have tumours, both sides.”

  “It wasn’t serious?”

  “Oh, yes, it was serious. She had everything taken out, but it’s a fad, all the gals do it. They say, Oh, I’m having everything taken out next week. No one minds. I thought of it too. I nearly did. They wanted me to do it and I thought, Save trouble. And I did—”

  “You did!”

  She did not reply.

  She said more quietly after a pause, “The Doc was always saying he was going to quit. I thought he would quit. He did quit a few times. So Mother thought she would have this operation. And he did come back. He’s too hard on Mother. She’s right.”

  She continued earnestly, “But I am grateful to my parents. They gave us a good background. We had a real home.”

  After dinner Martin said that he was tired and had soon to go to bed. “I have been ill. I fell downstairs. The Germans took their stair-carpets. They were in a hurry but not too much of a hurry for that. The Colonel hasn’t the money for a new carpet, so they polish the stairs to a fare-thee-well.”

  “I don’t really want to go,” said Linda nicely. “What I will do is to come out here and find a room and live near you. You have another room here. Perhaps I could stay on that sofa until tomorrow and then look for a room, a small room near the forest. There are a lot of children living round here. It must be healthy. And we could go riding.”

  “If you don’t go now,” said Martin, “you’ll miss the train after nine.”

  “I want to stay,” she said affectionately.

  “No, go home tonight and see us soon. Martin is so tired.”

  “Will you look after him?” she said to Laura. “If he is tired when he comes to Paris for business, he can go up to my room to rest. I’ll tell the man he’s a friend of my parents, and he can stay.”

  She said in a lowered voice, “The reason I came to France was I was working for the Doc in the New York office and while he was away in Canada and Mother in South America, I came on a little drawer in the desk with letters from Laura; and in one of them you spoke about a letter the Doc had written to you, Laura. He said he was up a tree about a gal; and you said, Get a stand-in. And in another of them, the last one, you spoke about the Doc coming to Europe, as if it were all settled and you expected him in the summer. Last summer.” She threw this out, not accusing, but with disillusionment.

  “Yes,” said Laura.

  “I knew nothing about it. I was so upset I didn’t speak to anyone at home for a few days after they came back. The Doc asked me what was the matter. Do you want me to do this or that? Oh, go out and do whatever you want to do, I said, leave me alone. You don’t care about what I want. But they insisted; and I said nothing. But at last the Doc came down to the office with me in the subway and said, Now come on, what’s the matter, Lin? I said, Were you thinking of going to France? He had to admit that he had been thinking of it; and that he had even mentioned to you that he might go in May. And Mother too? He said he had been so angry with Mother about some escapade that he had not told her, but she was going, too. And not me? I said. I thought you were getting married, Lin, he said. So I saw they were just going to marry me and then start living again, start off without me. I felt bad. I wouldn’t tell him how I fe
lt and I didn’t speak to them. I made up my mind to go myself, get there before them and I would meet them here. And when the Doc went away again, that’s what I did. Mother was away somewhere. I guess she was cheating on the Doc again. I rang up and got a passage. I sold my coat and got things on our credit accounts and took money out of the office and I sailed. When I got here I wrote to them.”

  She was, at that moment, a gentle and lovable girl, beautiful with all her sallow skin, bad complexion; and in a manner trustful and simple. Martin was irritated by this story but she did not know it. Laura took her to the station and, waiting on the platform, Linda said, “I’ll come out in a few days and look for a room. Perhaps over the restaurant you showed me. You said the food is very good there. And the Doc will like this place, those walls and those streets and the forest. We will all go out together. He used to take me out every weekend to some place. We used to stay overnight sometimes. We can do it here too. We’ll all go together,” she repeated joyfully. “It will be very good.”

  “Will you have money to stay?” asked Laura.

  “I have plenty of money,” she answered carelessly. “I have sold my coat for twenty-seven thousand francs and I have other money.”

  She went away; but they did not hear from her. When Martin went to Paris a month later he called at her hotel but he found she had moved. The hotel-keeper’s wife had a talk with him. “Are you her father’s friend?”

  “I am her father’s best friend.”

  “Are her parents coming for her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She says they are.”

  “Yes, I know she thinks so; but they’re business people.”

  “Some women came for her,” she said significantly.

  “Some women? American friends?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She looked at him, nodded. He nodded and smiled but he did not know what she meant.

  “The women came and took her.”

  “And you have no address?”

  “I thought you would have. She talked about you.”

  She had no more to say. When he was going she said, “If her parents come for her, I know she will go back home. This life is not for her. She doesn’t understand it.”