In less than five minutes after leaving the Ritz, William drew up in front of the brown steps. He descended from his chauffeur’s seat, opened the enclosed quarters behind, and escorted Charlotte up to the heavy double oak doors, carrying her hand baggage.
She rang the bell. It was answered almost instantly by a stranger—a young woman in a long dark coat and a sailor hat. Charlotte recognized her from Lisa’s description as the trained nurse now in attendance upon her mother. There had been a string of nurses since Charlotte’s departure. The present nurse was a treasure, Lisa said. Although Mother Vale had dismissed her already twice, the nurse had treated it as just a whim and still remained.
“Mercy!” she exclaimed. “I tried to get down before you rang! I’m the nurse. Pickford is my name. Dora, not Mary. Come in here a minute.” She led the way into the reception-room.
“Is something wrong with Mother?”
“Mercy, no! She’s fit as a fiddle.” She had a broad, pleasant face. Charlotte liked her instantly. “But she’s got ears sharp as a cat’s, and heard the doorbell sure as preaching. Now listen, I’m dismissed. I’m paid off, said goodbye and everything. But if you should need me I’ll be on the floor above your mother’s room, armed to the teeth. She’s been complaining all day of a pain in her chest. You know how it is with the funny old dears. My Grandma Pickford was just like her. She’s crazy to go to the party she’s putting on for you tonight, so she won’t let her pain get very bad. But in case she needs to be told that her heart, and all the works, are steady as a clock, why, I’ll be on tap. She’s all ready for the party except her dress, sitting up in her chair all dressed up in her best neglijee, looking as cute as a little red wagon. Now hurry and go up to her.”
Charlotte found her mother seated in her high-backed Martha Washington armchair, resembling a dowager queen seated in state on her throne. Lavender ostrich plumes covered the top of her body. A gorgeous white robe that looked like bleached caracul fur was spread over her knees. Her transformation, pure white and glossy as spun glass, rested on her head like a crown. She wore her pearl and diamond dog collar around her neck, and in her ears pearl and diamond earrings. On her hands, resting on the short arms of the chair, large diamonds, set in gold, scintillated. In contrast to all this brilliance, her skin looked dull. It had a brownish cast, and hung limp and lifeless. But there was nothing limp or lifeless about her eyes. They were steely blue, bright, and piercing.
“Well, Mother, hello!” Charlotte crossed the room, leaned down and kissed the surface of the transformation. “You’re looking wonderful. What a marvelous slumber-robe!” she went on, standing so close to her mother’s chair that the piercing blue eyes could scrutinize only the material of her skirt. “Lisa says you’ve been very well. No colds all spring, and free from the old pain. I’m so glad.”
“Lisa knows nothing about me! Step over here so I can see you.”
Charlotte obeyed.
Her mother lifted her tortoise-shell lorgnettes. She was silent for at least thirty seconds. “Turn around,” she said in an icy tone. “Walk up and down. Sit down. Take off your hat.”
Charlotte complied, trying to stifle the old self-consciousness. “It’s worse than Lisa led me to suppose,” her mother announced. “Much worse! Much! Much! Smelling salts, please.”
Charlotte found the familiar, squat, dark-green bottle in the adjoining bathroom. She removed the glass stopper and held the bottle at just the right distance from her mother’s nose. With lips and eyes tightly compressed, her mother inhaled slowly and deeply.
“It’s passing,” she whispered. “That will do. Go and sit down.” She took the bottle herself and Charlotte returned to her chair. “I must pull myself together,” she murmured. “It’s getting near dinnertime, and I have things to say to you. I’ve asked a number of the family to dinner at seven-thirty—Lloyd-and-Rosa, Hilary-and-Justine, Uncle Herbert and Hester, also Nichols and June.”
“Yes, Lisa told me. That’s very nice of you, Mother.”
“Wait! Listen, please! There’ll be twelve in all. I’m wearing my white lace. I’d like you to wear your black-and-white foulard.”
“But, Mother, it won’t fit. I’ve lost over twenty-five pounds.”
“Oh, yes, it will. I’ve had Miss Till here for the last week. Hilda, the new waitress, is just Lisa’s size. We’ve fitted all your dresses to her. Have you rouge on your lips?”
“A little.”
“Have you enamel on your nails?”
“A little.”
“What’s happened to your eyebrows?”
“Surely you can see,” said Charlotte, starting toward the door.
“Wait a minute. I’ve something else to say to you. Now that you are cured of whatever ailed you, and come home to take up your duties as daughter again, I have dismissed the last nurse. I have become used to having someone occupy your father’s room on the same floor with me. You will occupy your father’s room from now on. I had William move all your things down yesterday.”
The color mounted to Charlotte’s face. She had left for Cascade so unexpectedly last fall that she had failed to remove a number of articles from the dark tunnels behind her books—cigarettes, three reclining bottles of medicated sherry, so bitter she’d never been able to consume but half of one bottle, a pink tin make-up box, and all that literature which her mother considered indecent. Her bookshelves had never been disturbed since she could remember. She had felt no anxiety that these pitiful evidences of her vices would be discovered.
“You had no right to move my things, Mother,” she murmured.
“No right in my house to move what I see fit? I’m not surprised you blush! I was in your room when William took your books down, and let me say what we found hidden there was a very great shock. No wonder my old pain started up again. Now, on top of it, comes the very great shock of seeing your appearance!” She wafted the smelling salts beneath her nostrils. “Why, Charlotte, you’ll be the laughing stock of the whole city if you go around looking the way you do now. Worse than that, you’ll be pitied and avoided.”
“Well, I’ve always been pitied and avoided in this city, so I shan’t mind it,” retorted Charlotte, in an attempt at levity.
“When an unmarried woman of your age begins trying to look like a girl, it’s obvious to everybody that she’s trying to catch a man. And if she has spent months in a sanatorium, and hides such things behind her books as I found yesterday!—If I were in your place I’d do all I could not to arouse any more suspicions about myself. Remember Stephanie Stebbins.”
Another wave of color surged to Charlotte’s face. “Your mother can’t hurt you,” Doctor Jaquith told her. “Don’t let her frighten you.” Well, but what if her mother were right? What if she would appear like one of those pathological cases of a spinster masquerading as an irresistible young girl? Stephanie Stebbins she used to see in the Public Gardens when she was a child. She belonged to an old proud Boston family who were able to afford an attendant. They humored her hallucination to the extent of allowing her to dress in her absurdly youthful costumes.
“But there were other members of the Stebbins family who were queer, Mother,” said Charlotte. “The queerness broke out in Stephanie when she was only fourteen. I’m past the age.”
“Humph! There’s no age limit for women making fools of themselves, and an old fool is more ridiculous than a young one, to my way of thinking. I’ve seen many a woman old enough to have grandchildren suddenly begin dressing like a young chicken. They deceive nobody but themselves.”
Still another hot wave surged up. Was it possible that the favorable impression she thought she had made on the cruise was self-deception? And the conviction that Jerry loved her a delusion—anyway, tainted by delusion, because she wanted to be loved so? The hills of Italy seemed very far away. Ravello, the balcony, the little pocket of glowing coals in the corner of the dark room—It was all more like a dream now than reality—one of those pernicious daydreams, largely a fabrication
of one’s own imagination. An idyl, Jerry had called it, footprints in the snow, letters traced by an airplane in the sky. What a fool to be treasuring melted footprints, dissipated puffs of vapor, the dead petals of the flower of a night-blooming cereus! What romantic sentimentality! The mantle of self-contempt fell upon her shoulders. She drooped perceptibly beneath its weight.
“I think if you wear your glasses tonight,” dimly she heard her mother saying, “you’ll be less of a shock to the others. Also leave off whatever you’ve got on your face. As to your hair and eyebrows, you can say that often, after severe sickness, one loses one’s hair, and that you are letting yours grow as soon as possible.” Charlotte made no comment, and her mother added, in a kinder tone, “Don’t feel too badly. I’ll do all I can to help the situation.”
Still Charlotte was silent. As she sat staring out at the street, the same similarities of its details recurred to her. The mounting doorsteps looked like a row of back yard bulkheads from this angle, the chimneys and ventilators like stalactites sticking up along the regular roofline. How they endured! They were facts. Her relationship to Jerry existed only in thought. It had no substance—no reality except in that invisible stream-ofconsciousness Doctor Jaquith talked about. By now, perhaps, she had ceased to exist in Jerry’s consciousness, except as an occasional fleeting memory of a brief episode.
She rose. “I think I’ll go to my room,” she remarked in her old listless tone.
She crossed the hall. She wouldn’t have known her father’s room from hers just above first glance. Everything was placed exactly as it had been, even to the pictures on the walls—a photogravure in green and white of the Coliseum by moonlight, another photogravure in color of the pigeons in Saint Mark’s Square. There was also an engraving of a woman with long crimpy hair kneeling before a cross, and several of Aunt Lizzie’s watercolors of Gloucester sea scenes in narrow gold frames.
Most of the articles in the room had been selected by her mother. The “set” of mahogany furniture her mother had given her when she was twenty-one. It consisted of a swell-front bureau and a swell-front chiffonier, two chairs, and twin beds, so that when she married no new bedroom furniture would be necessary. She gazed at the long-resented objects. These, too, were facts—solid and inescapable.
The black-and-white foulard dress was stretched out on the foot of one of the beds. She held it up to her. It smelled strongly of some cleansing fluid. Quelques Fleurs would clash with such an odor. Everything on the cruise would clash with her life here.
There was a knock on the door. It was Hilda, the new parlor maid.
“This just came by express for you,” she announced, and passed Charlotte a box, wrapped in brown paper. There was a white address tag on the box with the name of a New York florist on it, and beneath it her name and address written in ink.
It was Jerry’s handwriting! There, right before her eyes, was her name inscribed by a pen Jerry had guided, as unquestionably a fact as her girlhood furniture or the brick façades. Her reaction was like that of a thirsty traveler on a desert when he discovers that the water, palms, and shade, which he feared were a mirage, are a real oasis.
She placed the box on the foot of the bed, removed the brown paper, the several layers of newspapers beneath, raised the cover and lifted out a cotton-batting-wrapped bundle. There was no card. She unbuttoned the cotton batting. Three fresh, crisp, crimson camellias! Arranged in a cluster all ready to wear. Exact replicas of the camellias Jerry had given her the last day in Naples!
It was the first signal she had received from him. Both had abided by their solemn agreement so far. Even now Jerry had not broken any of its specified terms, but he had ignored its underlying principle for the first time. Probably for the last time, too. But God bless him for this once!
The camellias assured her that their brief relationship was still existing in his consciousness too. They were proof that she was not a victim of delusion, or self-deception either. Courage and self-confidence gushed back into her depleted reservoir, welling up in her like water quickly rising in a pool when a strong stream beneath its surface rushes in. She wouldn’t wear the foulard tonight! And she wouldn’t occupy this room!
It required two trips to transfer all her baggage to the room above. She accomplished it without her mother’s knowledge, each time carefully stepping over a certain well-remembered creak in the stairs. The room was unsettled. There was a pile of pictures in one corner. In front of the grill-covered fireplace several pairs of chairs were stacked—seat to seat, bare legs sticking up, undersides exposed, like a dog on his back waiting to be scratched. The rugs were rolled up. The marble mantel was bare. But the important pieces of furniture were in place. The bed was set up and had a mattress on it. It was an enormous black-walnut turreted affair.
She proceeded to unpack. She shook out the gown which she was going to wear tonight. She hung it up in the empty closet—blissfully empty, it struck her. Blissfully empty, too, the walls of the room bearing only a faint pattern now of the stodgy pictures that had crowded so close around her night and day. It was as if the room had been purged! She would never allow them to return! Unwittingly her mother released her from their incubus.
17
A REBEL INDEED
She procured sheets, blankets, and pillowcases from the linen closet. She was stretching the bottom sheet over the yellowed blue and white ticking when she heard a warning creak on the stairs. She stood up straight and faced the door. Her mother opened it, without knocking, as usual.
She wasn’t a tall woman and had always been thin. She looked like an emaciated bird of some exotic species, as she stood there on the threshold, head held high, her eyes flashing beneath the white topknot—a bird that was moulting from the breast down, for the negligee proved to be a bed-jacket. Beneath it she was dressed in her austere underclothes—plain corset-cover and straight white skirt reaching a little below her knees. She wore white stockings and her evening silver slippers with low French heels.
“What are you doing in this room?”
“Getting ready to sleep here.”
“Didn’t you understand I wish someone to sleep on the same floor with me?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And who do you think is going to do it?”
“We’ll ask one of the maids, or get the nurse to come back.”
“We! We! So long as I pay the bills I’m running this house. Please remember you are my guest, Charlotte.”
“Then please treat me like one. Your guest prefers to sleep in this room if you don’t mind.” Her tone was playfully cajoling.
“This is no time for humor! And as it happens I do mind. Where did those come from?” She had spied the red camellias on the white marble mantel.
“From New York.”
“Who sent them?”
“I forget the name of the florist. Here’s the tag.” Charlotte picked up the precious justification for her self-confidence, crossed the room, and offered it to her mother.
Her mother waved it aside. “I’ve seen it. I heard the bell and had the box brought to me first. You know perfectly well what I mean. What person sent you the flowers?”
“There was no card. Perhaps Lisa sent them because she can’t be here herself.”
“In other words, you don’t intend to tell me.”
“Mother, I don’t want to be unkind or disagreeable. I’ve come home to live with you again, here in the same house, but it can’t be in the same way. I’ve been living my own life, making my own decisions for a long while now. It’s impossible to go back to being treated like a child again. I don’t think I shall do anything of importance that will displease you. But, Mother, from now on you must give me complete freedom as to my personal habits, and tastes—where I sleep, what I read, what I wear.”
“I must, must I?” Her mother’s right hand was resting against the door casing, and Charlotte observed the fingers begin a characteristic tapping. To Charlotte the tapping was like the rumble of distant
thunder when storm is brewing.
“Mother, please be fair, and meet me halfway.”
“Be fair! Meet you halfway! So this is my reward!”
This phrase was as familiar to Charlotte as a Bible text heard many times before, and she knew well the sermon that would follow. It dwelt chiefly upon the sacrifices of mothers and the ingratitude of children—of daughters especially, more especially of only daughters who arrive late in the child-bearing period.
“They told me before you were born that my recompense for a late child would be the comfort the child would be to me in my old age, especially if it was a girl. And on your first day at home you act like this! Comfort? No, Charlotte. Sorrow, grief.” She leaned her head against the door casing, closed her eyes, and drew in a deep breath, letting it out cautiously, at the same time pressing her hand against her left breast.
Always before, compunction had stirred Charlotte at the sight of these gestures of distress. But now she made no motion toward her mother, expressed no sympathy or alarm. Finally her mother opened her eyes, and murmured, her hand still pressing her side, “Have you tried on the foulard?”
“No, I’m not wearing the foulard.”
“You mean to disregard my wishes on your first night at home?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m wearing a dress Lisa and I bought in New York yesterday.”
Her mother stood up straight, clutching both her breasts now. “Oh, the pain! the pain!” she moaned, staggered toward the stairs, groped for the banisters, and hobbled down.
She wasn’t used to banisters, or to hobbling, or to French heels. On the third step from the bottom one of the French heels caught on a loose edge of the stair carpet, and she tilted forward, falling in a heap at the foot of the stairs on the thick red Turkish rug at the bottom.
Now, Voyager Page 15
