Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  “Isn’t that funny? I thought they all made it,” she said.

  For a time he read to her about the perils of migration. She recrossed her ankles, while she listened, observing the arches of her bare feet. Then, because she heard a murmur of voices in the glassed-in porch below, where the bank manager and his wife slept, and knew that the rest would be coming up the stairs and that only a short time was left her in her son’s room, she lost her feigned reverence for birds. “Listen, Davy baby,” she began. “I don’t want you to get vain about being a good dancer or looking like the great lover Gable just because you stirred up those women down there. You’re neither. You want to know what it is?” She tilted her head back, lifting her gaze to the ceiling. “It’s your youth. It’s because you’re so young, baby.” She laughed. “You look at them as if you’re seeing women for the first time, and what it does to them is make them feel they’re being seen for the first time by any man. You make them feel fabulous—oh, as if they’ve got a thousand secrets they could tell you.” She laughed again, still toward the ceiling. “You know what Russell is going to say? When everybody is asleep, he’ll say in a whisper, he’ll say, ‘Davy got out of hand tonight, didn’t he? Those women will be creeping around the house all night long.’ ” She brought her gaze down, a humorously warning gaze. “You want to put a chair against your door?”

  She saw in his expressionless face that he did not want to understand her joke. He did not want to suspect that she had come up the stairs and away from the others not to tell him about the other women but to tell him, by her presence, that nobody else could claim his enticing youth except herself, if it were to be claimed at all. He was her son; she had given him his life and his youth, his present and his future, his elusiveness, and, by telling him she knew his effect upon the other women, she was reminding him of her claim to him, if she had a claim. “Go on,” she said, settling farther into her chair. “Read to me, read to me.”

  She heard Duggan and his wife come up the stairs and enter their bedroom quietly, while the murmuring below was borne out on the still air into the dark yard. After a time she heard Russell come up. Then the murmuring ceased and the house was silent. David read to her for a while longer and when he was tired of reading she told him to turn off the light, and she sat in darkness, reluctant to go to her husband, to lie down beside him. She was struck by the years of her accumulated contempt for her husband as by an unexpected blow to her body. Their voices muted by the darkness, she and her son talked together, finding inconsequential things to talk about. He told her about a boy he had made friends with a few days before and how far around the lake they went with the boy’s uncle in his motorboat, and as he talked she listened more to the sound of his voice than to the words, feeling the sound of his young voice, his faltering, low, slightly hoarse voice reverberate in her body.

  Her husband was sitting on the bed in the darkness. The light from the hallway, as she opened the door, revealed him half undressed, smoking a cigarette. Though he was not yet in bed, he had already turned off the lamp, or not turned it on, apparently wanting to reject her with darkness, and she felt that she had come from the presence of a man who was more than he. It seemed to her that Russell and the others in the house and herself were all to be left behind by her son, their lives nothing compared to what his life was to be, that this man, castigating her with darkness, sat in a cul-de-sac of a life. She felt that all of them except her son were trapped in the summer night in that house with the unwashed glasses and ashtrays on floors and couches and windowsills, with intimate, used garments on floors and chairs—everything testifying to wasted lives.

  “Golden vipers,” she said, low, pacing the floor in her bare feet, making no noise on the floorboards, as if she were weightless. “Always some little surprise or other, always some concoction nobody ever heard of before and that’s deadly familiar. How do you manage to accomplish both at the same time?”

  “Enough, enough. Every little thing. Enough . . . ,” he said, breathing out the words as if someone were testing him physically to see how much pain he was able to bear.

  “They all add up to the big thing.”

  “What’s the big thing?” he asked, challengingly, unafraid.

  “You. They all add up to you.” She was unable to move, struck by her own cruelty.

  “You don’t see me right, Vivian,” he said. “You’ve got a crazy way of looking at me. You put together things nobody notices because they’re nothing to notice. You watch for everything and call it a fault.”

  She pressed her temples to destroy the cruelty in her head, but it was not cornered by a posture or a wish. “It’s you I see,” she insisted.

  “Me? Me?” He kept his voice low. “You act like I misrepresented myself. I never misrepresented myself, Vivian. Besides, you’re smart, Vivian. You’re smart enough to know if a man’s lying to you. That’s not saying I’m satisfied with myself. You don’t know what’s plaguing me. You think I think everything’s great. You think I think my life’s just great. What I gripe about—this guy and that guy, some deals—you think there’s nothing else that gripes me. I see the way you see me and I don’t look so good, sometimes, but you can’t see what I feel. I’d like to tell you what I feel. Or maybe I wouldn’t like to. If I could tell you, you still wouldn’t know.” He paused. “I’ll tell you,” and paused again. He was rubbing his knees, trying to rub away his confusion over himself, straining to engage his being in whatever was the aspiration he could not find words for.

  It was so amorphous a thing for him to tell—the thing which he hoped would make him more in her eyes—that the attempt to reveal it was almost like an attempt to confess a crime instead of to reveal a virtue.

  She went over to him. There was no one else to lie down beside if she wanted an embrace against her own cruelty. He leaned forward to clasp her around her legs, drawing her down with him.

  “Vivian, listen. When I first saw you, the way you ran down that hill like a kid, I said there’s a woman with a heart as big as the world. So if I blow up, you’re supposed to know I don’t mean it. Lie still, lie still,” he urged.

  14

  Maria came to visit more frequently at Vivian’s invitation until she was with them almost ritually every weekend. Along with the diffidence, there was now in her manner almost the slyness of a spy in the enemy camp. At twelve she was ineffectually pretty in Vivian’s eyes; there was no quickness, no grace, no wiles, no artifice to make persuasive the large, smoky blue eyes and fair skin; and this lack of conscious femininity, which was, to Vivian, the very soul of a woman, was not, she thought, the girl’s fault, not the dead mother’s fault, not the fault of the grandmother with whom she lived, but Russell’s fault. The girl was evidence to her always that he had not been the man he ought to have been in that other marriage. The girl was like the dead wife’s past consciousness of him as he was; she was like the wife’s dismayed, sorrowing consciousness of him.

  With the girl, they drove up to the mountains to ski, and Maria, who could not ski and could not learn, spent the time walking in snowshoes, and Vivian sometimes accompanied her, affected by the sight of the girl alone, her sad face surrounded by a knit cap of exultant red. In the summer, they drove to Monterey, or up into the gold-mining country and gambled on the machines in desolate saloons, or they went to Clearlake or to Tahoe to swim.

  Constantly urged by Russell to intrude upon David, to swim as far, to climb as far, Maria, one day at Lake Tahoe, in the midst of Russell’s badgering, stood up from the shallow water where she had been paddling around and struck out after David, who was climbing onto a raft several yards offshore. She was an awkward swimmer, fearful and rigid. Even so, while they watched apprehensively and with shame, the girl, apparently propelled by sheer anger against the man who had taunted her, got as far as midway, and then could neither turn back nor continue on to the raft. Russell ran into the water and swam after her, and, with one arm around her, helped her back to shore. Once on her feet and
out of the water, Maria refused to go as far as the blanket where they had congregated before. She sat down on wet sand, facing the water, clasping her knees, not acknowledging her father’s presence or Vivian’s. Vivian laid a sweater over the girl’s back and sat down beside her. Russell lay on his back, several yards away.

  “I think he wanted me to drown,” Maria said.

  “That’s not true.” Vivian put her arm around the girl.

  “It’s true,” the girl said.

  “But he rescued you.”

  “I wasn’t drowning.”

  “Then you see, it’s not true,” Vivian said, hugging the girl to impress upon her their humorous reasoning.

  Maria sat alone, after Vivian had left her, until it was time for them to leave the lake, and on the long drive back to the city that evening she did not speak, not even to answer.

  Russell returned at two in the morning, after taking Maria home, and, as was his habit, stopping by at the nightclub. He stumbled down onto the bench of Vivian’s dressing table, facing her where she lay in bed. “You terribly awfully fond of her, Vivian?” he asked. “Why?”

  “Why?” she repeated, half asleep.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I guess I feel sorry for her.”

  “You’re not fond of her and you’re not sorry for her and you’re not fond of me and you’re not sorry for me. You just don’t like me. It’s that simple. That’s the crux of it. You don’t like me and because you don’t like me you fix it up so we see her every week. You use her to remind me of something you think ought to be plaguing me. What do you want to plague me with, Vivian?” He began to weep without covering his face, and his pale eyes, paler because of the deeply flushed face, seemed to have wept out their color before he returned home to weep.

  She slept in the guest room after that night, and heard him come home, stumbling, slamming doors, an hour after the nightclub closed. One night he did not come home, and in the morning her father telephoned to tell her that the manager had ordered Russell from the club because he had made a nuisance of himself, complaining to the patrons that his wife refused to sleep with him. He did not come home that day and, at two in the morning, her father telephoned again: Russell had spent the evening in the restaurant next door to the club, buying drinks for a couple, buying supper for them, telling of his ostracism, that his wife forbade him to come home and his partners forbade him to enter the nightclub.

  An hour after her father had called, Russell returned. “It’s me, don’t shoot!” he shouted, unlocking the front door. “Vivian, you hear me up there? I’m turning on all the lights so you can see it’s me. You saw that thing in the papers? She shot her husband dead because she thought he was a prowler?” He came up the stairs, stamping, and into their bedroom, shaking his keys above his head with both hands.

  As if he felt he required some excuse for being there, for returning, he began to undress, pulling at his tie, unbuttoning his shirt before he had removed his coat. He took off his coat and seemed surprised to find his tie gone and his shirt already unbuttoned. Then, as if he were afraid that somebody else had unbuttoned him because he was incapable of it, because he was drunk, his face flushed up in humiliation. “What’s this guilt every woman puts on me? What’s this bloody guilt?” he shouted. “What’re you retaliating for, Viv? What’re you retaliating for? You’re always retaliating for something I never know I do to you.”

  “I said nothing,” she said.

  “You say nothing. What makes you think you need to say something? I get the point. And Maria says nothing, but I get the point. She’s like a creditor—I didn’t pay my bill, I didn’t meet my obligations, or the check bounces. What’s this guilt every woman puts on me? What’s this bloody guilt? I been walking around with it all my life. I was sitting next to this guy and I was telling him what a wonderful woman you are and goddamn how I didn’t deserve you, how I wasn’t good enough for you, when he says to me, ‘You got guilt on you, man. What you don’t deserve is your guilt.’ That man, a stranger, knows more about me than any man I call a friend. ‘You got guilt on you,’ he says. ‘That’s the only thing you don’t deserve.’ You hear that? Seems to be a goddamn disease that women got. They give you a dose of guilt like a whore gives you a dose of clap.” He sat down on the bench, bent over to untie his shoe, his face lifted to her at the same moment that his bare back was reflected in the large, round mirror of the dressing table, and it seemed to her that his undressing was an act assuring him his words would not, after all, bring about the end. “If there were trials, if there were trials, if they could accuse you of leading your wife to her end just by being yourself, they’d do it and hang you for it. Isn’t that the truth, over there? That you got me for life and what kind of life is it? You got everything invested in me and who am I? What I’d like to know is why the hell did you get into the bind? And why the hell did Anna? Why did she? What do you want? What do you expect? You think you’re embracing the whole goddamn universe and you wake up the next morning and it’s me there? It’s me there? And what do you do, then? You give me this guilt. You give me this guilt when I’m spitting up my heart to do the job right.”

  She threw off the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, trembling. Alerted by her movement, apparently suspecting that she was about to flee across the hall to her son, he lifted his head as if he could, if he tried, hear David listening. The boy could not hear the words, she knew, but the angry pitch could reach him. “You get ’em young enough, you got ’em on your side. You get ’em in the cradle. That’s it. That’s a goddamn political truth, every politician knows that. Give ’em the ideology with their mother’s milk and you got ’em for life. Go on in and throw yourself on him and tell him what you’re suffering, tell him how I make you suffer.” He slammed his hand down hard and flat on the bench. “I never did anything to you!” he shouted. “I never did anything to any woman that I have to feel guilty about. Why do you want to make me guilty?”

  “I’m not Anna,” she said. “Don’t talk to me that way,” as if he had shouted that other wife into her grave.

  “You’re all Anna,” he cried. “You’re all alike. Sometimes I start to call you Anna.” He stood up to unbuckle his belt but the rage against her forced him to put on his shirt again. His hands shook as they went down the buttons.

  She began to walk around the room, frightened by his accusation that she was as his wife Anna had been. She had not thought that the desperation in herself was as much as in that other woman, but this comparing them roused in her the fear that it was as much. “If I’m Anna,” she cried, “then I can tell you how she felt. You want to know how she felt? Everything she said against herself was against you, because she was afraid to say it against you.”

  “She wasn’t afraid to say it!” he shouted. “What makes you think she was afraid?”

  “Sometimes I say it, but I’m afraid when I say it,” she told him. “Every time I say something against you to your face, it’s like a terrible falling, like I’ve cut the ground out from under my feet.”

  “That is the ground under your feet!” he shouted. “That is the ground.”

  “No, it’s true,” she said, twining her fingers. “It’s true what I say. That’s the way she felt, I know. She couldn’t bear you anymore, but she couldn’t cut the ground away. That’s a terrible thing, not to be able to bear the ground under your feet. What do you do then but die?”

  “You blame me for it?”

  She gave him a look of scorn, and was appalled by the slipping away of the ground. He came toward her and she waited, unable to expect that he would strike her. He struck her and she fell to her knees, clinging to him. He grasped her arms and flung her off. When she got to her feet, he followed her. “Go on! Goddamn! Go on! Go on, faster!” he shouted. “You know the way, you know the way. Take off your goddamn nightgown. What’s that on for when you run naked in the hallway? He’ll think you’re dressed to go out, looks like a goddamn dress to go out in.” He grasped the
hem of it, but she swung around, striking at him, and, missing him, fell against her son’s door.

  Above her, she saw her son strike Russell in the chest. The boy flew at the man, all his taciturnity released into rage, into shouting and striking. Russell flung him away, and when the boy fell against the wall, struck him in the face with the back of his hand and left them. David helped her into his room and locked the door, and they sat together on his bed, trembling, listening to Russell’s sobs and his screams at the sobs to stay down, and they heard the rush of water in the basin. Then he left the house, raced the engine of his car, and roared away.

  She ran down the stairs and bolted the door, afraid that he would return, afraid that later in the night, wherever he was, in some hotel room, he would be forced to return. She lay down in her bed. She was not concerned with her son; he could take care of himself and his own wounds. If he was trembling, it was with fear of things beginning, of woundings and conflicts beginning; he was not trembling with the fear of endings.

  15

  In the morning they packed a few clothes and left the house, wanting to be away if Russell returned. On the drive down to Monterey, David drowsed in the sun beating into the open car, his head lolling back against the seat. She glanced at his face; as dearly familiar as it was, she always found more than a touch of the unfamiliar, and now the bruise increased the strangeness. As she drove with the drowsing boy, it seemed to her that his elusiveness was an accusation that she had always, since his birth, held other persons to be more valuable than he, that all her time was spent in the company of other persons for whom she must make herself valuable, when who were the others, after all? He was to repay her in kind, she knew. It was inevitable. He was to spend his life in the company of persons whose value for him she would never be able to comprehend, and she felt a deep stirring of curiosity about that life of his beyond his fourteen years and about those persons, some not yet born, who were to rake his mind and his heart with their being.