Listen for the Whisperer

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  Laura’s voice broke into my thoughts. “To be truly happy,” she said, fingering a plump tomato, “one must be able to savor small everyday events. When we live with tragedy, that ability is wiped out. I love being able to relish this market again.”

  I tried to match her mood. Once more I attempted to put all that was ominous out of my mind, to tell myself that it didn’t matter. The sunny day and blue sky, the shining water and cheerful throngs, all served to deny that life held an under layer which threatened storm and calamity.

  All the while as we moved about, the thought of Gunnar went with me. Not faced and accepted as it had been last night after my dream, but disturbingly present. I could not let it surface completely. I was afraid to look at it too closely because this was a problem without solution to which I was betraying myself and all my long-held convictions. Yet it was there, with me constantly.

  When we were laden with all we could carry, we returned to the car and piled ourselves and our burdens into it. Again Irene drove as we turned toward Kalfaret. Beside me in the seat Laura seemed eternally young and filled with the very enthusiasm of youth. I could only pray that everything would be right for her, and that she was not flying headlong toward disaster—as I myself might be, in a different way.

  We drove past the park and she laughed at the sight of Grieg, leaning on his familiar cane as he stood on his pedestal, with a pigeon perched on his head. She pointed out the flower beds, and once she made Irene pull over to a curb so we could watch a marching band of youngsters go past. There was nothing to give evidence that this was a haunted woman, and I marveled at her ability to be caught up in the joy of little things.

  Back at the house, in the hour or two before Gunnar would call for us, we spent some time—at Laura’s insistence—on my book, my interviewing. Not that I any longer needed to “interview.” She seemed to know what I might find useful, and she plainly enjoyed telling me stories of the past. It was not all triumphant. She was realistic about what her life in Hollywood had been like, and she didn’t try to gloss it over.

  In many ways that life had been hard and rough. Stars had been considered the property of the studio, and were often treated as such. There were the early risings and long hours that often left her exhausted, and with time for nothing but her work. There were sometimes primitive trips on location. And the fact that she had been thrown into enforced company with men and women who were sometimes ruthless in their determination to hold their own positions and climb at all costs. The competitiveness could be ugly at times. Then there had been the gossip from columnists, and magazines whose maws must be forever filled with stories, whether true or not. But there had been warm and genuine affection too. There had been unexpected loyalties. And appreciation. A camera crew, a makeup man, script girl, hairdresser, who recognized Laura as a pro who appeared on time and kept no one waiting, who was willing to work as hard as anyone else in the studio, star or no star, and who held temperament to a minimum when she was on the job. The glamour which the public saw wore thin very quickly when you went to work on a set. There others knew the truth about an actor which could never be concealed.

  I let her talk and listened absorbed. I said nothing about the thing Irene had told me. Perhaps Laura already knew. I walked on thin ice and took care not to crack it through.

  When Gunnar came, I found it hard to meet his eyes directly. In the night my dream had seemed reality. Now dreaming must be battened down. The longing to touch him and be near him—these new longings which had suddenly surfaced—must be denied.

  He asked at once how I felt and seemed pleased to find Laura and me so amiably inclined toward each other, and physically in good health. But I didn’t want to be approved merely because I was being unexpectedly nice to Laura Worth.

  In the car, Laura and I sat beside him in the front seat, with me in the middle, and I tried to give myself over to the pleasant aspects of the outing. For a little while all else could be left behind.

  Gunnar’s house, where he had once lived with his wife, was situated on the water in a northern section of Bergen. It was a low modern house with picture windows that fronted on the town fjord. A gracious living room with soft-toned woods and beige carpets looked out upon black rocks piled in a wall against the water. Outside, a path led down to a small beach, where salt water lapped the sand.

  Mrs. Thoresen greeted us warmly and made me feel welcome at once. She was a tall woman, not beautiful, but with an air of assurance that was in its way equal to Laura’s. Norwegian women were well emancipated, and were often partners with their husbands in working out their mutual lives. Gunnar had said that she interested herself in serving the city, and I could imagine her running committees, meeting difficult problems with good judgment and capability. Her English was excellent and she spoke with the same British accent that Gunnar had acquired. I could see how proud she was of him, and how her eyes followed him as he moved about the room—yet there was nothing fatuous or smothering about her affection. She granted him the right to be himself, as she was independently herself.

  As we sat in the pleasant living room that had once belonged to Gunnar and his wife, my eyes were drawn to a silver-framed portrait on the piano. Without question, I knew that the smiling blond girl who looked out of the frame was Gunnar’s wife, Astrid. I didn’t want to see her face, to know what she had been like, and after that first glance I did not look toward the piano again.

  “It has been too long since you have visited us,” Mrs. Thoresen was telling Laura. “I am glad to see you looking well and happy. And I am pleased that you have brought Miss Hollins to visit us. Gunnar has told me so much about your father, Miss Hollins.”

  I wondered what he might have told her about me, but if his words had been less than approving, she did not show it. When we had talked for a little while she led us to the dining section of the long living room and served us an attractive light luncheon of open-faced sandwiches, decoratively arranged.

  Laura plied Mrs. Thoresen with questions and kept her talking about her work in helping with the youth center in town, where city-bound boys and girls in their early teens could have a place of their own to come to any night of the week. They came to play games, to dance, to learn something of the social graces—perhaps to escape from home as young people anywhere were so often eager to do.

  “We permit no visiting adults, as a rule,” Mrs. Thoresen said. “Only the couple who run the center are present. Parents are kept away because this is a place for the young people themselves. It has worked out well. There is less breaking of street lamps, less vandalism and damage to cars among these children. Most of these particular young people will not go to the university, but may attend schools of their own choosing—a beauty operator’s school, a waiter’s school, a school for mechanics.”

  Apparently Laura had gone to the center once, not as a visitor, but to talk to the young people about what it had been like to be a movie actress in America. English was taught in all the schools, and afterwards the boys and girls had been eager to practice their English by talking with Laura.

  The luncheon hour passed serenely enough. At least I hoped I was outwardly serene. My new awareness of Gunnar was always with me. I watched him when he did not know I was looking at him. I studied his long, good-looking face, and the way his brown hair grew back from his forehead. I listened to the deep tones of his voice, and was aware of his hands, long like his face, with slender, prehensile fingers that I knew could be both gentle and strong. I was lost—and knew I was lost. For the moment I did not care.

  After lunch, Laura told Gunnar to take me outside and show me the beach—she wanted to talk to his mother. Thus imperiously dismissed, he smiled at me and led me outside through glass doors. Purple and yellow crocuses were up in the tiny garden, and the forsythia was heavy with yellow buds. Already the snow on the mountains looked thinner, more patchy. These days of sunny bright weather were bringing spring to Norway.

  The effect of my dream was upon me ag
ain—the feeling that I did not want to think and weigh, but for this little while I wanted only to be with this man whom my father had loved, and toward whom I had been drawn from the first.

  We climbed down a stony path and he took my hand to help me over a boulder that blocked the way to the beach. I jumped down from the rock and for a moment stood close to him, almost within the circle of his arms. He stepped back from me deliberately and I stood on the sand beside him, not wanting to look at him after that moment of involuntary rejection, staring instead at the small boat drawn up on the beach, at the water which lapped cleanly at our feet. Gunnar began to talk to me quietly, and I knew in silent rebellion that once more he would speak only of Laura.

  “After her performance last night, what did you think?” he asked.

  I raised my head defiantly and looked across the water toward the nearest islands. “I think she proved what she wanted to prove.”

  “And what she hardly needed to prove—that she is still an actress,” he said.

  “She proved more than that. Now Miles will have to accept the fact that she must have her chance. She’ll let nothing stop her.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  I looked at him directly then, challenging him. It would be better for me if he made me angry again. “I think she should do what she wants to do.”

  “Even if she fails?”

  “She has the right to failure,” I told him.

  “I believe you would still like to see that happen. I believe you would encourage her along this course.”

  “It doesn’t make much difference what you believe,” I said stiffly.

  “I know that, Leigh. You make it very clear.”

  He walked away from me across the sand and put one foot up on the overturned boat. I felt curiously alone and abandoned. Even though I’d wanted to challenge and anger him, there was an aching in me that was an adding up of all the times in my life when I had felt unutterably lonely. Not Ruth, not my father, no friend I’d ever had, could make up for that empty loneliness. All because of Laura! That was what I’d always told myself. These feelings of loss and emptiness had been stamped upon me and out of them had grown my futile angers, my suspicion of anyone who tried to reach me, to crack through the shield I wore to guard myself against further hurt and rejection.

  But now something had happened to the shield. Without warning it lay in shards about my feet and I found myself exposed to emotions I’d never felt before. With these feelings came a sharp realization—self-realization. I was not alone because Laura had let me go and forgotten me, and therefore no one could love me. I was alone because I had never been able to love. Not even my father. Not even Ruth. I was alone, not because I had been rejected, but because I had always been the one to reject. I had not even loved myself.

  There was a searing clarity in this new knowledge. It was frightening, unnerving. I had a wild impulse to run to Gunnar’s arms. I wanted to plead, “Hold me, protect me—don’t let anything touch me!” But so foolish a gesture would only alarm him and would not help me. It was not protection I needed. What I needed was the strength to become vulnerable. The strength to love where it was dangerous to love—both Laura and Gunnar.

  I spoke to him quietly, and heard the unfamiliar quiver in my voice. “It isn’t true that I don’t care what you believe. I care very much. You were my father’s friend, and I wish you would be mine. Something is—happening to me. Something inside myself—since I’ve come to Bergen. It’s new—and frightening. I need time to understand it.”

  His guarded look did not lift, but he spoke to me more gently. “Perhaps what your father hoped for is happening to you, Leigh.”

  I tried to ponder my own feelings aloud. “It doesn’t matter any more that I don’t mean anything to her as a daughter. I understand that well enough. What matters is that I’m coming to know her and I can feel an affection toward her. Not only because she is Laura Worth, but because she is both my mother and a woman in her own right.”

  Suddenly tears were running down my face and I knew they were tears of release, bursting from a spring that had been frozen for most of my life. Gunnar came to me across the sand and put his arms about me as I’d longed to have him do.

  “It would be good if your father could be here now, if he could hold you like this.”

  I didn’t want him to hold me as my father might have done. But that didn’t matter either. Where there had been no one and nothing, there were now two people whom I could care about. Either could hurt me, humiliate me, turn away from me. And that didn’t matter either. The thawing of the ice had gone too far to be stopped, and I wept against Gunnar’s shoulder, while he stroked my hair and held me till I quieted. Then I stepped back from him of my own accord and wiped my eyes with the big handkerchief he offered me.

  “It hurts a great deal to love,” I said wonderingly. “I never knew that it could be such a hurting thing.”

  His smile was grave. “Yes. It is a hurting thing to love,” he said, and I knew he was remembering Astrid.

  “Just the same it’s better to be alive and able to be hurt.” I felt my own astonishment that I could say such words and believe in them.

  “And now, because you have this new feeling about Laura,” Gunnar went on, “you must help the rest of us to discourage her from this mad thing she plans to do.”

  For a moment I stared at him helplessly. I was discovering something else about my own feelings. There was loyalty as well as love.

  I shook my head vehemently. “No! I’m on her side. If that’s what she wants, she must go back and face her world, and become what she’s now prepared to become, as she never was before. I think she may be the greatest actress in America today—if she has her way.”

  He was truly angry at that. I saw the storminess of his own harsh country in his eyes. I saw what he believed and knew that he would not change. All that I’d said about love had been canceled out because he still thought I meant to punish Laura, that I wanted to see her bring about her own self-destruction.

  I had meant to tell him what had happened last night, and what Irene had told me this morning. Now I would tell him nothing. I turned away, as angry as he—and desperately hurt. I walked back toward the house and he came after me on the path with his long strides, in time to open the doors for me, icily polite.

  We found Laura and Gunnar’s mother talking placidly in the living room where we had left them. From the frame on the piano Astrid’s face smiled at me as if in recognition. Now I would have liked to know about her. I wanted to know what she had done when Gunnar froze into an imitation of his own Norwegian winter. Or had he never frozen against her? She had a gentle, smiling face. What had she been to him? How much had she loved him? All these things I wanted to know—and never would.

  I looked across the room at Laura, and saw her, not as the actress I’d admired, but as a woman. Tempestuous, unreasonable, often self-engrossed and self-indulgent—yet with so much more to her complex nature than I had been willing to concede. She had been strong enough to recognize that, for her, her work must come first, and that she would destroy any who came too close to her. For the first time I realized that such decisions were not ruthlessly made, not made without pain and sacrifice—but out of her own self-knowledge. Other women who had the same drive to become stars had tried the opposite course, and often their lives were strewn with broken marriages, and children even more bitterly damaged than I had been. Laura, at least, had not attempted marriage until she was free of Hollywood.

  She must have sensed my attention upon her, for she glanced at me across the room—and gave me her famous smile. It was the smile of Maggie Thornton, but I knew something else about it now. It was, first of all, Laura’s smile. My own lips moved into a strangeness, an expression with which I was not familiar, and I knew I was smiling back at her in a new way. She recognized the difference, and read it better than I did.

  “You see!” she said to Gunnar, with a small triumph in her voic
e. “We’re friends now, Leigh and I.”

  I knew very well that she took pride in subjugating me. But for once I didn’t bristle. I would learn to accept what she could give, without asking for too much more. And, however clumsily, I would give her in return something she had never before known—and perhaps would not value—the affection of a daughter.

  “I am not sure that you are friends,” Gunnar said darkly. “You perhaps give your trust too easily, Laura.”

  She smiled at him, paying no attention to his words, though I knew now that he did not trust me, and that he would undercut me with her at every turn.

  “Gunnar, play your fiddle for us—for Leigh,” she commanded. “I’m sure she’s never head a Hardanger fiddle.”

  He went to a cabinet and took out the instrument. Then he brought it to show me with cool courtesy, explaining that the peasant fiddle had been known in Norway as early as the 1600’s. It had eight strings, four being understrings. The flat bridge was beautifully inlaid with mother-of-pearl and topped by a crowned lion’s head. It was in the town of Hardanger that these fiddles had first been made, and so they bore its name.

  “A country friend taught me to play it when I was very young,” Gunnar said. “The volume is strong. It is best heard outside.”

  He opened doors that gave upon the rocky wall which held off the sea, and stepped through them. We sat indoors and listened to him play. The music was strange and lively, the country melodies rather like the sound of Scottish tunes played on the bagpipe. This was the sound I had heard that night in Kalfaret. It was music to be danced to, but it also had a wild, almost mournful, undercurrent that belonged to the mountains and valleys and fjords of Norway. Even though the bagpipe was a wind instrument, and the Hardanger fiddle stringed, the music was polyphonic and very like.