Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  “Guy’s very cooperative,” Isobel said, settling in the driver’s seat, smoothing her coat under her, fitting the key with a sure hand. “He uses the car, too, mostly on weekends. Even though he takes his friends with him—they go to the beach or Seattle or Mount Rainier—why, he brings it back in good shape, even the ashtrays emptied.”

  Naomi doubled over with a disbelieving laugh. “Guy drive? Oh, God, I keep seeing a twelve-year-old boy. He’s a man!”

  “In September he’ll be starting at the university,” Isobel said, glancing over her shoulder as she reversed the car out of the line. “Medicine.”

  “Medicine? Oh, you mean he’s going to be a doctor!” Again Naomi bent over, laughing, because she was so dense. She’s still Isobel, she thought. She’s got her own schoolteacher way of saying things, and she looks more like a teacher now than ever. So vapory kind, like a nun. “Well, isn’t that nice! A doctor! There’s nobody in the world gets more respect than a doctor.”

  The houses were far apart in this town. Back in her own neighborhood, they were boxy stuccos of pastel colors, plots of grass in front littered with children’s toys and paper. They passed an acre of grass, two horses grazing, then a long row of small houses all alike, gray frame with dark green trim. “Company houses,” said Isobel, and Naomi nodded as though she knew the meaning. Then, after more grass, “That one? The white one?” she asked, peering through the windshield, directed by Isobel’s pointing finger. “Say, that’s sure a cute little house.”

  “It belonged to my aunt,” Isobel said. “She left it to me. She died three years ago. We’ve got awfully nice neighbors. Another teacher at the high school lives just a couple of houses down, the green one, see? And on the other side of us there’s a nice family, he works on a newspaper in the city. They’re all nice people around.”

  Isobel parked the car exactly before the few stone steps to the yard so that, in lieu of an honest welcome, there was a path for the guest’s feet directly as the guest stepped out of the car. Naomi thought—Anybody looking out a window would see a smartly dressed visitor, nice figure, nice legs, nice posture, a visitor positive of her welcome, carrying a snappy, round, black and white overnight case. A forever-young woman delighted with small surprises. “Say, look what you got here!” pausing on the concrete path. “Clam shells! Say, don’t they make a pretty border!” her voice the voice of Athena, a tough woman with a kind heart.

  So this is the house Isobel got for herself! Naomi passed through the little hallway and into the living room, her heels muted by braided rugs. This is the house where Isobel found refuge, protected by distance and silence. “Oh, say, this is cozy, Isobel!”

  “Let me take your bag upstairs,” Isobel said. “You’re welcome to my bedroom.”

  “No, no!” shaking her head vigorously. “What’s the matter with the sofa? I’ll sleep on the sofa. Won’t be any trouble to anybody, that way,” tossing the bag onto the sofa, removing her hat, her coat, and tossing these over the bag. “Wait’ll I get my cigarettes,” she called after Isobel who was moving on into the kitchen to make tea, and, fishing up the package from her purse, holding it under her breasts, she followed Isobel. At the kitchen table, she hung a cigarette on her lips and struck a match. “I can stay overnight, like I told you, but I got to get back in the morning. I’m staying with friends in Seattle and it wouldn’t be polite if I stayed away longer. They drove me to the ferry and I wanted them to come along for the ride, but they said it’s nothing new to them. Real nice people. The wife used to work in the recorder’s office with me.”

  She sat down, leaned back, flicking together the nails of thumb and little finger to make a hard, worldly, nervous clicking. “Say, you’ve got a sweet little kitchen here!” glancing around at the crockery windmill clock on the wall, at the crockery Dutch boy and girl with ivy growing out of their heads, at the yellow and green curtains with ruffles. “Nobody keeps house like Isobel, that’s what Mama always said. You remember?” Her face lapsed. “Mama’s dead, you know. I wrote you, didn’t I?”

  Isobel was setting teacups down, place mats, teaspoons. “We were sorry to hear,” she said. “And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if Naomi could come here for a visit, a change of scenery. Last night when you phoned, we were so pleased. Guy said,” and she laughed, “he said ‘I wonder if she looks like I remember her, in a blue dress.’ ”

  “Mama never did forgive you for taking Guy away,” she said, thinking, Why am I making accusations for Mama? “I was always having to explain to her how I figured you felt. But you did do everything so fast, hustled him off on the plane, sent him all that way, a kid alone.”

  A slice of lemon slid off the saucer Isobel was setting down. She picked it up with hasty fingers. “The stewardess took care of him,” her voice flat. “And my aunt met him in Seattle. He was twelve years old already.”

  “That’s what I told Mama,” her voice rising with dolorous insistence like that of a child who is seldom listened to. “That’s what I said. Oh, I was always defending you, Izzybell. Remember how I used to call you Izzybell? Oh, say, I sure missed you, Izzybell.”

  Isobel sat down angrily, a teacher fed up with a student’s perverse behavior. “One thing, one thing let me ask of you. Not one word to Guy about his father’s suicide. Not one word. And for that matter, not to anybody else, if anybody comes by while you’re here.”

  “Oh, God, never!” clasping her throat. “Never. What did you think, that I came all the way here just to bring up old troubles?”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  “Well, that’s certainly not too much to ask.” She laughed. “You don’t have to be afraid of me, that’s just a little thing to ask.”

  Isobel pushed herself up as if already unbearably weary of this visitor, and, at the stove, pouring boiling water into the flowered teapot, her back to the visitor, she asked cheerily, “Tell me about you. Anything interesting?”

  “Me?” Naomi crossed her legs, sliding her palms down along her thighs, and clasping her hands together when they met upon her knees. “I got married. Yes, I did. I was going to write and tell you, but oh, my, it was like the roof falling in. Dan, his name was Dan O’Leary, that’s just what it was, and a nice guy, nice as pie, but an alcoholic. One of those real ones. It didn’t last long, the marriage I mean, oh, maybe six months. He went back to New York, business stuff. He never wanted me to go and see Mama, I had to fight with him. When he left, I moved back with her.” All told with a shrugging of shoulders, with pulls on her cigarette, and a crossing and recrossing of legs.

  “What was his business?” Isobel asked.

  “Oh, he used to be an engineer, really. He used to be a big time engineer, he was that smart. But then his alcohol craving got the better of him, and he started drifting.”

  “It’s sad, isn’t it, what it does?” Isobel, sipping her tea.

  Naomi rubbed her knees. “You’d never believe your sister-in-law, old workhorse Naomi, you’d never think she’d start drinking around, now would you? I used to go around to the bars with him, got to like it. Oh, don’t get worried!” holding up her hand. “Don’t worry about me. I’m off it now, haven’t had a drink since the night I almost got run over. After Dan left and I moved back with Mama, I used to go out after she was asleep, go visit the bars. Up until the night I almost got it. That sobered me up.”

  “What about Cort? What’s he doing?”

  “Cort? Kid brother Cort? He was just twenty-six when you left, wasn’t he? Well, now he’s married, got himself a nice honey, and they got two boys, yep, two boys, and now they got a baby girl. They don’t waste time these days, do they? The oldest boy’s the smartest kid you ever saw, four years old and talks like a judge. Mama used to say he was going to grow up to be like his Uncle Hal. But Hal was one in a million. Everybody watching him. Watch that man going nowhere but up! Got out of law school, right away he’s in with the biggest lawyer in town. If he’d made that election to Congress, I’ll bet he’d be a Senator
now. Senator Hal Costigan. It’s okay, isn’t it, if I tell Guy what a smart father he had?”

  “He knows it.”

  “What did you tell him happened?” she asked, dartingly.

  “I told him it was a heart attack.”

  “That’s what I’ll say, then. Because I’ve got to talk about Hal, you just can’t not talk about him. You can’t come and meet the son of a man like Hal and not say something about his father. That’s asking too much.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I know what you asked. You don’t have to tell me twice,” a friendly jabbing in her voice, a pretense at being offended.

  At four, Guy came home. Naomi, rising, cried, “Look at that boy! It’s Guy, I bet!” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks. “Your Mom said you remember your Aunt Naomi,” holding his hands, swinging his arms from side to side.

  “That’s true,” he said, trying not to lower his eyes, trying not to shift his feet.

  “You sure don’t look like your Dad!” roaming her gaze over his broad face, like Isobel’s, over the ugly haircut, shorn close, glancing down to the large feet in hiker’s boots. Looks like any other teenager, she thought. “Don’t get me wrong, you’re a good-looking guy, but you don’t look like your Dad.”

  She dropped his hands, rattled by her own effusiveness. Slowed by her behavior, self-conscious, he took off his leather jacket and washed his hands at the kitchen sink. She helped set the table, laying out plates edged in blue and gold, lifting silverware from the wine velvet lining of the case, protesting that she wanted to eat on any old plate with just any old fork. The ornaments for the meal and the meal itself, composedly created by Isobel, an apron across her little bulge of a stomach and a glimmer of sweat on her brow, all were declarations of this guest’s imposition. While they ate, Naomi told old family jokes, even joggling Isobel’s foot for emphasis, but all the while aware of Guy’s sullen face, given grudgingly to a smile. Catch Hal with a face like that when he was a boy, and he’d change quick as a flash. But this one showed it off, as if he’d made it all by himself. Maybe it was the time of life to be sullen, maybe it was natural, she thought. Maybe I wanted to be sullen, too, but Mama wouldn’t let me. “You got a girlfriend? I bet you got a girlfriend.”

  “Up ’til yesterday,” he said.

  Oh-ho, there’s the reason! she thought, as Isobel said, “And tomorrow there’ll be another. Guy never has to worry.”

  “What’re you talking about?” he demanded. “You said yourself that Alice was a prize, you said nobody, no other girl, measured up to her. Why do you make it sound so, oh, so damn, oh, like it doesn’t matter?” Filling his mouth with peas, he deprived her of the chance to answer, as if it were her mouth he had stopped. His mother ate on neatly, implying that to observe pauses in conversation was an art.

  Oh-ho! Naomi thought. His girl’s thrown him over. That’s why his eyes can’t lift up, that’s why he looks like a mean bear.

  “Alice Ann is a nice girl, prettier than most, lots of personality,” Isobel explained to Naomi. “Her father is a physician and her mother comes from a wealthy family, and Alice Ann has been, well, she has that manner of having the advantages.”

  What’s she doing? Telling me that Guy deserves the best things in life? Naomi saw Guy’s hands breaking a biscuit and buttering it, callow hands that had petted around the girl’s prize body. Like a handshake with a movie star, maybe he’d never wash his hands again to keep the feel of the girl on them, and when he was married to some other girl and had three kids, he’d tell the fellows in the bar about that one who got away.

  “They were going to be married,” Isobel said. “Her parents like him so much. He was over there twice a week for supper. They were even going to help him with medical school. Then her brother comes back for the summer with this friend of his from Harvard, and the friend, well, he and Alice Ann, well, she fell in love with him. Yesterday she broke it off with Guy. She cried about it.”

  “All right, tell it all,” he grumbled. “She cried. . . . ”

  “That’s what you said!”

  There he was, trying not to be pleased with the fact that she’d cried. At least she’d cried, he’d always have that to remember. Naomi ate on, daintily, a guest appreciative of every morsel and their sharing of family matters.

  “She cried,” he said. “So what?”

  They ate on in silence. Naomi shifted in her chair, an involuntarily flirtatious move, flipped her napkin and spread it again over her lap, trying to quiet an odd triumph over his loss. “I guess I better not take seconds,” she said, “because I saw that cherry pie.”

  “They’re cherries from the tree in our yard,” Isobel said, exaggerating their pride in that bountiful tree.

  “Oh, I saw it!” Naomi cried. “Aren’t you the lucky ones!”

  When the kitchen was tidied, Naomi followed Isobel into the small garden at the front of the house, and while Isobel troweled around the plants, Naomi, in a borrowed sweater, wandered up and down the concrete path, arms crossed to keep herself warm. “The air here sure is different,” she said. She gazed up into the branches of the cherry tree, every branch hung with a profusion of red and yellow cherries. The cherries were the colors of sunset, the colors of life and variety, the stems so springy, curving with the weight of the tiny fruit, the sky like large, pale blue leaves intermingling with the green leaves.

  The trowel made a dry, rasping sound. She went over to Isobel’s squatting figure, her shoes on the gravel between the flower beds sending up a fiery sound. “You mean Guy goes all the way to those mountains just for the snow?” hugging herself, facing the range across the waters and beyond the city, mountains almost transparent, almost air.

  The trowel rasped on, clods broke apart. “You know, I never mentioned it to Guy, but there’s something about Alice Ann I didn’t like. She’s calculating. She saw possibilities in Guy. She was the one who made the first move, she invited Guy to go on a hiking trip with her parents. But all the time I kept thinking—If somebody comes along who’s a little older than Guy, say, knows more about women . . . ”

  Isobel unbent, rubbing her gravel-bitten knees on the way up, her trowel with its flakes of dirt held outward. “In a way, I’m glad it happened.”

  Don’t bother me with her hot and cold, Naomi pleaded. Because the only one I knew was Dan, and a couple more that were hotel-room romances. If I ever go up to a room again, I’ll go up every night until I come into the courthouse some morning reeking with the smell of the man and me, and my stockings hanging down in baggy wrinkles, and after that I’ll have to live in one of those rooms. Cozily bowing her shoulders, she went ahead of Isobel to the door. “Say, this sure is a cute sweater. You knit this one yourself?”

  Guy was on the hassock, watching television. When they entered the darkening room, he straightened up from his slump.

  Naomi collapsed in the center of the sofa, stretching out her legs. “Say, it gets chizzly around here, doesn’t it? What we could use right now is a little bitty rum or something.”

  Isobel knelt to light the oil stove. “We’ve got a bottle of brandy somewhere. Got it for Christmas a few years ago.”

  Naomi wiggled the toes of her red shoes to catch the boy’s eye. “Excuse me if I’m interrupting.”

  “Why don’t we just turn it off,” Isobel said, and did it herself on her way to the kitchen.

  In the quiet, the boy was left without a voice, without an excuse for his lack of a voice. Naomi felt for her cigarettes in her purse on the sofa, the small rustling, the scratch of the match loud in the silence. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

  He shifted on the hassock.

  “Want a cigarette?” She lifted her arm to aim the package at him.

  “Don’t smoke,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Maybe you ought to. Want me to teach you?” A tremor crossed her belly, and she felt again the excitement of the cocktail bar, the anonymous man on the stool beside her, just
because the room was dim and he was humped in silence. A young lout over there, denied the facts of life by his mama.

  Guy sniggered his appreciation of her humor, unsuspecting of the innuendo because he was unaware of her as a woman whom other men took down into their beds.

  “No, you sure ain’t your father,” she mused, defiantly ungrammatical. “He was smaller than you, for one thing. Wiry, nervous, real nice smile. He kept that boy’s smile right to the end. I’m not saying you don’t have a nice smile yourself, you just don’t use it very often. I was telling Guy here,” she said to Isobel, returning, “that there wasn’t anybody had a nicer smile than Hal. What’d they call it in high school? A winning smile. Yeah, he was always winning.”

  Isobel settled down with her knitting. “It wasn’t just a matter of being lucky,” she said. “He worked hard.”

  Naomi waved it back at her. “Sure, I know he worked hard, but he had a winning streak going all the time. When you get those two things together,” holding up two fingers, “you’ve got dynamite.” She winked at Guy. “There was one time he didn’t work hard for something he wanted. When he fell in love with your mother, there, she fell right into his arms. Am I right, over there?”

  Isobel crossed her ankles. “I guess you’re right.”

  “I remember when you two got together, you and Hal, just kids in college. He brought you home one day to introduce you around. Say, I thought you were mighty cute, with all that nice curly hair. I remember Mama asking you in that just-asking way, asking you what your father did and you said, a grocery store, and Mama said, a market, and you said, no, a grocery store, and Mama said, oh, a little one, and you said, but he’s dead now.” Naomi laughed, twenty years late an encouraging laugh for the girl.

  Guy scratched his back, trapped in the evening that belonged to the visitor.

  “You got someplace else you want to go?” she asked him.

  “He wants to visit with you,” Isobel said.

  The sky in the window was dark, the lamplight brighter, the oil heater purring. “Yeah, I remember I thought to myself—Well, here comes that cute girl to Hal’s crummy house, old cheap furniture, rag rugs from Woolworth’s, his skinny sister with a frizzy cheap permanent in her hair, smiling like a jack-o’-lantern, like a happy loony, everybody living on her file-clerk salary, and Mama asking her what kind of people she comes from. You remember that, Izzybell?”