“I never showed anybody before,” Joe said. “Don’t tell, miss, it’s a secret,” and Victorine felt a queer sisterhood, a little thrill of understanding, for Joe’s secret oneness, his stand against outsiders, his hide-out, his modest but shining dwelling, and his funny guilty look. But it only lasted a minute. She felt ill at ease and wanted to go. Joe was neither adult nor child, she could not place him and dared not love him. Joe, the impervious hired man, had a secret inner being! It was news and would take time.
“Thank you very much, Joe.” As she turned to go, she thought she imagined a fluttering near the rosary, a reflection it must be, a shadow caused by the sun behind the stirring leaves outside.
“My butterflies,” whispered Joe.
Victorine stared at three beautiful Monarch butterflies, one above the other; stuck through with glistening pins, they were still faintly alive on the wall, weakly they lifted their wings in unison.
“Pretty,” said Joe caressingly. He stood so close to her that as she turned away in horror from the sickeningly lovely little creatures on the wall she could see the segments in the pupils of his eyes converging and stretching and shrinking, the setting sun lit them up warmly, they were yellow with brown edges and they seemed to lead into him, deep into his secret mysterious self. She saw the darkness inside him, but the perspective was long and it made her dizzy.
“Doesn’t it hurt them?” she said timidly, hanging her head, ashamed to leave the helpless trio without an effort to save them, but she was stepping out of the door and knew the butterflies would die.
“Not a bit,” said Joe easily, “and they’re so pretty I didn’t want to break them. The other things,” he said, “you folks threw them away.” He looked at her as if asking for a promise, as if for approval, it was a pact of some sort and her own thieving instincts understood his culpability. In the hired man, too, then, there appeared to be that built-in sinfulness that adults as a rule did not understand. Their big felonies did not seem to trouble or affront them. They felt no pain. (“How long, oh Lord, how long.”) Joe, perhaps, underprivileged, undernourished, had remained a child in these things. In big and little worldly matters he was scrupulously honest and Victorine’s father entrusted the whole business of the slight farming to Joe without question, and her mother always got Joe to cash her cheques and take her jewels to the safe-deposit box. Elsie sent him to the store to buy her the Woman’s Home Companion and some gum drops, and Joe brought back the change to the penny. Joe was faithful to his wife with the fragile womb, the only exception a slip or two when drunk in a neighbouring town on payday that forgetfulness after the event spared him the lie, which he would know, according to his code, would be the greater sin. Joe’s real uneasiness then, his shame, was not thievery nor any breakage of any written commandment, any more than the littler child’s, Victorine’s, was; Joe’s depravity, like hers, was self-indulgence, and he did not solve the enigma by thinking he had snitched the worthless décor of his hide-out. The thrill and the shame and the guilt that made them sick was the secret, the self-indulgence, the shifting subject-matter of it in each case misleading and of no consequence, like a firefly mistaken for a star, without integrity, untrustworthy. What Joe said was true, the folks had thrown the things out, but he didn’t believe it because, ignorant though he was and surely lacking a formal education, his reasoning had to find, well, a reason, a reason for the strange and passionate guilt he felt alone in his little ten-cent but priceless temple, and unerringly he invited into it only a child, a sensitive and passionate one, too, Victorine. It was sin at its purest, and basic metal, without adulteration or chicanery or prestidigitation, and to call it mutual masturbation would simply be calling it by another name that smelled as sweet, but would not disclose its secret meaning or mystery. To delve too deeply into Victorine and Joe would be to destroy them. Let us say only that they were brother and sister under the skin, fastened together by an understanding that they did not understand and a crime they had not committed. Their parole was limitless, they checked in with no one, and the F.B.I. was ignorant of their existence. Their being outlaws was between themselves.
“I stole something once,” said Victorine suddenly, the hair standing up on the back of her neck, it was delicious.
“I didn’t steal anything,” said Joe weakly.
“Oh, no, no,” said Victorine quickly.
She had been about to tell him. As misled as he was, mistaken, too, she recalled the content, she thought, of her indulgence, the petty thievery she had practised, the planning, the tiptoeing, the thrill that made her shake all over as she took the shiny dimes and nickels from her grandmother’s bureau drawer. Her hands had been wet with perspiration, her mind a blank.
“You folks threw them out,” he repeated.
“They did, I know.” She did not wish to be associated with the adults or with anyone. She felt irritated, her pleasure, her strong attraction to Joe as if they suckled blissfully at the same breast, was going away; she clutched at it. “Joe, I sneaked in and took the dimes and nickels.”
“Oh no you didn’t, miss. . . .”
“I loved it,” said Victorine without bravado, “I loved it, it was so lonely and secret and my heart beat so quick and afterwards I went fast asleep, I was so tired.” She sighed.
Joe, her skin brother, looked at the little room he stood in and came close to comprehension. “Like this, like me and this,” he said.
It came to Victorine, too, a lovely clarity, just for a second. “Yes, Joe, and like the way I feel in church, and blood,” she said wonderingly as if speaking in tongues, “and the kitchen . . .” Then she remembered the specific thrill, the spot thrill, the sudden let-go of tension after her big Sunday, upstairs in her room, her spontaneous find, and for a split second she understood but not really. It evaded her. Joe was watching her closely and the hot blush at her visual recollection nearly melted her eyes. Had she or had she not told him? Thinking out loud, she had run into her self-knowledge. Had she disclosed it! She waited. Joe said nothing.
“We are abominable sinners,” said Victorine coolly. She did not mind because she said to herself as she had said of Misael (“I will not speak to him again”), “I will not do it again.”
“Perhaps so,” said Joe; he was amused, his guilt lay undefined in him and he was not one to lie awake probing his subconscious and he thought she referred to the stealing they had or had not done and her funny enthusiastic talk that attracted him he explained simply as the talk of his betters. He certainly did not think himself a sinner as he understood sin. He was a hard-working man, a dependable one, he did not play cards or fornicate. His little sprees caused him no remorse, he was kind to his distempered wife and used her no worse for his pleasure than the next man did his, and took back for himself but ten dollars of his pay a week from her. He did not complain because there were no children from her tilted womb and he did not deliberately look elsewhere for gratification when her head ached. It did not enter his consciousness to take advantage now of the pretty little girl with long legs and warm skin who stood so close to him. He did not calculate, or make a guess at how simple on this particular Sunday a quick and heaven-sent seduction would be. The hired man was a good boy and his hide-out, his guilty blush and uneasy demeanour was a throwback, we might guess, something in him that had not grown up with the rest of him. The childish thrill of secret indulgence that so attracted Victorine to him, his dark brotherhood, he did not connect, as she had, for a second, intuitively, with sin, and to a more sophisticated person, an adult, it would have seemed an engaging simplicity, perhaps; to a woman a loveableness rather than the passionate attraction it was to Victorine, who felt they had sinned together secretly and strangely. She put her hand in his big paw as she had taken the smooth hand of Misael and wanting more excitement, not yet exhausted or chastened, she said, “It’s dark now, let’s shoot rats.”
She shuddered outside in the sudden chill as she had in the kitchen at the sudden warmth, and the “abominab
le child” savoured in advance the stealthy stalking of the obese rodents that she nimbly avoided, not wanting them to run over her feet in their irrational half-circle chase in the chicken yard after something, no doubt, their greedy interest was set on, their compulsion making them fearless, and it was easy, with her sharp eyes and her suppressed careful aim, to hit them with the twenty-two. After several shots she felt a choking horror and handed Joe the rifle. It was enough, she was surfeited. Joe, with only the economical need in his mind to exterminate a nuisance let go at another, it curled up and stretched out on its back showing its overlapping yellow teeth. It did not bleed.
“Don’t!”
Victorine felt, at last, disgust, and it included everything, everything that had happened and been so strongly felt all day, it even, perhaps especially, included Joe. But, “Don’t tell,” she whispered, shivering, and she felt, almost against her will, that she loved him.
“How disgusting!” Out amongst the curled and stretched-out dead and dying rats came skipping and dodging an hysterical hen. She swung from side to side in her agitation and hurry and cackled with annoyance. The big rooster gained on her and sat down hard; arching his powerful neck, his comb flapping over his beady eyes, he viciously pecked again and again at her head. Feathers flew.
“Get off!” cried Victorine, stamping her foot, she was near tears.
“It’s Nature,” said Joe quietly, and it was and Joe knew it.
But Victorine doubted. Joe was different outside than he was in the little room, less of a child, not as silky and sensual and guilty, less of an outlaw and an outcast. He was an adult, one of Them. He knew the answers. He felt no pain. She failed, too, to see any relation or likeness between her own passionate behaviour and feelings and, if she had known the word, animal coitus. Nature! Chickens straddled by roosters—Nature! Nature was big sugar maples.
“They like it well enough,” said Joe. “It doesn’t hurt.” He thought to comfort her but their moment of almost blood relationship was over. She had not felt any pity for the indecorous-appearing hen violently bitten and tousled by the big rooster any more than she had for the helpless rats shot to death by her and by him. She felt only disgust, the disgust that had been building up all day masquerading as pleasure : the sensational and mysterious rites in Trinity Church (Take, eat, this is my Body—drink—my Blood), lonely self-indulgence and imaginative daydreaming (Misael!), physical fear, the bloody obscene ritual in the kitchen, the spontaneous specific thrill she had come upon in her room, between her legs, her secret understanding and acceptance of another’s private and guilty indulgence and its powerful attraction, and then, cruelty, the nastiest love interest of all, the massacre that had made her blood pound in her ears. “Don’t!” she had called out and it was a big don’t. She was pleading for mercy but not for the rats, for herself. Only by chance had she witnessed the lowly union of the fowls, a pin-point demonstration which, if in the big algebra of things was meant, if there is any meaning at all, in the sequence of events, any plot in the whole business, to clarify Victorine’s lust to herself or to witnesses, was a complete test-tube failure, a parable that didn’t come off. The little scene simply irritated her nerves, if there was a drama she was indifferent to it, and her “How disgusting!” like her “Don’t!” was bigger than that. Poor Victorine, it looked as if her whole Sunday was used up preparing her for a sexual act and it had taken place in the barnyard, played by very minor stage-hands. Well, the greedy ardour and the final mounting disgust can surely be described as merely physical like too much lobster, and no harm has been done by the extraneous to her soul. A good and dreamless sleep in which she plays no part at all, the sleep of the young and the good and the exhausted, will purify her heart and give her strength for other daylight nightmares—the big exaggeration of real life that does seem to the very young like a king-sized, out-of-drawing and hypnagogic bad dream, as if the lenses in their eyes were borrowed from colts and fillies, and the very size of the extravaganza, the enormity of it, implied hostility.
Chapter III
Daddy’s Youthful Indiscretion
No one knows why Victorine’s father’s mother, not talkative or given to reminiscing in her old age as some old people are, named him Homer, but she did and it stayed with him and he rather liked it, and it did somehow become him. She, bookish and shy as some remembered her when she was a young woman, may have hoped to produce a poet, who might just possibly say the things that, tongue-tied and frightened, she dared not pronounce. Her almost total silence as an old lady, lately passed on, may or may not have been the result of her disappointment. In any event and be that as it may, Flora, or Victorine’s paternal grandma, had given birth and surprisingly easily to five successful businessmen one after the other, the youngest of whom is that Homer who is Victorine’s father, whose adventures and illicit meanderings he never put on paper or set to music. As if she recognized in his crib, in spite of his ambitious nom de plume, just one more average man, Flora had given up, and on the advice of her doctor, some years later, submitted to the removal of those battered and bruised internal organs which were of no more use to her. All, it seemed, that the five boys inherited from their mother was a speechlessness, hers. But not for the same reason. Flora had not spoken because the overwhelming beauty of her visions frightened her. The boys were fearless, uninhibited and ambitious and would have certainly learned to talk if it had been to their advantage. But even as little boys they found that a dead pan and silence gave them a prestige among the barbarous little chatterers who often found themselves in trouble because they were just that, and later, strong silent men, they were an asset in Wall Street and highly respected along Beacon Street and Worth and found themselves listed in Dun and Bradstreet without having opened their mouths. Women, too, with the exception of their wives, hung on their lips, as it were, and imagined how sweet it must be—what they didn’t say—to be unutterable; and they were handsome and tolerable lovers, devoted husbands. It follows that not one of them was ever sued for breach of promise, no vulgar publicity ever followed a change of heart. No love letters would ever be found in any trunk in any attic. In truth, the only literate papers left behind by the five L’Hommedieu brothers would be, we figure, stock transfers and contracts, leases and seven years of cheque stubs in neat brown envelopes, and even on these the signatures indecipherable. A hundred years from now the five will appear never to have existed, possibly because, unlike Caesar, they scorned the use of code as well, and on no oak and no tortoise will be found even the initials of the L’Hommedieu boys. No one ever guessed that they did not speak because they might have had nothing to say.
We must narrow down the quintet for story-telling purposes to Homer, not so much because he is Homer as that he is Victorine’s daddy. Chemically, certainly in her arteries and veins, in her tissue and glands, there is Homer, as in her children and theirs there will be, too, until, infinitely devisable, Homer will have become a mere anaemia almost, a powerless cell in a single drop of blood, a microscopic ancestor. But at present Homer counted. He counted in Wall Street and in Washington, and he held the respect of his colleagues with whom he played bridge in the club car and golf on Sundays. He was devoted to his wife and generous with his children. He carried adequate insurance. He sometimes asked if the hens were laying.
Victorine and Dennis, hand in hand, were scuffing ankle deep in the dry bright leaves when, hatless, a briefcase in his hand and his overcoat over his arm, Homer, who always walked from the station to keep fit, came in the drive and went silently into the house. The children watched him go in; he had imperceptibly raised his chin in greeting.
“That’s my daddy,” said Dennis.
“Yes,” said Victorine. She felt affronted as if she had been snubbed, but it went away.
“Daddy sleeps with my mommy,” said Dennis, as if it were news.
“Don’t be silly,” said Victorine and she meant it, it was an absurd idea. It seemed unlikely that her father was ever anything but immacu
lately dressed. Victorine wasn’t stupid. She was taken up with her own feelings; introspective and sensitive, she created her own illusions, made up her own problems and chores, solved the insoluble with loving care. Inside her head a continued story developed chapter by chapter . . . She suffered, but not from current events.
But Dennis was a peeker and an observer, ruthless. “I’d be happy if Daddy was dead,” he said.
“That’s bad,” said Victorine, “very bad.” She didn’t much care. She was looking at the big sprawling sunset, the strawberry-coloured mass of clouds, the thin streaks of ultramarine blue, a violet haze that was settling for the night.
“I thau you!” said Dennis, feeling the loss of interest.
“What,” Victorine looked at him blankly.
Delighted, he chanted it, “I thau you, I thau you.” He was cleverer than he looked, plump and soggy and red-cheeked. He sensed in Victorine a secret, and a hidden naughty something. He had seen nothing, but he brought a blush to his sister’s virgin cheek, a feeling of fear and captivity to her spirit.
“Go away or I’ll hit you!” she said and she did clench her fists and her eyes flashed.
“Mamma!” he screamed, “Elthie!”
“Jesus,” Costello rode up on his bike, “you can hear him for miles. Hello, Vicky.” Straddling his bike, using his feet as brakes, he came to a halt and let the bike fall where it would. By the time the pedals had stopped spinning Dennis had found the big bosom of Elsie and was comforted. “Oh, Elthie, guess what!”
“Please,” said Victorine, “don’t swear.”
Costello looked his sister over, a queer expression came over his face. They were alone, it was dusk, he came and stood very close to her and looked down into her face. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “God damn.”
“Costello!”
Victorine Page 5
