He got out of bed again, unable to lie still, and went to the window. At the turn of the path he saw two figures standing together, then move apart, and one, a man, tramped briskly upwards while the other—yes, it was Emily—moved more slowly towards the villa. Kaarlo had probably walked her home, though it hadn’t looked like Kaarlo. It might have been Michel Clément or Abe Fielding. He felt suddenly unutterably lonely and he turned from the window with violent revulsion and climbed back into bed. Had he heard Emily laughing out there in the snow or was it just in his imagination that she had turned from him towards a happiness in which he could have no share?
Oh, God, it would have to be Indiana! It didn’t really matter where, as long as there were the students and a certain amount of latitude given him in his teaching. It was only that it seemed to matter.
Sam sat on his twin bed in the hotel bedroom, waiting for his father to come back before turning off the light. During the holidays, unless they were planning an excursion that meant particularly early rising, Abe put no restrictions on Sam’s bedtime, and the boy had a feeling of freedom and pleasure as he sat there, his legs dangling over the side of the bed, writing a long letter to Mimi.
Abe had urged him to come to Kaarlo’s and Maggie’s with him, but Sam had said, “I don’t think I feel much like listening to music tonight, dad. I think I’ll take a long hot soak and write a letter.”
“A love letter?” Abe had asked, grinning.
And Sam had answered, “Well, in a manner of speaking, yes.”
He was putting the letter in the envelope when his father came in.
“Still at it?” Abe asked. “How many fortunate young ladies are going to be the recipients of your billets doux?”
“Just one,” Sam said. “My mind’s sort of been wandering most of the evening. Think I’ll take my shower now before I turn in.”
When he came out of the bathroom Abe was sitting on the edge of his bed in his blue-and-white striped pajamas staring at the picture of Kristina in the silver frame on the bureau. Sam climbed carefully into bed and lay there, his eyes wide open and awake, looking at his father. “Wish I could remember mother,” he said at last.
“Yes,” Abe said.
“I have an idea what she was like from talking to you, but it’s not the same thing as knowing her myself.”
“No,” Abe said. “You’re not unlike her. Both in looks and temperament. A masculine version.”
“Not a bit like Betty, was she?”
“Kristina and Betty were diametric opposites. Betty was a mistake from all points of view.”
Sam pulled the covers up under his chin and watched the hump his feet made under the blankets at the foot of the bed. “I know, dad. I’m sorry.”
Abe sat there on the side of his bed, his thin ankles showing between the bottoms of his pajamas and his brown leather slippers so that he looked somehow vulnerable and Sam was fiercely angry at Betty, angrier than he had ever been while Betty was with them.
“I thought I had to—to have some sort of substitute mother for you,” Abe said. “And I knew it would be impossible-wrong—to marry anyone because she reminded me of Kris. And I was hellishly lonely. So I blundered about as badly as anyone can blunder.”
“I don’t remember Betty too well,” Sam said. “Just that you were always going out in the evenings. And she broke things a lot. Cups and glasses. I remember that. Not washing them, or anything. Just broke them. She didn’t like to do things like washing dishes, did she? I can’t imagine her doing cooking and stuff, and having fun at it the way Mrs. Bowen does, if you’d been poor. And parties. I remember parties with everybody making lots of noise and sometimes you’d leave everybody and come upstairs and sit with me. And then I had polio and I went to Warm Springs and when I got back she was gone and I was glad.”
Abe stood up and went over to the long windows that led out onto the balcony and pushed them ajar and cold air knifed into the room. He got into bed, lit a cigarette, and turned out the light. “It was a lousy deal for you, Sam,” he said. “I should have put a stop to it sooner.”
“I used to lie awake at night worrying about whether or not you’d marry again,” Sam said. “Do you have to pay her alimony or anything?”
“I did, and quite a sizable one, till she remarried.”
“Love’s a funny thing,” Sam said, watching his father’s cigarette glow and fade in the rapidly chilling room. “But you never did love her like my own mother, did you?”
“No.” Abe’s voice was sharp.
“I suppose it was partly sex, wasn’t it?” Sam asked, able to put in the dark the questions that would have been impossible before the light was out. “I’ve come to the conclusion that sex is an even odder thing than love.”
“But take them together and they can light up half the planet. Don’t minimize either of them, Sam, and certainly not in conjunction. It’s a magic combination.”
“Was that the way it was with you and mother?” Sam asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you think it can happen more than once to the same person?”
There was a long pause before Abe answered. Then all he said was, “I don’t know.”
“Do you think—you’re not likely ever to marry again at this date, are you?”
Abe chuckled. “At this period of my senility? I don’t know, Sam. I’m not entirely decrepit yet. Would you mind if I did?”
“Gosh, no,” Sam said. “It would all depend on who she was. I just wondered.”
“Not without the magic combination, anyhow,” Abe said. “Good night, son.”
“’Night, dad.”
Abe put out his cigarette, pulled the pillow half over his head as he always did for warmth in winter, and was almost asleep when Sam’s voice came again.
“Hey, dad, are you asleep?”
“Well, not entirely, why?”
“Anti-Semitism reared its ugly head at the thé dansant this afternoon.”
“Oh? How so?”
“This creep Snider Bean I picked up to be Virginia Bowen’s date. He made snide remarks about Mimi.”
“Snider made snide reamrks? So what did you do?”
“I didn’t get a chance to do anything. He made them to Virginia while Mimi and I were dancing, and Virginia walked out on him and went home. So when we got back to the table Beanie went off after her and I said, what was that about? and Mimi said, I suppose it’s occurred to you I’m a Jew, or words to that effect.”
“Had it?”
“No. I don’t go about wondering what people are. Just if I like them.”
“That’s okay, then,” Abe said. “Don’t change.”
“Yeah, but what do you do about people like Beanie?”
“That’s a tough one, Sam. Speak your piece, I guess. Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t let cowardice or fear of not running with the herd make you slide into appearing to agree with anything you don’t honestly agree with.”
“Doesn’t seem like enough,” Sam said.
“It would be if everybody did it. If we all stood up for what we believed in.”
“Do people ever?” Sam asked. “Look at the Bible. Peter three times before the cock crew. Hey, maybe I ought to be a minister.”
“Worth thinking about.”
“You wouldn’t split a gasket or anything?”
In the darkness Abe smiled and lit another cigarette. The match flared and for a moment his face was illuminated in its tiny spotlight, the delicate arch of nose, the full, sensitive lips, the velvet brown of eyes that could turn cold as the frozen ground of February. “I’m with you a hundred percent in anything you believe in a hundred percent.”
“Even with all the extra schooling and everything?”
“Yes, Sam. Fortunately we don’t have to worry about that.”
“Did mother? Stand up for what she believed in, I mean?”
“Yes, Sam.”
“Anybody else you know?”
“Sure. Quite a lot of p
eople.”
“Who?”
“Kaarlo. Emily Bowen. And her husband. Courtney.”
“That funny little Virginia did this afternoon,” Sam said. “Walked out on Beanie. I guess that took courage for a kid like her.”
“Quite a lot of courage, I should think,” Abe said.
“I think Mimi would. She’s quite a girl, dad.”
“Yes,” Abe said. “She’ll be a beauty when she grows up to herself.”
“Well, good night, dad.”
“Good night, Sam.”
Darkness and cold air slipping in through the crack in the French windows. Music from the ballroom. Voices and laughter in the halls. In the village a dog baying.
In the chalet in the small bedroom that had once been Kaarlo’s Gertrude lay awake. The curtains were drawn at the window so that the moon, if it should break through the clouds, would not shine in on her, and the darkness was absolute, darkness so deep it had no edges, no thin line of light to mark a boundary of chest or bed or window’s edge, no shape, no form. Kaarlo was on the couch in the big room and the door was closed between them and she could not see the door.
The sleeping pills were in the bathroom and if she got up, stumbling over things in the darkness, she would waken Kaarlo and it was not a sleeping pill she wanted. A sedative would quiet her for the moment but then there would be the headache in the morning, the hangover without any fun preceding it to compensate for it. Or was sleep compensation enough? Sleep had never seemed that important in the old days. Those were the old days and these were the now days (though they seemed all nights, just as fingers can seem all thumbs) and were there ever going to be any new days?
If she were still in the sanatorium she could ring for a nurse and she would have a glass of warm milk, which she loathed, but at least it would be a diversion. If she pressed the emergency button they would all come running. When she was first in the sanatorium Dr. Clément had promised her that if she ever rang the emergency bell that he would be there within sixty seconds. He did not lie. She knew that. She had found it out the night that she wakened for no apparent reason choking with blood gushing from her throat as it had done that day in her chalet, blood warm and crimson over the white sheets, the yellow blankets. In her horror she had still managed to press the emergency button and hardly had she taken her finger from it than they were all there and Sister Baldwin, the dour night sister from London, had been so suddenly kind that Gertrude had thought—I must be going to die or old Starchy would be furious over the mess on the bedclothes. But she had not died and the bedclothes were changed so swiftly and gently that she was hardly aware of any commotion and the blood was stopped and she lay flat on the bed holding a piece of ice in her mouth and Dr. Clément sat beside the bed holding her hand, not to take her pulse now, simply for the comfort of human contact. He had sat there holding her hand for a long time and his steady closeness had taken away her fear.
That, of course, was what she wanted.
The darkness seemed to deepen.—A coward, that’s what I’m turning into. I was never afraid before, not of blood, nor of sleeplessness when I drank half the night or even all of it, nor of the dark when I spent night after night in deserted barns or alone in the chalet or in the huts up the mountain waiting, not knowing if the approaching footstep would be Henri or Kaarlo, one of our own people, or one of the Germans. I wasn’t afraid then.
—It was because I had something to do, she thought. A tiger who’s not afraid in the jungle is afraid in the safety of its cage. I am afraid to the point of screaming.
She put her hand over her mouth and pressed back the scream. When it was finally down, swallowed like the medicine Kaarlo had given her at bedtime (because neither he not Clément trusted her to do things properly herself) she sat up in bed.
—No, she thought. No, I promised Clément, and Kaarlo would be angry.
But she did not lie down. She sat there and she could hear the music from the hotel.—How long does it go on? What about people who want to sleep? And what about people who want to dance? What about little Emily dancing at the casino with Abe Fielding? I want a drink. A drink might put me to sleep. Damn it, why couldn’t I have got this business during the war and then I could have died legitimately and without fear instead of in terror and boredom …
The music from the hotel seemed to get louder, the darkness deeper.
—I can’t stand it.
She swung her feet out of bed, stood up, moved unsteadily towards where she knew the door must be.—The chair. Damn. What a crash. Sure to waken Kaarlo. The door. Turn the handle. My God, it’s frozen stiff.
She wrenched it free.
—Kaarlo!
She ran stumbling across the room to him crashing into the couch, pulling back the covers, crawling in beside him, pressing up against the steamy, sleepy warmth of his body, shivering violently.
He pulled himself up out of the deep pit of those first heavy hours of sleep.
“I couldn’t stand it in there alone!” Her teeth were chattering.
He held her close to him, quieting her. She pressed her lips against his shoulder.
“You’d better stay till you’re warm and then I’ll carry you back and fix you a hot-water bottle and a warm drink and give you a pill,” he said.
She shook her head against him, still shivering, pressing closer.
His hand had been rubbing firmly, soothingly, against the small of her back. Now he stopped. “No.”
“Yes, Kaarlo!” She wriggled against him, higher, until she could reach his lips with hers. After a moment his hand started its rhythmic motion again.
Perhaps because of Courtney’s restlessness, because of his cold feet drawing the warmth from her, Emily dreamed, dreamed that she was back in the small New England village where she had been born, where her father was the doctor. In her dream she had done something terrible. She did not know what it was, only that it had been a very great sin, and not knowing what it was that had been committed made it even more fearful. She knew that her only salvation lay in going to her father and confessing, and she moved on leaden feet towards the surgery. In the waiting room people sat in winter coats, collars turned up, hats pulled down towards ears. Gertrude was there in a sleek black low-cut evening dress. In the office her father sat at his big flat-top desk. Compassionate and brusque at the same time. No. It was not her father. It was not her father at the desk at all. It was Courtney. If she told Courtney he would assume responsibility for whatever it was that had been done and then everything would be all right.
She wakened. Across the hall she could hear Connie singing softly to herself as she often did if she roused before the rest of the household.
“‘Away in a manger,’” Connie sang, “‘no crib for a bed. Silent night. Holy night.’”
Emily looked over at Courtney. He was still asleep.
For a long time she had thought that if you loved anyone you had to tell him everything; go to him and confess as in the dream; there could be no secrets. But now in the dark of early morning with the copper bottle cold against her feet she felt that this desire to tell all was simply an evasion of responsibility, a weakness in wanting to push on to the person you love something that is your own responsibility to solve. It would be easier for her to tell Courtney all about Abe, to come to him as he sat at his desk in the chill little workroom and confess, to hand the responsibility for her ambivalence to him, to let him settle the problem of her puny conscience for her.
—But I know, she thought, lying there beside him on Madame Pedroti’s lumpy bed, that if I love Courtney that is the last thing I must do. If I love Courtney he must never know.
Three
Abe and Sam stopped at the villa to pick up Emily and Virginia and Mimi at four o’clock. Already it was night in the village. Light still lay on the upper slopes and the mountain peaks were brilliant, but in the village the shadows lurked around the corners and in the distance they could hear the night baying of the dogs. Sam and Virgini
a and Mimi hurried along ahead, their skates slung across their shoulders and thumping against their bodies as they moved.
“Look, Abe,” Emily said. “The stars are beginning to come out and up on the mountains it’s still sunlight.”
“If you go down to the bottom of a well even on a very bright day you can see the stars,” Abe said.
“Really, Abe?”
He laughed. “So I’ve been told. I’ve never had the opportunity to try it personally.”
“I suppose it’s logical,” Emily said, “like living here in the village, only more so, but I don’t really understand it. Vee came to me once with the fascinating information that if we could get beyond the atmosphere of our earth we could truly see the stars, but the sky would be black, absolutely black, with no atmosphere between us and the sun. Something about there being no light unless there are particles of atmosphere in the air to catch the light rays and refract them. Something like that. I don’t really understand it. But it’s sort of like is there a noise when a tree falls in the forest if nobody is there to hear it.…” She stopped. “I am babbling on.”
Abe caught at her hand and pushed it into the depths of his pocket. For a moment she let it rest there; then she pulled it out. “No, Abe.”
“Why not?”
“The children.”
“They aren’t looking.”
“But if they turn around …”
“What if they do? We’re friends, aren’t we? Old friends. So what’s more natural than for two old friends casually to hold hands?”
“It isn’t casual.”
“No,” Abe said, “but to anybody but you and me it would seem as though it were.”
Emily kept her hands deep in her own pockets and shook her head. “No. It wouldn’t look casual with me. I don’t hold hands with people. Virginia would—”
“All right, darling,” Abe said. “We won’t if it makes you uncomfortable.”
She said, “Oh, Abe, I’ve never thought before that I was a bitch.”
A Winter's Love Page 12
