“What’s wrong with her!” Dora’s mother repeated incredulously.
So then Dora had nothing to say, until her mother went on, “And he? I suppose he’s still there?”
“Paul? Things would be in a fine mess if he weren’t.” Dora hung up indignantly.
Annette had the idea, which she shared with Stella, that Dora was in love with Paul. Stella liked this idea and made Annette give her more details. And then Stella asked, “And he?”
Annette gave a little laugh at that. “Naturally, he’s pleased. He likes it.”
“Yes, but does he feel the same way?” Stella asked.
“Goodness, Stella, if you’re in Paul’s position, you don’t ask yourself such questions. You take what falls down from heaven and keep quiet. Thank you, darling. Just what we needed,” she said as Paul returned with more toast, and she began to butter it at once.
Stella watched Paul and Dora together, but it was difficult for her to see what Annette saw. Paul was always reserved, and as for Dora—Stella knew that she was, like herself, a person of deep feeling; but everything in Dora’s training, her nature, even in her physical presence, was calculated to hide this. “Poor thing, what do you expect, she’s so dreadfully repressed,” Annette said when Stella complained she couldn’t see anything of what Annette had described. “Probably she doesn’t even know it herself. What she needs is opening up—the way I opened you up,” she said to Stella, who then blushed and smiled again in that big-schoolgirl way.
Whatever their feelings for each other, Paul and Dora certainly spent a lot of time together in the house. That may have been partly because Annette now monopolized Stella. She had taken Stella’s regime in hand, and it was she who decided that now it was time for Stella to have her nap, and now it was time to play chess with Annette, and now, perhaps (all bundled up in furs and boots), what about a drive with Annette through Central Park? So it didn’t matter whether Paul and Dora liked being together—they had no alternative. They always had plenty to talk about—mostly about Annette, or Stella and Annette. It wasn’t long, then, before Paul told Dora about the big scene that had taken place between Stella and Annette eight years earlier. He had never talked about this to anyone, even though it was by no means a secret, for it had been enacted in front of the whole teatime crowd assembled in the hotel restaurant where Paul had at that time been a waiter.
He knew Stella well; she was a regular patron. She was very generous with her tips and always had a friendly word for the staff. She had quite a large circle of friends—most of them rich, clever, middle-aged women like herself—but after Annette appeared this circle gradually shrank, and after a while she came only with Annette. Stella didn’t seem to mind the loss of her other friends. She appeared very happy, feasting herself on the presence of Annette and basking in her high spirits.
But on the day of the big scene Annette had not been in high spirits. She was an avid consumer of teatime pastries, but on this afternoon she was eating compulsively, angrily. She was still licking up the remains of one rich, squashy cake when she imperiously waved her hand for the trolley to be wheeled over to her again. Stella also had a fondness for these pastries, but she had to be careful of her weight. When the trolley was summoned for the third time, Stella made a selection of her own, but Annette (her mouth sticky with whipped cream and chocolate flakes) turned on her. “Are you completely out of your mind!” she cried. “Stuffing yourself when—look at you—you’re already the size of a buffalo. It’s disgusting.”
All this was said in front of Paul, who was refilling their cups with tea, and the trolley waiter, who stood there gaping. Paul took charge then, waving his colleague away and also removing himself and his teapot discreetly to other tables. But he kept an eye on Stella. He had always liked her, and he felt protective about her. He thought of her as a wonderful American lady, and admired the expensive suits and shoes she wore, from the best shops. He also watched Annette; he knew her type only too well, unfortunately. After those first words, he kept his eye on the two of them as best he could, although it was a very busy time and the place was packed. Every time he looked again, he saw that the scene between them had advanced a stage further, and he was appalled. Annette appeared almost to have lost control of herself. But Paul knew that she hadn’t, really; she couldn’t afford to. A person like her had always to be in control of herself, and of others, and of situations. She could only survive by manipulation. So she must have deliberately let herself fly into a terrible rage, and although Paul couldn’t hear what she was saying (she was almost shouting, but luckily much of what she was saying was drowned out in the teatime roar), he knew it was mercilessly cruel. He could tell this from the expression on Annette’s face, which was frightening. Even as she was shouting at Stella, she continued to attack the huge piece of Black Forest cake she had selected from the trolley; her mouth dripped with it, so that she looked like a beast of prey—cruel and greedy.
When Paul looked next, Annette had gone, and Stella sat alone. And now he didn’t care how many tables were clamoring for him; he went straight over to her and stood between her and the rest of the restaurant, shielding her with his back while pretending to pour tea for her. “Now,” he said, “now, now.” She had completely disintegrated. Her shoulders were hunched within her tailored suit, her face was ugly and red, and huge tears rolled down it. “Now, now,” he said over and over, not so much to say something as to prevent the sounds that came from her, the helpless sobs, from being heard at adjoining tables.
“I guess I know when that was,” Dora said when Paul had told her this story. And Paul confirmed that it was eight years ago when Annette had walked out on Stella and gone off to London with one of her businessman friends. Paul guessed that she had staged the scene in order to rid herself of Stella. In any case, within a day or two she had packed her bags and moved out and flown to London. It was then that Paul began to be really close to Stella, and gradually it became his life’s task to take care of her.
Annette said it was a wonderful arrangement. She said this often—to Stella when they were in bed together and Paul was serving their breakfast, and to Dora, too, looking at her out of the corners of her merry black eyes. “Such a nice person,” she said about Paul. “So helpful and good.” And once she added, “Of course, he’s very lucky, too. He’s fallen on his feet here. What a chance for him—a person from his class.” She turned her mouth down in utter contempt.
“What class is that?” Dora said coldly.
“Oh, darling,” said Annette. Again she looked at Dora with dancing, teasing eyes. “I wonder what your family thinks of him,” she went on. “Not quite what they’re used to, is it? A waiter.” Again she pulled her mouth down. “A proletarian.”
“A what?” said Dora.
Annette repeated the word for her, relishing her own contempt.
Dora, of course, did not report this conversation to Paul, but she did ask him what he thought Annette’s own background had been. Now it was Paul’s turn to pull his mouth down, and he grimaced just as Annette had done when she spoke about him. “Yes, yes,” he said, “we all know what she is, where she comes from.”
“She says she’s Russian,” Dora said.
Actually, Annette was vague about her lineage. Sometimes her parents were White Russians who had fled their homeland and settled in Paris, leaving vast estates behind; sometimes only her father was of Russian ancestry, and her mother was a French ballet dancer.
“Yes, yes,” Paul said again. He added, “And about her age.”
“She says she’s thirty-five.”
“All right,” Paul said. “Sometimes a lady likes to take off a year here and there. That is quite natural; we all understand it. But to take off fifteen years!”
“Fifteen years?”
“That’s really shameless,” Paul said. “She is quite shameless.”
After that, Dora looked more closely at Annette. She could not believe she was fifty. Of course, Annette used a lot of make
-up, and her hair was not its own color, but all the same there was a youthful vitality in her face and in her plump, active little body. Dora herself, who was not quite thirty, felt almost middle-aged beside her, and of course dowdy. Annette often commented on Dora’s appearance, usually in front of Stella. She would study her, with her head to one side and the tip of her rosy tongue thoughtfully protruding. “Yes,” she said once, speaking about one of Dora’s discreet dresses, “it’s nice, smart—but wait!” She jumped up and dashed away, to return with one of her own bird-of-paradise scarves, which she quickly wound around Dora’s neck. “There!” she cried in triumph. Stella nodded and smiled, and Annette said, “Paul likes it, too, don’t you, Paul?” And when Dora pulled the scarf off, Annette cried, “Oh, why? It looks so chic!” and Stella echoed her.
Stella and Dora, as aunt and favorite niece, had always had a lot in common. They liked the same books and in the past they had often gone to concerts and exhibitions together, and had usually come away with the same reactions. Stella had appreciated the girl’s mind, her good taste, and her quiet, withdrawn, modest behavior. But now she no longer seemed to value these qualities, and, like Annette with the bright scarf, Stella began to suggest changes. She wanted Dora to go out and enjoy herself. “Why don’t you go to a play tonight—Off Broadway! And supper afterward?” Or, “The stores are open late tomorrow. Why don’t you let Annette take you shopping?”
“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Annette.
“I don’t need anything,” Dora said.
Another time, it might be Annette who suggested an outing—to a film festival, to a musical, to a newly opened restaurant. When Dora refused, Annette would say, “Paul can take you, if you like. He can have the evening off, can’t he, Stella?”
“Oh, my dear,” said Stella, in horror at the idea that Paul should have to ask for such a thing.
But neither Paul nor Dora had any inclination to go. They preferred to stay with Stella.
Dora’s mother telephoned more frequently from the Vineyard. “How is she? Is she still there? Should I come?”
Dora always told her not to. She said it was all right—Stella was the same, no change. But in fact there was a change; Stella was not the same. She had kept active as long as she could, and got dressed at least once a day in her skirt and cardigan, and came downstairs to sit by the cozy log fire Paul had lit. But now, as her illness progressed, she was forced to stay more and more in her bedroom, and Paul lit a fire in there. In the evenings, when Dora first came home from her job in the museum, it was the place where they all congregated, with Stella in bed as their centerpiece. Annette spent most of her days in there. She had an armchair and little table by the fire, and there she sat, playing solitaire while Stella dozed. Excellent meals were brought in on trays by Paul, and snacks in between, and Annette seemed to be perfectly content to sit there throughout the day and let Stella watch her, when she was awake. It was mid-winter; the snow fell outside, and the one tree visible from the window was stripped and dead, so it seemed nice to be sitting inside, even in a sickroom.
Sometimes, when Stella was asleep, Paul and Dora became restless. They had a lot of things on their minds and no one else to share them with, so they tended to sneak away together, usually up to Paul’s room. Sometimes when Stella woke up, she asked, “Has Dora gone home?” And Annette would kick a log into the fire and say, “No, she is with Paul, upstairs.” Stella saw Annette’s face lit by the flickering flames, and a smile flickering there as well. Stella, too, was pleased to think of Paul and Dora together; it gave her satisfaction to imagine what happiness might be going on between them in her house.
There was no fire in Paul’s room. There was a little fireplace, but he liked to keep the room cold, with the radiator turned off and, whenever possible, the window left open. And though Dora usually felt the cold very much, she was glad of this outer coolness, because she felt there were fires within her. The moment they were alone together, they began to speak of Annette. Dora did her very best to be fair and to assume that Annette was living in the house and keeping vigil in the sickroom for love of Stella, for noble motives. But whenever she said that, Paul took on the knowing sneer he always had for Annette. “Listen,” he said, “Dora”—there was always the slightest hesitation when he said her name, for she had only recently managed to persuade him not to call her Miss Dora—“listen, she is not the type to do anything for love, that I can tell you. She can’t afford to.” His thin lips went thinner, and his cold, pale eyes looked at Dora now with dislike. “I’m afraid you wouldn’t know about that . . . Dora. About a person like her, the way she has to live all her life.”
“How?” asked Dora, curiously excited.
“On her wits, on what she has up here,” he said, slapping his forehead. “Yes, and of course, what she has down there, too,” he said, pointing downward with a coarseness very unusual for him. “Excuse me,” he said immediately but in an unrepentant tone. “That’s the way it is. If you don’t have”—and he rubbed two fingers together in a moneylender’s gesture—“then that’s the way you have to make do. I’ve seen hundreds like her—thousands—all over the world. They used to sit around in the restaurants I worked in. They were the first to come and the last to leave. They could never go home, because there was the landlord downstairs waiting to be paid, or maybe the people they were living with had told them to leave. You don’t know what that’s like, Dora—when you’re asked to leave by your host. When they want to be polite to you, they say they’ve got other guests coming. But they don’t always want to be polite; they don’t need to be, do they? For instance, now, if this house were yours and you wanted someone to leave, you wouldn’t have to pretend anything. You could just say, ‘Go.’ You could say it to Annette, you could say it to me. ‘Go’—just like that.” He had grown very pale, and Dora, too, grew pale.
Stella’s doctor paid regular visits, and he talked gravely to Dora afterward in the drawing room. Annette was always there, and her right to be there was by now indisputable. Each time, Dora had to recover from what the doctor had told her, waiting downstairs to collect herself before going back to Stella. Annette waited with her, to comfort and strengthen her, but if Dora stayed too long, sitting there in silence, with her head bowed, Annette got restless and began to pace the room. There was a cashmere shawl thrown over a grand piano in one corner, and sometimes Annette took it off and wrapped it around herself and modeled it before the pier glass. Once she sighed and said, “How beautiful,” and, picking up a silver box, she sighed again and opened it and shut it, looking at her reflection there, too, for Paul had polished the box to perfection. “He keeps things well,” she murmured to Dora. “Quite the little housekeeper. He’s going to miss all this, you know. When it’s no longer here.” She gave a third deep sigh, and, unwinding herself from the shawl, replaced it on the piano—though very slowly, letting her hand linger over the soft wool, as if reluctant to let go.
“What are you going to do with all of it?” she asked, indicating the drawing room and all of its contents—all Stella’s beloved screens, fans, clocks, and mirrors. “Sell it, I suppose,” she went on, now almost talking to herself. “No use keeping it, and, my goodness, it should all fetch a pretty penny. A pretty penny,” she repeated, wistfully.
Dora still hadn’t spoken, sunk in thoughts of Stella and the doctor’s prognosis.
“And what about us?” Annette asked. “What are you going to do about us, Paul and me? We won’t fetch much, I’m afraid.” She laughed at that—a deep, cynical, unfeminine laugh—and, looking at her, Dora believed for the first time that Annette was fifty, for this laugh seemed to come out of years of disappointment.
Annette caught Dora’s look of surprise, and she went on, “She’s not going to leave much to us, you know that—to Paul and me. It’s all going to you, naturally. Naturally,” she repeated. “Money like that doesn’t go out of the family. It never does.” And again she seemed to speak out of long, long experience.
Dor
a’s mother said, “How is she? I could come over for the weekend.”
“Mother, it’s all right,” Dora said into the telephone.
“Dora, are you telling me everything I ought to know? My own sister, after all.”
“It’s all right,” Dora repeated.
Dora had always had a room kept ready for her in Stella’s house, and now she moved into it, locking up her own apartment. She wanted to be there with Stella all the time. Stella had shrunk so much that her own bed seemed to overwhelm her. Her booming voice, too, was down to its own echo. One day, Annette fell asleep by the fireside, and Dora sat by Stella’s bed, holding her hand. For the first time in a long while, aunt and niece had the opportunity to talk privately together. Stella talked about Annette; she kept looking at her fondly as she slept. It was the afternoon of a winter day and the light was failing, so that Annette was mostly in shadow. Her head was supported on her hand, her face was flushed by the fire, and she breathed peacefully.
“She’s so kind to me—you have no idea,” Stella said. “But that’s nothing new. She’s always been like that, all goodness and kindness.” She smiled at her memories. “Of course, we had our little difficulties sometimes, but everyone has those, don’t they? If they’re really close to each other. That’s part of it—hurting each other because you love each other so much. It’s different when people don’t care for you, or only pretend to.”
“Mother calls every day to ask after you,” Dora said.
Stella nodded, as if she knew that and also knew what it was worth.
“I wish—I wish—I wish—” said Stella, after a long silence, swinging Dora’s hand about. This by-play was one of the things they had between them, as if they had spent their childhood together.
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