Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  “Does it seem she’s always known you?” It was a question she ought to have left behind in sleep, where she must have heard it clearly spoken.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Neither did she. Unless she meant that the woman he loved now must seem to him to have known him back in the years of his obscurity, when no one else had known he was already the man he was to become, when only he had known.

  “She loves me, that’s all I know,” he said, and the longing in his voice confirmed his love for the other. “She would have loved me when I was a nobody, if that’s what you want me to doubt.”

  She got up and with her back to him began to dress, wanting to destroy the tormentor in herself, wanting to give in to the way things were in the world, wanting to regain an innocence from years ago, that receptive innocence to which all things offered themselves.

  She heard him get up and begin to dress. Somewhere in the house a phone rang. Over in her aerie the woman must be wondering why he hadn’t appeared, suspecting he was caught in the maelstrom stirred up by the woman he’d left. He closed the door to the small room where Ilona had seen a desk and books, and she heard no words, only the resonance of his voice against the door. She imagined the compulsion of love that brought the woman to phone him. More than compulsion—the conviction that she was loved and her voice always welcomed and waited for, and Ilona imagined his pleasure, his relief, hearing the voice that rescued him from his tormentor, if only for a brief moment.

  When he came back she begged him, “Don’t tell her what I’m feeling. Never tell her.”

  “She’s compassionate,” he said.

  Compassion from the woman he loved for the woman he left—what an unbearable offering! It was a blow to her very center. Why didn’t he know this? It was the simplest thing in the world to know. She tried to get past him in the doorway. She was dressed and she tried to get past him and go out into the world and leave him forever.

  “Wait, wait, wait, Ilona.”

  With both fists she struck him on the chest. He caught her wrists and she struggled to be free, twisting her arms, trying to bite his hands. The woman must be watching from over there in her aerie, that serene, that knowing face watching her, Ilona, whose compassion was only a tenuous little virtue, and who had none at all for these lovers. It was as if he had taken it away from her and given it to the other, who had already so many virtues to be loved for.

  “Wait, Ilona, wait. I don’t know where I am.”

  It calmed her a bit, his confession. If he didn’t know where he was, then neither did the woman know for sure and neither did she.

  Then they were wandering together through unlit rooms, arms around each other, locked in silence. After a time he began to switch on lamps, and after a time she sat down at the table in the room with the flowering plants and he began to prepare supper for them and, watching him moving about in the kitchen light, she saw him as the ultimate stranger, someone proving to her how little she knew about anyone, almost nothing about the feel of his life to him, about the desperation of his desires, and she saw herself as a censor of his life, substituting herself for life’s deepenings.

  Martin set plates and silver on the table, sat down across from her and served her.

  “Give me your hand”—placing his left hand over her left hand, and they held their forks in their right hands but could not eat.

  “I expected you to understand”—touching the tines of his fork to his brow and then to his heart. “Like you feel for your characters.”

  She shook her head. She understood nothing, and the time was coming—it might already be here—when she wouldn’t be able even to pretend in her work to be on the trail of even the slightest clue.

  “Ilona, look at me.”

  No matter how gently he asked she couldn’t lift her eyes. Her eyes would be so unseeing he’d wish he had never asked her to meet his eyes.

  He kept his hand over hers all through the silent meal, and when they sat on the backporch steps, under faint stars and in the warm wind, he stroked her hand and stroked her hair. Voices and music from the apartments and houses around them were carried toward them and away, and the thrashing of branches was louder in the darkness.

  When they lay down together to sleep he kissed her on her forehead and on her lips, lay back, clasped her hand in his hands on his chest and, breathing very quietly, fell asleep, yielding to sleep so it might bear him away. She remembered dreams he had told her about—daring escapes, false accusations that might be true, of being trapped again in the army and running amok, and she remembered a dream about her. He had sat up in sleep and called her name, though she was lying right there beside him, because he was dreaming that she was running down some stairs, away from him forever. She slept and was wakened by the certainty that this night was the last night she would sleep beside him and that no one would question him about her disappearance. No one, because he was absolved of any act, any confounding of himself and others, he was absolved because his life was just as it ought to be. All the strangers out in the world who saw his work as an absolving of them for being so human, all were absolving him of her disappearance from his life.

  The streetlamp was dimming out, giving way to dawn. She picked up her clothes to carry them into another room so the rustling as she dressed wouldn’t wake him. He was sleeping on his back again, his face upward, and she found no grateful acceptance in his face of that absolution she had granted him. A troubling lay over his face, but lightly, as if whatever was going on in the depths of sleep had a long way to rise to the surface.

  A dense fog covered the city, concealing the hills below this one. Only a few patches of neighborhoods could be seen, floating islets, appearing and vanishing in a gray sea. She went down the hill trying not to shiver. Yesterday she had come here in just a skirt and blouse, believing the hot spell was to go on forever or disbelieving she was to stay the night.

  11

  When her heart waked her in the night she would get up, slip a sweater over her pajamas, sit down at her table, and call up from the past the one who was pleading with her to rescue him, the one she had kept at a distance so that he could never be recognized as her brother. In the middle of the night, every night, she was called out on a rescue mission, fearful over whom she must rescue, not her brother alone but herself along with him. Nobody else in the world was going to get up from bed and sit down at a notebook to rescue them from the dark.

  Early on in their time together, Martin had told her about himself and his farm family in Montana in an amused, indulgent way like a father of himself, and that was the way he had told about them in his novel, and when he had asked Ilona about herself she had told him a few things, hesitantly, and then more, and everything she told him seemed to have been waiting to be told just to him. It was only the usual way lovers exchange stories about their lives, hoping, without knowing they were hoping, that years later when they had lost touch with each other, what little each had learned about the other would be remembered with understanding. Once when they were strolling and she glimpsed his reflection in a mirror in a store window she had mistaken his face for her own. They didn’t resemble each other. She had entrusted his face, his broad, wide-gazed face, with her own history, her own self, and his face had become so kindred, so dearly familiar, that to see his face as her own had been a natural enough mistake. But now this scribbling away in a dimestore notebook set her among those nocturnal souls who fill their pages—every inch and the margins too—with eternal concerns of no concern at all to anyone else.

  Over and over in memory she approached the yellow stucco bungalow in the weeds, afraid to go in and see again the ones unutterably dear, those she could not tell about because to attempt to tell was like an invasion of sacred ground, because something was protecting them from her, from fallacy, from artifice, from failure. But at last she went in, choosing—among all the weathers in which she had approached that bungalow and gone in—a summer twilight, because the sky
of that time of day had been filled with promise and the deeper the blue became the more certain she had become of the existence of the world’s great cities and far outposts.

  She had always come home alone. She had a lover in that time, that last year, but she never brought him home to see her mother fading away in the tiny bedroom where the plaster had fallen in patches and the slats showed through like the bones of the house, and to see her brother in other men’s discarded clothes, too small or too large, and to see his excited face and to hear his hollowy voice, like the voice of a desert prophet. Every stranger was the wisest being on earth for him, even the welfare worker who came at intervals since their father died to assure herself they were in need and whose eyes swelled with fear of him, the towering man leaning over her, asking her questions about people in the newspapers and in history, because wasn’t it her job to collect data on everyone in the world? If Ilona were to bring a lover home, just for that lover to see who were the ones she was close to, he would have to be someone like Rilke who saw the blind man, the leper, the lunatic, with infinite compassion and whose poetry she read in the back room of the bookstore when there were no customers to wait on and no books to wrap.

  Out of high school, seventeen, she had inquired at every bookstore for a job, the secondhand ones, the antiquarian ones, the ones that sold only the latest, because to work in the midst of thousands of books, no matter how cluttered, how musty, how concrete-cold the store might be, was to feel cloistered and concealed from the world and yet in the world. From the edge of the city she had ventured far into its illusory center, into a glamour core, an enclave, where she passed celebrities on the street and persons who desired nothing more devoutly than to be mistaken for celebrities, all of them confusing her eyes and widening her sight. She was hired because her stuttery shyness must have stirred the proprietor’s benevolence or because she answered in an unpredictable way his predictable questions.

  “Who’s your favorite writer?”

  “Conrad.” Was that a mistake?

  “Why him?”

  “Because,” trying to make a joke that would soften her trying to make a joke that would soften her stiff lips, “because if God could write He’d write like Conrad.”

  “You mean God took a nom de plume? If He’s up to tricks like that, He wouldn’t be satisfied with one. Name some more.”

  Whenever celebrities wandered into the store, figures one hundred times smaller than they were on the screen, then something—pride or a faltering conviction of incomparably more value in the dusted books—protected her from their bedazzling selves. She would look away, and if she had to wait on them she would pretend ignorance of who they were. But sometimes they would see her hands tremble and sometimes she lost her voice.

  From the illusory capital that mesmerized the rest of the world, she rode a long way back each night to the bungalow with the stains under the windows from rain on the rusted screens and, stepping from the streetcar, she saw the racing forms, pink, green, yellow, caught in the dry weeds of the yard, tossed there by the throngs on their way back from the racetrack a mile away, the papers thrown away yesterday bleached by this day’s sun. The crowds were already gone, inward-bound to the city, except for a few stragglers on foot, except for some elegant cars still coming from the track, bound back to where the faultless beauties lived and those who loved them. In one of these cars—three persons: the bareheaded man at the wheel, another man on the far side, and, between the men, a lovely woman. No one in the car glanced at her, no one in the car suspected her of wondering how it felt to be so highly visible for beauty and how it felt to bring that beauty like a gift to lovers. If that face in the center were to glance out, the girl on the sidewalk might be extinguished by the secret, ideal life in the depths of that glance and by the way the eyes would slide away as if they’d seen nobody out there.

  Night in that little house low to the ground, the last night, and Ilona awake in the bed that had been both hers and her mother’s, and her brother calling to her from his bedroom across the hall that was not really a hall but only a cubicle of space, his voice startling her from sorrow over her mother, a sorrow like a dark, cradling sleep. It was a few nights after their mother’s strong will to live had left her body, taking all traces of grace and beauty meant to charm death into giving up its own inexorable will.

  “Ilo?”

  “Yes?”

  “Ilo, let me come with you.”

  “Let me find out first.”

  “You need a man to protect you.”

  “Nobody’s going to hurt me.”

  She was already twenty but for him she was the child who had protected him from terrible possibilities waiting for him everywhere, inside the city, out in vast space, and in the narrow confines of buses and streetcars, and now if she would only allow him to repay that kindness he would be grateful for the rest of his life. In the tentative silence after he went back to his bed, she sensed the imploring going on in his shallow sleep where he must be offering up incontestable reasons, down on his knees. The tempest that possessed him when she was a little girl spent itself when their father died, though the furrows in his brow got deeper, and the sweat in his hair and the agitated walk and the fear in his eyes remained.

  “Ilo?”

  Near dawn, and he was in the doorway again, a tall wraith in faded, shrunken pajamas, closely resembling an asylum inmate in an old etching she had come upon in the bookstore, and the likeness was an anointing of him, as if across a century the artist rescued him from his solitary, forsaken condition. At seven he had almost been forsaken by life, consumed by fever for days, and after that he was not who he had been, not anymore the little boy who drew intricate pictures of trains and passengers, someone in each window unlike anyone else in all the other windows.

  “Ilo, we won’t see each other again.”

  “Don’t think that way.”

  Then from his lonely throat dry sobs rose. A few only, because he must be afraid they would turn her against him since he was not the most reliable of protectors. Like an admonition his very loneliness closed up his throat, and he went back to bed.

  They sat at the table trying to eat their breakfast of dry toast, the table where their father had taught him to read and to write, where their father, the times he was home, ate his supper in a slow, reflective way like a man far from home, where she, Ilona, had scratched away at her stories, each story a refuge into which she escaped and where no one recognized her. This table was to be taken away with the rest of the furniture by the mailman, with whom he had made friends and who was to pay him a few dollars.

  “Ilo, you won’t have to work. I’ll find a job and take care of you.”

  It was like an offer to lame her for life, an offer to imprison her within his own benighted being forever.

  “Wherever I go,” she said, “let me get settled first.” And this denial to him of the future he was begging from her was a cruelty that was to strike back at her when she was to write at all the many tables of her life, roaming her imagination with the hope of finding her own future there. No latent beauty was to be revealed in her work, only the cruelty of forsaking him that confessed itself in the emptiness of each story.

  “I’ll go to Aunt Sarah’s, I’ll go to Seattle and live with her.” He was striding around the room in a frenzy of helplessness. “If she can’t take me in I’ll get a room near her and I’ll help her, I’ll do her shopping for her and I’ll go with her on the streetcar if she’s afraid of going out alone and I’ll mop the floors for her.”

  The old woman who was their father’s sister had come down to console them when their father died and to pay for the funeral, and she had tucked her purse under her pillow at night, afraid the two demented children might steal from her while she slept.

  “Then I’ll know where to reach you,” she said, “when the time comes for you to be with me.”

  He thanked her profusely for that. “If you don’t do well where you go,” he said, “you can
come and live with me.”

  “If I don’t do well,” she promised.

  Eagerly, on the run, he helped the mailman’s two sons carry the furniture out to the open truck. He hoisted up his father’s ancient black suitcase of heavy, pebbled leather, with straps and buckles. Up it went and over. Their father was gone most of the time, on the road, searching for work on newspapers in other cities, soliciting ads. He was on the edge of oldness when she was born, and the Sundays he took her to hear the soapbox orators in Pershing Square, people would ask him if she were his grandchild. So his suitcase was old-fashioned even then. On the run, her brother carried out grocery boxes filled with salvage-store clothes, with paraphernalia of inestimable value, each box tied with twine, and, last, the wooden box with handle, containing his shoemaker’s tools.

  They were alone in the empty house. The mailman’s sons waited, one in the driver’s seat, the other on a chair in the truckbed. The seat beside the driver was to be his, like a seat of honor. He wore a black suit that some larger man, years ago, must have worn to his own significant events. He was to spend the night, or even a few nights, at the mailman’s house, and she was to board a bus to San Francisco, where she had never been. It was time to part. When he bent his head to kiss her on the cheek, his loneliness struck him across the face and left him pale and shaken. He was already lost in the world he was to enter as soon as this embrace was over. He would never again be even halfway sure she loved him, though she kissed his trembling cheek and his brow filmed with sweat.

  Then he climbed up into the truck and, wearing a departed man’s dapper Panama hat and hunched over in fear of this exciting time, he waved to her, an exaggerated wild waving, as they drove off.

  Ilona, alone at her table, raised her head and saw that it was a dark four o’clock. If it was six o’clock in Chicago, was he already on his way to his job through cold half-dark streets or was he on his way home from a hospital’s steamy basement kitchen after scrubbing pots and pans all night, a tall figure, head sunk forward, hat pulled down over his ears, overcoat flapping in the wind? Or was he still asleep in that city closer than this one to the hour of waking, and if he was still asleep, his sleep was not deeper than hers had been all her waking life.