Three Short Novels

by Gina Berriault

  Isobel rocked once, and, almost with fear, Naomi saw that the chair was one of those upholstered rockers for matrons. “She was right, you know,” Isobel said, her gaze down on her ticking needles and the dragging sock in her lap. “She didn’t want him to ruin his chances.”

  “You know what I said to myself? I said, that little gal’s going to be good for him. And I was right.”

  “I don’t know if I was good for him,” Isobel said. “But he acted as if I were. He loved his little family, he was a good father and husband, so maybe I was good for him. I can’t say he was easy to live with, but that’s the way it is with ambitious men.”

  Naomi got up hastily and elbowed her way around the room in search of an ashtray. Oh, God, what’s she doing? Telling a story to a kindergarten class? Who’s she talking about? Storybook animals? “Just because nobody smokes around here . . . ”

  Isobel was up at once, and came back apologizing, offering the tiny, flowered bowl the guest had used at the kitchen table, and Naomi went on elbowing the room, bowl in one hand, cigarette in the other. “Tell you what,” she said, just as Isobel settled into her rocker again. “You go get that brandy. Just a teensy weensy bit, that’s all I’ll have, I promise. Just to celebrate me being here, how’s that?”

  Guy brought the brandy, and she took the bottle from him, and the glasses. “Oh, say, this is great! You’re sweet.” Perched on the sofa arm, she poured the brandy, her wrist perky. “Just a little bitty bit for each. Am I the only one around here who knows how to pour a drink?” One for the overgrown kid and one for his mother who keeps him a kid. “Say, this will hit the spot!”

  Guy, on the hassock again, held up his glass to catch the lamplight in the amber brandy, and Naomi watched him focus on the wobbling light, transfixed, herself, by his seeking look, a look she had always observed in young faces and that seemed the essence of their beauty. Maybe she’d had that look herself when she was young, but nobody had ever told her.

  “They serve all kinds of great stuff over at Alice Ann’s,” Guy said. “Her father’s got a real wine cellar.”

  “Take me over there sometime!” she whooped, her humor separating her from the boy just as their antennae were touching. “Hey, listen, you mark my words. Someday you’re going to have your own wine cellar and you’ll be pulling corks for better men than Mr. Doctor-What’s-His-Name. Listen, you don’t need a doctor’s daughter to get ahead, you’ve got all you need in yourself. The same way with your father. And maybe your luck’ll bring you a wife like Hal’s, like your Mom over there. You should’ve seen them, living in a little house in somebody’s backyard, both of them studying away hard as they could. Made me want to cry.”

  “Naomi helped us out,” Isobel said. Her glass stood untouched on the chairside table.

  “You make it sound like I was going to sponge off her father,” Guy said.

  “Listen, you think I can’t see you were in love with her, I mean in love ? It’s written all over you.”

  She took a big swallow of brandy. The warmth spread down into her breasts, a burning bush in both of those silly, leftover things. She saw Isobel take a slow sip and sipped slowly herself, mockingly, thinking how like children they all were, the three of them at a make-believe tea party. “That’s the best way to do it,” she said, instructively. “You sip it slow. You’re right, Izzybell.”

  “It was a gift,” Isobel said. “It must be the best.”

  Naomi gazed down the length of her legs to the toes of her red shoes. “Say, it’s good to get away, believe me. I’ve got two whole weeks off. I’ve been in that courthouse seems like two hundred years.”

  “I’ve always said that clerks are underpaid,” Isobel said. “They do an awful lot of routine work that keeps the wheels going around.”

  “They do! They do!” her voice big enough to discuss politics with and what was going on in the world. “And even when they get everything microfilmed and automated, they’re still going to need clerks. Maybe even more. Less room for the papers and more room for the clerks. How do you like that? So I guess I don’t have to worry about a job.”

  “You get to meet nice people that way,” Isobel mused. “You’re not isolated. Some clerks are, but at the courthouse you’ve got all those men who come in to consult the records.”

  “Most of those guys are married,” waving her hand. “And if they aren’t, they want the young ones. We had a kid under me, twenty, about the same age I was when I started, but pretty. My trouble was I wasn’t pretty to begin with. She didn’t work there more than six months and she marries the deputy district attorney. She brings her kids in for me to see, a couple of babies. Real sweet girl.” She held up her glass. “Empty. No glass is allowed to go empty around here,” she proclaimed, pouring.

  “But there must be some nice men who come in . . . ,” Isobel persisted.

  “You want to know who? Creeps. That’s who’s interested in me. There was a creep came in the other day, some farmer looking up a deed, one of those real skinny guys who’ve got enormous eyes you wonder what they’re so big for. And you know what he says to me? He said, didn’t they have your picture in the paper? For what, I said, Queen of the Grape Festival? And he said, six years ago, that time your brother killed himself. He was smiling at me like he thought I wanted to talk about it, like it was what I talked about all the time. Then he asked me where was the best place to eat lunch and I said the Wherry Hotel, and he asked me to eat lunch with him and I said, real cold, that I always brought my lunch in a paper bag. That’s the kind of creep you meet on this job.”

  Silence. This panic, was it like stage fright? Because here she was, Naomi acting Naomi’s part, indignantly erect at her desk, withering with her stare the hayseed at the counter.

  “What brother was that?” Guy asked.

  “Never mind,” waving the question away. “Everybody’s got to forgive me. It’s bad taste to pity yourself.”

  “Was it Cort?”

  “Cort? You crazy? Cort’s got the soul of a farm horse and me, too, and we’re both alive and pulling. It’s the sensitive ones who leave early. The party’s too rough for them.”

  The silence wasn’t broken yet because the silence was Isobel’s, who sat with her head bowed, fingers stopped, her feet in fringed moccasins set severely close together. “You are a vile, insane woman,” Isobel said.

  Naomi hung a cigarette on her lips, searched for matches in the pockets of the borrowed sweater though she knew none were there, found a packet on the sofa, and scratched one across. The flame shook up and down, eluding the cigarette, and, frightened by her own shaking hand, she almost gave up. She leaned back, crossing her legs, blowing out smoke. “That’s okay with me,” she said.

  “What for?” said Guy.

  “What for what?” Naomi snapped.

  “I mean why.”

  “Who knows why?” her voice hard and shaky. “Because there he was, Hal O. Costigan, candidate for U.S. Congress, lots of friends, pals, lots of charm. Who the hell knows why? They said he did it because he ruined his chances by running around with a high school girl and they got found out. But who the hell knows why he was running around with her? It’s the same question. A man with a nice wife, cute son, why would he want to do anything like that? Maybe he was in love with the girl and couldn’t help himself. I guess that’s happened before,” laughing a high, mocking laugh.

  “You stop it!” Isobel cried.

  Guy glanced at his mother, but fear of her, like a violent hand laid on him, twisted his head away, forbidding him to see her rage.

  Ashes scattered over her lap. “It ain’t easy,” Naomi said, frantically brushing the ashes away with her left hand, holding the cigarette high in the other.

  “I say don’t answer me,” Isobel hissed. “Just stop it.” Since there was no other place for her to go, she settled back into the rocker, tucking her skirt around her, shooting out one leg to see what was on her foot, a shoe or a slipper.

  “It ain’t easy,”
Naomi said, a bad student.

  “Guy never did anything to you!”

  “What do you mean I never did anything to her? What’s she done against me?” Unmovable on his hassock, slow to pick up on anything.

  Isobel stood up, catching at the knitting falling to the floor. She knelt to pick it up, her back to him. “You didn’t have to know about it.”

  “So now I know!” he shouted. “Is it going to ruin my life?” He had thrown tantrums, Naomi suspected, and he had slammed doors, and he had shouted, but he had never shouted before with this voice.

  He was up on his feet, hitching up his trousers, tugging down his sweater. “No dead man is going to ruin my life. A lot of guys I know don’t have a father. Do they cry about it? If he killed himself, it’s something people do all the time, you’re always reading about it in the papers. How’s he going to ruin my life?” With a palm to each temple he brushed back his hair, shorn too close for the gesture to make a difference. “I guess I’ll take the car,” he said.

  “What for?” Isobel demanded. “Where you going?”

  “You asked me so I’ll tell you. I’m going to find Lorraine Forbes. You know her, you had her in your class last year. Well, this Lorraine likes me. She more than likes me, she clings to me.”

  “You leave her alone!” Isobel was following him. “You want to stay in this town forever, a fool, a fool because you got yourself a kid to support?”

  “She never leaves me alone,” he said. At the front door he remembered his jacket. Leaving the door ajar, night air streaming in, he went into the kitchen and came out again, zipping up his leather jacket, striding past Isobel, who was covering her throat with her sweater to keep her dreadful voice from any neighbor passing by.

  Guy’s footsteps down the path were quick as Isobel’s coming toward her. Naomi stood up, covering her face. The fist struck her wrist and, as she lowered her arms to soothe the place, the fist struck her face. But the shock of pain was nothing compared to the shock of Isobel’s face. Naomi gripped the weeping woman’s arms, forcing them downward, but partway down their resistance vanished, and Isobel clasped her around the waist. Enraptured, Naomi clasped her in return with all the strength of the young woman, years ago, who had been so spontaneously fond of the red-haired, round-faced girl, Hal’s bride, little scholar, just learning. In her arms now was the plump teacher body, as spent as her own and to be left by all. Holding each other, they sat down on the sofa.

  “Your mother must have felt this way about Hal,” Isobel was saying. “She was Hal, she lived in him. Like me, what’s life got to do with me? A teacher, what’s that? What I know I keep back from them. The awful things, the things that happen, I keep back, and pretty soon they’re the ones who know. They find out for themselves and they figure I never did.”

  Isobel was up, searching for something around the room, a note being passed among the students, about her. “I’m glad he knows. I’m glad and I’ll tell him more because I’m the only one who knows about Hal. Everybody else thought—well, here’s a man who’s got respect for himself, who’s got it for the next fellow, who’s got enough for everybody. You can say they loved him for that in their hicktown way. But he didn’t have it, he was faking it. He should have been an actor. It was like a fever, he’d run around with a fever all day and at night he’d come down with the chills. He said someday he’d get rid of himself, he said it was like a mandate. I came down with the disease myself. The neat little Red Cross nurse out in the jungle with her white shoes on.”

  Naomi was by the window. Beyond the reflection of the room, a watery cluster of lights floated on the night. She covered her face.

  “Isobel,” she called through her hands, “do you pity him? I’m supposed to pity him, but I’ve got no pity in me.”

  Silence. No pity? It was what she had come to hear, it was what she had come to share so that she wasn’t so alone.

  “I pity him,” Isobel was saying. “Sometimes there’s nothing and sometimes there’s the pity, and the pity when it comes always makes up for the times I feel nothing. It rushes in where there was nothing.”

  Naomi heard Isobel catching sharp breaths, heard her go farther away, up the hallway. Alone, she took her hands down from her face. The roof was still over her, the lamp on. Her confession was shaking her heart, her hands, but nothing else was shaken from its harmonious place.

  Isobel came back, wiping her eyes on the blanket in her arms. Together they tossed off the sofa cushions, floated down sheets, unfolded the blanket. Naomi had come a thousand miles from the house where her mother had lain, waiting for her to come home from work. She had come all that way to confess about Hal, and it was an affront to her mother that she, Naomi, was given a bed to lie down in. She ought to be wandering the streets of that cold city across the waters.

  “I always tried to keep Mama clean,” she said. “Her bed clean and everything. Whenever I see a nice clean bed I think of Mama. Even on television, if I see one. My friend Athena has this bed a mile high. Looks like a cloud, lots of eyelet pillows. Her father died just after Mama. She says she deserves a good night’s sleep. She got herself this fancy bed.”

  The overnight case was found, and Naomi held up her black nylon nightie. “Something special, this is. Got it when I used to go up to Dan’s hotel room. He said he liked black lace on a woman, so I got it.”

  Isobel was kneeling by the heater, turning it off. “That girl,” she said, “that girl who Hal . . . ”

  “Dolores.”

  “That picture of her, she was lovely, wasn’t she? Answer to a prayer or something.” She got up, began her search around the room again.

  “She came back,” Naomi said. “I saw her once. It was on my bus, I was on my way home. She recognized me, too, I could tell. She looks real cheap. At first I thought it wasn’t her. She got real thin, and her hair’s cut—you remember how it was long?—and you should see the makeup. Before I knew who she was I felt sorry for her, I said to myself, oh, boy, that girl sure thinks she’s the cat’s pajamas.” She took no pleasure now in the girl’s change, but she’d taken it then, on the bus, because the change had seemed like punishment, until she admitted what she’d known all along, that the girl warranted none. That bus ride with the girl was the longest ever. There she’d sat, just across the aisle from the girl, clutching her vengeful pleasure to her breast.

  Naomi sat down on the sofa and pushed off one pump with the toe of the other. The news she’d brought to Isobel about the girl was a gift like the few others she’d brought. Isobel might be grateful for it, but it wasn’t going to last very long.

  “Isobel, kiss me goodnight.” Lifting her face at the same moment Isobel bent over her, she forced the kiss intended for her hair to come down on her forehead instead.

  “Sleep well,” said Isobel.

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  Naomi, tilting on one hip and then the other, unsnapped her nylons from the garter belt and peeled them down. Barefooted, she crossed the room to turn off the lamp by the rocker, and when she returned to the sofa Isobel was gone. Unzipping her dress, lifting it off, she heard footsteps above her, a secret, surreptitious sound like Isobel’s wish that the woman in the dark room below had never come back into her life.

  Wrapped in the blanket, Naomi sat on her bed, poured more brandy from the gifty bottle, lifted her feet to the low table, and drank, protected by the blanket as a baby is or a potentate, protected by the brandy against the attempt of the house to expel her, Naomi, who had entered under false pretenses as mute, as deaf, as lacking memory, heart, as a harmless woman climbing up the ramp from the ferry, waving a clean-gloved hand and smiling the ivory-toothed, silver-specked smile of the middle-aged visitor, the past tucked into her overnight case, the past weighing nothing more than the cheap gifts from a drugstore back home, perfume for Isobel and a tie clip for Guy.

  The languor from the brandy was spreading all the way down to her feet. She tried to raise her knees, and the languor brought her Dan.
“Dan,” whispering. She placed a hand each side of him, there at his waist, to form him and to bring him to lie down upon her with the weight of his life, but he denied himself to her and disappeared. Burdened as he was with himself, he could still turn away from those who would further burden him with themselves.

  Left alone again, she summoned up the people on the train to be with her. On the train there had been lots of company, sleeping and awake, curled up and sprawling, in all the seats up and down the coach, and she had drowsed side by side with an old woman whose throat noises in sleep accompanied the mechanical noises of the train. The train swept along, wayside lights flickering, vanishing. Lurching figures to and from the toilets, quiet, deformed elderly women—lumping together of breasts and belly, lumping down of ankles—going dimly by in slippers, hardly there and gone, and their quiet husbands in white shirts cross-marked by suspenders, the cross of morning reprisal that the king’s scout leaves on the door at night, figures gentle to their own selves as to children who wake in the night and must be led.

  Naomi slept, opened her eyes to a lighted station deep in night, the train stock-still, waiting. Someone was pottering about in a little office of unshaded light. What station was it? What town?

  “Isobel?” swallowing down sleep.

  Isobel, moving around in the light from the kitchen doorway, her bathrobe hanging open, the sash trailing. “You never should have come,” said Isobel.

  “What time is it?” Naomi whispered. Was it time to get up and get dressed and go down to the ferry dock?

  “Four.”

  Ah! Guy and the girl! The couple in the car! Naomi sighed a long, anxious sigh, a favor done for sleepless Isobel, a comprehension of this terrible night and who was to blame for it. She lifted her feet off the table, aware that a scolding for one thing leads to a scolding for another.